Cubism, and the things that were done for literature by Joyce and Pound, and the glorification of barbarism and the recovery of the unconscious (the sexual nature of the unconscious through Freud, the mass archetypal structure through Jung), the great movements, even Marxism, can be seen as movements to recapture pre-historic sacral values, and this process has been going on for fifty years or so.
Recall Marshall McLuhan’s idea that technologies for conveying information shift ratios in the mass psyche in the way that the mass psyche relates to the world. McLuhan was famous for predicting electronic feudalism. He said that the television screen was more like a page of manuscript than a page of print, and that the linearity and uniformity and rational assumptions of grammar were transcended in the conveying of information, to be replaced by electronic gestalts that were looked at rather than read. The ratios between the senses would shift, and this would have profound on effects on art, the history of ideas, and this sort of thing. What is happening is that a kind of super-McLuhanistic phenomenon is happening where we are collapsing not into the electronic feudalism, but into the electronic tribalism which he discussed, and it is shifting our sensory ratios away from the visual and towards the audial.
Under the influence of psilocybin, the language forming centers are activated with the visual cortex so that forms of synesthesia are linked to forms of sound, so that people singing control the fabric of hallucination through sound. We found this to be true of ayahuasca in the Amazon where the shamans use of voice controls the visual fabric of what’s going on. There’s another level to that which is going on which is with the addition of meaning, the control of the visual surface, the topology of meaning rather than the ongoing decoding from a dictionary, is transcended, meaning then is able also to work its adumbrations on this topological surface and you see into.....well there are different ways of cognizing it. The place where the ursprache is coming from, the assembly language that lies behind all formalized or culturally validated languages. Wittgenstein calls it the unspeakable; its the place where explication cannot go almost by definition, in order to avoid a tautology. Now it seemed to me that the nearness of these tryptamine hallucinogens to normal metabolites of bran chemistry, and the fragileness that people like McLuhan and Julian Jaynes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world, in other words, it's a delicate balance of sensory ratios, chemistry, language and history. Given all this, it seemed probable to me that this phenomenon, encountered in deep psychedelic experiences with psilocybin, actually has a potential historical impact.
It is a kind of human ability, which is at present submerged in the psyche, contactable only by the shamanic means of journeying into historical hyperspace, in other words, of going into that place where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough that you can have an intimation, at least, of what is to come, and I think that this is what is to come, and it is a kind of telepathy, but its not telepathy as we imagined it to be.
When I imagined telepathy I thought of it as hearing another person think, and having them hearing you think. This is something where the modality of meaning is shifted out of the common dictionary, that is a cultural convention, and into a shared visual topology which is examined by both parties, both the speaker who caused this thing to be, and the audience who shares the space where this is happening. It’s interesting that beta-carbolines, which are used to accentuate the hallucinogenic effect of DMT in these ayahuasca preparations in the Amazon, is very definitely part of normal human brain metabolism, and the MAO inhibition it performs on DMT is introduced from the outside, is a mirror image of the function it is performing in the brain. This shifting of the sensory ratios is causing language to become more visual. At this point I always have to quote Philo-Judaeus, who was a first century Alexandrine Jew who talked about the Logs. I have made analogies between the phenomenon I am describing and the Logos, but the critical quote was that “a more perfect Logos" was possible, and that it would be a phenomenon that would pass between the modality of being heard to the modality of being beheld without ever crossing through a quantized point of transition where you could say it was one, now it is the other. I think that the cultural shockwaves that would be generated by the emergence of visible language will totally transform the culture to the point that the point beyond the end of history, the entry into hyperspace, the eschatological monad, all these religious or theological constructs about history are actually intuitions about language undergoing this transformation. Now several things about this transformation, its obviously not something which the culture is doing as a decision, it isn’t like home computers and cable TV, it is being brought on as an informational utility, it is something that is being imposed from outside, and I think it is. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Gaian hypothesis of homeostatic regulation of the environment of the Earth through the interaction of all life acting as a single organism, well it obviously regulates trigger species such as we are, are part of this homeostatic method of regulation, and the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil of that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology, in other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language, because what you cannot think you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine, you cannot steer your culture and go. So I am proposing on one level that hallucinogen be thought of as human macro almost social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulate the evolution of human culture generally. Now one final thought about all this, it seems clear to me, and I’ve mentioned it in the other lectures, that the evolution, another aspect of what’s happening to the culture generally is transformation into a space faring species, and that the momentum for this has been building for millenia, it is not something that was decided in the 1950’s, it is in fact what we are all about. I looked at a book recently by Terry Wilson about Brion Gysin called Here to Go, and he asked the question, “What are we here for?” and he answers the question himself, “We’re here to go”. And I think there’s great truth in that, especially in the current historical moment where it's clear that man as a species, and the planet as a unified ecosystem, have become antagonistic to each other. This is not unusual in nature, in fact it is a phenomenon that occurs between a mother and a fetus. When the fetus comes to term, when the birth is imminent, it must happen, otherwise the survival of both parties is threatened, even though the birth trauma for the mother and the child represents one of the major crises that they will face in their sojourn through existence. Nevertheless, it is inevitable and necessary, and if it comes of off correctly its to the good of everyone. Where psychedelics comes together with that, it is going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th Century politics, all of these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means. The I Ching says you never confront evil directly, because when it is named, it sharpens its weapons, and it learns to defend itself. So what is called for is this sideways attack through hyperspace.
