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Transcription of Terrence McKenna's Alien Dreamtim
SPACE TIME CONTINUUM
WITH TERENCE MCKENNA
ALIEN DREAMTIME
WARNING!
The following pages contain the words to the Space Time Continuum / Alien
Dreamtime album and are to be used as reference material after the album
has been smealed, grokked, or otherwise brainally infused. Do yourself a
favor and discontinue further reading of these pages if you have not first
listened to the album.
You have been warned.
Alien Dreamtime was a multi media event recorded live on February
26th/27th 1993 at the Transmission theater, San Francisco, Ca. A video of
this event produced by Rose-X media house is available through City of
Tribes Communications 63 Fountain st, SF, Ca 94114. The didgeridoo is
played with the greatest respect for all the aboriginal people of
Australia and the spirit of all first world people. All tracks published
by Space Monkey.
Archaic Revival
Allright... tonight, for your edification and amusement... three
raves, two interregnums. Visions by Rose X. Didgeredoo, Stephen Kent.
And sound by Space Time. Words and ideas by Terence McKenna. Rap one:
The Archaic Revival.
History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human
species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches,
people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into
trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane
moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the
plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned
mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery
and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism.
Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us.
Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret
faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the
Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism,
surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. The 20th century
mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the
mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant-human symbiosis occurred
that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using,
culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.
And why does this matter? It matters because it chose that the
way out is back, and that the future is a forward escape into the past.
This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of
history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you
this because if the community understands what it is that holds it
together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for
flight into hyperspace. Because what we need is a new myth. What we need
is a new true story that tells us where were going in the universe. And
that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology and that when
psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is
suppressed. And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the
dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return
us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of feeling immediate
experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from
you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of
immediate experience. But thats what holds the community together. And
as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions
of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is
that in the body-- in the body-- there are Niagara of beauty, alien
beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.
I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic
experience, like going to the grave without having sex. It means that you
never figured out what it was all about. The mystery is in the body, and
the way the body works itself into nature. What the archaic revival means
is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three
enemies of the people, and the three enemies of the people are pechemony,
monogamy, and monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the
dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that youre getting it all
reconnected, and get it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of
separateness and self-definition through thing fetish. Getting it all
connected means tapping into the Gaian mind. And the Gaian mind is what
were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living
fact of the entelechy of the planet, and without that experience we wander
in a desert of bogus ideologies, but with that experience, the compass of
the self can be set. And thats the idea, that were figuring out how to
reset the compass of the self, through community, through ecstatic dance,
through psychedelics, intelligence-- intelligence... this is what we have
to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
Im gonna take five here, and uh, well be back and chat some more.
Alien Love
Hello... so, that was like an introduction, ha ha! Now for some
preaching to the choir on the subject of: How come it is that the further
in you go, the bigger it gets? I remember the very, very first time I
smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark, you might say. And I remember
that this friend of mine that always got there first, visited me with this
little glass pipe, and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And
since I was a graduate of Dr. Hoffmans, I figured there were no surprises.
So the only question I asked was how long does it last? And he said,
About five minutes. So, I did it. And...
There was uh, something like a flower. Like a chrysanthemum in
orange and yellow that sort of spinning. Spinning. And then, it was like
I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another
place that didnt seem like a state of mind. It seemed like another place.
And what was going on in this place (aside from the tastefully soffited
indirect lighting and the crawling hallucinations along the domed wall),
what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, a lot of
what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jeweled
basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they had faces they
wouldve been grinning at me, but they didnt have faces. And they assured
me that they loved me, and they told me not to be amazed, not to give way
to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I
hadnt really done it this time! And what they were doing, was they were
making objects come into existence by singing them into existence.
Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars, morphing themselves with
Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of
linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyperdimensional transform
into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered
themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them, that if I could
bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite
the same again.
And I wondered where am I? And what is going on? And it occurred
to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous
continuum that was somehow intersecting my own. And then I thought, a more
elegant explanation would be to take it at face value, and realize that I
had broken into an ecology of souls, and that somehow I was getting a peek
over the other side. Somehow, I was finding out that thing, that you
cheerfully assume you cant find out... but it felt like I was finding out.
And it felt... and then I cant remember what it felt like because the
little self-transforming tikes interrupted me and said, Dont think about
it. Dont think about who we are-- think about doing what were doing. Do
it! Do it now. Do it!
Speaking in Tongues
And what they meant was: use your voice to make an object. And as I
understood I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these
little elf tikes jumping in and out of my chest (they liked to do that to
reassure you), and they said, Do it! And I felt language rise up in me
that was unhooked from English and I began to speak like this:
Eeeoo ded hwauopsy mectoph, mectagin dupwoxin, moi phoi wops eppepepekin
gitto phepsy demego doi aga din a doich demoi aga donc heedey obectdee
doohueana.
(Or words to that effect). And I wondered then what it all meant, and why
it felt so good (if it didnt mean anything). And I thought about it a few
years, actually, and I decided, you know, that meaning and language are
two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic
experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the
real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words, and that if you
know the words that the world is made of, you make of it, whatever you wish!
