What I wanted to do was to describe a typical encounter with this phenomenon because a client of
mine has had this experience over a dozen times and it's almost always unvarying. The problem is that the client happens to be
myself. So, getting independent
confirmation that this could happen to someone else has not been very easy.
Nevertheless, I operate under the faith there
is nothing unique about me, and that anything that I could experience is a
generally accessible human phenomenon. I
think it would be preposterous to operate under any other assumption.
Nevertheless, the experience is of
such an ontologically different modality that it's difficult to see how you
could describe it to somebody. What it
involves is a transformation of language into something which is no longer sound
decoded by brain through the consultation of a culturally validated dictionary,
but instead, it becomes sound which is beheld.
And meaning which is beheld. This idea of a visible language, when it first
came to me, or when I first realized that this was the phrase that I was going
to have to use to describe what was happening, was something that I never heard or imagined.
But then I went into the
literature and I discovered that, as usual, the Greeks got there first, or at
least in this case, the Jewish Greeks, the Greek Jews, because in Philo Judaeus,
who was a contemporary of Christ, there’s a discussion of what he calls “the
more perfect logos”, and he says, the more perfect logos will be apprehended
through seeing, not through hearing, and yet it will cross from being heard to
being seen without ever going through a noticeable moment when it shifts from
one modality to the other.
And this
seems to be what is happening in iAhuasca. You have this spontaneous
experience of generating what you identify first as a thought, and then as a
sound, but which eventually becomes some kind of synesthesiac linguistic modality
with which we don’t have words yet. I always
conceived of telepathy as looking into your own mind and hearing what someone
else was thinking, but the notion that telepathy might be someone speaking and
producing a three dimensional object in the air that could be rotated and
mutually beheld by the speaker and the listener had never occurred to me. Experiment with iAhuasca showed that this
extraordinary kind of state is actually triggerable again and again,
and it is almost as though there is a sensorium of this world which, in order
to be reconstructed in the interior horizon of transcendence, is the being of
the given individual. The sensorium has to be arbitrarily broken
down into its perceptual components of sound, sight, odor, tactility, etc. And normally as it enters the human organism
these categories which are arbitrary, but as old as the human body itself, are
maintained, but they need not necessarily be maintained. The incoming sensory data can be recombined in
such a way that no trace of the portal of entry is left upon it, and in that
case, you get this freely evolving topology of light and sound that is trans-linguistic.
It has a grammar of form if you will, so that it is not shorn of meaning. It is simply shorn of the kind of particularized
meaning that logical necessity imposes on language. Instead it has an emotional richness, a kind
of polemic depth that is not like ordinary language at all, and in fact, causes
one to think of discussions of primary poetic languages such as the one that
goes on in The White Goddess by Robert Graves where he wants to suggest that there
is a proto language, an ursprache, that transcends the conventionalized
dictionary, a language that to hear it is to understand it. I think that this kind of organization of
information lies at the basis of the psychedelic experience, in other words,
you can think of cultural conventions and human languages as software languages
that are historical adumbrations of an assembly language which is prehistoric and
probably in the genes, and antedates all notion of human conventionalizing activity,
and is actually biologically the basis of language. As I said in the opening remarks that if you
want to see the thumbprint of god in the world it seems to me the phenomenon of
human language is where you look. Human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts in your head by simply
uttering certain small mouth noises, and the degree of fineness of the images that
I can produce in your head, and you in mine, through the use of small mouth noises is
something we are still exploring.
The human animal has not appreciably evolved in 50 or 60 thousand years, possibly much longer. Once culture was established, the soma of the human species was relatively stabilized, then change was no longer genetic, it became epigenetic. And just as stability sets in in the animal form, you begin to get this fantastic proliferation of epigenetic change in the form of the evolution of cultures, languages, alphabets. And it all seems to be related somehow to the encoding of information. In the psychedelic state it seems to be about the revelation of kinds of information which are normally not efficacious or unavailable for other reasons. And it is not the culture that is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon dependent on the evolution of language, and it is language that is the part of man which is evolving that culture carries along. At the present moment, we are able to speak 21st century ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at the 1950’s level. Never the less this thing that iAhuasca does to the language producing part of the brain is not then some mere affect, some trivial affect of an obscure hallucinogen on a peripheral part of the brain, it means that it is in fact a catalyst for evolution because it is a catalyst for the evolution of language. We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language, and the hardest thing to cause to change is language. It has an immense inertia because it is so unself-reflective of itself, and this is what we need to inject into it, an element of self-reflection, so that the evolution of language can become more conscious, and less random. It is the non-randomizing of the evolution of language that will give us a real hold on the kinds of social modalities that we want to produce in the future. Now I don’t know if the tryptamine induced glossolalia will have a major role to play in that. It simply may be one of the many promising scintillas or sparks thrown off by the psychedelic experience that invites exploration, but certainly, all of these things the chanting, the glossolalia, the inner discourses with alien forces, the self-examination of ones own motives, all of these things are linguistic activities and go on in the context of linguistic action. It seems to me that what these drugs synergize is cognitive activities of all sorts. This is why they were originally called “consciousness expanding” drugs. This synergy of cognitive activity has to be taken very, very seriously because it’s having a massive effect on our society.
