"McKenna - Jun 15 1992" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

[question from audience -- inaudible]

Well, we're going to have a question and answer session here -- I hope you're first off the mark because that's what I'd like to talk about. The format for this evening is we're going to have about a 20 minute intermission so you can stretch your legs and exercise your consumer rights over at the book table, and we'll be hearing a couple of rave cuts that my voice has been slyly integrated into. First of all, these are -- this is an exclusive premier, by the way, these records will not be released until later this year -- re-evolution by the Shaman and tribal drifts version of Shaman I Am. So let's take a....

Question and Answer Time
Q: [inaudible]

TM: The question is 'What do I think psychedelics have...'

Q: No, no, what do you think happens to us after physical death?

TM: Yes, well, my answer would have to be based on psychedelic experience. I described in my talk this encounter with these self-transforming...self-transforming machine elves. And, you know, if you take this kind of experience seriously to the point where you actually feel an obligation to produce a rational explanation, then it would seem to me that in spite of its radical nature, the most conservative explanation that you could come up with as to the nature of these entities is that since they are intelligent, since they seek to communicate with human beings, perhaps they are human beings. And then the only kind of human being they could be is a dead human being and, you know, even I found that a bit of an intellectual stretch to imagine that what the push toward scientific rationalism was going to eventually lead to was an erasing of the distinctions between the living and the dead. But when you go to shamans and expose them to DMT and then say, 'So what about it?', they say 'Well, these are the ancestors. Didn't we tell you that we do our stuff by ancestor magic?' And then you have to say 'Well, then, aha, now I'm getting the picture'. An ancestor is a dead person, but you know in the DMT state, these things don't... it isn't Aunt Mini and Uncle Ned, these are far removed from any association to us and our world. You know, when Patrick converted the pagan Irish, he invented the doctrine of purgatory that had previously not been church dogma and he invented the notion of purgatory to convince the pagan Irish that their belief in fairyland in a nearby dimension inhabited by diminutive dead soles could be assimilated to Christian dogma, and this worked so successfully that then it was accepted as general church dogma and very successfully used to convert Slavic people as well.

So I think ... you know that line by W. B. Yates about 'Once out of nature I would be a thing of gold and gold enameling'? It's as though the transcendental object at the end of time which the shaman encounters, and the individual apocalypse of the human soul at death are mirror images of one another -- as above so below. That's why I'm always amused that people resist the idea of the end of the world, when you can be damn sure that their world is going to end, because some day they're going to slip beneath the sod, so we find the end of the world incredible and improbable as a notion, but it's actually guaranteed for every one of us. As far as, you know, any tried and true data on the after death state, I really couldn't say. My style is more to model and then to hope to improve models later. I did turn on a very high Tibetan Lama to DMT once, and he said after settling back on his heels 'It's the lesser lights'. What it meant for him was that it was a kind of near-death experience. He said 'You can't go further than that without the thread of return being broken'. So, you know, I think DMT is an excellent tool for studying death. I think there is very little reason to rule out the possibility that something survives physical death because nature is so economical, and with such variety of form, can memory and the perfection of the individual personality be all for naught? I'm not sure, I don't know, certainly it's an interesting question. I think, you know, a deeper definition of what a psychedelic life is, is that it's a life lived in constant preparation for death, the big trip, you know, you want to learn the way. This is what the shamans say, they say, you know, 'We're living people, who can go to and from the after world and this empowers us in a very special way'. Now, I need another question, but I can't see anybody.

Q: Do you still believe ??? in 2012?

TM: Do I still believe in the apex of novelty in the year 2012? Well, for those who aren't familiar with my work, when I talked tonight about the spiral of involution and the way in which each advancement into novelty happens more rapidly, I was not just whistling Dixie. I have a mathematic formulism which I chose not to bore you with tonight -- and you should be thankful I assure you -- which leads me to the conclusion that rather than a Big Bang at the beginning, 10, 12, 19 billion years ago, a more pleasing cosmology would be what I call 'the Big Surprise'. And the Big Surprise comes not emerging out of a pure vacuum for no reason, but the big surprise emerges out of the integration of complexity into one final holographic spin-down of all dimensions into a single point. I crib from your own Alfred North Whitehead informing these ideas, because Whitehead had this idea of what he called 'concrescence' and he said, you know, that the universe had an appertition for novelty, an appetite for novelty that moved toward a nexus of concrescence, and I believe that, yes, we are so close to the transcendental object at the end of time that really it is going to occur probably in late 2012. The reasons for being so specific are too complex to go into now, but I'll just give you a short of throw-away explanation which is that's the end date of the Mayan calendar. That's not why I chose it, but I later, after choosing this date, discovered it was the end date of Mayan calendar. Well, the only thing I have in common with the Maya, they took mushrooms and I take mushrooms, so it's almost as though, you know, this is the bar code stamped on the psilocybin paraphoniae, when you get it all pieced together, no matter where in time and space you are, there's this vector pointing at the early years of the 21st century as the place where we, where it becomes explicit that we are in a process of exponential transformation.

