Terence McKenna - 1984 - New Maps of Hyper Space

NEW MAPS OF HYPERSPACE by Terence McKenna
NEW MAPS OF HYPERSPACE

by Terence McKenna
In James Joyce's *Ulysses*, Stephen Dedalus tells us, "History is the nightmare from which I am
trying to awaken". I would turn this around and say that history is what we are trying to escape
from into dream. The dream is eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history. We
wish to escape into the dream. 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. If one leaves aside the last three
hundred years of historical experience as it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the
phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications - Neoplatonic,
Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, 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. One part loses its *raison d'etre* and falls into
dissolution; metabolism stops. The other part goes we know not where. Perhaps nowhere if one
believes it does not exist; but then one has the problem of trying to explain life. And, though
science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic systems, the idea that
science can make *any* statement about what life is or where it comes from is currently
preposterous. Science has nothing to say about how one can decide to close one's hand into a fist,
and yet it happens. This is utterly outside the realm of scientific explanation because what we see
in that phenomenon is mind as a first cause. It is a example of telekinesis: matter is caused by
mind to move. So we need not fear the sneers of science in the matter of the fate or origin of the
soul. My probe into this area has always been the psychedelic experience, but recently I have
been investigating dreams, because dreams are a much more generalized form of experience of
the hyperdimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded. Looking at what people with
shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes to the realization that for these people dream
reality is experientially a parallel continuum. The shaman accesses this continuum with
hallucinogens as well as with other techniques, but most effectively with hallucinogens.
Everyone else accesses it through dreams. Freud's idea about dreams was that they were what he
called "day-residues", and that one could trace the content of a dream down to a distortion of
something that happened during waking time. I suggest that it is much more useful to try to make
a geometric model of consciousness, to take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and to
say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a higher-order
spatial dimension. In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is
only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenum - recent experiments in
quantum physics tend to back this up - a holographic plenum of information. All information is
everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind
of eternity - an eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, "It
always existed." It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not
primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at
the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a
shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. At death, the thing that casts
the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a
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dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in,
extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These
declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches
all higher religions. 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. The metaphor of
a vehicle - an after-death vehicle, an astral body - is used by several traditions. Shamanism and
certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that 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.
One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean
break. Yet there deos seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one
is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance. Apparently at the moment of
death there is a kind of separation, like birth - the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a
possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that
as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal
death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment - a crisis of passage - and the whole purpose of
shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's
relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position. I
want to include an abyss in this model - one less familiar to rationalists, but familiar to us all one
level deeper in the psyche as inheritors of the Judeo-Christian culture. That is the idea that the
world will end, that there will be a final time, that there is not only the crisis of the death of the
individual but also the crisis of death in the history of the species. What this seems to be about is
that from the time of the awareness until the resolution of the apocalyptic potential, there are
roughly one hundred thousand years. In biological time, this is only a moment, yet it is ten times
the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in the balance, because it is a mad
rush from hominid to starflight. In the leap across those one hundred thousand years, energies
are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic
arises, all of these concerns that control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical
constancy appear. Ever present is the possibility of aborting the species' transformation into a
hyperspatial entelechy. We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final historical seconds of that
crisis - 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 specieswide analogy. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum
of the historical forces already set in motion. Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an
nevolving species. Some time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the
biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic, cultural
phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but the human somatotype
remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much like people of a long time ago. But
technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five
hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree
of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles.
Rhis is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded

psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying
saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. The body can become an
internalized holographic object embedded in a solid-state, hyperdimensional matrix that is
eternal, so that we each wander through a true Elysium. This is a kind of Islamic paradise in
which one is free to experience all the pleasures of the flesh provided one realizes that one is a
projection of a holographic solid-state matrix that is microminiaturized, superconducting, and
nowhere to be found: it is part of the plenum. All technological history is about producing
prototypes of this situation with greater and greater closure toward the ideal, so that airplanes,
automobiles, space shuttles, space colonies, starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type
are, as Mircea Eliade said, "self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about man's
aspiration to self-transcendence." Our wish, our salvation, and our only hope is to end the
historical crisis by becoming the alien, by ending alienation, by recognizing the alien as the Self,
in fact - recognizing the alien as an Overmind that holds all the physical laws of the planet intact
in the same way that one holds an idea intact in one's thoughts. The givens that are thought to be
writ in adamantine are actually merely the moods of the Goddess, whose reflection we happen to
be. The whole meaning of human history lies in recovering this piece of lost information so that
man may be dirigible or, to paraphrase James Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* on Moicane, the red
light district of Dublin: "Here in Moicane we flop on the seamy side, but up n'ent, prospector,
you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings, so if you want to be Phoenixed, come and
be parked." It is that simple, you see, but it takes courage to be parked when the Grim Reaper
draws near. "A blessing in disguise", Joyce calls him. What psychedelics encourage, and where I
hope attention will focus once hallucinogens are culturally integrated to the point where large
groups of people can plan research programs without fear of persecution, is the modeling of the
after-death state. Psychedelics may do more than model this state; they may reveal the nature of
it. Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted
so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all
experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed
through light-years of three-dimensional universe, and the interior mental universe. They are
adumbrations of the same thing. We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low
quality of the code we customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has built-in
dualisms. This is a problem of language. All codes have relative code qualities, except the
Logos. The Logos is perfect and, therefore, partakes of no quality other than tiself. I am here
using the word *Logos* in the sense in which Philo Judaeus uses it - that of the Divine Reason
that embraces the arhcetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As
long as one maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems of code quality.
The dualism built into our language makes the death of the species and the death of the
individual appear to be opposed things. Likewise, the scenarios that biology has created through
examining the physical universe versus the angel- and demon-haunted worlds that depth
psychology is reporting is also a dichotomy. The psychedelic experience acts to resolve this
dichotomy. 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. This is not to suggest that everyone should experiment
with mushrooms or other naturally occurring sources of psychoactive tryptamines. We should try
to assimilate and integrate the psychedelic experience since it is a plane of experience that is
directly accessible to each of us. The role that we play in relationship determines how we will
present ourselves in that final, intimated transformation. In other words, in this notion there is a
kind of teleological bias; there is abelief that there is a hyperobject called the Overmind, or God,
that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience of this shadow. As one draws
clsoer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change
intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-
dimensional space. One way of thinking of this is to suppose that the waking world and the
world of the dream have begun to merge so that in a certain sense the school of UFO criticism
that has said flying sources are hallucinations was correct in 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. Then one gets these curious experiences,
sometimes called psychotic breaks, that always have a tremendous impact on the experient
because there seems to be an exterior component that could not possibly be subjective. At such
times coincidences begin to build and build until one must finally admit that one does not know
what is going on. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to claim that this is a psychological
phenomenon, because there are accompanying changes in the external world. Jung called this
"synchronicity" and made a psychological model of it, but it is really an alternative physics
beginning to impinge on local reality. The 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. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the
speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must
realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time
whatsoever. There is an experience of time zero. So if one imagines for a moment oneself to be
made of light, or in possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light, one can traverse
from any point in the universe to any other with a subjective experience of time zero. This means
that one crosses to Alpha Centauri in time zero, but the amount of time that has passed in the
relativistic universe is four and a half years. But if one moves very great distances, if one crosses
two huindred and fifty thousand light-years to Andromeda, one would still have a subjective
experience of time zero. The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time
that is created by one's own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian universe there
is no time whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become eternal, the universe is aging at a
staggering rae all around one in this situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe - the
way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into the eternal
mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity. I
believe that this is what technology pushes toward. There is no contradiction between ecological
balance and space migration, between hypertechnology and radical ecology. These issues are red
herrings; the real historical entity that is becoming imminent is the human soul. The monkey
body has served to carry us to this moment of release, and it will always serve as a focus of self-
image, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.
This is what is meant by the return to the Father, the transcendence of *physis*, the rising out of
the Gnostic universal prison of iron that traps the light: nothing less than the transformation of

