true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
maximum ingression of novelty, or the end of the wave, will occur on December 22, 2012. Strangely enough this is the end date that the
Mayans assigned to their calendar system as well. What is it that gives both a twentieth-century individual and an ancient Meso-American
civilization the same date upon which to peg the transformation of the world? Is it that both used psychedelic mushrooms? Could the answer
be so simple? I don't think so. Rather, I suspect that when we inspect the structure of our own deep unconscious we will make the unexpected
discovery that we are ordered on the same principle as the larger universe in which we arose. This notion, surprising at first, quickly comes to
be seen as obvious, natural, and inevitable.
The analogy that explains how this might be so is provided by looking at sand dunes. The interesting thing about such dunes is that they bear a
resemblance to the force that created them, wind. It is as if each grain of sand were a bit inside the memory of a natural computer. The wind is
the input that arranges the grains of sand so that they become a lower-dimensional template of a higher-dimensional phenomenon, in this case
the wind. There is nothing magical about this, and it does not seem mysterious to us: wind, a pressure that is variable over time, creates a
rippled dune, which is a structure regularly variable in space. In my thinking, the genes of organisms are grains of sand arranged by the ebb
and flow of the winds of time. Naturally, then, organisms bear the imprint of the inherent variables in the temporal medium in which they
arose. DNA is the blank slate upon which the changing temporal variables have had their sequence and relative differences recorded. Any
technique that saw into the energetic relationships within a living organism, such as yoga or the use of psychedelic plants, would also give a
deep insight concerning the variable nature of time. The King Wen sequence of the / Ching is the product of this kind of insight.
Human culture is a curve of expanding potentiality. In our own tormented century it has reached vertical gain. Human beings threaten every
species on the planet. We have stockpiled radioactive materials everywhere, and every species on earth can feel this. The planet when viewed
as a sentient entity can react to this kind of pressure. It is three billion years old, and it has many options.
Dualistic talk about humanity not being part of the natural order is foolish. We could not have arisen unless we served a purpose that fit into
the planetary ecology. It is not clear what our purpose is, but it seems to have to do with our enormous research instruments. And crises! By
stockpiling atomic weapons, we have claimed the capacity to destroy the earth like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple. Why? We do not
know why. Surely not for the political and social reasons that are given. We are simply a tool-building species that is itself the tool of a
planetary ecology that is a higher intelligence. It knows what the dangers and limits on the cosmic scale are and it is furiously organizing life
to both preserve and transform itself.
My story is a peculiar one. It is hard to know what to make of it. The notion of some kind of fantastically complicated visionary revelation that
happens to put one at the very center of the action is a symptom of mental illness. This theory does that, and yet so does immediate
experience, and so do the ontologies of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. My theory may be clinically pathological, but unlike these religious
systems, I have enough humor to realize this. It is important to appreciate the intrinsic comedy of privileged knowledge. It is also important to
have recourse to the scientific method whenever appropriate. Most scientific theories can be disproven in the calm confines of the laboratory,
evolution to the contrary.
To empathize with the visions at La Chorrera one must imagine what one can imagine. Imagine if wishes were horses, how beggars would
ride. The ideas developed at La Chorrera were so compelling because they promised new dimensions of human freedom. The Amazonian
rumors of time-binding magical fluids self-generated out of the bodies of master shamans are nothing less than intimations of the
metamorphosis of the human body/mind into a higher-dimensional state. Were such a transformation of matter possible, one could do
anything with it. One might spread it out and climb on it and take it up to any altitude, adding oxygen at will. It's the haunting image of the
flying saucer yet again. One can climb inside it: putting on your mind like a mental wet suit. The flying saucer is an image of the perfected
human mind: waiting, warmly humming, at the end of human history on this planet. When it is perfect, there will be an ontological mutation
of the human form, nothing less than the resurrection-body that Christianity anticipates.
It is the genius of human technology to master and to serve the energies of life and death and time and space. The UFO holds out the
possibility of mind become object, a ship that can cross the universe in the time it takes to think about it. Because that is what the universe is—
a thought. And when thought becomes mobile and objectified, then humanity—novices in the mastery of thought— will begin to set out.
Of course we may discover that we are not to set out; the future may reveal instead that there is something out there calling us home. Then it
will be our technology and the call of the Other that
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