The Gaian Mind
- A
Literary cut-up from the works of
Terence McKenna
The planet is some kind
of organized intelligence. It's very
different from us. It has had 5- or
6-billion years to create a slow moving
mind which is made of oceans and rivers
and rain forests and glaciers. It's
becoming aware of us, as we are becoming
aware of it, strangely enough. Two less
likely members of a relationship can
hardly be imagined - the technological
apes and the dreaming planet. And yet,
because the life of each depends on the
other, there's a feeling towards this
immense, strange, wise, old, neutral,
weird thing, and it is trying to figure
out why its dreams are so tormented and
why everything is out of balance.
- from Spacetime Tsunami
The planet has a kind of
intelligence... it can actually open a
channel of communication with an
individual human being. The message that
nature sends is, transform your language
through a synergy between electronic
culture and the psychedelic imagination,
a synergy between dance and idea, a
synergy between understanding and
intuition, and dissolve the boundaries
that your culture has sanctioned between
you, to become part of this Gaian
supermind.
- from Re-Evolution
The
psychedelic experience is far more than
instant psychotherapy or instant
regression to infantile traumatic
situations, far more than simply a kind
of super-aphrodisiac, far more than
simply an aid in formulating ideas or
coming up with artistic concepts. What
the psychedelic experience really is, is
opening the doorway into a lost
continent of the human mind, a continent
that we have almost lost all connection
to, and the nature of this lost world of
the human mind is that it is a Gaian
entelechy. It turns out, if we can trust
the evidence of the psychedelic
experience, that we are not the only
intelligent life forms on this planet,
that we share this planet with some kind
of conscious mind - call it Gaia, call
it Zeta Reticulians who came here a
million years ago, call it God Almighty,
it doesn't matter what you call it, the
fact of the matter is that the claims of
religion that there is some kind of
higher power can be experientially
verified through psychedelics.
Now this is not, in
Milton's wonderful phrase "The God
who hung the stars like lamps in heaven"
- it doesn't have to do with that, in my
opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale, it's
planetary in scale. There is some kind
of disincarnate intelligence. It's in
the water, it's in the ground, it's in
the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere
we breath, and our unhappiness, our
discomfort, arises from the fact that we
have fallen into history and history is
a state of benighted ignorance
concerning the real facts of how the
world works.
"What the psychedelic experience
really is, is opening the doorway
into a lost continent of the human
mind, a continent that we have
almost lost all connection to, and
the nature of this lost world of the
human mind is that it is a Gaian
entelechy."
- from the Camden Center presentation
Now, why it is that when
we dose ourselves with a human
neurotransmitter like DMT, why (do) we
then encounter armies of elves teaching
us a perfected form of communication,
this is a very difficult question. When
you go to traditional cultures,
shamanistic cultures in the Amazon and
put this question to them, they answer
without hesitation when you ask about
these small entities, they say "Oh,
yes, those are the ancestors, those are
the ancestor spirits with which we work
all of our magic." This is worldwide
and traditionally the answer that you
would get from shamans if you were to
ask them how they do their magic - it's
through the intercession of the helping
spirit who is a creature in another
dimension.
Well, we may have
imagined many different scenarios, a
future technological and social
innovation, but I think very few of us
have imagined the possibility that the
real programme of shamanism would have
to be taken seriously, and that shamans
are actually people who have learned to
penetrate into another dimension, a
dimension where, for want of a better
word, we would have to say the souls of
the ancestors are somehow present. It
isn't, you see, as though we penetrate
into the realm of the dead, it's more as
though we discover that this world is
the realm of the dead and that there is
a kind of higher-dimensional world with
greater degrees of freedom, with a
greater sense of spontaneity and a
lesser dependency on the entropic world
of matter, and that that other universe
is attempting to impinge into our own,
perhaps to rescue us from our historical
dilemma, we don't know - perhaps shamans
have always had commerce with these
magical invisible worlds and it's only
the sad fate of Western human beings to
have lost touch and awareness with this
domain to the point where it comes to us
as a kind of a revelation.
You see, I believe that
the whole fall into history, the whole
rise of male dominance and patriarchy
really can be traced to a broken
connection with the living world of the
Gaian mind, and there's nothing
airy-fairy about this notion; the living
world of the Gaian mind is what shamans
access through psychoactive plants, and
without psychoactive plants that access
comes as an unconfirmable rumour.
"The Gaian mind is what we're
calling the psychedelic experience.
It's 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."
- Alien Dreamtime
- The Archaic Revival
I
can imagine a world where people live in
idyllic pastoral naturalism, naked with
perfected ageless bodies, it looks like
an aboriginal high Paleolithic
existence, but when you transport
yourself into these people's bodies and
they close their eyes, what they see are
menus hanging in mental space and these
menus are generated by an object on the
inside of their eyelid no larger than a
contact lens and that object is a
doorway for them into a virtual global
culture that is electronically
instantaneous, multi-levelled,
multi-sensory, transformative, you know,
the complete database of the species on
call at a glance.
"Like the octopus, our destiny is to
become what we think, to have our
thoughts become our bodies and our
bodies become our thoughts. This is the
essence of a more perfect Logos, a Logos
not heard but beheld. VR can help
here..",
- The Archaic
Revival, p 232.