our species. Very shortly an acceleration of this phenomenon will take place in the form of space
exploration and space colonies. The coral-reef-like animal called Man that has extruded
technology over the surface of the earth will be freed from the constraints of anything but the
imagination and the limitations of materials. It has been suggested that the earlioest space
colonies include efforts to duplicate the idyllic ecosystem of Hawaii as an ideal. These exercises
in ecological understanding will prove we know what we are doing. However, as soon as this
understanding is under control we will be released into the realm of art. This is what we have
always striven for. We will make our world - all of our worlds - and the world we came from
will be maintained as a garden. What Eliade discussed as metaphors of self-transforming flight
will be realized shortly in the technology of space colonization. The transition from earth to
space will be a staggeringly tight genetic filter, a much tighter filter than any previous frontier
has ever been, including the genetic and demographic filter represented by the colonization of
the New World. It has been said that the vitality of the Americas is due to the fact that only the
dreamers and the pioneers and the fanatics made the trip across. This will be even more true of
the transition to space. The technological conquest of space will set the stage; then, for the
internalization of that metaphor, it will bring the conquest of inner space and the collapse of the
state vectors associated with this technology deployed in Newtonian space. Then the human
species will have become more than dirigible. A technology that would internalize the body and
exteriorize the soul will develop parallel to the move to space.
*The Invisible Landscape*, a book by my brother and myself, made an effort to short-circuit that
chronology and, in a certain sense, to force the issue. It is the story, or rather it is the intelectual
underpinnings of the story, of an expedition to the Amazon by my brother and myself and
several other people in 1971. During that expedition, my brother formulated an idea that
involved using harmine and harmaline, compounds that occur in *Banisteriopsis caapi*, the
woody vine that is the basis for *ayahuasca*. We undertook an effor to use harmine in
conjunction with the human voice in what we called "the experiment at La Chorrera". It was an
effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of harmine molecules metabolizing in the
body in such a way that they would bind preferentially and permanently with endogenous
molecular structures. Our candidate at the time was neural DNA, though Frank Barr, a researcher
into the properties of brain melanin, has made a convincing case that there is as great a
likelihood that harmine acts by binding with melanin bodies. In either case, the pharmacology
involves binding with a molecular site where information is stored, and this information is then
broadcast in such a way that one begins to get a mental readout on the structure of the soul. Our
experiment was an effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the cat, if you will, to hang
a superconducting, telemetric device on the Overmind so that there would be a continuous
readout of information from that dimension. The success or failure of this attempt may be judged
for oneself. The first half of the book describes the theoretical underpinnings of the experiment.
The second half describes the theory of the structure of time that derived from the bizarre mental
states that followed the experiment. I do not claim that we succeeded, only that our theory of
what happened is better than any theory proposed by critics. Whether we succeeded or not, this
style of thinking points the way. For example, when I speak of the technology of building a
starship, I imagine it will be done with voltages far below the voltage of a common flashlight
battery. This is, after all, where the most interesting phenomena go on in nature. Thought is that

kind of phenomenon; metabolism is that kind of phenomenon. A new science that places the
psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation should move toward a
practical realization of this goal - the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the
Overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the Overself. Then the anxiety of
facing a tremendous biological crisis in the form of the ecocrises, and the crisis of limitation in
physical space forced upon us by our planet- bound situation, can be obviated by cultivating the
soul and by practicing a new shamanism using tryptamine-containing plants. Psilocybin is the
most commonly available and experientially accessible of these compounds. Therefore my plea
to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may read these words is this: look again at
psilocybin, do not confuse it with the other psychedelics, and realize that it is a phenomenon
unto itself with 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. It holds the possibility of
transforming the entire species simply by virtue of the information that comes through it.
Psilocybin is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind
for at least a thousand years. When the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Mexico in the
sixteenth century, they immediately set about stamping out the mushroom religion. The Indians
called it *teonanacatl*, "the flesh of the gods". The Catholic church had a monopoly on
theophagia and was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on. Now, four
hundred years after that initial contact, I suggest that Eros, which retreated from Europe with the
rise of Christianity, retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca. Finally, pushed into
seclusion there, it now reemerges in Western consciousness. Our institutions, our epistemologies
are bankrupt and exhausted; we must start anew and hope that with the help of shamanically
inspired personalities, we can cultivate this ancient mystery once again. The Logos can be
unleashed, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus can speak again in
the minds of modern people. When it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have
become the alien. This is the promise that is held out; it may seem to some a nightmare vision,
but all historical changes of immense magnitude have a charged emotional quality. They propel
people into a completely new world. I believe that this work must be done using hallucinogens.
Traditionally it has been thought that there were many paths to spiritual advancement. In this
matter I must fall back on personal experience. I have not had good results with any other
techniques. I spent time in India, practiced yoga, visited among the various rishis, roshis,
geysheys, and gurus that Asia had to offer, and I believe they must be talking about something so
pale and removed from closure with the full tryptamine ecstasy that i don't really know what to
make of them and their wan hierophanies. Tantra claims to be another approach. Tantra means
"the short-cut path", and certainly it might be on the right track. Sexuality, orgasm, these things
do have tryptaminelike qualities to them, but the difference between psilocybin and all other
hallucinogens is information - immense amounts of information. LSD seemed somehow to be
largely related to the structure of the personality. Often it seemed to me the visions were merely
geometric patterns unless synergized by another compound. The classic psychedelic experience
that was written about by Aldous Huxley was two hundred micrograms of LSD and thirty
milligrams of mescaline. That combination delivers a visionary experience rather than an
experience of hallucinations. In my opinion the unique quality of psilocybin is that it reveals not
colored lights and moving grids, but places - jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic

forms of incredible complexity. There is no possibility that this could be construed as

neurological noise of any sort. It is, in factm the most highly ordered visual information that one
can experience, much more highly ordered than the normal waking vision. That's why it's very
hard with psychedelic compounds to bring back information. These things are hard to English
because it is like trying to make a three-dimensional rendering of a fourth-dimensional object.
Only through the medium of sight can the true modality of this Logos be perceived. That is whyy
it is so interesting that psilocybin and *ayahuasca* - the aboriginal tryptamine-containing brew -
both produce a telepathic experience and a shared state of mind. The unfolding group
hallucination is shared in complete silence. It's hard to prove this to a scientist, but if several
people share such an experience, one person can describe it and then cease the monologue and
another person may then take it up. Everyone is seeing the same thing! It is the quality of being
complex visual information that makes the Logos a vision of a truth that cannot be told. The
information thus imparted is not, however, merely restricted to the mode of seeing. The Logos is
capable of going from a thing heard to a thing seen, without ever crossing through a discernible
trnsition point. This seems a logical impossibility; yet
when one actually has the experience, one sees - aha! - it is as though thought that is heard does
become something seen. The thought that is heard becomes more and more intense until, finally,
its intensity is such that, with no transition, one is now beholding it in three- dimensional, visual
space. One commands it. This is very typical of psilocybin. Naturally, whenever a compound is
introduced into the body, one must exercise caution and be well informed with regard to possible
side effects. Professional psychedelic investigators are aware of these factors and freely
acknowledge that the obligation to be well informed is of primary importance.
Speaking for myself, let me say that I am not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate
each visionary experience. I have never lost my respect for these dimensions. Dread is one of the
emotions that I feel as I approach the experience. Psychedelic work is like sailing out onto a dark
ocean in a little skiff. One may view the moon rising serenely over the calm black water, or
something the size of a freight train may roar right through the scene and leave one clinging at an
oar. The dialogue with the other is what makes repetition of these experiences seem worthwhile.
The mushroom speaks to you when you speak to it. In the introduction to the book that my
brother and I wrote (under pseudonyms) called *Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide*,
there is a mushroom monologue that geins: "I am old, fifty times older than thought in your
species, and I came from the stars." Sometimes it's very human. My approach to it is Hasidic. I
rave at it; it raves at me. We argue about what it is going to cough up and what it isn't. I say,
"Well, look, I'm the propagator, you can't hold back on me," and it says, "But if I showed you the
flying saucer for five minutes, you would figure out how it works", and I say, "Well, come
through." It has many manifestations. Sometimes it's like Dorothy of Oz; sometimes it's like a
very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker. I asked it once, "What are you doing on Earth?" It said,
"Listen, if you're a mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I'm telling you, this was a very nice
neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control." "Monkeys out of control": that is the
mushroom voice's view of history. To us, history is something very different. History is the
shock wave of eschatology. In other words, we are living in a very unique moment, ten or twenty
thousand years long, where an immense transition is happening. The object at the end of and
beyond history is the human species fused into eternal tantric union with the superconducting

