When We Were Humans

I happened to be alone at the time the end of the world happened. I wandered off into the wilderness and never saw another human being again. I didn't take much with me, left quite suddenly. I would've left with someone if I knew I would really never be returning this time, anyone. When I look back on that time now I don't think about much, just all those people in the towns, all real people, not people of my fantasy or of my memory, but real living people that I could have asked to come with me and did not. I don't miss anyone in particular, none of my close friends and family, spread all around the world. I just wish I had asked someone to come with me, just a nearby person, to wander out into the wilderness forever.

It's amazing how quickly and completely it is possible to transform into a completely different lifestyle. I can't remember anymore what it feels like to sit in a little box-room with people all around me, to not want to be with them or to talk with them, to want to be alone. To have all the food I need just waiting for me to eat it, in the kitchen, to sleep in a warm dry cosy bed with a hot water bottle every night. And amidst this lifestyle, to be riddled with anxiety and dissatisfaction. To be weak and pathetic with the strength of human technology and organisation behind me. It delights me on quiet nights around the fire to imagine how I would use these things now, a kitchen with refrigerator, oven, stove, blender, electricity; all those people to share with and coordinate with and all those ways of communicating with them over long distances, phone, internet, mobile.

Now, I would love just to find someone to sleep beside in the night, to keep each other warm, to comfort one another. It amazes me that with all those people around we used to choose to sleep alone night after night, only sleeping with a single other person when we wanted to have sex with them, or if we were “in a relationship”. I can't quite put my finger on what that phrase used to mean. People used it all the time, but it was distinct from all the people we had relationships with, it meant something special, something more than just the people we had sex with. Maybe it did just mean the person we would sleep with every night, to keep each other warm and comforted.

I remember when I was living on the farm and the sow gave birth to nine little piglets. As soon as they were born they knew how to sleep. They would lay down in piles and if someone wasn't comfortable she would get up and squeeze back into the centre of the piggy pile. They were always warm and cosy, they were always together. As they got older and a lot less cute and more aggressive, competing for food, they would still lie together in piles to sleep. Even when they pissed each other off and oinked at each other they would consider no alternative to sleeping together in piles.

The sow would gather together some local long grass and dump it in a pile to make a soft bed for her and her piglets. The long grass would become hay in the sun and provide padding as well as insulation. Humans had been so good at this that we could just buy a mattress, buy sheets and blankets and arrange them in such a way, so brilliantly effectively, that we could sleep entirely alone and the body warmth of a single person would be enough to keep us warm all night. It was ingenious. Sad, to be alone, but brilliant that it was possible.

Sometimes in my wanderings now I come across the remains of what must have been an old farmhouse. There are a few remnants of what used to be there, usually a big square of hard brown dirt, not even much in the way of building materials. Usually the weeds and the grasses have already taken over the section where the house used to be. Usually everything has been taken, but once I found a little toy car in the long grass. It was all rusted over, so the wheels don't turn anymore. All the paint has chipped off and it's hard to know even what type of car it was. But I held on to that. It is so evocative of so many memories. I keep it very safe, wrapped up carefully in my pocket. Sometimes I take it out and look at it, just for a few seconds, and I am flooded with mountains of memories, huge waves of emotion, and I put it away and explore everything they offer me. I meditate on them, sitting alone by the fire after sunset, breathing into them. I can't really think about them, it's too much, but I think I am slowly starting to understand, somewhere in my mind beyond language, beyond thought. When I draw it forward into my conscious mind, what I usually use for important basic stuff like finding food and finding somewhere to sleep and looking out for firewood and potential predators, it just confuses and overwhelms me. I know now which brain is supposed to be used for which purpose.

When it's not raining I usually sleep in ditches, when I can find them. This is the closest I can find to sleeping in a bed, and where I feel safest. One day I was walking, rather absent-mindedly because I had eaten and it was still a while until night, and I saw another human. He was young and a man like me and he just came around the corner out of some trees. We both stopped suddenly and surprised and stared at each other in shock. When I first left I had seen a few humans wandering around, but I didn't realise how quickly they would disappear. I hadn't seen another human in a long time. There had been so many of them, then there were only a few and then none. No one, for so long. We stared at each for so long, both tense and not knowing what to expect. Suddenly I had an image flash into my mind. It was night and I was asleep, in a ditch, soft with dry grass, but this time there was a body beside me, warm and comforting. It was him! I felt a wave of excitement surge through my body and I made a slight movement towards the human. I saw a jolt move through his body as a result of my movement and he panicked and ran away. I knew I shouldn't chase him cos he would just run faster, so I waited for him. I sat down exactly where we had met so he could find me easily, and I waited for him to return. It got dark and I made a fire and slept right there. In the morning I waited again, all day without eating anything, relit my fire and again slept alone. The next day I wanted to look for food, but there wasn't much close to the spot where we had met and I didn't want to go far away. Every time I walked too far away from where we had met I would run back, just in case he returned and I wasn't there and he didn't know where to find me.

