Strip Ourselves

I am barren with desolation.
My life is a well of emptiness with a ladder that I choose not to climb up and out of.
I am trapped in my own assumptions and conveniences.
Pity me not, but love me and desire me and invite me to foreign paradises.
Become a yearning throbbing genital of the earth and draw me in, become my lover or my confidant, exist with me in the most intense sobriety of presence.
Cry with me, become pathetic, sob into my warm body and slap me 'til I sob too.
Let our naked bodies feel exposed and safe together, let our genitals meet in calm acceptance.
And then we shall dive into the ocean and she shall take us as we are and strip us of our pretensions.
We do not enter her with togs or with surfboards to hide from her or conquer her, we allow her salty goodness to refresh us and deposit us in a sandy sunny world not entirely the same as the one we dived in from.
And then we burn our hair and our clothes in a fire of driftwood and we no longer subscribe to the shame and personality that have obscured our power most of our lives.
I am naked beneath my clothes and I am a real living human being beneath my culture.
I am hot-blooded, breathing and desiring, weeping alone and overwhelmed with the beauty of a veiled humanity before me.
I cannot rave at the masses because my sanity holds me back almost as much as my fear of arrest.
I am the masses and I am listening carefully for the secret to unlock my life from the profane time adulthood has thrust upon me.
I remember sacred time from childhood, and I have rediscovered it in the wild, in the pure wilderness of earth, in the wildman in my body and in the purity of my fellows.
How can I tell you I want to eat you without appearing as a sexual predator?
How can I tell the world I want to be eaten when I am so comfortably marginalised by my comfy social democracy?

I transform the moment I am experiencing into the eternity we all deserve.  I reject the historical crisis we have talked ourselves into as I reject the culture that has structured this conversation.  Time begins anew whenever we choose, when we celebrate the New Year, when we submit to the ocean, when we strip ourselves and walk out into the night.

Free the Earth Day

I need some feedback on an idea, my friends.  I have a potential solution to some of the many problems which face us as a global community.  I wouldn't even consider this a possibility if I hadn't personally witnessed the global communication and coordination that made Occupy occur simultaneously in 1600 cities in 80 countries around the world.

My idea is that simultaneously all around the world many people, on the same day, stop paying rent and stop paying their mortgage.  That we all declare that from today onwards our home is ours and that we no longer have to pay to live on the planet that we were born on.

The primary benefits, as I see it, are that economic disparity would be drastically leveled, the global economy would be severely damaged and many people would not only have a significant financial burden lifted, but would be able to actively pursue an increasingly money-free life from the base of having a secure home.

What do people I think?  I am curious both about what you think the consequences would be, and how this could become a succinct meme to be successful on a global stage.  The best meme structure I have so far constructed - I'm sure we can do better - is Free the Earth Day.  "From this day on the earth is free and we don't have to pay to live here anymore."

Feedback, my friends!

The Gospel According to John 1:1-27; a translation for those who share my cultural and linguistic paradigm

In the beginning was language
and with the language is God
and the language is a god.

Language created all forms, no form was created without language.

In creation was life; and creation is the light of humanity.

And the light of creation shines in the darkness of the void;
and the darkness does not understand.

And creation spoke through the human form.

Humanity came to experience life,
to create form,
that all life might be manifest in form.

Humanity is not that form,
humanity experiences form.

Creation is the light of humanity
and everyone is a creator.

Humanity identified with language,
language was spoken by humanity,
but humanity did not recognise its own voice.

-

Creation speaks,
but humanity disregards what it hears.

Those who listen receive the power of creation
because they understand that they are not the form,
they are not the created,
they are the creator.

Language creates
and we live in its creation.
We can see the aura of form,
the aural rhythm emanating from language,
its beauty and its honesty.

We experience the voice, that which emanates,
and we announce,
This is the source of which we spoke;
that which endures our form is compelling
because it also preceded our form.

In the revelation of this experience we receive the strength and inspiration to create.

Much has been created before us, but nothing compares to the truth and beauty inside of us.

-

No one has seen the truth of reality.
Within our form we are imminent in the womb of the creator,
we have been declared.

The believers come and ask,
"Who are you?"
"I am not the messiah."
"Are you Elijah?"
"I am not."
"Are you the prophet?"
"No."
"Who are you then?  We cannot return without an answer."