Overmind/UFO. It is that mystery that casts its shadow back through time. All religion, all
philosophy, all wars, pogroms, and persecutions happen because people do not get the message
right. There is both the forward-flowing casuistry of being, causal determinism, and the
interference pattern that is formed against that by the backward-flowing fact of this
eschatological hyperobject throwing its shadow across the temporal landscape. We exist, yet
there is a great deal of noise. This situation called history is totally unique; it will last only a
moment, it began a moment ago. In that moment there is a tremendous burst of static as the
monkey goes to godhood, as the final eschatological object mitigates and transforms the forward
flow of entropic circumstance. Life is central to the career of organization in matter. I reject the
idea that we have been shunted onto a siding called organic existence and that our actual place is
in eternity. This mode of existence is an important part of the cycle. It is filter. There is the
possibility of extinction, the possibility of falling into *physis* forever, and so in that sense the
metaphor of the fall is valid. There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not,
however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise
is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read
alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition.
Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals
are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to
cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient. We have to
understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death
is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought,
analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm
of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self- engineering. The
imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is
where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity. Time is the
notion that gives ideas such as these their power, for they imply a new conception of time.
During the experiment at La Chorrera, the Logos demonstrated that time is not simply a
homogeneous medium where things occur, but a fluctuating density of probability. Though
science can sometimes tell us what can happen and what cannot happen, we have no theory that
explains why, out of everything that could happen, certain things undergo what Whitehead called
"the formality of actually occurring." This was what the Logos sought to explain, why out of all
the myriad things that could happen, certain things undergo the formality of occurring. It is
because there is a modular hierarchy of waves of temporal conditioning, or temporal density. A
certain event, rated highly improbable, is more probable at some moments than at others. Taking
that simple perception and being led by the Logos, I was able to construct a fractal model of time
that can be programmed on a computer and that gives a map of the ingression of what I call
"novelty" - the ingression of novelty into time. As a general rule, novelty is obviously increasing.
It has been since the very beginning of the universe. Immediately following the Big Bang there
was only the possibility of nuclear interaction, and then, as temperatures fell below the bond
strength of the nucleus, atomic systems could be formed. Still later, as temperatures fell further,
molecular systems appeared. Then much later, life became possible; then vrey complex life
forms evolved, thought became possible, culture was invented. The invention of printing and
electronic information transfer occurred. What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty

toward what Whitehead called "concrescence", a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together.
The "autopoetic lapis", the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows
together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the
tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a
shadow into *physis* as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and
apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the
gyre is tightening, I predict that concrescence will occur soon - around 2012 A.D. It will be the
entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws
accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination. All these images - the starship, the
space colony, the lapis - are precursory images. They follow naturally from the idea that history
is the shock wave of eschatology. As closes distance with the eschatological object, the
reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing itself. In the final moment the
Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the Mystery. The Mystery in all
its nakedness is seen, and nothing else exists. But what it is, decency can safely scarcely hint;
nevertheless, it is the crowning joy of futurism to seek anticipation of it.
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SPACE TIME CONTINUUM WITH TERENCE MCKENNA ALIEN DREAMTIME

WARNING!
The following pages contain the words to the Space Time Continuum / Alien Dreamtime album
and are to be used as reference material after the album has been smealed, grokked, or otherwise
brainally infused. Do yourself a favor and discontinue further reading of these pages if you have
not first listened to the album. You have been warned. 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. Archaic Revival Allright... 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 thats 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 Niagara 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 pechemony, 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. Im 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 didnt 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 wouldve been grinning at me, but they
didnt 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
hadnt 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 cant find out... but it felt like I was finding out. And it felt... and then
I cant remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tikes interrupted me and
said, Dont think about it. Dont 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 didnt 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, theres 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 doesnt fluctuate, except according to the vicissitudes of your own
existence. In other words, every moment is expected to be the same, and yet this isnt 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
aint. 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, weve 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 dont 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 cant 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 didnt 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!
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Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness
by Terence McKenna
There is a very circumscribed place in organic nature that has, I think, important implications for
students of human nature. I refer to the tryptophan-derived hallucinogens dimethyltryptamine
(DMT),
psilocybin, and a hybrid drug that is in aboriginal use in the rain forests of South America,
ayahuasca. This latter is a combination of dimethyltryptamine and a monoamine oxidase
inhibitor that is taken orally. It seems appropriate to talk about these drugs when we discuss the
nature of consciousness; it is also appropriate when we discuss quantum physics. It is my
interpretation that the major quantum mechanical phenomena that we all experience, aside from
waking consciousness itself, are dreams
and hallucinations. These states, at least in the restricted sense that I am concerned with, occur
when the large amounts of various sorts of radiation conveyed into the body by the senses are
restricted. Then we see interior images and interior processes that are psychophysical. These
processes definitely arise at the quantum mechanical level. It's been shown by John Smythies,

Alexander Shulgin, and others that there are quantum mechanical correlates to hallucinogenesis.
In other words, if one atom on the molecular ring of an inactive compound is moved, the
compound becomes highly active. To me this is a perfect proof of the dynamic linkage at the
formative level between quantum mechanically described matter and mind. Hallucinatory states
can be induced by a variety of hallucinogens and diassociative anesthetics, and by experiences
like fasting and other ordeals. But what makes the tryptamine family of compounds especially
interesting is the intensity of the hallucinations and the
concentration of activity in the visual cortex. There is an immense vividness to these interior
landscapes, as if information were being presented three-dimensionally and deployed fourth-
dimensionally, coded as light and as evolving surfaces. When one confronts these dimensions
one becomes part of a dynamic relationship relating to the experience while trying to decode
what it is saying. This phenomenon is not new - people have been talking to gods and demons
for far more of human history than they have not. It is only the conceit of the scientific and
postindustrial societies
that allows us to even propound some of the questions that we take to be so important. For
instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring premised upon a
number of assumptions that a moment's reflection will show are completely false. To search
expectantly for a
radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to

search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by
which it is assumed contact is likely to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world -
psychics,
shamans, mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads are filled with information, but it has been ruled
a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is validated through consensus via certain
sanctioned instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are so inundated
by these signals - these other dimensions - that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit. It is no
great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is
telling the truth, because the demons are of many kinds" :Some are made of ions, some of mind;
the ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind." The reaction to these voices is not
to kneel in genuflection before a god, because then one will be like Dorothy in her first
encounter with Oz. There is no dignity
in the universe unless we meet these things on our feet, and that means having an I/Thou
relationship. One say to the Other: "You say you are omniscient, omnipresent, or you say you are
from Zeta Reticuli. You're long on talk, but what can you show me?" Magicians, people who
invoke these things, have always understood that one must go into such encounters with one's
wits about oneself.
What does extraterrestrial communication have to do with this family of hallucinogenic

compounds I wish to discuss? Simply this: that the unique presentational phenomenology of this
family of compunds has been overlooked. Psilocybin, though rare, is the best known of these

neglectedsubstances. Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the
eyes of the law, is lumped together with LSD and mescaline, when in facteach of these
compounds is a phenomenologically defined universe unto itself. Psilocybin and DMT invoke
the Logos, although DMT is more intense and more brief in its action. This means that they work
directly on the language centers, so that an important aspect of the experience is the interior
dialogue. As soon as one discovers this about psilocybin and about tryptamines in general, one
must decide whether or not to enter into
this dialogue and to try and make sense of the incoming signal. This is what I have attempted. I
call myself an explorer rather than a scientist, because the area that I'm looking at contains
insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science. We are in a position comparable
to that of explorers
who map one river and only indicate other rivers flowing into it; we must leave many rivers
unascended and thus can say nothing about them. This Baconian collecting of data, with no
assumptions about what it might eventually yield, has pushed me to a number of conclusions that
I did not anticipate. Perhaps through reminiscence I can explain what I mean, for in this case
describing past experiences raises all of the issues. I first experimented with DMT in 1965; it
was even then a
compound rarely met with. It is surprising how few people are familiar with it, for we live in a
society that is absolutely obsessed with every kind of sensation imaginable and that adores every
therapy, every intoxication, every sexual configuration, and all forms of media overload. Yet,
however much we may be hedonists or pursuers of the bizarre, we find DMT to be too much. It
is, as they say in Spanish, bastante, it's enough - so much enough that it's too much. Once
smoked, the onset of the experience begins in about fifteen seconds. One falls immediately into a
trance. One's eyes are
closed and one hears a sound like ripping cellophane, like someone crumpling up plastic film
and throwing it away. A friend of mine suggests this is our radio entelechy ripping out of the
organic matrix. An ascending tone is heard. Also present is the normal hallucinogenic modality,
a
shifting geometric surface of migrating and changing colored forms. At the synaptic site of
activity, all available bond sites are being occupied, and one experiences the mode shift
occurring over a period of about thirty seconds. At that point one arrives in a place that defies
description, a space that has a feeling of being underground, or somehow insulated and domed.
In Finnegans Wake such a place is called the "merry go raum," from the Germanword raum, for
"space." The room is actually going around, and in that space one feels like a child, though one
has come out somewhere in eternity.
The experience always reminds me of the twenty-fourth fragment of Heraclitus: "The Aeon is a
child at play with colored balls." One not only becomes the Aeon at play with colored balls but
meets entities as well. In the book by my brother abd myself, The Invisible Landscape, I describe