The transformation of language is the signal that this archaic….that this nostalgia for the archaic world is coming to a head, and that this is its culmination. This is the peculiar thing that we all sense is coming, that we can’t quite imagine. It is synthetic and natural, obvious yet hidden. The interesting thing about it is that it emerges from an inner personal frontier, in other words, you’re not going to hear this on the evening news. The President is not going to explain it to you, the Secretary General of the UN isn’t going to explain it to you. You are only going to advance into the understanding of this phenomenon to the degree that you apply yourself to the knowledge of your being, to attention to being, to reflection on reflection, to attention on attention. Then it will become clear. And because it is a gradient of evolution, it doesn’t come with the force of a revelation. It is something which is drawn out, almost in the same way that we move forward into time. This thing is drawn out. In fact you could almost say that the act of history, or the fact of history, is a macro-phenomenon that arises out of the micro-physical fact of millions of people evolving their language. That this is what causes the moving wave front of historical becoming. So transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central fact of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.
The I Ching is the most advanced effort to do something like a language of consciousness, but it’s a language of gestalt. I don’t speak Japanese, but it’s said of Japanese that nothing which is obvious is ever mentioned. Language is reserved for clarifying the unclear, so people are not saying “It’s a hot day, isn’t it?” and that kind of stuff. They’re reserving language. The other possibility is that visual language is perhaps not translatable into English because it is a language of emotion, where emotion is seen to be a subtle spectrum, an integrated gradient of meaning, or integrated gradients of combination, as meaning has, so that there isn’t love, hate, disgust, and something else, but in fact an infinitude of emotional states that can be triggered by vocal sound. In a way I am simply describing singing, wordless singing, except that I am describing how that can rise to an ontologically different level and become so emotive that you understand very subtle differentiations of emotion.
I noticed that when we were in the Amazon taking ayahuasca with these people, and they would sing these thousand year old songs, you would eventually get to the place where you had the absolute conviction that you understood. The speed at which I’m going through emotional changes in relation to what I’m hearing must mean that I understand what I am hearing, because if I didn’t understand it I would just have a certain generalized emotion about it. It is changing my interior state so rapidly that it is like the experience of understanding. That’s the only thing it can be compared to.
Synchro-mysticism is a media form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with high levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of media organization second only to music in its ability to endure.
This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
The transformation of language is the signal that this archaic….that this nostalgia for the archaic world is coming to a head, and that this is its culmination. This is the peculiar thing that we all sense is coming, that we can’t quite imagine. It is synthetic and natural, obvious yet hidden. The interesting thing about it is that it emerges from an inner personal frontier, in other words, you’re not going to hear this on the evening news. The President is not going to explain it to you, the Secretary General of the UN isn’t going to explain it to you. You are only going to advance into the understanding of this phenomenon to the degree that you apply yourself to the knowledge of your being, to attention to being, to reflection on reflection, to attention on attention. Then it will become clear. And because it is a gradient of evolution, it doesn’t come with the force of a revelation. It is something which is drawn out, almost in the same way that we move forward into time. This thing is drawn out. In fact you could almost say that the act of history, or the fact of history, is a macro-phenomenon that arises out of the micro-physical fact of millions of people evolving their language. That this is what causes the moving wave front of historical becoming. So transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central fact of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.
The I Ching is the most advanced effort to do something like a language of consciousness, but it’s a language of gestalt. I don’t speak Japanese, but it’s said of Japanese that nothing which is obvious is ever mentioned. Language is reserved for clarifying the unclear, so people are not saying “It’s a hot day, isn’t it?” and that kind of stuff. They’re reserving language. The other possibility is that visual language is perhaps not translatable into English because it is a language of emotion, where emotion is seen to be a subtle spectrum, an integrated gradient of meaning, or integrated gradients of combination, as meaning has, so that there isn’t love, hate, disgust, and something else, but in fact an infinitude of emotional states that can be triggered by vocal sound. In a way I am simply describing singing, wordless singing, except that I am describing how that can rise to an ontologically different level and become so emotive that you understand very subtle differentiations of emotion.
I noticed that when we were in the Amazon taking ayahuasca with these people, and they would sing these thousand year old songs, you would eventually get to the place where you had the absolute conviction that you understood. The speed at which I’m going through emotional changes in relation to what I’m hearing must mean that I understand what I am hearing, because if I didn’t understand it I would just have a certain generalized emotion about it. It is changing my interior state so rapidly that it is like the experience of understanding. That’s the only thing it can be compared to.
Synchro-mysticism is a media form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with high levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of media organization second only to music in its ability to endure.
This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
Terence McKenna, 1983