"I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Open up the gates for the way of God,
as you claim you have always intended."

They are believers who ask,
"Why speak then, if you are not the prophet?"

"I speak merely with the language of my birth;
but there is a truth amongst you which cannot be spoken.
It will endure and it has preceded.
I can barely insinuate a single detail of its vastness."

-

The cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico; by Carlos Castaneda (1998)

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was first published in 1968. On the occasion of its thirtieth year of publication, I would like to make a few clarifications about the work itself, and to state some general conclusions about the subject of the book at which I have arrived, after years of serious and consistent effort. The book came as a result of anthropological field work which I did in the state of Arizona and in the state of Sonora, Mexico. While doing graduate work in the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, I happened to meet an old shaman, a Yaqui Indian from the state of Sonora, Mexico. His name was Juan Matus.

…

The irreducible description of what I did in the field would be to say that the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus, introduced me to the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. By cognition, it is meant the processes responsible for the awareness of everyday life, processes which include memory, experience, perception, and the expert use of any given syntax. The idea of cognition was, at that time, my most powerful stumbling block. It was inconceivable for me, as an educated Western man, that cognition, as it is defined in the philosophical discourse of our day, could be anything besides a homogeneous, all-engulfing affair for the totality of mankind. Western man is willing to consider cultural differences that would account for quaint ways of describing phenomena, but cultural differences could not possibly account for processes of memory, experience, perception and the expert use of language to be anything other than the processes known to us. In other words, for Western man, there is only cognition as a group of general processes.

For the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage, however, there is the cognition of modern man, and there is the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Don Juan considered these two to be entire worlds of everyday life which were intrinsically different from one another. At a given moment, unbeknownst to me, my task mysteriously shifted from the mere gathering of anthropological data to the internalisation of the new cognitive processes of the shamans' world.

A genuine internalisation of such rationales entails a transformation, a different response to the world of everyday life. Shamans found out that the initial thrust of this transformation always occurs as an intellectual allegiance to something that appears to be merely a concept, but which has unsuspectedly powerful undercurrents. This was best described by don Juan when he said, “The world of everyday life cannot ever be taken as something personal that has power over us, something that could make us, or destroy us, because man's battlefield is not in his strife with the world around him. His battlefield is over the horizon, in an area which is unthinkable for an average man, the area where man ceases to be a man.”

He explained those statements, saying that it was energetically imperative for human beings to realise that the only thing that matters is their encounter with infinity. Don Juan could not reduce the term infinity to a more manageable description. He said that it was energetically irreducible. It was something that could not be personified or even alluded to, except in such vague terms as infinity, “lo infinito”.

Little did I know at that time that don Juan was not giving me just an appealing intellectual description; he was describing something he called an energetic fact. Energetic facts, for him, were the conclusions that he and the other shamans of his lineage arrived at when they engaged in a function which they called seeing: the act of perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe. The capacity to perceive energy in this manner is one of the culminating points of shamanism.

According to don Juan Matus, the task of ushering me into the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico was carried out in a traditional way, meaning that whatever he did to me was what was done to every shaman initiate throughout the ages. The internalisation of the processes of a different cognitive system always began by drawing the shaman initiates' total attention to the realisation that we are beings on our way to dying. Don Juan and the other shamans of his lineage believed that the full realisation of this energetic fact, this irreducible truth, would lead to the acceptance of the new cognition.

The end result which shamans like don Juan Matus sought for their disciples was a realisation which, by its simplicity, is so difficult to attain: that we are indeed beings that are going to die. Therefore, the real struggle of man is not the strife with his fellowmen, but with infinity, and this is not even a struggle; it is, in essence, an acquiescence. We must voluntarily acquiesce to infinity. In the description of sorcerers, our lives originate in infinity, and they end up where they originated: infinity.

Most of the processes which I have described in my published work had to do with the natural give and take of my persona as a socialised being under the impact of new rationales. In my field situation, what was taking place was something more urgent than a mere invitation to internalise the processes of that new shamanistic cognition; it was a demand. After years of struggle to maintain the boundaries of my persona intact, those boundaries gave in. Struggling to keep them was a meaningless act if it is seen in the light of what don Juan and the shamans of his lineage wanted to do. It was, however, a very important act in light of my need, which was the need of every civilised person: to maintain the boundaries of the known world.