Eventually I got hungry and I didn't know why he would not yet have returned. I guess he's not coming back. I still think about him sometimes and expect him to suddenly come back. He's been looking for me for so long and didn't know where to find me, but he never does return. All I wanted was to sleep with him, to be warm and comforted in the night. I don't know why he was scared of me, like I would hurt him. There is no reason why I would hurt him. On the contrary, just walk with him in the day and lay with him in the night. Maybe even tell stories around the fire at night. That's what we used to do, when we were humans. I'm sure I could still tell stories, though I haven't spoken in so long. I used to talk to myself all the time, it would help me think. But I don't anymore. Occasionally I will make a sound with my mouth, just to hear my voice, to assure me that I can still make those sounds, but I don't bother to make even a word. I know I could still make a whole story, with a bit of practice, but I don't suppose I'll ever meet a human again to tell a story to.

~ ~ ~

Sadness offers a new lease on life. To a certain extent I can't afford to get sad, not like I used to. But even a little disappointment can spur me to change my world. I have the energy and the impetus now to set out into the world. I waited too long for that man to return and of course he never did. I happen to know that the world is a big place and I can go further than I have ever gone before. I may not know where to find my specific gardens, the garden I visit every season, but I trust I will find food wherever I go and if I die I accept that. I just need to go out into the world and find what is happening. It is no life alone. I have been alone too long.

I head towards the rising sun, choosing to travel east all the way, or at least until my nose leads me somewhere different. I pass through the bush that has always bounded my wandering area and emerge out into the sun. The clearing is choked with thick grass up to my neck. This grass would swallow anything and even makes me feel a little claustrophobic, but I just breathe myself into calm, trusting I will soon be out of it. I emerge from the dense grass onto the side of a hill overlooking a vast river valley and harbour. The hugeness of it overcomes me and I get the feeling, the strongest I have felt for years, of the bigness of the world, the variety, the possibility. I feel emotion surge through me at the thought that there might be other people out there. I remember having other people in my life, but I mostly remember being scared of them or irritated by them. I don't have any memories of just being quiet and appreciating their presence.

The sun is hot in the sky and I can hear the waves down in the harbour or out on the coast, crashing on the beach, and the sound travelling up the hill like an amphitheatre. I head down the hill with anticipation, which I try to calm. I know I'm not likely to find anyone and I don't want to be disappointed. So I convince myself that I'm just walking, I'm just exploring, I'm just finding what's out there to be found. I am seeing where the world leads me without attachment to what it will offer me and what it will deny me. I can follow this river for a while, I can drink some different water and see the sun rise and set from a different angle.

The days walking along the river are full of joy and excitement. Every day is radiant with hot sunshine and I swim in the river many times each day. As I dance on the grass by the river I get a vision of the man I saw for a few seconds all those months ago. I imagine that he has taken this trip with me and the two of us are dancing together like idiots on the grass here. I feel like I am about to cry but I push it up and out of my head as I furiously dance harder, leaping and shrieking until I get to a small tributary of the river I am following. I stop and look at it. It is narrow, though fast-moving, and I wouldn't even have to swim to get across, but I look at it. My eyes follow the stream up towards its source, a narrow dark gorge. After the sunshine and wide open space of the last days it seems silly to walk up into that dark gorge, but I happen to know that this is my route. I don't know, it may be an interesting detour, it may be the rest of my life.

The first night I find somewhere beautiful to sleep, in long grass that sinks into a soft bed beneath me, feeling secure beside a steep slope and some tall trees. In the morning I set off with great haste and determination and walk non-stop all day, up the slight slope into the gorge. It's like I know something is close and I'm almost running to get to it. It's like I know exactly where it is, like I'm just trying to get home through some familiar neighbourhood. It is like I've been here before, though I don't know how that would be possible. As the darkness slowly falls I try to continue, determined to find what I know to be just an arm's reach away. It is getting cold and it is finally the thought that whatever I pass I won't be able to see in the darkness that convinces me to stop for the night. It's too late for me to find a good bed or even make a fire, so I just focus on getting warm enough to sleep. I pile some grass under a low-hanging tree and try to make a bed. I lay there feeling silly, feeling unnaturally exposed on this flat open ground. Luckily it is is new moon and it is particularly dark and so the night shrouds me, this night that the earth cannot, and I eventually fall asleep.

I wake up to the first light before the sunrise and the sounds of birds singing. I feel strange, like I'm in a garden, not in the wilderness, slowly being reclaimed from human endeavour. For breakfast I eat the last grapefruit I carried from the tree down by the river. The juice drips down my fingers and my lips as I slowly fade from dream into the light of day. Today I'm not marching fast and determined into the gorge, today I wander and look at the sky and the tree-tops and the birds.

Suddenly, around a corner, I come across something that shocks me into stillness. It is a small wooden cabin, like a building, like humans used to live in. It is intact. Without broken windows and collapsed walls I feel like I am looking at something perfect, brand new, like an unreality, though it is clearly a part of its environment, having been here for a while. It might be what I have been looking for, but it terrifies me. I was not expecting it. It is not a person I can confront and communicate with, it is a dangerous structure that could contain anything and that I cannot know until I approach the danger and vulnerability of its threshold.

