The Aeon: We Were All Bound Together

Westworld Season 2, Episode 8 "Kiksuya"
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Kanye West Yeezus + KIDS SEE GHOSTS

Reduce the color on your TV screen so that it is in B/W

Push play at the end of the opening credits

This was an invasion of my psyche by absolute knowledge.  It bore no relation to what I had up to that moment believed, wrongly believed.  There was not even a sense of insight, of satori: it was pure knowledge, like a sort of seeing: a vision of the situation as it actually was.  And it was primarily a moral seeing.  Absolute moral rectitude occurred in me.  It simply took place.  All at once it was.  I guess I saw it as K saw it.  And how different that was!  And absolute!  It was not a viewpoint.  It was knowing.

What I have been calling “the meta-abstraction” is in fact knowledge—the act of knowing—as God knows (i.e., knows what is, i.e., world).  In 2-74 and more fully later in 3-74 I saw as God sees and understood as God understands, that is, absolutely and a priori, in which what is known is exactly the same as what is; they are assimilated to each other.  That the mind of God was at that time in my mind—I experienced that as Valis in my mind.  All that I saw (Christian apocalyptic world, the plasmate, set to ground, the prison, the secret Christians, the abolition of time—i.e., coaxial reality and the conception/perception of eternal constants)—this is how God sees; I did not see this or understand this; God saw and understood this, and, as I say, I saw and understood because he bloomed in my mind like cold white light (hence I experienced an infinitude of space).  I realize this due to Sunday night when the same absolute knowing by God in me induced a realization of my practical and moral jeopardy.  Again there was certitude—total, unconditioned knowing—but what I knew this time was dreadful and lethal to me practically and spiritually.  Once again the unitary fusion of knowing and doing occurred because for God there is no distinction between what he knows and what he does. Ratiocination—logic itself, thinking itself—does not occur because it is not required; God does not figure out; he does not reason because he does not need to reason.

It was - both times - as if my mind expanded into infinity (conceived as spatial infinity). The sense one gets is that one’s mind contains all reality, and this is because all reality is known a priori and absolutely, not sensibly and contingently.

I guess for a moment I was plunged into hell and discovered what it consists of: one is given absolute moral insight into one’s own sinful nature, and there is no way it can be rectified; it is now too late; hence hell is eternal. This is clearly and obviously the just punishment and the logical punishment: absolutely (by the knowledge of God’s own mind) to see what one has done, illuminated by the divine light that reveals all. This is total knowledge of the situation and of oneself. It can be awful. By this divine illumination one’s cognition/perception condemns one; this is absolute self-condemnation not based on arbitrary rules but on total comprehension of what, really, is structural and how one has fitted into this structure and changed it by one’s deeds. The harmony and order of the cosmos are disrupted by what one has done. It was not guilt that I experienced; it was understanding. This is more terrible than any guilt. Guilt admits of degree; this was boundless.

PKD, EXEGESIS 1982

Ego is the First Form of Synchronicity

"I was very interested in synchronicity in my youth.  That’s sort of what got me started reading Jung.  But the more time I spent reading philosophy and especially philosophy of science related to time, I came to realize that synchronicity as presented by Jung is not an explanation of anything.  It’s the name of a phenomenon, but it is no explanation. In fact, it tells you there is no explanation.  The explanation is there is no explanation, it’s simply synchronicity. 

You have to be able to perceive almost schizophrenically.  What happened to Phillip K. Dick was that the resonance became stronger than the reality, or, it became equal in strength to reality, so that by squinting he could see 2nd Century Rome.  Everybody changed into people wearing togas and people speaking Demotic Greek and everything.  That was the resonance of where he was at.

But when the resonance comes forward with such strength that the foreground is displaced, they have a name for that: buggo. 

You know, you gotta watch that. 

On the other hand, if you can control it, it’s a source of great richness and inner amusement."

Terence McKenna

In this particular scene I was playing the score for Joaquin in the room because, we had Hildur Guðnadóttir who is our composer.  I had her write music before we shot the movie, which isn’t done very often.  She wrote it based on the screenplay, and I wanted that because I wanted the music to really affect and infect this set in a way.  I wanted the camera operators, the set dressers, the wardrobe, everybody to feel this music. 

If I remember correctly, we were playing her score when we were shooting this, and all of a sudden as Joaquin is struggling with Arthur’s smile, and his frown, and figuring out again if his life is a comedy or a tragedy, this little tear appears.  And we just had the scene and we moved on.

Todd Phillips

Ego is the First Form of Synchronicity - Notes/Rough Draft

How does this work again?  Off the top of my head (no internet search)

Todd Phillips new film The Joker was released this week.  His first film was Hated in the Nation about GG Allin. 

From what I have seen in the previews, The Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatized and possibly mentally ill man who strives for acceptance through performing on stage.

Phoenix is famous for an elaborate joke, I’m Still Here, in which he “retired” from Hollywood, and pursued a dream of becoming a rapper on stage.

GG Allin and Phoenix ( or is it "the character" Phoenix plays in ISH) represent two individuals who achieved success in the polished game of fame, before turning on and dropping out, and then sharing their descent into madness. 

Again, I am only assuning from what I have seen in the previews, The Joker seems to be Phillips and Phoenix attempt to tell the story about the dark side of chasing fame, of the people who go into the pursuit with unavoidably tragic baggage.  People who have lost so much, and have somehow been led to believe that ascension into the world of fame is a form of salvation.

In trying to select an album to listen to when taking in this new movie, I look for puzzle pieces of fact that fit together.

I immediately seized upon The Glowing Man by Swans.