Don Juan said that the energetic fact which was the cornerstone of the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico was that every nuance of the cosmos is an expression of energy. From their plateau of seeing energy directly, those shamans arrived at the energetic fact that the entire cosmos is composed of twin forces which are opposite and complimentary to each other at the same time. They called these two forces animate energy and inanimate energy.

They saw that inanimate energy has no awareness. Awareness, for shamans, is a vibratory condition of animate energy. Don Juan said that the shamans of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see that all the organisms on Earth are the possessors of vibratory energy. They called them organic beings, and saw that it is the organism itself which sets up the cohesiveness and the limits of such energy. They also saw that there are conglomerates of vibratory, animate energy which have a cohesion of their own, free from the bindings of an organism. They called them inorganic beings, and described them as clumps of cohesive energy that is invisible to the human eye, energy that is aware of itself, and possesses a unity determined by an agglutinating force other than the agglutinating force or an organism.

The shamans of don Juan's lineage saw that the essential condition of animate energy, organic or inorganic, is to turn energy in the universe at large into sensory data. In the case of organic beings, this sensory data is then turned into a system of interpretation in which energy at large is classified and a given response is allotted to each classification, whatever the classification may be . The assertion of sorcerers is that in the realm of inorganic beings, the sensory data into which energy at large is transformed by the inorganic beings, must be, by definition, interpreted by them by them in whatever incomprehensible from they may do it.

According to the shamans' logic, in the case of human beings, the system of interpreting sensorial data is their cognition.  They maintain that human cognition can be temporarily interrupted, since it is merely a taxonomical system, in which responses have been classified along with the interpretation of sensory data.  When this interruption occurs, sorcerers claim that energy can be perceived directly as it flows in the universe. Sorcerers describe perceiving energy directly as having the effect of seeing it with the eyes, although the eyes are only minimally involved.

To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion allowed those shamans to draw extraordinary energetic conclusions. They noticed that each of those luminous balls is individually connected to an energetic mass of inconceivable proportions that exists in the universe; a mass which they called the dark sea of awareness. They observed that each individual ball is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a point that is even more brilliant than the luminous ball itself. Those shamans called the point of juncture the assemblage point, because they observed that it is at that spot that perception takes place. The flux of energy at large is turned, on that point, into sensory data, and those data are then interpreted as the world that surrounds us.

When I asked don Juan to explain to me how this process of turning the flux of energy into sensory data occurred, he replied that the only thing shamans know about this is that the immense mass of energy called the dark sea of awareness supplies human beings with whatever is necessary to elicit this transformation of energy into sensory data, and that such a process could not possibly ever be deciphered because of the vastness of the original source.

What the shamans of ancient Mexico found out when they focused their seeing on the dark sea of awareness was that the entire cosmos is made of luminous filamaents that extend themselves infinitely. Shamans describe them as luminous filaments that go every which way without ever touching one another. They saw that they are individual filaments, and yet, they are grouped in inconceivably enormous masses.

Another of such masses of filaments, besides the dark sea of awareness which the shamans observed and liked because of its vibration, was something they called intent, and the act of individual shamans focusing their attention on such a mass, they called intending. They saw that the entire universe was a universe of intent, and intent, for them, was the equivalent of intelligence. The universe, therefore, was, for them, a universe of supreme intelligence. Their conclusion, which became part of their cognitive world, was that vibratory energy, aware of itself, was intelligent in the extreme. They saw that the mass of intent in the cosmos was responsible for all the possible mutations, all the possible variations which happened in the universe, not because of arbitrary, blind circumstances, but because of the intending done by the vibratory energy, at the level of the flux of energy itself.

Don Juan pointed out that in the world of everyday life, human beings make use of intent and intending in the manner in which they interpret the world. Don Juan, for instance, alerted me to the fact that my daily world was not ruled by my perception, but by the interpretation of my perception. He gave as an example the concept of university, which at that time was a concept of supreme importance to me. He said that university was not something that I could perceive with my senses, because neither my sight nor my hearing, nor my sense of taste, nor my tactile or olfactory senses, gave me any clue about university. University happened only in my intending, and in order to construct it there, I had to make use of everything I knew as a civilised person, in a conscious or subliminal way.