I leap behind some bushes and wait, watching and listening carefully, close to the familiar and comforting earth. The cabin is quiet and still and I eventually decide it must be empty. I slowly approach the door, which is open, and look inside. It is dry, clean and tidy in there. There are some well-made beds along the walls, with blankets and mattresses. I walk in and the unexpected familiarity and deliciousness of the smell hits me. Woodsmoke and dust and stale feet, cooking food and running water and fabric and that rich sexual emotional scent of human beings. Surely someone must live here, though it is so quiet and still so early in the morning, like no one has ever been here before me. It is like someone is here right now, but not inhabiting the same dimension as me, so we cannot see, hear or touch each other.

I wander through the details of the cabin like it is the spare bedroom that has been left me for the night and which is now mine alone, like no one will walk in and surprise me. I look at all the little tools and trinkets carefully placed on shelves and surfaces, everything having its place and its utility or sentimental beauty. I find a curious object like a long black wood chip that immediately draws me toward it. I pick it up and I know what to do with it. There is a circular button in the centre of the black chip and I press it long and slow. Some words come up on the screen but nothing else happens. I see another object, a couple of plastic buds attached to a long string, and I remember. I plug the buds into the chip and put them in my ears. I press the button again and hear the most amazing sound, loud and so overwhelming I have to sit down on the bed. I fall onto my back, close my eyes and let it wash over my body and my soul. It is music.

I had almost forgotten the sound of the human voice. It is a man's voice, old and rough, but full of intention and emotion. He sings of love and pain, expectation, disappointment, cynicism and hope. It brings too much of what I have not forgotten back to the surface, too much for me to confront, so I simply allow the music to wash over me and pulse through me. I can feel the intense reality of the music, the strength and meaning of the old man's voice, throb through my body and I let it take me over. I let the ecstasy encompass me and the music becomes my body, the vibrations of the soundwaves reverberating in my ear form a new temporary body which I inhabit as fully as I have inhabited my flesh body.

As the music fades into a dull warmth I turn my head and open my eyes, though I have heard no sound. There is a warm yellow glow and a man standing there facing me. I wait for my eyes to focus and see that it is the man I saw that day. He is staring at me with patient warmth, as if he had been waiting for me to open my eyes. I stare back at him, each of us as if he had only passed out of the room for a few minutes, as if we were expecting each other. He walks over the bed on which I am lying and climbs in beside me. I shuffle over to give him some space. We lie there together with our eyes closed and I can feel the warmth of his body and I can smell his scent. It is warm and dusty and familiar. I snuggle in closer to him and wrap one of my arms around him. He responds by wriggling in closer to me, fitting his body into the shape of my embrace. I even notice his scent change with the intimacy of our closeness, it is sweeter and more intoxicating. I allow the cosiness to overcome us.

I open my eyes again faintly and see again the warm glow and the order of the room, the tidiness, the convenience. My friend is still beside me, but somehow he is impersonal, like he's undeniably human, but not necessarily any particular person. I can hear a faint sound in the next room, a woman singing and the smell of warm comforting food being prepared wafts in. I feel like she is my mother and I am at home, like a child, and all my needs are taken care of. I feel safe and secure, though my mother never used to sing like that when she cooked. I tried to distinguish what the cooking smells were, but they were all familiar and yet mingled together and I could not tell. I again closed my eyes and held my warm companion

Feeling sleepy and only half-awake I move onto my back and stretch my legs and my body. I reach my arms out to the side in a stretch and feel my whole body respond, moving intuitively into the exact spot of tension or tightness, stretching and relaxing until my body feels good and ready to stand. I then realise that there is no one beside me and that this does not surprise me. I look around the room and it is as tidy and orderly as I remember it, everything one could need is present and close-at-hand. The room is exactly as I found it, but I notice the patch of warm sun that had been shining on me through the window was now forming a rectangular patch on the wooden floor.

I stand up and walk to the door. Outside is warm and calm and bright. There are huge tufts of grass and herbs, but no trees this side of the creek. I can hear the rushing of the creek and various birds singing in the trees maybe ten metres away. There are insects buzzing through the grasses. I recognise a few big bushes of edible herbs growing happily amongst the long grass and perhaps even some sort of citrus tree bearing fruit not far upstream. I feel a peace and a happiness as I sit down on the step to look out at the scene. I like this cabin and I like the feeling of sitting on something solid and dry, with the sun shining directly upon me. I feel rich, like the whole world is at my feet. A feeling of joys wells up inside me but fails to reach its full breadth when I realise there is no one to share this place with. How can I be rich if there is no one to welcome into my home and into my bed, no one to feed and laugh with? How can I feel blessed with abundance if I cannot give this abundance away? Otherwise, it is worthless. I can enjoy it for the rest of the day, and I can go to sleep in that clean dry bed, but I know that unless I plan to leave first thing in the morning, I won't be able to get out of bed. If my plan is to stay here the bed will paralyse me and I won't be able to move.

