(read me) Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

[Kazoo...]

Here's a little read to chew on, especially for those who are beginning to learn to "see"...

... and when i say little...he he... i recommend getting a nice cup o' tea, a comfy chair and a bit of free time and diving right in with a open mind, its gonna be a journey but i think you will be better for the effort....

oh Terence you ol' refreshing wind bag, even when i feel like your preaching to the choir, i cant help but stumble across more pearls than i can fit in this coats pockets....

And remember this is just one mans noble attempt at the interpretation of the many mysteries that keep us up at night.... take it as you would a grain of salt....




....One mans pebble is another mans pearl.....



Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness
by Terence McKenna
1992

Erowid Terence McKenna Vault : Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness, by Terence McKenna

www.erowid.org

......En-joy.....

 

[۩]

Being monkeys, when we encounter a translinguistic object, a kind of cognitive dissonance is set up in our hindbrain. We try to pour language over it and it sheds it like water off a duck's back. We try again and fail again, and this cognitive dissonance, this "wow" or "flutter" that is building off this object causes wonder, astonishment, and awe at the brink of terror. One must control that. And the way to control it is to do what the entities are telling one to do, to do what they are doing.

This happened to me twenty seconds after I smoked DMT on a particular day in 1966. I was appalled. Until then I had thought that I had my ontological categories intact. I had taken LSD before, yet this thing came upon me like a bolt from the blue. I came down and said (and I said it many time), "I cannot believe this; this is impossible, this is completely impossible." There was a declension of gnosis that proved to me in a moment that right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien. I call it the Logos, and I make no judgements about it. I constantly engage it in dialogue, saying, "Well, what are you? Are you some kind of diffuse consciousness that is in the ecosystem of the Earth? Are you a god or an extraterrestrial? Show me what you know."

The theory that I put forth in Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, held the Stropharia cubensis mushroom was a species that did not evolve on earth. Within the mushroom trance, I was informed that once a culture has complete understanding of its genetic information, it re-engineers itself for survival. The Stropharia cubensis mushroom's version of re-engineering is a mycelial network strategy when in contact with planetary surfaces and a spore-dispersion strategy as a means of radiating throughout the galaxy.

I am baffled by what I call "the black hole effect" that seems to surround DMT. A black hole causes a curvature of space such that no light can leave it, and, since no signal can leave it, no information can leave it. Let us leave aside the issue of whether this is true in practice of spinning black holes. Think of it as a metaphor. Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if we may for a moment comap these two things, are silent. They are silent because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your attention.

The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily techniques, not ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out over millennia that make it possible, though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these areas. People of predilection are noticed and encouraged.

In archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving institution, the signs are fairly easy to recognize: oddness or uniqueness in an individual. Epilepsy is often a signature in preliterate societies, or survival of an unusual ordeal in an unexpected way. For instance, people who are struck by lightning and live are thought to make excellent shamans. People who nearly die of a disease and fight their way back to health after weeks and weeks of an indeterminate zone are thought to have strength of soul. Among aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states. In traveling around the world and dealing with shamans, I find the distinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary centeredness. Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is alienated from society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says, "Ah, here's somebody to have a conversation with." The anthropological literature always presents shamans as embedded in a tradition, but once one gets to know them they are always very sophisticated about what they are doing. They are the true phenomenologists of this world; they know plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields "spirits." We hear the word "spirits" through a series of narrowing declensions of meaning that are worse almost than not understanding. Shamans speak of "spirit" the way a quantum physicist might speak of "charm"; it is a technical gloss for a very complicated concept.

 

[Virola78]

Just WOW

 

[Citta]

I love McKenna ^^

 

[benzyme]

yeah?

then feast on this

 

[88]

ANd here's some more interesting tidbits for all of you who regularly converse with ancient quantum consciousnesses that live in hyperspace:

Article from yesterday in physicsworld - "The Eerie Silence" about why SETI is not the right way to look for alien intelligence:



Check these paragraphs out:

"...If the aliens really wanted to leave a message for posterity, implanting it in the genomes of micro-organisms might be a better strategy than sending out radio signals from a beacon. Using viruses or living cells as information repositories has many advantages: biological nanosystems are self-replicating and self-repairing, and have the potential to conserve information for millions of years. Some genes, for example, have remained largely unchanged for more than a billion years."

"...when contemplating a multimillion-year technology, human categories are almost certainly misleading. Perhaps the most suspect assumption is that we would be dealing with flesh-and-blood beings. It is likely that biological intelligence is but a transitory phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe; even on Earth we can predict the rise of "artificial" intelligence and glimpse a future in which engineered information-processing systems and genetically modified neural networks will be merged to create novel "thinking systems" that far outstrip human intellectual prowess."

"The most powerful thinking systems in the universe might turn out to be instantiated in quantum computers – what the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek has dubbed "quintelligence"."

"The late author and futurist Arthur C Clarke once remarked that a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic."

thought you all might like this ...

 

[stevowitz]

Whew!

so much to take in, Thank you !