them
as self-transforming machine elves, for that is how they appear. These entities are dynamically
contorting topological modules that are somehow distinct from the surrounding background,
which is itself undergoing a continuous transformation. These entities remind me of the scene in
the film version of The Wizard of Oz after the Munchkins come with a death certificate for the
Witch of the East. They all have very squeaky voices and they sing a little song about being
"absolutely and completely dead." The tryptamine Munchkins come, these hyperdimensional
machine-elf entities,
and they bathe one in love. It's not erotic but it is open-hearted. It certainly feels good. These
beings are like fractal reflections of some previously hidden and suddenly autonomous part of
one's own psyche. And they are speaking, saying, "Don't be alarmed. Remember, and do what
we are doing." One of the interesting characteristics of DMT is that it sometimes inspires fear -
this marks the experience as existentially authentic. One of the interesting approaches to
evaluating such a
compound is to see how eager people are to do it a second time. A touch of terror gives the
stamp of validity to the experience because it means, "This is real." We are in the balance. We
read the literature, we know the maximum doses, the LD-50, and so on. But nevertheless, so
great is one's
faith in the mind that when one is out in it one comes to feel that the rules of pharmacology do
not really apply and that control of existence on that plane is really a matter of focus of will and
good luck. I'm not saying that there's something intrinsically good about terror. I'm saying that,
granted the situation, if one is not terrified then one must be somewhat out of contact with the
full dynamics of what is happening. To not be terrified means either that one is a fool or that one
has taken a compound that paralyzes the ability to be terrified. I have nothing against hedonism,
and I certainly bring something out of it. But the experience must move one's heart, and it will
not move the heart unless
it deals with the issues of life and death. If it deals with life and death it will move one to fear, it
will move one to tears, it will move one to laughter. These places are profoundly strange and
alien.
The fractal elves seem to be reassuring, saying, "Don't worry, don't worry; do this, look at this."
Meanwhile, one is completely "over there." One's ego is intact. One's fear reflexes are intact.
One is not "fuzzed out" at all. Consequently, the natural reaction is amazement; profound
astonishment that persists and persists. One breathes and it persists. The elves are saying, "Don't
get a loop of wonder going that quenches your ability to understand. Try not to be so amazed.
Try to focus and look
at what we're doing." What they're doing is emitting sounds like music, like language. These
sounds pass without any quantized moment of distinction - as Philo Judaeus said that the Logos
would when it became perfect – from things heard to things beheld. One hears and beholds a

language of alien meaning that is conveying alien information that cannot be Englished. Being
monkeys, when we encounter a translinguistic object, a kind of cognitive dissonance is set up in
our hindbrain. We try to pour language over it and it sheds it like water off a duck's back. We try
again and fail again, and this cognitive dissonance, this "wow" or "flutter" that is building off
this object causes wonder, astonishment and awe at the brink of terror. One must control that.
And the way to control it is to do
what the entities are telling ine to do, to do what they are doing. I mention these "effects" to
invite the attention of experimentalists, whether they be shaman sor scientists. There is
something going on
with these compounds that is not part of the normal presentational spectrum of hallucinogenic
drug experience. When one begins to experiment with one's voice, unanticipated phenomena
become possible. One experiences glossolalia, although unlike classical glossolalia, which has
been studied.
Students of classical glossolalia have measured pools of saliva eighteen inches across on the
floors of South American churches where people have been kneeling. After classical glossolalia
has occurred, the glossolaliasts often turn to ask the people nearby, "Did I do it? Did I speak in
tongues?" This hallucinogen induced phenomenon isn't like that; it's simply a brain state that
allows the expression of the assembly language that lies behind language, or a primal language
of the sort that Robert Graves
discussed in The White Goddess, or a Kabbalistic language of the sort that is described in the
Zohar, a primal 'ur sprach' that comes out of oneself. One discovers one can make the
extradimensional objects - the feeling-toned, meaning- toned, three-dimensional rotating
complexes of transforming light and
color. To know this is to feel like a child. One is playing with colored balls; one has become the
Aeon.
This happened to me twenty seconds after I smoked DMT on a particular day in 1966. I was
appalled. Until then I had thought that I had my ontological categories intact. I had taken LSD
before, yet this thing came upon me like a bolt from the blue. I came down and said (and I said it
many time), "I cannot believe this; this is impossible, this is completely impossible." There was a
declension of gnosis that proved to me in a moment that right here and now, one quanta away,
there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and
extremely alien. I call it the Logos, and I make no judgements about it. I constantly engage it in
dialogue, saying, "Well, what are you? Are you some kind of diffuse consciousness that is in the
ecosystem of the Earth? Are you
a god or an extraterrestrial? Show me what you know." The psilocybin mushrooms also convey
one into the world of the tryptamine hypercontinuum. Indeed, psilocybin is a psychoactive
tryptamine.

The mushroom is full of answers to the questions raised by its own presence. The true history of
the galaxy over the last four and a half billion years is trivial to it. One can access images of
cosmological
history. Such experiences naturally raise the question of independent validation - at least for a
time this was my question. But as I became more familiar with the epistemological assumptions
of modern science, I slowly realized that the structure of the Western intellectual enterprise is so
flimsy at the center that apparently no one knows anything with certitude. It was then that I
became less reluctant to talk about these experiences. They are experiences, and as such they are
primary data for being.
This dimension is not remote, and yet it is so unspeakably bizarre that it casts into doubt all of
humanity's historical assumptions. The psilocybin mushrooms do the same things that DMT
does,
although the experience builds up over an hour and is sustained for a couple of hours. There is
the same confrontation with an alien intelligence and extremely bizarre translinguistic
information complexes. These experiences strongly suggest that there is some latent ability of
the human brain/body that has yet to be discovered; yet, once discovered, it will be so obvious
that it
will fall right into the mainstream of cultural evolution. It seems to me that either language is the
shadow of this ability or that this ability will be a further extension of language. Perhaps a
human language is possible in which the intent of meaning is actually beheld in three-
dimensional space. If
this can happen on DMT, it means it is at least, under some circumstances, accessible to human
beings. Given ten thousand years and high cultural involvement in such a talent, does anyone
doubt that it could become a cultural convenience in the same way that mathematics or language
has
become a cultural convenience? Naturally, as a result of the confrontation of alien intelligence
with organized intellect on the other side, many theories have been elaborated. The theory that I
put forth in Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, held the Stropharia cubensis
mushroom was a species that did not evolve on earth. Within the mushroom trance, I was
informed that once a culture has complete understanding of its genetic information, it
reengineers itself for survival. The Stropharia cubensis mushroom's version of reengineering is a
mycelial network strategy when in contact with planetary surfaces and a spore-dispersion
strategy as a means of radiating throughout the
galaxy. And, though I am troubled by how freely Bell's nonlocality theorem is tossed around,
nevertheless the alien intellecton the other side does seem to be in
possession in a huge body of information drawn from the history of the galaxy. It/they say that