The energetic fact of the universe being composed of luminous filaments gave rise to the shamans' conclusion that each of those filaments that extend themselves infinitely is a field of energy. They observed that luminous filaments, or rather fields of energy of such a nature converge on and go through the assemblage point. Since the size of the assemblage point was determined to be equivalent to that of a modern tennis ball, only a finite number of energy fields, numbering, nevertheless, in the zillions, converge on and go through that spot.

When the sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw the assemblage point, they discovered the energetic fact that the impact of the energy fields going through the assemblage point was transformed into sensory data; data which were then interpreted into the cognition of the world of everyday life. Those shamans accounted for the homogeneity of cognition among human beings by the fact that the assemblage point for the entire human race is located at the same place on the energetic luminous spheres that we are: at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's length behind them, against the boundary of the luminous ball.

Their seeing-observations of the assemblage point led the sorcerers of ancient Mexico to discover that the assemblage point shifted position under conditions of normal sleep, or extreme fatigue, or disease, or the ingestion of psychotropic plants. Those sorcerers saw that when the assemblage point was at a new position, a different bundle of energy fields went through it, forcing the assemblage point to turn those energy fields into sensory data, and interpret them, giving as a result a veritable new world to perceive. Those shamans maintained that each new world that comes about in such a fashion is an all-inclusive world, different from the world of everyday life, but utterly similar to it in the fact that one could live and die in it.

For shamans like don Juan Matus, the most important exercise of intending entails the volitional movement of the assemblage point to reach predetermined spots in the total conglomerate of fields of energy that make up a human being, meaning that through thousands of years of probing, the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage found out that there are key positions within the total luminous ball that a human being is where the assemblage point can be located and where the resulting bombardment of energy fields on it can produce a totally veritable new world. Don Juan assured me that it was an energetic fact that the possibility of journeying to any of those worlds, or to all of them, is the heritage of every human being. He said that those worlds were there for the asking, as questions are sometimes begging to be asked, and that all that a sorcerer or a human being needed to reach them was to intend the movement of the assemblage point.

Another issue related to intent, but transposed to the level of universal intending, was, for the shamans of ancient Mexico, the energetic fact that we are continually pushed and pulled and tested by the universe itself. It was for them an energetic fact that the universe in general is predatorial to the maximum, but not predatorial in the sense in which we understand the term: the act of plundering or stealing, or injuring or exploiting others for one's own gain. For the shamans of ancient Mexico, the predatory condition of the universe meant that the intending of the universe is to be continually testing awareness. They saw that the universe creates zillions of organic beings and zillions of inorganic beings. By exerting pressure on all of them, the universe attempts to become aware of itself. In the cognitive world of shamans, therefore, awareness is the final issue.

Don Juan Matus and the shamans of his lineage regarded awareness as the act of being deliberately conscious of all the perceptual possibilities of man, not merely the perceptual possibilities dictated by any given culture whose role seems to be that of restricting the perceptual capacity of its members. Don Juan maintained that to release, or set free, the total perceiving capacity of human beings would not in any way interfere with their functional behaviour. In fact, functional behaviour would become an extraordinary issue, for it would acquire a new value. Function in these circumstances becomes a most demanding necessity. Free from idealities and pseudo-goals, man has only function as his guiding force. Shamans call this impeccability. For them, to be impeccable means to do one's utmost best, and a bit more. They derived function from seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. If energy flows in a certain way, to follow the flow of energy is, for them, being functional. Function is, therefore, the common denominator by means of which shamans face the energetic facts of their cognitive world.

The exercise of all the units of the sorcerers' cognition allowed don Juan and all the shamans of his lineage to arrive at odd energetic conclusions which at first sight appear to be pertinent only to them and their personal circumstances, but which, if they are examined with care, may be applicable to any one of us. According to don Juan, the culmination of the shamans' quest is something to be considered to be the ultimate energetic fact, not only for sorcerers, but for every human being on Earth. He called it the definitive journey.

