Transmissions
from
Terence McKenna-Land
Item:
Tryptamine Hallucinogens and
Consciousness
by Terence McKenna
A talk given at the Lilly/Goswami
Conference on Consciousness and Quantum
Physics at Esalen, December 1983. It was
to be the first of many lectures at
Esalen Institute
on the Big Sur Coast of
California.
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 compounds has been overlooked.
Psilocybin, though rare, is the best
known of these neglected substances.
Psilocybin, in the minds of the
uninformed public and in the eyes of the
law, is lumped together with LSD and
mescaline, when in fact each 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 German
word 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 and 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 shamans or 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 Chenoboskion 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 ecstasy 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 black 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
make 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?"