So I decide to leave in the morning. I'll build a little fire in that oven and make myself some food. I think I even saw a hot water cylinder, so if I get the fire hot enough I may be able to have a hot bath! I can sit by the fire and read a book, while waiting for the fire to get warm enough for my bath. I'll enjoy this cabin for just one night and then set off again into the wilderness to find my destiny, my life, a companion. I'll leave at first light, I won't even cook myself a breakfast. Maybe I'll take some fruit with me, but I will leave straight away. I won't carry anything else; no books, no bedding. I have to be light. I have to maintain my freedom. I have to follow that river upstream to its source.

Patterns of birth and death

The only memory of our homes found by archeologists will be the fruit stickers in the compost,

all the rest will be looted for resources by the deteriorating many of our descendents.

I know it will all be gone as I know I will die,

because I believe in time.

The illusion is obvious, it's now hip to reject Reality,

the linguistic entity that defines our lives.

Sensitivity draws me towards the details of times' plurality

like the plurality of dreams,

but the extent to which these universes exist

is the extent to which I can talk about them with my friends.

Communication creates my reality, and communication rejects what I do not like.

Time heals everything

                                        that shame does not obscure

                                        that is exposed to the light

                                        that is not breaking into dense carbon beneath the surface of my skin

                                        that is spoken into honest air

                                                    with friends and lovers

                                        that is not subject to censure by The State.

It rises to the surface,

painful as a volcano,

spews its wrath,

releases hate-gas into the atmosphere;

the trees breathe, the earth eats, the waters rise and fall,

themselves cleaned by rain and salt, patterns of birth and death.

Nature is the centre of the mandala; by Terence McKenna

The formal title of the lecture is “Nature is the centre of the mandala”.  This is simply a structure to anticipate and discuss where nature lies in the cultural future that is unfolding in front of all of us. 

I have always had a relationship with nature that I pretty much took for granted but perhaps was somewhat unique and more intense than most peoples'.  I grew up in a small town in Colorado.  I was very early into being a rock hound and a butterfly collector.  The attraction of tropical butterflies was the exuberant expanse of colour, the affirmation of the patterned richness of the universe that was seen to be thrown out like a spark by these things.  This search for iridescence thrown off by nature, seen first in the glint of metallic ore crystals and then in the colourful expanse of butterflies and then in tropical fish, reached a kind of apotheosis with the discovery of the psychedelic plant hallucinogens, where suddenly the colour, the flash, the iridescence, is not two or three dimensional, it is multi-dimensional, it is inside the body, it is outside the body.

I came to see that nature, as experienced – meaning as it hits you when you walk around in it and pick at it and carry it with you – has been bred out of the repertoire of images that most people bring to bear on their reality.  Consequently the reality is de-spirited.  The spirit resident in nature is not visible when these mechanistic grids are laid over it.  The lux natura, the salvational radiance that can be found in the organic kingdom, a term of Paracelsus, has slipped from the grip of modern human beings.

It seems to me that nature is psyche, in a way that has been occluded by the perverse development of language.  We take nature to be external to ourselves and sustained by the laws of physics.  It is not that at all.  It is a kind of stratum of expectation that has been laid down by the human journey through time.  There are elements of nature which are not aspects of the human journey through time, but they are occult.  This has been the strategy of science; to use an instrumentality to reveal the occult side of nature.  The problem is that this occult side of nature, once explicated, does not reveal a satisfying reflection of ourselves.

It seems to me that a small miracle is taking place, the thing that we least expected to happen.  It is that our point-of-view is actually gaining ground.  Sitting on the mountainside in Hawaii, you think you're like Lenin in Germany; you have to politically think it all through so that, to the extent to which one's voice can be heard, mistakes are not made.  All this New Age hustle and bustle, though 95% of it is just intellectual noise and efforts to coin the perfect analogy that fail, appears to have become the cutting edge of the guiding image of this mega-culture.  So it becomes important for people who identify with the human potential movement, spiritual development, the rebirth of intuition, to make a place in the plan for the role of nature. 

The Gaia response claims nature as a stabilising feminine force.  That's definitely the image that has to emerge.  The recognition of the presence of control mechanisms that are not coercive, that are Taoistic, is a way of coming to terms with nature that we have resisted. 

It's a simple idea.  Before technology people had to store firewood in the autumn for the winter, in the spring they had to sharpen tools for the late spring planting.  There was an implicit rhythm laid down by nature that entered the human cosmos at every level and was reflected in poetry, culture building and the evolution of language.  There has been a flattening of the human dimension.  Urbanisation and other factors removed the influence of these rhythms, with the final culmination being the modern city, where life under electric light goes on 24 hours a day.  There is no more a sense of being embedded in flux, there is instead the myth of the eternal culture.