there is nothing unusual about this, that humanity's conceptions of organized intelligence and the
dispersion of life in the galaxy are hopelessly culture-bound, that the galaxy has been an
organized society for billions of years. Life evolves under so many different regimens of
chemistry, temperature, and pressure, that searching for an extraterrestrial who will sit down and
have a conversation with you is doomed to failure. The main problem with searching for
extraterrestrials is to recognize them. Time is so vast and evolutionary strategies and
evironments so varied that the trick is to know that contact is being made at all. The Stropharia
cubensis mushroom, if one can believe what it says in one of its
moods, is a symbiote, and it desires ever deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved
symbiosis with human society early by associating itself with domesticated cattle and through
them human nomads. Like the plants men and women grew and the animals they husbanded, the
mushroom was able to inculcate itself into the human family, so that where human genes went
these other genes would be carried. But the classic mushroom cults of Mexico were destroyed by
the coming of the Spanish conquest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute monopoly
on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in the New World they came upon people calling a
mushroom teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. They set to work, and the Inquisition was able to
push the old religion into the mountains
of Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages when Valentina and Gordon Wasson found it
there in the 1950s. There is another metaphor. One must balance these explainations.
Now I shall sound as if I didn't think the mushroom is an extraterrestrial. It may instead be what
I've recently come to suspect - that the human soul is so alienated from us in our present culture
that we treat it as an extraterrestrial. To us the most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul.
Aliens Hollywood-style could arrive on earth tomorrow and the DMT trance would remain more
weird and continue to hold more promise for useful information for the human future. It is that
intense. ignorance forced the mushroom cult into hiding. Ignorance burned the libraries of the
Hellenistic
world at an earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowledge, shattering the stellar and
astronomical machinery that had been the work of centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-
Christian-Judaic tradition. The inheritors of this tradition built a triumph of mechanism. It was
they who later realized the alchemical dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - and the
twentieth century - with the transformation of elements and the discovery of gene transplants.
But then, having conquered the New
World and driven its people into cultural fragmentation and diaspora, they came unexpectedly
upon the body of Osiris - the condensed body of Eros - in the mountains of Mexico where Eros
has retreated at the coming of the Christos. And by finding the mushroom, they unleashed it.
Phillip K. Dick, in one of his last novels, Valis, discusses the long hibernation of the Logos. A
creature of pure information, it was buried in the ground at Nag Hammadi, along with the
burying of the henoboskion
Library circa 370 A.D. As static information, it existed there until 1947, when the texts were

translated and read. As soon as people had the information in their minds, the symbiote came
alive, for, like the mushroom consciousness, Dick imagined it to be a thing of pure information.
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. All of these places that were thought the be discrete and separate are seen to be part
of a single continuum.
History is the dash over ten to fifteen thousand years from nomadism to flying saucer, hopefully
without ripping the envelope of the planet so badly that the birth is aborted and fails, and we
remain brutish prisoners of matter. History is the shockwave of eschatology. Something is at the
end of time
and is casting an enormous shadow over human history, drawing all human becoming toward it.
All the wars, the philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations
- all of this is occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the
monkeys react
to the symbiote, which is in the environment and which is feeding information to humanity about
the larger picture. I do not belong to the school that wants to attribute all of our accomplishments
to knowledge given to us as a gift from friendly aliens - I'm describing something I hope is more
profound than that. As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they come more and
more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation in
which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of intelligence on a galactic scale.
Science and
mathematics may be culture-bound. We cannot know for sure, because we have never dealt with
an alien mathematics or an alien culture except in the occult realm, and that evidence is
inadmissible by the guardians of scientific truth. This means that the contents of shamanic
experience and of plant-induced ecstasies are inadmissible even though they are the source of
novelty and the
cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being. Think about this for a
moment: If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then
what is to become of us? The future is bound to be psychedelic, because the future belongs to the
mind. We are just beginning to push the buttons on the mind. Once we take a serious
engineering approach to this, we are going to discover the plasticity, the mutability, the eternal
nature of the mind and, I believe, release it from the monkey. My 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. From that point on, we will be eternal
somewhere in the solid-state matrix of

the translinguistic lens we have become. One's body image will exist as a holographic wave
transform while one is at play in the fields of the Lord and living in Elysium.Other intelligent
monkeys have walked this planet. We exterminated them and so now we are unique, but what is
loose on this planet is language, self-replicating information systems that reflect functions of
DNA: learning, coding, templating, recording, testing, retesting, recodong against DNA
functions. The again, language may be a quality of an entirely different order. Whatever
language is, it is in us monkeys now and moving
through us and moving out of our hands and into the noosphere with which we have surrounded
ourselves. The tryptamine state seems to be in one sense transtemporal; it is an anticipation of
the future, It is as though Plato's metaphor were true – that time IS the moving image of eternity.
The tryptamine ecstacy is a stepping out of the moving image and into eternity, the eternity of
the
standing now, the nunc stans of Thomas Aquinas. In that state, all of human history is seen to
lead toward this culminating moment. Acceleration is visible in all the processes around us: the
fact that fire was discovered several million years ago; language came perhaps thirty-five
thousand years ago;
measurement, five thousand; Galileo, four hundred; then Watson-Crick and DNA. What is
obviously
happening is that everything is being drawn together. On the other hand, the description our
physicists are giving us of the universe - that it has lasted billions of years and will last billions
of years into the future - is a dualistic conception, an inductive projection that is very
unsophisticated when applied to the nature of consciousness and language. Consciousness is
somehow able to collapse the state vector and thereby cause the stuff of being to undergo what
Alfred North Whitehead called "the formality of
actually occurring." Here is the beginning of an understanding of the centrality of human beings.
Western societies have been on a decentralizing bender for five hundred years, concluding that
the Earth is not the center of the universe and man is not the beloved of God. We have moved
ourselves out toward the edge of the galaxy, when the fact is that the most richly organized
material in the universe is th human cerebral cortex, and the densest and richest experience in the
univese is the experience you are having right now. Everything should be constellated outward
from the
perceiving self. That is the primary datum. The perceiving self under the influence of these
hallucinogenic plants gives information that is totally at variance with the models that we
inherit from our past, yet these dimensions exist. One one level, this information is a matter of no
great consequence, for many cultures have understood this for millennia. But we moderns are so
grotesquely alienated and taken out of what life is about that to us it comes as a revelation.
Without

psychedelics the closest we can get to the Mystery is to try to feel in some abstract mode the
power of myth or ritual. This grasping is a very overintellectualized and unsatisfying sort of
process.
As I said, I am an explorer, not a scientist. If I were unique, then none of my conclusions would
have any meaning outside the context of myself. My experiences, like yours, have to be more or
less part of the human condition. Some may have more facility for such exploration than others,
and these
states may be difficult to achieve, but they are part of the human condition.There are few clues
that these extradimensional places exist. If art carries images out of the Other from the Logos to
the world - drawing ideas down into matter - why is human art history so devoid of what
psychedelic voyagers have experienced so totally? Perhaps the flying saucer or UFO is the
central motif to be understood in order to get a handle on reality here and now. We are alienated,
so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with
the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses. When we can love the alien, then we will have
begun to heal the psychic discontinuity that has plagued us since at least the sixteenth century,
possibly earlier. My testimony is that magic is alive in hyperspace. It is not necessary to believe
me, only to form a relationship with these hallucinogenic plants. The fact is that the gnosis
comes from plants. There is some certainty that one
is dealing with a creature of integrity if one deals with a plant, but the creatures born in the
demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully. DMT is an
endogenous hallucinogen. It is present in small amounts in the human brain. Also it is improtant
that psilocybin is
4-phosphoraloxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine and that serotonin, the major neurotransmitter in the

human brain, found in all life and most concentrated in humans, is 5-hydroxytryptamine. The
very fact that the onset of DMT is so rapid, coming on in forty-five seconds and lasting five
minutes, means that the brain is absolutely at home with this compound. On the other hand, a
hallucinogen like LSD is retained in the body for some time. I will add a cautionary note. I
always feel odd telling people to
verify my observations since the sine qua non is the hallucinogenic plant. Experimenters should
be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of
extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move
carefully, reflect a
great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the
philosphical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially
dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. The
library is the first place
to go when looking into taking a new compound. We need all the information availaable to

