augmented illusions

 You can feel that we’re approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focussed and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that’s the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see.

Mark Willis was kind enough to link to a video of/by Terence McKenna that I put up. I started to get interested in McKenna, because I found myself being part of a tradition with a direct link to indigenous mystical traditions. A tradition, which had developed a very sophisticated apparatus for teaching, something which has endured to the present day and which is flourishing now. Once you find yourself in the Himalayas, spiritually speaking, the native traditions of central asia and Siberia are never far away, not geographically and not in time. McKenna’s theory is that our brains have been shaped by the ingestion of entheogens, amanita muscaria, psylocibine, peyote. This has opened up pathways and has caused a change in the physical structure of our brains, producing art, poetry, music, philosophy. All this may be debatable and McKenna was always a person who courted controversy. I do know, however, that there are mind-altering substances at the heart of all mystical traditions.

And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on…, we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don’t worry if you’ve seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history. A return to the archaic mode.

I remember something that Carmen Rivera, who is a curandera from Peru, said to me years ago. She said: “it seems that Europeans and Americans are blessed, with all the medicine that is so available over here. But it’s so strange that they cannot use it as medicine, because to them, nothing is holy, not even their own body and mind.” Often, people who practice adapted forms of shamanism will tell me, that it’s so much better to induce altered states yourself, that this is more worthy. I don’t agree, but that’s because of my experience. In the tradition in which I practice, even enlightenment can be out of reach if a practitioner forgoes the food and drink that a teacher may offer.