Eh moi dea doi phegenheggo...
And one of the things that I learned about DMT, was that, if you ever had
it, even just once, then you can have a dream. And in this dream somebody
will pull out a little glass pipe, and then it will happen. It will
happen just like the real thing. Because theres a button somewhere inside
each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side. And
thats the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to
sail. Good luck!
Timewave Zero
Hello, all right. Have you ever noticed how, um, theres this
quality to reality, which comes and goes and kind of, ebbs and flows. And
nobody ever mentions it, or has a name for it. Except that some people
call it a bad hair day or they say, Things are really weird recently. And
I think we never notice it and we never talk about it because were
embedded in a culture that expects us to believe that all times are the
same, and that your bank account doesnt fluctuate, except according to the
vicissitudes of your own existence. In other words, every moment is
expected to be the same, and yet this isnt what we experience. And so
what I noticed was that, running through reality is the ebb and flow of
novelty. And some days, and some years, and some centuries are very novel
indeed. And some aint. And they come and go on all scales, differently,
interweaving, resonantly. And this is what time seems to be.
And science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about
nature, that nature is a novelty-conserving engine. And that from the
very first moments of that most improbable Big Bang, novelty has been
conserved, because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy
pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules,
no atoms, no magnetic fields. There was only an ocean of free electrons.
And then, time passed. And the universe cooled. And novel structures
crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms. Atoms of hydrogen and
helium. Aggregating into stars. And at the center of those stars, the
temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen
before, which was: fusion. And fusion, cooking in the hearts of stars,
brought forth more novelty. Heavy elements, iron, carbon, forvalent
carbon. And as time passed, there not only then, elemental systems, but
because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the
universe, molecular structures and out of molecules come simple subsets of
organisms, the genetic machinery for transcripting information,
aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing
time, always building and conserving upon complexity and always faster and
faster and faster... and then, we come to ourselves. And where do we fit
into all of this?
Five million years ago, we were an animal of some sort. Where
will we be five million years from tonight? What we represent is not a
sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something-or-other on the
edge of nowhere. What we represent is the nexus of concressent novelty
that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself
in upon itself, for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as
we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The
human neocortex is the most densely ramified and complexified structure in
the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation
of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for awhile. Since
the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language, but now, and by
now, I mean for the last 10,000 years, weve been into something new: not
genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but
epigenetic activity. Writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing,
body-piercing, and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the
ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea-excreting force in
nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social
engines, plans, and spreads over the earth, into space; into the
microphysical domain; into the macrophysical domain. We, who five million
years were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necessary upon the
cities of our enemies, the very energy which lights the stars at night.
Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us
out of nature and sculpting us in its own image. And the confrontation
with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending
apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the denouement
of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a
universal process of concressing and expressing novelty that is now going
to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.
You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can
feel it in your own trips. You can feel that were 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 focused 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, thats 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 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, but that we
cannot currently see.
Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you
name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which
cross their desks, that the disappearance of the ozone hole, the
toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rainforests, what this
means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and
that the human species has now, without choice, begun the descent down the
birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the
corner, and nearly completely unimaginable.
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 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 dont worry if
youve 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, a rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of
20,000 years ago. A techno-escape into a future that looks more like the
past than the future, because materialism, consumerism, product fetishism,
all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become
nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence. If-- if-- we
have the dream. If we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the
creativity that is inimicable to the human condition.
This is what were talking about here-- psychedelics as a catalyst
to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language, because
what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So that we need
then, is the forced evolution of language, and the way to do that is to go
back to agents that created language in the very first place. And that
means, the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious
beckoning extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up, into
the chakras of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind
of the Totally Other that created us and brought us forth out of animal
organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we
do determines how well the experiment of life on earth does. Because we
have become the cutting edge of that experiment. We define it, and we
hold in our hands the power to make or to break it.
This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a
pseudo-millennium. This is the real thing, folks. This is not a test.
This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is
no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calendar as a club. We can
make the millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human
civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries
through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism,
monogamy, and monotony. All these things are possible. If we can
understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all together, which is
the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine
social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long,
this is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they
understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone
elses being, you cant be led into thing fetishism and consumerism. The
message of psychedelics is that culture can be reengineered as a set of
emotional values, rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if
we are able to make this point, we can pull back, we can pull back and we
can transcend. Nine times in the last million years, the ice has ground
south from the poles, pushing human populations ahead of it, and those
people didnt fuck up. Why should we, then? We are all survivors. We are
the inheritors of a million years of striving for the Unspeakable. And
now, with the engines of technology in our hands, we ought to be able to
reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time,
invoke it into existence like a UFO, and open the violent doorway into
hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world
beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the
galactic millennium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across
space and time. This is the moment. A planet brings forth an opportunity
like this only once in its lifetime. And we are ready, and we are poised,
and as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it
our own. Its there-- go for it! And thank you!
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