navigate dimensions that are profoundly strange and alien. I have been to Konarak and visited
Bubaneshwar.
I'm familiar with Hindu iconography and have collected thankas. I saw similarites between my
LSD experiences and the iconography of Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, it was LSD experiences
that drove me to collect Mahayana art. But what amazed me was the total absence of the motifs
of DMT. It is not
there; it is not there in any tradition familiar to me. There is a very interesting story by Jorge Luis
Borges called "The Sect of the Phoenix." Allow me to recapitulate. Borges starts out by writing:
"There is no human group in which members of the sect do not appear. It is also true that there is
no persecution or rigor they have not suffered and perpetrated." He continues, The rite is the
only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The rite constitutes the Secret. This Secret...is
transmitted from generation to generation. The act in itself is trivial, momentary, and requires no
description. The Secret is sacred, but is always somewhat ridiculous; its performance is furtive
and the adept do not speak of it. There are no decent words to name it, but it is understood that
all words name
it or rather inevitably allude to it. Borges never explicitly says what the Secret is, but if one
knows his
other story, "The Aleph," one can put these two together and realize that the Aleph is the
experience of the Secret of the Cult of the Phoenix. In the Amazon, when the mushroom was
revealing its information and deputizing us to do various things, we asked, "Why us? Why
should we be the
ambassadors of an alien species into human culture?" And it answered,"Because you did not
believe in anything. Because you have never given over your belief to anyone." The sect of the
phoenix, the cult of this experience, is perhaps millennia old, but it has not yet been brought to
light where the
historical threads may run. The prehistoric use of ecstatic plants on this planet is not well
understood. Until recently, psilocybin mushroom taking was confined to the central isthumus of
Mexico. The psilocybin-containing species Stropharia cubensis is not known to be in archaic use
in a shamanic
rite anywhere in the world. DMT is used in the Amazon and has been for millennia,but by
cultures quite primitive - usually nomadic hunter-gatherers. I am baffled by what I call "the
black hole effect" that seems to surround DMT. A block hole causes a curvature of space such
that no light can
leave it, and, since no signal can leave it, no information can leave it. Let us leave aside the issue
of whether this is true in practice of spinning black holes. Think of it as a metaphor.

Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very
hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is
able to articulate what it is, the less others are able to understand. This is why I think people who
attain enlightenment, if we may for a moment comap these two things, are silent. They are silent
because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been
looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your
attention. The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism
is primarily techniques, not ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out over
millennia that mo\ake it possible, though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these areas. People
of predilection are noticed and encouraged. In archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving
institution, the signs are fairly easy to recognize: oddness or uniqueness in an individual.
Epilepsy is often a signature in preliterate societies, or survival of an
unusual ordeal in an unexpected way. For instance, people who are struck by lightning and live
are thought to make excellent shamans. People who nearly die of a disease and fight their way
back to health after weeks and weeks of an indeterminate zone are thought to have strength of
soul. Among
aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states.
In traveling around the world and dealing with shamans, I find the distinguishing characteristic is
an extraordinary centeredness. Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is alienated from
society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says, "Ah, here's somebody to have a
conversation with." The anthropological literature always presents shamans as embedded in a
tradition, but once one gets to know them they are always very sophisticated about what they are
doing. They are the true
phenomenologists of this world; they know plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields
"spirits." We hear the word "spirits" through a series of narrowing declensions of meaning that
are worse almost than not understanding. Shamans speak of "spirit" the way a quantum physicist
might speak of "charm"; it is a technical gloss for a very complicated concept. It is possible that
there are shamanic family lines, at least in the case of hallucinogen-using shamans, because
shamanic ability is to some
degree determined by how many active receptor sites occur in the brain, thus facilitating these
experiences. Some claim to have these experiences naturally, but I am underwhelmed by the
evidence that this is so. What it comes down to for me is "What can you show me?" I always ask
that question; finally in the Amazon, informants said, "Let's take our machetes and hike out here
half a mile and get some vine and boil it up and we will show you what we can show you." Let
us be clear. People die in these societies that I'm talking about all the time and for all kinds of
reasons. Death is really much more among them than it is in our society. Those who have
epilepsy who don't die are brought to the attention of the shaman and trained in breathing and
plant usage and other things - the fact is that we don't really know all of what goes on. These
secret information systems have not been well studied.
Shamanism is not, in these traditional societies, a terribly pleasant office. Shamans are not

normally allowed to have any political power, because they are sacred. The shaman is to be
found sitting at the headman's side in the council meetings, but after the council meeting he
returns to his hut at the
edge of the village. Shamans are peripheral to society's goings on in ordinary social life in every
sense of the word. They are called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill, a
psychological difficulty, a marital quarral, a theft, or weather that must be predicted. We do not
live in that kind of society, so when I explore these plants' effects and try to call your attention to
them, it is as a
phenomenon. I don't know what we can do with this phenomenon, but I have a feeling that the
potential is great. The mind-set that I always bring to it is simply exploratory and Baconian - the
mapping and gathering of facts. Herbert Guenther talks about human uniqueness and says one
must
come to terms with one's uniqueness. We are naive about the role of language and being as the
primary facts of experience. What good is a theory of how the universe works if it's a series of
tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only
intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience.
What the mushroom says about itself is this: that it is an extraterrestrial organism, that spores can
survive the conditions of interstellar space. They are deep, deep purple - the color that they
would
have to be to absorb the deep ultraviolet end of the spectrum. The casing of a spore is one of the
hardest organic substances known. The electron density approaches that of a metal. Is it possible
that these mushrooms never evolved on earth? That is what the Stropharia cubensis itself
suggests. Global currents may form on the outside of the spore. The spores are very light and by
Brownian motion are
capable of percolation to the edge if the planet's atmosphere. Then, through interaction with
energetic particles, some small number could actually escape into space. Understand that this is
an evolutionary strategy where only one in many billions of spores actually makes the transition
between the stars -
a biological strategy for radiating throughout the galaxy without a technology. Of course this
happens over very long periods of time. But if you think that the galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-
years from edge to edge, if something were moving only one one-hundredth the speed of light -
now that's
not a tremendous speed that presents problems to any advanced technology – it could cross the
galaxy in one hundred million years. There's life on this planet 1.8 billion years old; that's
eighteen times longer than one hundred million years. So, looking at the galaxy on those time

scales, one sees that
the percolation of spores between the stars is a perfectly viable strategy for biology. It might take
millions of years, but it's the same principle by which plants migrate into a desert or across an
ocean.
There are no fungi in the fossil record older than forty million years. The orthodox explaination
is that fungi are soft-bodied and do not fossilize well, but on the other hand we have fossilized
soft-bodied worms and other benthic marine invertebrates from South African gunflint chert that
is dated to over a billion years. I don't necessarily believe what the mushroom tells me; rather we
have a dialogue. It is a very strange person and has many bizarre opinions. I entertain it the way I
would any eccentric friend. I say, "Well, so that's what you think." When the mushroom began
saying it was an extraterrestrial, I
felt that I was placed in the dilemma of a child who wishes to destroy a radio to see if there are
little people inside. I couldn't figure out whether the mushroom is the alien or the mushroom is
some kind of technological artifact allowing me to hear the alien when the alien is actually light-
years aways, using some kind of Bell nonlocality principle to communicate. The mushroom
states its own position very clearly. It says, "I require the nervous system of a mammal. Do you
have one handy?"
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><>><><><><><><><><><><><><><>><><><><><><><><>
Excerpted from the TalkingBook version of Terence McKenna's "True Hallucinations."
These chapters are not included in the recent mass-market HarperCollins printed edition for
conspiratorially obvious reasons. – Chapter 20: The Oversoul as Saucer. There is building in
global society an increasingly intense expectation of the intervention into human history by
UFOs. It is very similar in tone to the buildup of messianic expectation in the Hellenistic world
in the several centuries preceding the birth of Christ. The leaders of Roman society may have
been caught off guard by the appearance of Christ, but they had no one to blame but themselves
since milllions of people
in the ancient world were expectantly awaiting some kind of messiah. So today, science and
govenment koo-koo the idea of world contact with the UFOs, while the contact cults grow ever
larger and more insistent that contact is about to occur. Imagine, therefore, what you may never
have seriously imagined before. Imagine what would happen if the UFOs were to appear.
Imagine a spaceship of the close encounters of the third kind variety suddenly appearing in orbit
around the Earth. Television and mass media would carry its image to every man, woman and
child on the