I was at a conference recently where someone proposed the notion that our time is not special, that there is nothing unique about this moment.  I think nothing could be further from the truth.  There is no question that there is a deepening ambiguity in the present moment.  There is a something coming over global civilisation.  It registers in all of us as how weird it is, how compressed time is, how complicated the interconnections are.  I think this is a real phenomenon which will eventually be elucidated.  Eventually, there will be a break with the prevailing paradigm of historical process. 

In case you're not aware, the current prevailing paradigm is the one that calls itself the “trendlessly fluctuating theory”.  It says, “We trendlessly fluctuate; and to search for a trend is to be drawn into a cultural hysteria.”  Standing outside of the cultural hysteria, the trend is fairly clear.  It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. 

Nature anticipates all of this, and anchors it.  Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.  We are getting closer and closer to the end of history and we will not go past it with a moment of blindness.  There will be vouchsafed intuitions about the emerging structure of the Other into which culture is being subsumed.  You're all familiar with the image of the Ouroboros, the snake which takes its tail in its mouth.  The end of history is an archaic revival.  The ground of being in which the original archaic renaissance occurred was nature.  In terms of the expression of design elements, in terms of the expression of human relationships and political agendas, the economies of nature are going to set the guiding images.

I read Edward O. Wilson's book Biophilia in which he describes his work with ants in Suriname and how there are ants who grow fungi in their nests.  They cut leaves off trees and chew them up into a mash which they then store in rooms underground.  They bring the right spores in and grow them there and it produces a sugar which the ants then eat.  They tend the fungal gardens and remove foreign spores.  This is a symbiosis between a social organism, the ant, and a fungal organism, which produces an enzyme, sugar, which drives the ant society to a greater state of activity.  Activity, in an insect economy, defines how well you can survive.  This provides a curious analogy for the situation that exists in human society vis-a-vie hallucinogenic plants. 

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes that stimulate imagination.  Imagination is reconnected to this feedback loop in which we ask ourselves, “How can I make more of this hallucinogenic plant that is giving us all these great ideas?”  So then you get the invention of agriculture, but one can't grow all plants in one place.  So then the feedback loop from the presence of hallucinogenic plants in the diet asks the question, “How can we get the plants that we can't grow?” and the answer is, networks of trade and systems of barter, and behind that lies the need for language.  

These types of symbiotic processes are implicit in the human experience.  Some of you have heard another lecture I give in which I go into this in great detail.  I try to show that mushrooms in the dung of undulate animals on the veldt of Africa 150,000 years ago drove a series of processes which resulted in self-reflecting human beings.  That process didn't end with the invention of language or the domestication of cattle, it continues right up to the present day.  

It is as though, from a planetary point of view, an enzyme system called the human species was deputised into an information-gathering mode.  It was sent out as a kind of prodigal subsystem, a kind of episome of the social environment, to cognise the organisation of the natural world through a process called "human history" or "the historical advance toward understanding and sufficiently complete modelling".  That I think is what is happening. 

The human species was deputised for Gaia into the Fall; the fall into profane time, the time of non-participation in the immediacy of the Tao, through a series of successive linguistic declensions.  This begins to sound almost Biblical, because it says there is a Fall, and the Fall is somehow related to a confusion of languages, not one from another, but from the object of experience.  As the language became less and less natural, the world of the species using this language became less and less natural, because the evolution of symbols moved toward the abstract, it became the realisation of ideals.  In Platonic philosophy we get the enunciation of abstractions, great over-weaning concepts that subsume entire areas of particulars.  This ability to subsume particulars under a class name is the beginning of this process of replacing the particulars with the symbolic structures.  The reason for this process we can only guess at.  It seems as though nature requires this reflection upon itself; that the completion of nature is in the hands of a single target species, which acts as an enzyme within the global organism of Gaia.  

From the point-of-view of an extraterrestrial looking down on the surface of the planet there are not discreet organisms, there is simply a gene swarm.  Through viruses and many non-genetic ways in which genes are transformed, the previously imagined sharp declensions between species are actually somewhat illusory.  Within the confines of my body, the unfolding of gene expression and the molecular assembly of enzyme systems and proteins is simply under a tighter regimen of control than are the same kind of processes which are going on between people.  We are really a loosely regulated organism that has a tendency to ever-tighten the connection between its sub-units. 

So you can see that with the evolution of language, the evolution of technology being at the service of media, the rise of cities, oral poetry, we seem to strive for greater and greater cohesion, greater and greater free-flow of thought among ourselves.  What we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language-structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the realisation that we are a part of nature.  When that happens the childhood of our species will pass away and we will stand tremulously on the brink of the first moments of coherent human civilisation. 

This, I think, is already beginning to happen.  It's a slow process but it's a kind of cascading phenomenon such that once it begins to happen it happens faster and faster.  The mirroring of psyche that was always the glamour that stood behind nature is correctly perceived with greater and greater clarity as this process proceeds.  This correct perceiving of nature's relationship to self and language is the essence of all of these cultural vectors that are converging; feminism, the exploration of space, the perfection of the thinking machine, or of the human-machine interface and the mysterium tremendum at the core of the psychedelic experience.  All of these things are anticipations of the post-historical state which lies beyond the working out of the themes that have been set in motion by materialistic science.  