I mean, to me it's explicit already. I mean, I cannot deal with a city like London or Manhattan without saying, you know, measured against the background of organic nature, this represents some fantastic mutational phenomenon. I mean whether it's good, whether it's bad, who knows, but it certainly is peculiar and it certainly is happening very very quickly. That's why I think that it's a bunch bum(?) to think that you're suspended in a universe which will endure into some unimaginable future. As I mentioned a moment ago, each one of us is going to die, rather soon, so why not assume that whatever that transformation is it will be general, and then prepare to meet it as a collectivity, not the death of the rationalist and the reductionists where we return to worms, but, you know, the death of Blake and of Revelations and of the Tao Te Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- the death that is victory, the transcendence of matter. That's what death is, and what we need now for the good of the planet and for ourselves is to somehow find a doorway into the imagination, that's where the future lies. Our powers have grown too great to be unleashed on the surface of a fragile planet.

Q: ??

TM: Oh, dear, you know cannabis.

Q: ??

TM: Well let me answer that. The question is that I urged higher doses and greater frequency, and the question is: do I really think that endlessly revisiting these places has something to be said for it. Is that a fair re-phrase of it? Yeah. Well, I don't find these places readily rationally apprehensible. I go back and look again and again and I'm astonished every time, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I may be a bit slow. The thing about it is that it exceeds intellectual grasp, you know, you finally come against something where you say 'This is not an unsolved problem, this is a mystery, it will not yield to closure'. And one of the things I'm fascinated by is I think that the way we need to live -- or that's maybe too strong -- the way we need to mentally balance our karmic accounts is to not seek closure, to Understand -- for heaven's sake, I mean you're a talking monkey, where is it writ large that you should be able to model the cosmos in all its complexity and glory? Better than having an anxiety about the absence of a complete explanation, we need to live in the open-ended, risky but exhilarating domain of openness and just, you know, live your life under the shadow of the great 'who knows', because the tales that were told are fairy tales. Science is a fairy tale, you know, economics is a fairy tale, political theory a fairy tale -- nobody has the faintest idea what's going on. We are not in command of the situation at all. That, in one way, is empowering, because it means, in the words of the dourest philosopher, Ripo Yang(?) 'Worry is preposterous'. So all I would say to address your question operationally is, if raising the dose isn't making it more interesting for you, then, you know, maybe you should found a side branch of the church, because to me it's an ocean, you know, and my mind is a thimble and I go to the ocean and it's crashing in. I'm actually like an ant with a thimble, attempting to fill that thimble from incoming surf -- risky business, what? -- and each time I take away a little bit, but the richness of it, as I said, I think it exceeds the grasp of apprehension. Somebody else -- or did you, did you had a two-part question.

Q: [inaudible]

TM: The question is: do I really think this stuff poses... god, what a question to ask. It's like if I wasn't dangerous before, I will be after I answer this question. The question is: do I really think this stuff has a political efficacy, or is it just some kind of elitist masturbatory artschool trip that isn't taking us anywhere? Yes, I absolutely believe that the issue is a maintenance of social boundaries and that this is done through conditioning and propaganda, not rationally contrived because it's been going on too long, it's just how we are. We are conditioned to submit to powerful male figures, we are conditioned to value the material world over the inner world, we are conditioned to chase money, all of these things, and these.. you see, if you don't take psychedelics -- or at least in my case, there may be other ways to reach this -- but in my case, if I didn't take psychedelics I would believe that culture is truth. Culture is not truth. Culture is other people's trash, you know, the detritus of thousands of years of mistakes, that's what culture is, and I think [applause]... So, as to why I'm allowed to walk around and advocate this stuff, well, first of all have you noticed I use big words? That stamps me as an intellectual, the most pitiful creature in the human zoo and never to be feared by any power or establishment anywhere. No, I think basically the powers that be and the structures that are in place are like a dinosaur.