planet. Governments would be paralyzed. Science would be helpless to explain where it came
from or how it got here. Millenarian hysteria would break out everywhere. The UFO would be
hailed as savior and denounced as antichrist. The end of the world would appear imminent, and
all this would occur before the contact was more than a visual image. Then the UFO would begin
its revelation. Vast displays of beneficent power can be expected. Perhaps it would mysteriously
neutralize all weapons of mass destruction, or it might use some sort of ray to cure all terrestrial
cancer. Whatever it does one may be sure that its actions will be impressive. Its actions will
convert millions to the UFO religion in a space of hours. Indeed, its actions will be specifically
designed to overwhelm us with the reality of its power and presence. That will close the first
stage of the revelation. The second stage will be
the teachings. Telepathically imparted, the specifics of the teachings cannot be anticipated, but
they will urge love, voluntary simplicity, concern for one another, renunciation of war, perhaps
renunciation of the destructive application of science. Whatever the teachings, the UFO will
promise immense reward to those who follow them and dire consequences for those who do not.
And the teachings will be delivered in so poetically perfect a way, so rich in understanding and
appealing nuances that no one will doubt their origin in a being wise and good and immensely
superior to ourselves. The delivery of the teachings will set the stage for the third and last and
most shocking phase of the revelation: the departure. The saucer, promising vaguely to return,
will simply disappear. The entire process could take less than a month. If this seems a short time
recall that the entire public career of Christ lasted only three years. Christ's career occured in a
world where information could move no faster than a horse's gallup. Yet three years in one small
part of the world was all that was necessary to launch a world religion that was vital for 1500
years. In a world of electronic communication the impact of the saucer's arrival, miracles,
teaching and departure would be incalculable - even if it all occured within a month. The saucer
would leave in its wake a
science utterly unable to provide any answers to the important questions concerning what had
gone on. The vast majority of people would be fanatical converts to the teachings of the saucer,
and any institution in opposition to those teachings could expect to be swept away almost
overnight. The departure of the UFO would create a sense of abandonment, the agony of which
could be expected to echo in the human psyche for centuries. The only panacea would be the
religion of the saucer, the religion left behind. Science would be discredited and soon abandoned
in favor of a thousand or more years of exegesis of the saucerian message. Is it not a familiar
pattern in the light of our discussion of Christ and Rome? What will never be said in the wake of
such an event and so must be said now while there is still time for all of the above to occur and
yet still be deception. A benign deception designed to save us from our advanced science and
infantile ethics, but a deception nevertheless. The saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no
matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is NOT a vehicle from some other star
system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest trick. If one knows this one can live
through the revelation and the destruction of our scientific world and yet evade the immense
power of this most powerful of all transference phenomenon and thereby maintain the integrity
of one's own soul and spirit. Remember, I am not a debunker of flying saucers or a defender of
science, I am a contactee, and this book is the painstakingly told story of my own involvement

with the UFOs. I am one of those Vallee has pinpointed as being a carrier of ideas that pave the
way for
the scenario I have just described. Yet from it all I have learned that there is no religious
revelation more satisfying than the hard won fruits of simple understanding. And there is no
liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which
one lives. I reach these conclusions through my use and familiarity with psilocybin and other
psychedelic drugs. They immerse their user in the world of the oversoul and make one privileged
to at least a part of its mechanics of operation. They allow a private dialogue with the oversoul
that is outside the context of the struggle between science and revelation that leaves no choice
between the alienation of the
rationalist and the tired formulas of the fanatic believer. Psychedelic drugs hold out the
possibility of healing the breach between science and morality at the level of the individual, thus
freeing one to evolve independent of the chaos and transformation the UFOs may soon bring to
humanity. Vallee's recent book 'Messengers of Deception' vibrates with fear of the unconscious
and alienation from the matrix of the larger psyche out of which rational thought has emerged.
He fears the destruction of rationalism and scientific thought, yet never once does he mention the
potential world wrecking crisis that the undirected development of science and technology has
brought into being. He paints himself as an open-minded investigator of UFOs, yet never
questions the motives of the retired and unnamed intelligence officers in which he places so
much faith. It is impossible that the CIA is unaware of the social impact belief in UFOs is
having? If they were unaware of it before then surely the recent writings of Vallee himself must
have alerted them to the potential challenge UFO beliefs pose to orthodox institutions. Based on
Vallee's own ideas of an informational struggle between rational and irrational elements, how
was he able to ignore the possibility that the mutilations which he is so eager to connect with
UFOs are nothing more that a govenment agency's clumsy attempt to discredit the genuine UFO
phenomenon? It is a typical method of the intelligence community to discredit human groups it
opposes by faking atrocities in such a way that they appear to have been committed by the group
whose discrediting is sought. Vallee gives examples of this but never suspects that some
government agency might be using this technique to impede the transfer of loyalties from
political institutions to the UFOs. He mentions the proximity of animal mutilations to high-
security government installations but never suggests this might be because such installations are
the source of these mutilations. Few UFO sightings involve confusion among witnesses over
whether or not what they saw was aUFO or a helicopter. Yet in the animal mutilation cases many
witnesses insist a
helicopter was involved. Vallee is at pains to say no physical evidence of a UFO has ever been
collected. Yet later he passes over the fact that a quite ordinary surgical scalpel was found at one
cattle mutilation site. It seems possible to me that some people in government have read Vallee
and are familiar with his theories regarding UFOs as a factor introducing shifts in belief systems
and institutional loyalties on a global scale. Without knowing what UFOs really are these
persons and agencies have launched smokescreen operations designed to cast doubt on the
motives and harmlessness of UFOs and so to retard or halt the shift of loyalties and beliefs now
reaching epidemic

proportions. I suspect that Vallee's book may be the opening shot in a media war whose purpose
will be to connect the occult, right-wing fanatacism, and animal mutilations to the UFO, all in an
effort to cast doubt on the vast power and benign intent of the saucer phenomenon. Vallee's title
'Messengers of Deception' bears a curious resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover's 'Masters of Deceit'.
There the boogey man was communism. In Vallee's book we are told the new boogey man is
UFO phenomenon. Who chose the title for Vallee's book? Was it Vallee or the mysterious major
who was so helpful in guiding Vallee down these new avenues of speculation? I believe that
Vallee whether wittingly or unwittingly is himself a messenger of deception and has become the
spearhead of a conscious effort to sow even
deeper confusion in society regarding UFOs. We might say it is an effort foredoomed to failure.
The collective overmind of our species is the source of the UFO and its designs cannot be
deflected or turned aside. Its viewpoint is one of thousands of years and its means visionary and
charismatic belief systems which act to restore the balance between understanding of and
reverence for the universe is a message more powerful than any offered by the profane
materialist societies that have grown so foolish as to imagine themselves the stewards of human
destiny. Humanity alone and each of us individualy is the steward of human destiny. This is the
real meaning of the UFOs and the experiment at La Chorrera. Chapter 21: Open Ending My own
ideas concerning the mechanics by which the
oversoul creates the UFO encounters might take the following form. Dimethyltriptamine when
smoked, snuffed, or injected induces a brief and extremely intense psychedelic experience whose
overwhelming sense of contact with the Other is unparalleled. For the last decade or so this
extraordinary property of DMT has made it seem to many who sought a chemical basis for
schizophrenia as the long sought schizotoxin. Studies have proved inconclusive however. DMT
concentration has not been proven to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls.
Studies have established the presence of DMT in the human body, however the origin and
significance of the DMT is unknown. Although it may reflect endogenous synthesis, it could also
result from diet, bacterial byproducts, human laboratory error, or other sources. Bearing in mind
the bizarre power of the DMT experience, its presence and unknown role in human metabolism,
add one more fact: the strange aura of suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense
hallucination phase of the DMT experience. This period of suggestibility may last 15 seconds to
a minute, and is a time during which the assumptions which the experient projects concerning
the unusual shift of sensory input acquires enormous power. A few moments later the power of
the now numinous assumption overwhelmes the consciousness of the observer with a scenario
while totally bizarre and outrageous nevertheless is
somehow a complete psychological fulfillment of the expectations formed in the few minutes of
transition that preceded the visionary engulfment. What I am proposing is that something like
this happens during a UFO close encounter and the cause may very well be something which
must be partially sought in the human organism. Imagine a person wandering alone in unfamiliar
country: suddenly there's a hackle-raising sense of weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the
limbs, followed by a clearing of vision and a loud crackling sould. At this point the sense of