These forces have been set in motion and sustained by so-called “new thought”, New Age thinking.  It seems that we all noticed early on a trend in society which is now going to have tremendous repercussions and because this seems to be happening, there is a responsibility to clear thinking about what this thing is and how it works.  There seems to be a rush to get in line with the sloppiest metaphor as quickly as possible.  There have been a number of syncretic fates, new myths, that have arisen and competed with each other with greater and lesser degrees of success.  I suppose this is a healthy thing, except that it gives such comfort to the people who think we're all just airheads.  They observe all this and it confirms to them that it's a hopeless lot. 

Everybody has their own version of what is the mistake that is being made.  So here's my version.  There is a confusion between scientific materialism and reason.  Science has set itself up as a kind of new pontificate and brooks no challenge.  It expects to make judgement on any idea emerging from any realm of human endeavor.  It has set itself up as judge and jury.  The fact of the matter is that this is only by virtue of its spectacular acts of technological prestidigitation.  What science is really most successful in telling us about are realms which none of us have ever penetrated nor are ever likely to.  I mean, how much do you wish to know about the rings of Neptune or the quark? 

We are continuously sold the line that somehow, when the metaphors of consciousness are fully mapped onto quantum physics and biology that a great step forward will have been taken.  It seems to me that since the information coming out of quantum physics and molecular biology is so removed from the realm of common experience that if we succeed in mapping mental phenomena onto those realms we will have succeeded in the final act of alienation; because we will have at last totally removed our experience of ourselves from the realm of felt cognition.  

Instead of the idea that there needs to be an erection of an overarching metaphor from the physical sciences into the social and psychiatric sciences, there should be the recognition and celebration of mystery.  

We are an intelligent species caught in a historical process.  No generation which preceded us knew what was going on.  There is no reason to assume that we know what is going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on.  And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?  It's a highly unlikely enterprise.  Look at the data sample.  The data sample is your lifetime, on one planet, in one tiny corner of the universe.  From this, via the fallacy of induction, certain principles of uniformity are extended to the far-flung corners of the cosmos in space and time.  A bunch of fancy metaphors are built up that nobody can check on anyway and then this is called understanding.  You see, it isn't understanding.  Understanding issues into appropriate activity.  A model of the universe which doesn't issue into appropriate activity in the here and now is a curious model indeed.  Appropriate activity in the here and now is the sine qua non.  Everything else is unconfirmed rumour.  

Nature is the visible manifestation of this mystery, it entirely surrounds and completes us.  It is there to be beheld and imbibed in.  It is simply that one must either replace the sterile language of scientific materialism or one must bring no language whatsoever to it, so that it speaks for itself.  

Ayahuasca, the South American visionary vine, unlike the mushroom, does not speak, it shows; its language is visible; a fractal hieroglyphic surface of intermediate dimensions that contains an endless unfolding of phenomena, at level after level into the micro-physical realm.  This is a correct seeing of what is.  The mystery is co-present with its denial.  It is a matter of changing points of view and changing points-of-view is a matter of retooling language.  If nature is psyche, ayahuasca is the auto-poetic self-reflecting cloud of cognition that manifests as language.  It is partly based in the structure of matter, it is partly based in the implicit syntax of the perceiver, it is partly an interference pattern between the two; but it is as close to the ground that one can approach without theory.  

The key to the forward-looking expression of the archaic revival, the key to making the New Age fulfill its best hope and not fall into a crypto-fascism of paradigmatic warfare, is to enunciate two principles.  The primacy of experience and the toxic nature of ideology.  This to me is the core.  If the New Age, the archaic revival, can exemplify these two principles then we can navigate past the dangerous shoal that threatens any idea that attempts to leave its cult status and enter the mainstream.  

I connect the primacy of experience to Heidegger's notion of what he called "care for the project of being".  The primacy of felt experience begins with a notion as simple as "be here now".  We must take ourselves more seriously, more lightly and more seriously.  We are not at the bottom of a pyramid of goods and information production where we pay the sucker's price for everything as it is handed down through pieces of intractable cultural machinery that we have no effect on.  That is the myth that is being promulgated by those very institutions; the myth of the hapless consumer; the myth of the meaning of faddism.  As if there is a meaning to switching from one ideology to another the way hemlines and perfumes and decorator colours come and go.  This is allowing ourselves to be self-victimised.  

The other side of that is the toxicity of ideology.  Ideology itself is poisonous.  In the 15th and 16th centuries there was 120 years of intermittent religious warfare because people were so uptight about whether you were a Catholic or a Hugenaught or a Walloon.  These were life-or-death issues.  Finally people just became sick of it.  I hope, I choose to believe, that we may be approaching such a watershed with the social ideologies that have been dinging themselves into the global population for the past hundred years.  They are extremely bankrupt.  The notion of any kind of serious competition between Marxist-Leninism and capitalist-democratic techno-fascism, or whatever it is, is ludicrous.  Neither system works within the need to wage ideological warfare against the other.  