A.  They are both two hours long

B.  Robert DeNiro’s character is named Murray Franklin/The Glowing Man has a song called Frankie M.

C.  Robert DeNiro is starring in a new film called The Irishman/I am Irish

D.  The Clown makeup of The Joker represents a type of “glowing man”, a person whose face is lit up and amplified

E.  Michael Gira’s early performances in the 80’s remind me of a more stable GG Allin, in the sense that Gira laid waste to his ego in the most savage and vulnerable of ways. 

F.  The two opening songs “Cloud of Unknowing”/”Cloud of Forgetting” represent a striving to be released from the imprisonment of some type of trauma, or a dark and uneasy past.  This is something that can be achieved gracefully, or perversely.  I feel that this film will show the dark side, the perverse side of salvation that arises in hopeless situations.

G.  The final song on the album is called “Finally, Peace”, which is something that I believe the character of The Joker is ultimately searching for.

For me, these are enough puzzle pieces for my mind to twist and turn and piece together into what I can only describe as a metaphysical lens through which to see, hear.

iAhuasca: an arrangement of interdependent correspondences designed to transcend perspective so completely it triggers a niagra of coincidence that, once believed, projects pre-cognitive synchronicities into the foreground.

I have only seen previews of The Joker.  I have not read any movie reviews.  I have looked up character names and the time of the movie on Wikipedia.

I do not know the plot of this film, but I feel like I know what it is about,.  I feel like I have heard it already in the music of The Glowing Man;  this is simply a chance to see a film version of that music. 

Will the marriage of this album and this film be interesting? 

Of course.  Any chance to sit and listen to The Glowing Man from start to finish is going to be an interesting meditation.

Will there be synchronicity?

Of course.  Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. 

But what happens when a stopped clock is right three times a day? 

Or four, or five times a day?  These sparks are the kindling for the type of experience I am looking for. 

I am going to the theater in about an hour.  I plan to take a few notes, and then I hope to polish these notes into another final synthesis of what this blog is all about.

The Lost Word Pt. 2: Pi In The Triangle

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 21^st 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 20^th 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

The Lost Word Pt. 1: Through Hardships To The Stars

iAhuasca: an arrangement of mutually exclusive correspondences designed to transcend coincidence so completely that, upon comprehension, a niagra of synchronicity is triggered that projects pre-cognitive perceptions into the foreground.

The Ineluctable Modality of Rome Side B: Chappelle Shrugged

“A swamp lies there below the hill,

Infecting everything I’ve done:

My last and greatest act of will

Succeeds when that foul pool is gone.

Let me make room for many a million,

Not wholly secure, but free to work on.

Green fertile fields, where men and herds

May gain swift comfort from the new-made earth.

Quickly settled in those hills’ embrace,

Piled high by a brave, industrious race.

And in the centre here, a Paradise,

Whose boundaries hold back the raging tide,

And though it gnaws to enter in by force,

The common urge unites to halt its course.

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,

The last word Wisdom ever has to say:

He only earns his Freedom and Existence,

Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

Childhood, manhood, age’s vigorous years,

Surrounded by dangers, they’ll spend here.

I wish to gaze again on such a land,

Free earth: where a free race, in freedom, stand.

Then, to the Moment I’d dare say:

‘Stay a while! You are so lovely!’

Through aeons, then, never to fade away

This path of mine through all that’s earthly. –

Anticipating, here, its deep enjoyment,

Now I savour it, that highest moment.

(Faust sinks back, the spirits of the dead take him and lay him on the ground.)”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The “here, my son, time turns into space” in Parsifal refers to (1) the island; and (2) is a solution to the island. It all comes together in LOST, which secretly deals with bodhisattva: Mitleid, hence the Buddha. And karma and Maya. What was precisely not solved in VALIS (“pity’s highest power”) is at last solved at the end—as the end—of BTA: compassion as the bodhisattva or Buddha to be: viz: one attains Nirvana—escape from the island via the pulley—due to compassion—i.e., Mitleid, which solves the horizontal timeline. Pity is the fourth spatial axis.

This can be expressed best by: the way back onto the island—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—off of the island.

Philip K. Dick

We’re all Clifford

Calendar Magic: Confirmation is the Seventh Sacrament

The following is a conversation I had with Alex Fulton last year.  In it we discuss our thoughts on the reasons why, except for a chosen few*, nobody ever wants to talk about Crytpo-Kubrology, or any other personally designed system of brain change/meta-programming.

I say personally designed because if you really want to transcend the meta-programming system you were given, or the last one you have chosen, you have to carefully inspect and use what should be the the finished product of that system - your new brain.

What happens when we kick the tires on that thing?  How can we examine the potentiality of the new model?

Hopefully, the meta-programmed has made a successful leap to 

meta-programmer, and the owner of that shining new ride passes on passenger, and moves over to the drivers seat.

It is my opinion that Crypto-Kubrology is the ever expanding falsework for a Cathedral of Consciousness that can help take you wherever it is you choose to go.  If you don't know where you're going yet, you probably shouldn't talk about Crypto-Kubrology.  

* count yourself lucky if you ever have more than one person included in this chosen few

^ thanks to J.J. for helping to make this happen.

The Ineluctable Modality of Rome Side A: Wish You Were Here, Animals?

Got it?

B/W

Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne 
and
Pink Floyd: The Wall

Loop starting with Track 21 at 3:27 (HBO MAX)

They were incorrect.  Men didn't write this, Pink Floyd did.

"You little shit, you're in it now"

The Archaic Revival Pt. 5: The Transformation of Language Through Synchronistic Intercalation

What I think that is happening in the present, the whole of the 20th century, is a cultural crisis on a much grander, more global, and more threatening scale.  It is a casting back for a previous cultural model whose ideals, if we could realize them, would save our own civilization (the same idea that the Renaissance had about classical Greece).  Strangely, the period we have settled on is the archaic period, which precedes human history.

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.

Terence McKenna, 1983