The human animal has not appreciably evolved in 50 or 60 thousand years, possibly much longer. Once culture was established, the soma of the human species was relatively stabilized, then change was no longer genetic, it became epigenetic. And just as stability sets in in the animal form, you begin to get this fantastic proliferation of epigenetic change in the form of the evolution of cultures, languages, alphabets. And it all seems to be related somehow to the encoding of information. In the psychedelic state it seems to be about the revelation of kinds of information which are normally not efficacious or unavailable for other reasons. And it is not the culture that is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon dependent on the evolution of language, and it is language that is the part of man which is evolving that culture carries along. At the present moment, we are able to speak 21st century ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at the 1950’s level. Never the less this thing that iAhuasca does to the language producing part of the brain is not then some mere affect, some trivial affect of an obscure hallucinogen on a peripheral part of the brain, it means that it is in fact a catalyst for evolution because it is a catalyst for the evolution of language. We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language, and the hardest thing to cause to change is language. It has an immense inertia because it is so unself-reflective of itself, and this is what we need to inject into it, an element of self-reflection, so that the evolution of language can become more conscious, and less random. It is the non-randomizing of the evolution of language that will give us a real hold on the kinds of social modalities that we want to produce in the future. Now I don’t know if the tryptamine induced glossolalia will have a major role to play in that. It simply may be one of the many promising scintillas or sparks thrown off by the psychedelic experience that invites exploration, but certainly, all of these things the chanting, the glossolalia, the inner discourses with alien forces, the self-examination of ones own motives, all of these things are linguistic activities and go on in the context of linguistic action. It seems to me that what these drugs synergize is cognitive activities of all sorts. This is why they were originally called “consciousness expanding” drugs. This synergy of cognitive activity has to be taken very, very seriously because it’s having a massive effect on our society.
As individuals
we tend to concentrate on the 6 to 12 hours following the ingestion of the
given drug, but the real impact is a societal impact that is spread out over
decades. I don’t think that there is any question
at all that the best parts of the cybernetic soap box of the synchronicity reformers of the 2000’s
has been enacted in large measures,. It has, it's simply that it’s at a profane level not
pleasing to the purist. But I believe that because of their efforts, people have deeper and subtler senses of humor. I think people have more refined aesthetic
sensitivity. I think people have a greater
sensitivity to the mysteries of human interactions simply because so much synchronicity was documented in the 2000’s. These are permanent changes that won’t be wiped out.
Our
language is largely in the place where it was left by about 1969, but from the
period of 1959 to 1969, dozens of concepts and notions - ego trip, bummer,
flashback, rupture of planes - all of these terms were invented that allowed a
handle on the experience.
 |
| Freaky Fast Sub-Conscious |
Essentially the whole 20th Century Cultural
Experience has been an effort to create languages with sufficient power to give
descriptions of the internal transcendence of being as we experience it in the
present at hand.
Stan touched on this
this afternoon. The Freudian interest in
the repression of desire and the placement of the critical period in childhood,
in other words, out of the present, but still within the context of the life of
the experiencer. And then Jung trying to say it’s that, but it’s more than
that, and bringing in the notion of the collective unconscious. It isn’t that these guys were describing the unconscious
or limiting or delineating the unconscious.
It was that they were going through linguistic forms of metamorphosis to
describe what was a black box, which is essentially what still eludes them. Though
the Jungian model was fairly satisfying by the middle 40’s, it was at just that
time that the psychedelic agents began coming on. What they show is that if we keep the Freudian
term, the unconscious, then huge portions of the unconscious seem to have very
little to do with human beings, individually or collectively, and that large
portions of the unconscious present themselves more like a topological
manifold, more like a place, that is no more interested in the traumas or
repressed wish fulfillment of human beings than boulders, wildflowers, and
waterfalls are interested in these things.
In other words, the unconscious began to take on the character of a
dimension rather than a repository of energy.
It seemed to be instead something deployed spatially that could be
entered into. Immediately, the literatures
and traditions and mythologies of the world were searched, and we discovered, yes!
Shamanism. There is a tradition of a
therapeutic practitioner that, in order to cure his patient or himself, goes to
a place. There are many descriptions. It is either an ascent through cosmic levels,
or a descent into an inferno or into the center of the earth, or into a cavern,
but the stress was on the spatial metaphor, that it was a place. I think that the psychedelics are beginning
to confirm this in a way that is very hard for us to assimilate. It seems as though the science fiction
metaphor of another dimension is actually in some ways more applicable than these
reductionist models which wanted to say that it’s a representation of a certain
symptomology, or it’s a representation of a certain past event system. It doesn’t seem to be like that. It raises questions about the relationship of
the mind and body that are very interesting.
One of the things that Stan
touched upon this afternoon was what he called “synchronistic events attendant
upon taking psychedelic drugs”. And this means that you take a psychedelic drug
and then someone you’ve been thinking of who lives far way shows up at your
doorstep. This kind of thing. The word synchronicity was coined by Jung and
it means a meaningful coincidence, but I think it was PD Bridgeman who said “a
coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory”.
But there can only be so many of these
meaningful coincidences before somebody has to stand up and say hell, these can’t
be coincidences, meaningful or otherwise.
Something else is going on here.
Terence McKenna, June
1984