Ideology has become an anachronism.  It's a kind of lack of good taste.  It's like being a nut.  You come on with some ideology and people just look at their plates; they're embarrassed for you.

The ideology that naturally claims our attention is pretty well understood.  It says in the Old Testament, “You can know the truth, the truth is the still small voice in your heart.”  You don't have to take courses in theology and ethics to get all this down.  The political agenda is fairly clear; you feed people, you cure disease, you anticipate and solve social problems having to do with sewerage disposal, distribution of land and wealth.  None of this stuff is controversial unless you're living inside a locked ward.  

This anti-ideological position has to be articulated by causing language to evolve.  You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.  And then other people say, “Oh so this thing that I've always thought but never felt like saying is actually legitimate and okay and I can say it and I will say it”.  It begins to move like a wave through society.  

You will be told that for me to advocate the poisonous nature of ideology without calling it anarchy is to peddle my own private ideology.  But this is absurd.  It's like saying that if someone tells you not to drive they're advocating a certain style of driving.  That's not it at all.  It's a translation of levels, it's something entirely different. 

We cannot afford the continued existence of the unconscious.  It is a neurotic excuse for not getting our act together as a species.  The way in which the unconscious is eliminated is by turning the language machinery back upon itself and reflecting on the process of attention.  This is what Buddhism is all about; attention to attention.  Awareness of the modality of the cognitive process.  Doing that to oneself has a kind of morphogenic field effect, a kind of chain-reaction which sweeps through society.  It's simply that the act of conscious self-inspection creates more conscious people which creates a more conscious society, which erodes the possibility of the poisonous and toxic effects of ideology. 

This is what psychedelics are about in terms of their social and legal position in society.  Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may leap out of a third-storey window.  Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid-down models of behaviour and information processing.  They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.  Government and society spend a lot of money educating you into being a loyal worker, consumer, debt-payer and citizen. 

I think anarchy is the great future for human society.  Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.  To the degree that people are responsible, we will have anarchy.

I want to leave you with the notion that nature, the linguistically expressed topological manifold of the psyche, is indeed a historical object that is pulling us forward.  When we cross over into the eschatology that appears fairly eminent, we will find it to be anticipated by the human relationship with nature, the embedding of psyche in nature, the mysterious relationship mediated by language.  

The key to unfolding a sane society, in my single humble opinion, is an obligation to reason that clearly distinguishes between reason and science, an obligation to self-involvement in immediate experience, which means psychedelics, sexuality and what I call “time”; a deep literary involvement with the felt present.  Psychedelics, sexuality and time.  To empower the individual.  To make the individual naturally responsible.  To create the basis for a caring global society that will transcend the historical cultures as though we were just moving very naturally out of winter and into spring; no apocalypse, no millennium, no rescue by flying saucers, no Mayan return, simply the unfolding of a programme of mutual caring and responsibility.  This is the highest aspiration of the New Age and I feel that it is attainable.

~

An abridged transcription of a Terence McKenna lecture from sometime in the 1980s.  From Psychedelic Salon podcast #197, "McNature" .
Unedited, unimproved audio from Archive.org.  

to God's perfect Darkness [thank you, Allen Ginsberg] [thank you, my triangle]

Death be upon us all in the realisation of our karma
Death be upon us all in the leap of faith into dangerous depths of love
Death be upon us all in the consequences of our bodies
Death be upon us all in the recurring dream of our denial
Death be upon us all as we linger frightened for lifetimes on the precipice of our inevitable completion
Death be upon us all in the transcendence of our perfection from the materiality of time
Death be upon us all in the mercy of an unforgiveable failure
Death be upon us all in the blessing of our forgiveness of others

Death be upon us as the harsh truth of necessity
Death as the change that saves us
Death the abandonment of generations of accumulated hatreds
Death as the swept-away invigoration of the River of Life
Death, the Gatekeeper of Infinity

Death, the answer to every question
Nature's perfect restoration of balance
The god of mercy and transformation
The baptism of fire
The world we've dreamed of in fear and unbearable yearning from birth
The debunking force of every human cosmology
The dusk at the end of every day
My greatest fear and hope
The only solace we can rely on

Death be upon those who fear it the most
Death be upon those who choose it in their sad lives
Death be upon those whose bodies cannot contain the intensity of life
Death be upon those exhausted at the completion of a necessary task
Death be the blessing of a Culture long-gone-wrong
Death be the triumph of those whose natural integrity have alienated them from their own culture
Death be the Apocalypse we've all been praying for

Death be not the beast in the darkness with which we threaten each other
but the gift at the completion of Hope, the completion of Karma, the fulfillment of the wholeness of this moment

Living in houses

It's time to get back to the earth. Living in houses destroys us in more ways than we can comprehend.