strangeness within and without the body would trigger a fear reaction in most people. The fear
reaction causes a rapid and automatic search for a culturally-validated explaination of what is
going on, and an explaination will
always be found. It may range from, "I am being bewitched by a demon," to "Surely it is a
visitation of the Holy Mother," to "My God! It must be a UFO!" In each case the abandonment
of the ego to a culturally prescribed explaination of the experience of the Other causes the
experience to exfoliate, exploit and elaborate all the themes that the culture's current myth of the
Other entails. It is known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced into
the human body. Is it not possible that we human beings are occasionally susceptible to a kind of
visionary seizure? When for reasons of stress or diet these factors combine with psychodynamic
factors to initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT? Pheremones may play a part in this
experience and isolation may be its trigger. Whatever its cause, our conditioning as individuals
causes the experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the deepest concerns
and yearnings of the current culture toward the Other. In our own time this has given rise to the
hope of friendly visiting extraterrestrials. As late as 1917 the miracle at Fatima was interpreted
wordwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today it would surely be hailed as an
extraterrestrial contact. If my suggestion regarding DMT were found to be correct, it would
provide insight into the way in which the cultural feedback thermostat explaination of UFOs put
forth by Vallee and others actually works. Those people who experience the DMT seizure and
are plunged into the current myth of the Other actually return as apostles of
that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by those means to exert the tuning and control of
historical development that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs. Stress,
generalized as an impending sense of historical crisis, may be the factor that induces the
UFO/close-contact experience. As the historical crisis deepens the number of contacts will
increase until the atemporal portion of the mass psyche has effected enough individuals that
there is actually a turning away from the stress-causing course of action. How well is the
Superego able to play the role of God? Can it come in saucerian splendor to save the world from
the flames at the end of time? Or can it only beckon
and warn with visions and dire prophesy? These are questions that we might answer if we
diligently explore the states of mind that DMT and psilocybin make available. Perhaps the UFO
encounters involve nothing more than an autonomous and negative psychic complex able to
emerge during the situation of unusual energy dynamics induced in the psyche by psilocybin.
However, a different explainatory approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum
whose modalities bisect each other with equal ease. This is the approach which grants the
phenomenological existence of the constructs seen in the Stropharia trance and in UFO
encounters. Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may
merge imperceptibly into autonomously
existing worlds we would call 'hyperdimensional', indicating the paradox of their simultaneous
invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence which belies the
term hallucination. Ahead of us lies the future, where we can expect the ingression of the
alternative dimension to intensify. It is therefore important for us to have a sense of the powers

in that Other world and their shifting agencies. In a traditional society, our exploration of these
matters would be firmly imbedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these forces.
Techniques tried and true would be available to fortify our psychic constitution. Since we are
members of a profane society whose relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have
no such consolation. No dispelling ritual or words of proven self-empowerment. By reason and
intuition we must attempt to conquer the fears that attend journeys into the unknown. But reason
and intuition need data with which to construct maps of reality. If we outdistance the inflow of
fact we move beyond the safety zone of the conjuring rod of intuition and reason. For these
reasons we move slowly and steadily. We are human factors in a multi- variable equation where
the shift of unseen parameters can trigger large perturbations and resonances of unexpected
types. Knowing this, and knowing how little we do
know, we should be excused for this defense of caution when taking to ourselves the visions
which the Stropharia brings. Carl Jung's 'Mysterium Coniunctionis' reminds us of the reality of
the situation that insues once the psyche is hooked into making the transference to the alchemical
or saucerian goal. Jung, citing Gerhart Dorn, stresses that the materialization of the stone is only
a prologue to the experience of the perfected self in a state of illumination. Jung wrote, "Though
we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a
position to say in what this relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because
the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may
be identical somewhere beyond our
present experience." Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and it is only a
hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimension - of a co-dimension inclusive of our continuum -
allows a hologram of other realized forms of organization, far distant, to become visible at
certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels have been damped by
selection in favor of more directly relevant lines of information relating to animal survival.
Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance since
such an ability has no selective advantage, unless the information it conveys falls upon the
receptors of an organism already
sophisicated enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts for later application in different
contexts. Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a distance only begin
to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has already achieved sufficient sophistication to
be called conscious and mind-possessing. The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at
medical engineering which amplifies, for inspection by consciousness, the quantum resonance of
the other parts of the spatial continuum holographically at hand. This experience is the
vision which the UFOs and psilocybin impart: visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives
and societies, machines, ruins, landscapes. The hierophanies all unfold in a 'nunc-stans' that has
all space -standing in it- like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by
human beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the
primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination.
Imagination being the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually
existing in the present at hand. The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the

ideological content of specific visions that empirical attention should center. What are the
working details of the worlds whose presence impinges on ours so strongly? What of the beings
sometimes confronted often furtively sensed, who seem to have some existence in a world of
their own revealed by the psilocybin and in UFO contact? There may exist a vast communication
network in the topological nature of things. A network that becomes a fact only for those species
or individuals who will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by them be
found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To
validate the idea of the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance one must emerge with some
idea spawned by the visionary Other but with a utility in the here and now. The wave
quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in
completeness. It took years to elaborate and its relation to the here and now is still
elusive. Fragmentary themes abound: symbiosis, saucer-lens vehicles whose possessors navigate
the higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference and fantasy. In the
classical sense of the word the experimenter with hallucinogens pursues gnosis: privileged
knowledge concerning nature and vouchsafed by her in ecstacy. The history of consciousness is
the halting exploration of the once irrational images and processes met in dreams and trace. Such
images become concepts and discoveries as information flows through the multiple-continuum
of being seeking equilibrium, yet paradoxically carrying everywhere images of ways the flow
towards entropy was locally reversed by this being or that society or phenomenon. We are
immersed in a holographic ocean of places and ideas. We can understand this to whatever depth
we are able. The ocean of images and the intricacy of their connections is infinite. It is perhaps
why great genius preceeds by apparent leaps. Because the revolutionary idea which inspires the
genius comes upon one complete, entire by itself, from the ocean of mind. History is the story of
the search for the intuitive leap that will reveal the very mechanism of that other dimension. The
need for such a leap by humanity will grow as we exhaust complexity in all realms save the
microphysical and the psychological. My own method has been immersion in the images and
self- examination of the phenomenon of tryptamine hallucinogenesis. This means taking the
Stropharia psilocybe and pondering just what this all may mean. With confidence that as more
people come to share this experience time will deepen our understanding, if not answer all
questions. For psilocybin argues that hallucinogens are windows into higher dimensions. That
even as a cone can yield circle, ellipse or parabola to an act of two-dimensional sectioning and
yet remain intrinsically a cone, so reality is something that changes according to the angle of
regarding. It argues that human beings are many forms over vast scales of time, that all life is
unified at some level, and all intelligence in the universe are but facets of the mystery called
humanness. In probing the Other we shall always come back with images of ourselves. In
probing ourselves we shall return with images of the Other. In the phenomenon of being itself no
less than in the phenomenon of the UFO encounters we are merely privileged observers of a
relationship between what is naively called the world and the transpersonal portion of the human
psyche. How this relationship came to be, and what its limitations are, we cannot know until we
gain access to the transpersonal and atemporal part of the psyche. Of what this consists we do
not know and no hypothesis can be ruled out. My hunch is that if we could really comprehend
death then we could understand the UFO. But that neither can be understood unless they are
looked at in light of the question, what is humanness? I believe that the transpersonal component

of the human psyche is not distinct from matter and that therefore it can literally do anything. It
is not subject to the will of any individual. It has a will and an understanding that is orders of
magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals who compose it as cells compose a
body. It has a plan, glimpsed by individuals only as vision or religious hierophany. Nevertheless,
the plan is unfolding. There will be many more UFO sightings, many more close contacts. Our
belief systems are undergoing accelerated evolution via increased input from the other.
Somewhere ahead of us there is a critical barrier where we will at last have enough data to obtain
an integrating insight into the riddle of humanity's relation to the UFO. I believe that as this
happens the childhood of our species will pass away and when this is done we will be free to use
the staggering understanding that humankind and the UFO are one.

Terence McKenna - 1984 - New Maps of Hyper Space

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Terence McKenna - 1984 - New Maps of Hyper Space

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NEW MAPS OF HYPERSPACE by Terence McKenna

NEW MAPS OF HYPERSPACE

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forms of incredible complexity. There is no possibility that this could be construed as

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SPACE TIME CONTINUUM WITH TERENCE MCKENNA ALIEN DREAMTIME

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Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

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radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to

What does extraterrestrial communication have to do with this family of hallucinogenic

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neglectedsubstances. Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the

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become a cultural convenience? Naturally, as a result of the confrontation of alien intelligence

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4-phosphoraloxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine and that serotonin, the major neurotransmitter in the

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scales, one sees that

Excerpted from the TalkingBook version of Terence McKenna's "True Hallucinations."

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