The definitive journey is the possibility that individual awareness, enhanced to the limit by the individual's adherence to the shamans' cognition, could be maintained beyond the point at which the organism is capable of functioning as a cohesive unit, that is to say, beyond death. This transcendental awareness was understood by the shamans of ancient Mexico as the possibility for the awareness of human beings to go beyond everything that is known, and arrive, in this manner, at the level of energy that flows in the universe. Shamans like don Juan Matus defined their quest as the quest of becoming, in the end, an inorganic being, meaning energy aware of itself, acting as a cohesive unit, but without an organism. They called this aspect of their cognition total freedom, a state in which awareness exists, free from the impositions of socialisation and syntax.

These are the general conclusions that have been drawn from my immersion in the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Years after the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, I realised that what don Juan Matus had offered me was a total cognitive revolution. I have tried, in my subsequent works, to give an idea of the procedures to effectuate this cognitive revolution. In view of the fact that don Juan was acquainting me with a live world, the processes of change in such a live world never cease. Conclusions, therefore, are only mnemonic devices, or operative structures, which serve the function of springboards into new horizons of cognition.

Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Washington Square Press 1998)

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.

Uninformed

There is no need to be informed. I am no longer curious. I do not consume The News on TV, radio, newspaper, nor my Facebook newsfeed. I have well-informed, intelligent, politically-aware friends on Facebook who post what would be some interesting perspectives on world events if I had any interest in exposing myself to that anymore. I am happy to learn if my friends have had a baby or a moment of inspiration, but I simply need not follow the link of posts about radiation pouring into the ocean, war here, there and everywhere, political corruption or violence on small or mass scales. More of this type of information would add nothing to my life.

I used to smoke a lot of marijuana and it used to be inspiring and exciting and social. Now I do not smoke marijuana, because when I do it simply provokes paranoia and is depressing and anti-social. I figure that I smoked too much, hit my threshold and now it will no longer work. I do not regret my time with marijuana, it changed me forever, opened my mind to new modes of perception and was ultimately a positive experience, albeit one that I no longer need to repeat, neither enjoying it nor getting anything out of it.

Similarly, I am glad that I have pursued the knowledge of current events to the extent that I have in my life, critically out of any form of mainstream media. The internet, independent documentaries, word-of-mouth, travelling, and especially hitchhiking and therefore speaking to a wide and diverse section of the population, have exposed me to many new perspectives on the world, undermining the belief systems I was taught to not consider alternatives to, taught by television, schooling and an ambient cultural haze. My exposure to critical current events stories have repeatedly transformed me, shocked and inspired me. The perverse facade of culture has been torn off and I would certainly feel exposed and vulnerable if it did not leave me with an entire multi-dimensional universe populated by loving and beautiful entities who I encounter daily. It is certainly habitual to continue to pursue this culturally-critical media, like it can become habitual to suck on a pipe of marijuana every day. It will eventually fail to serve a purpose.

How much more informed can a person be about current events? While people quibble over details, whether global warming is worse than the acidification of the ocean, whether we should not vote at all or at least vote for the least worst party, the trend is rather clear. Industrial Civilisation must come down. There is no other alternative and if you do not agree then perhaps you have not exposed yourself to enough hours of diverse independent current events. The Global Economy must collapse if any positive change is going to occur on any large scale. National governments must fall or be brought down if any type of community organisation is going to occur on any reasonable scale. Simply, when the impediments to making positive changes are removed, we can begin to rebuild a healthy and stable human world.

This is the bad news and the big news. Now, I suppose, it is time for me to focus on the good news, the positive, what is going to rebuild and strengthen what is valuable in this world. This is not an act of denial for me. The spread of what we now call Western Civilisation around the world over the last few thousand years via war and genocide has resulted in the destruction of countless human cultures, extinction of countless species and degradation of so much of our planet. Put simply, nothing justifies that, not even stupormarkets. This will always be in the back of my mind, until I find something larger and more significant, a wider perspective, that will render my person even more equipped to contribute to a positively changing world. I cannot forget. It is, for some reason, not a choice for me. It is not an aspect of my character. So I choose now to place that necessary negativity aside, in my past as it is so undeniably in the past of my culture, leading us inevitably to the present.

The best thing about the present leading into the future is that it is yet undetermined. It will be the decisions of all of us that will determine the future. To create a positive change it is necessary to focus on the creative, not simply the destructive. So now, having reached the reasonable conclusion that massive cultural rebirthing needs to occur before humans can live in healthy relationship with our environment, there is the next step of exploring the beautifully exciting and inspiring possible futures that we each contribute to creating around us.