For example?

Sleeping patterns. There is one reason why we don't go to sleep when it gets dark and wake up when it gets light. Houses (and electric light). One example.

Partying and live music is another good reason we don't go to sleep when it gets dark.

I guess if things were different we would party and perform live music during the day, or at night under the stars and especially the full moon and around the fire (rather than in houses).

They promote compulsive behavior. They disengage us from reality; earth, air, water, sun, other plants and animals. They separate us from our neighbors and even our friends. In houses we sleep in different rooms and different beds; when we sleep on the earth we naturally sleep together, if only to keep each other warm.

Agreed Chris, I am completely off balance after coming back from Mexico, main reason being where I'm living.

If you clean up your house sufficiently, you will be vacuuming the floor until you are back on a healthy living soil and you will be dusting the roof and walls until they no longer protect you from reality and the air flows and the sky is visible in all its beauty.

I am a fat slob.  I live in a house.  I may not be actually fat, but I feel like I am.  When I eat a big meal I look at my stomach, it juts out rudely.  After eating a big meal, I feel like eating.  While eating I feel like I should be doing something, like reading or watching TV.  I want my food to be cooked and heavy with carbohydrates, specifically crude grains; fried rice, tortillas, bread or pasta.  I eat because there is nothing else to do.  I eat because I can't relax.  I eat because my environment is entirely uninspiring.  I create my own space, I cover the walls with beauty, I keep it clean and I fill it with comfortable furniture and meaningful objects.  I enclose myself in this space, surrounded by these objects, alone.  Here I am able to create a fantasy world, in my thoughts perhaps, or when asleep in my dreams.  At my best I create stories to reach out to the world from this space, but usually I don't have the energy.

I remember when I used to be alive.  I used to sleep on the beach.  I used to make fire before going to sleep at night.  I used to fall asleep looking at the stars.  I used to breathe fresh ocean air, cleaned by the salt.  I used to run naked up the beach when it was empty and leap into the water with exuberance and submission.  The ocean would always deposit me back on the sand, safe and refreshed; reborn.  No matter how many hot chlorinated showers I enjoy I cannot recreate this type of cleanliness.  No matter how many times I masturbate down the drain pipe I never have the feeling that I have entered the vagina of the Earth and been accepted.

I am a filthy smelly bum.  I sleep in the park.  I carry bags around with my everywhere I go.  I have everything I need on hand.  I sleep in the bush, surrounded by trees, cosy on a yoga mat in a sleeping bag, wrapped up in a woolen blanket.  When I wake up in the morning I eat my stolen breakfast on a picnic table in the sun.  I wash my hands and face and collect water from the public toilet.  I rarely shower.  Sometimes, when I am on a crowded bus or in a crowded cinema, I feel self-conscious about my smell or wonder if I have dirt on my face.  In the park this does not matter.  I love being in the city, I love to meet people and to have experiences and to expose my self to cinema and theatre and live music.  But public transport and shedules are so stressful in comparison to the world where the clock is the sun and the moon and the agenda is sitting on the earth and urinating on a tree.

When I am in a house I crave to be alone, to have my own room, to be able to close and maybe even lock the door.  When I am outside I love to sleep with everyone, in a row, to snuggle, to keep each other warm.  I look at the pigs I live with, sleeping in piles, and I envy them.  I sleep alone in a bed.  I sleep on the earth by the fire beside all my friends.  I sleep in a pile of humans in the bush. 

Terence McKenna

Two links that could change your life or explain a lot.  Here are many audio files to be downloaded and listened to at your leisure, talks by Terence McKenna.

https://www.dmt-nexus.me/Files.aspx?Filetype=Audio

Terence McKenna is a great artist and his art is to speak.

He speaks a lot about psychedelics, how they disolve boundaries; but to listen to the best of his talks is to have a psychedelic experience, to watch as more boundaries dissolve than you thought was possible.  For me it is exciting to see my petty comforts dissolve and watch as the vast landscape begins to appear to me.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/
This is the podcast, Psychedelic Salon, that introduced me to the linguistic fluidity and profundity of Terence McKenna.  There is also hundreds of others podcasts on psychedelics, freedom of thought and other topics that promote the development of human life.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=235
"Nature is the centre of the mandala."  This is the best of the many Terence McKenna talks I have listened to.  He cuts to the core of the modern urban digitised human condition.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=262
This is also first-class Terence McKenna.  He goes through his theory of human evolution in relation to psylocibin mushrooms.

I guess listening to some of this stuff as I spent days wandering the beaches of Sydney changed the way I see the world forever.  There is the risk that everything will change for you as a result of listening to material that does not distract you from reality but actually confronts you with it and many of its strangest implications.

http://ia700208.us.archive.org/10/items/PsychedeliaRawArchivesOfTerenceMckennaTalks/
Another archive of McKenna audio material I have found.

Nature is the centre of the mandala

In the city, I feel guilty for not being productive.  I feel guilty for turning off my cellphone and neglecting my urban responsibilities.