In-house destinations to Terrence
McKenna-Land
| |
Aliens & Archetypes
Terrence McKenna
interview transcript with Dr Jeffrey Mishlove on
"Thinking Allowed" PBS series... |
|
| |
The Muchroom Speaks
And our opinions rest upon what
it tells eloquently of itself in
the cool night of the mind... |
|
Bibliography
Abraham, Ralph, McKenna,
Terence & Sheldrake, Rupert, Trialogues
at the Edge of the West,
(Santa Fe, Bear
& Company, 1992)
Eisenman, Stephen F., Nineteenth Century
Art: A Critical History, (London, Thames
& Hudson, 1994)
Harvey, David, The Condition of
Postmodernity, (Oxford, Basil Blackwell,
1989)
Heelas, Paul, Lash, Scott & Morris,
Paul, Detraditionalisation,
(Massachusetts, Blackwell, 1996)
Heelas, Paul, The New Age Movement,
(Massachusetts, Black-well, 1996)
---
"The New Age in Cultural Context:
The Premodern, the Modern and the
Postmodern",
Religion 23, 2 (1993) 103 -
116
Jonas, Hans, Philosophical Essays, (New
Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1974)
---
The Gnostic Religion, 2nd Ed.,
(Boston, Beacon Press, 1963)
Krell, David Farrell & Wood, David [eds],
Exceedingly Nietzsche, (New York,
Routledge, 1988)
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of
Narcissism, (New York, W.W.Norton, 1978)
Lyon, David, "A Bit of a Circus: Notes
on Postmodernity and the New Age",
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McKenna, Terence, "The Camden Centre
Talk 15/6/92", Terence McKenna Land @
http://www.deoxy.org/mckenna.htm
----
The Archaic Revival, (New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991)
Morrison, Grant, Jimenez, Phil & Lark,
Michael, "The Girl Most Likely To", The
Invisibles, Vol. 2, No. 6, July 1997,
(New York, DC Comics)
Smith, David, "The Premodern and the
Postmodern: Some Parallels, with Special
Reference to Hinduism", Religion 23, 2
(1993) 157 - 165
Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self,
(Massachusetts, Harvard U.P, 1989)
---
The Ethics of Authenticity,
(Massachusetts, Harvard U.P, 1991)
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival,
(New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p
xiii
Quoted in Hans Jonas, Philosophical
Essays, (New Jersey, Prentice-Hall,
1974), p 271
Abraham, Ralph, McKenna, Terence &
Sheldrake, Rupert, Trialogues at the
Edge of the West, (Santa Fe, Bear &
Company, 1992), p 174
Paul Heelas, "Introduction:
Detraditionalization and its Rivals", in
Heelas, Paul, Lash, Scott & Morris, Paul
[eds], Detraditionalisation,
(Massachusetts, Blackwell, 1996), p 2
Ibid, p 3
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self,
(Massachusetts, Harvard U.P, 1991), p
314
Ibid, p 325 - 7
Quoted in Ibid, p 327
Ibid, p 328
Terence McKenna, "The Camden Centre
Talk, 15/6/92", Terence McKenna Land @
http://www.deoxy.org/mckenna.htm, p 2
Ibid, p 8
Ibid, p 1
Quoted in Paul Heelas, The New Age
Movement, (Cambridge. Mass, Blackwell,
1996), p 153
McKenna, Camden, p 18
Quoted in Taylor, Sources, p 357
Ibid
Quoted in Ibid, p 358
Ibid, p 359 - 60
Ibid, p 359
McKenna, Camden, p 12
Ibid, p 1
Ibid, p 15
McKenna, Archaic, p 94
Quoted in Alan D. Schrift, "Foucault and
Derrida on Nietzsche and the End(s) of
"Man", in David Farrell Krell and David
Wood [eds], Exceedingly Nietzsche, (New
York, Routledge, 1988) p 131.
McKenna, Archaic, p 241
Ibid, p 249
See Taylor on "Inwardness", in Sources,
pp 111 - 207
Paul Morris, "Community Beyond
Tradition", in Heelas, Lash & Morris [eds],
Detraditionalization, p 227
McKenna, Camden, p 21
McKenna, Archaic, p 167
McKenna, Camden, p 7
Ibid, p 26
Ibid, p 13
Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays, p 273
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of
Authenticity, (Massachusetts, Harvard
U.P, 1991), pp 1 -12
See, for example, Abraham & McKenna in
Trialogues, p 47 - 53
Jonas, Essays, p 272
Ibid, p 273
See William Bloom's summary of New Age
axioms, quoted in Paul Heelas, "The New
Age in Cultural Context: The Premodern,
the Modern and the Postmodern", Religion
23, 2 (1993) p 104
David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity, (Oxford, Basil Blackwell,
1989), p 284
Ibid, p 284 - 5
Quoted in Heelas, Cultural Context, p
110
Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century
Art, A Critical History, (London, Thames
& Hudson, 1994),
p 247.
McKenna, Camden, p 6
Harvey, Postmodernity, p 293
Harvey, Postmodernity, p 291
McKenna, Camden, p 19 Douglas Kellner,
quoted in Heelas, Cultural Context, p
111
