T e r e n c e M c K e n n a L a n d

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

In the Amazon and other places where visionary plants are understood and used, you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different from ordinary reality. Their vividness cannot be stressed enough. They are more real than real, and that's something that you sense intuitively. They establish an ontological priority. They are more real than real, and once you get that under your belt and let it rattle around in your mind, then the compass of your life begins to spin and you realize that you are not looking in on the Other; the Other is looking in on you. This is a tremendous challenge to the intellectual structures that have carried us so far during the last thousand years. We can do tricks with atoms, there's no question about that, but these tricks immolate us. The higher-order structure of molecules, let alone organelles and that kind of thing, is intellectual incognita to us. We have no notion of how these things work or what is going on. Yet it is from those levels that the constituent modalities of reality are being laid down.

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

DMT is a pseudo-neurotransmitter that when ingested and allowed to come to rest in the synapses of the brain, allows one to see sound, so that one can use the voice to produce not musical compositions, but pictoral and visual compositions. This, to my mind, indicates that we're on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, so that we are going to go from a language that is heard to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior processing. The language will still be made of sound but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual impression. This is actually being done by shamans in the Amazon. The songs they sing sound as they do in order to look a certain way. They are not musical compositions as we're used to thinking of them. They are pictoral art that is caused by audio signals.

If you really wanted to study an aboriginal race and you really had a hot technology, what you would do is study their social psychology and you would say, "are there any chinks in the armor of their expectations about how reality behaves?" and you would discover in studying us - this species intoxicates itself and it has a curious attitiude towards it's intoxications: anything goes. So if someone drinks a bottle of stolichnaya and announces that they see pink elephants we are all amused. We say of course you do you're drunk out of your mind.. Isn't it obvious that an alien would hide its presence in an intoxication? This is the non-invasive, tasteful, respectful way to have intercourse with another species. ..you put yourself into a plant, You put a barcode into a molecule. Then the shaman intoxicates himself and he says 'aha it's an ancestor spirit' or 'it's the soul of the plant, but whatever it is it's giving me good information. It's telling me where the reindeer went..what the weather will be next week..who stole the goose..who slept with who..and which of the ill members of my tribe will live and who will die..'


T.McKenna