Q: ??

TM: Pardon me?

Q: ??

TM: Do I feel that they're going to carry on regardless? No, because you see, what's happening is that the contradictions in their system are reaching epidemic proportions. The people who run, I don't know, the Bank of England, the IMF, the UN Security Council, whoever, they have studies sitting on their desks which tell me that business as usual has been removed from the menu, that in fact the atmosphere is being destroyed, that in fact the planktonic life in the sea is in danger -- and that's the bottom of the food chain -- that in fact the toxic mess in the East Bloc -- radioactive and otherwise -- is insoluble at this point. So, you know, it's not heads who are alone in awakening to the fact that we are either headed for a nightmare of social collapse and catastrophe, or we are actually going to mutate toward angelhood, but, you know, blundering through, as we've done for the past thousand years, is no longer an option. Within the next 30 years we are going to have to discuss and contemplate things that would stand your hair on end and things that to people of another generation are going to seem incomprehensible. I mean, what are we going to do? Are we going to download ourselves into a supercooled cube of gold ytterbium alloy buried a thousand feet deep on the dark side of the moon and wander through an ersatz electronic wonderland forever? Are we going to atomize our consciousness and spread it to redwood trees and coral reefs and termite colonies? Are we going to build ships the size of Manitoba and depart for the galactic centre? What exactly is the plan folks, because business as usual is off the menu, and you know, in the '60s these substances were called consciousness expanding drugs, it was just a straight phenomenological description, consciousness expanding drug or substance. Well, if you take that notion seriously for a moment, then you need to stop and apply attention to this matter, because consciousness, the lack of consciousness is why we are going mad, because we cannot solve our problems. If there is one chance in ten thousand that these things actually increase in any measurable domain consciousness, then, by Henry, we should be leaning into it full bore, because if we don't get our act together, you know, the fossil record has a place for failed experiments and I'm not interested in that. [applause]

Q: ??

TM: No, I just think that's a description of the process I'm promoting from the point of view of someone who doesn't like it. The best and the brightest did desert the power structure because the power structure was essentially a merchant of plutonium, paranoia and mass death and propaganda. Yes, the values of Western civilisation are insupportable. The values of Western civilisation are held to the planet the way a madman holds a gun to his temple. That's what it's going to lead to. For instance, take something like free markets -- this is the clarion call of the politically correct at the moment. Free markets means the right to manufacture and sell junk everywhere, it means, you know, nobody will be able to say no. We don't want free markets, we want trade to be as difficult as possible and the more high tech and machined the object is the more we want to make it difficult to move it around, because what we must do -- and I'm not a luddite , I'm not anti-technology, I'm anti-materialism, we must dematerialise the accouterments of the culture. I can imagine a world where people live in idyllic pastoral naturalism, naked with perfected ageless bodies, it looks like an aboriginal high Paleolithic existence, but when you transport yourself into these people's bodies and they close their eyes, what they see are menus hanging in mental space and these menus are generated by an object on the inside of their eyelid no larger than a contact lens and that object is a doorway for them into a virtual global culture that is electronically instantaneous, multi-levelled, multi-sensory, transformative, you know, the complete database of the species on call at a glance, and so forth and so on. This is a reasonable technological goal. If we cared for it as much as we care for atom bombs and epidemic diseases deliverable by artillery shell, we'd have it today. So, you know, the wrong dreams have been executed, the dreams of the paranoia, the psychotic and the dominator, and what we need now are dreams that celebrate consciousness, difference, variety and empower meaning, because the philosophies and the points of view of the last thousand years leave you with a mess of pottage, leave you with no explanation. Our religion as a culture is incomprehensible to 99 per cent of us. I mean, who would care to stride up here and solve a tensor equation? And yet that's, you know, the holy writ. We are completely alienated, so alienated from ourselves are we that when we encounter our own souls in the psychedelic dimension, we mistake it for a UFO. This is serious alienation folks, I think we have to get back into the inner jeweled realm and make ourselves at home there. Is there a woman? Yes.

Q: [female] Inaudible.

TM: Speak louder.

Q: [still inaudible -- but in connection with 'emotional hangups']