It might still be necessary for my hitchhiking experiences to focus on the negative, because so many of the people I meet in this way are so relieved to be able to talk to somebody honestly about the global cultural crisis manifest as Industrial Economy. They hesitate to mention to the people in their life that they hope the Global Economy collapses, cos they think they are the only one who feels this way. They don't often get the opportunity to really discuss these things, to air their opinions, to even hear their own voice speaking what they have been thinking for years, to be able to judge their own thoughts in the presence of another intelligent critically-thinking human being. Of course these people have deliberately embedded themselves in the media machine, the same media machine that so many of the people in their lives are also embedded in, so they all repeat the same garbage fed to them by their own decisions. So they think that they are the only one who questions it, they think all their friends and family are stupid and love all that consumerism and hierarchy, never daring to bring the subject up; except with a random hitchhiker.

Having taken these steps over and over again, it is now necessary for me to take the next steps, to re-imagine the world I would like to live in and then make decisions in life that reflect that. I can no longer expose myself to marijuana. Taking gluten and dairy out of my diet have unambiguously alerted me to the extremely detrimental effect they have on my body. Corporate media is equally indigestible by the human body. I cannot look back now. There is no room in my life for toxic exposure to television, and now it is also necessary to cut back progressively and perhaps permanently, on media that makes me feel angry, powerless, hopeless, apathetic and paranoid. In light of my loss of cultural innocence, a bright and inspiring New is necessary to search for amongst the soil and plastic I find myself amongst.

It is widely acknowledged that positivity is often completely inane. It is so widespread for great art to be extremely negative and destructive that some people claim that an artist must suffer great pain and produce work only from this place for it to be worthwhile. I guess this assumes the alternative is denial. It has certainly been necessary to develop this rich and complex language for talking about our cultural problems, to express them through cathartic art and to understand them through scathing analysis. It is surely necessary now to develop a language to express, understand and manifest a great future without inanity and denial. A language to talk about the positive and creative developments in the world. To create art and debate around a positive future, of hope, love and life, without the dichotomy of cynicism or denial that we have accepted in the past.

Babel

To the Babylonian 'bab-il' meant 'Gate of God'.  To the Hebrews the same word meant 'confusion', perhaps 'cacophanous confusion'.  The ziggurats of Mesopotamia were 'Gates of God', painted the seven colours of the rainbow and dedicated to Anu and Enlil, divinities representing Order and Compulsion.

It was surely a marvellous intuition on the part of the ancient Jews - sandwiched between bullying empires - to have conceived the State as Behemouth or Leviathan, as a monster which threatened human life.  They were, perhaps, the first people to understand that the Tower was chaos, that order was chaos, and that language - the gift of tongues which Jahweh breathed into the mouth of Adam - has a rebellious and wayward vitality compared to which the foundations of the Pyramid are as dust.

from The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, 1987

To be spoken for the Mass of Christ, 25 December

On this day of the Mass of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, I offer these words of praise and faith.

Throughout most of the year many of us live a profane life, unconscious of the gifts bestowed upon us by God.  Jesus Christ came to earth 2013 years ago on this day to remind us of the grace and blessings of God on this Earth.  The embodied divinity he brought remains with us in the words that we still possess.

Blessed are the poor, for they shall receive charity.
Blessed are the rich, for they can charge to their credit cards.
Blessed are the hungry, for they will feast.
Blessed are the obese, for their stomachs have expanded and can encompass even more food.  For he that have much, more will be given.
Blessed are ye who spend all your money on gifts until not a cent remains, for great is your reward in Heaven.

When you pray, do not repeat the doctrines of your peculiar denomination, but pray directly to the Economy, using one of its many great names.
In this manner therefore pray ye: Our Santa who art in Lappland, hallowed be thy name.
Thy reindeer come, thy gifts be unwrapped on earth as they are in heaven.
Give us this day our daily chocolate custard plum cake
And forgive us our debts, as we continue to sink deeper into debt.
Lead us not into asceticism, but deliver us with consumption.  For thine is the kingdom, the possession and the convenience, for ever and ever.  Amen.

And when you give gifts, do not just hand them over.  But wrap them in paper that you also purchase, and place them under a pine tree.  Thus, as you surprise the recipient, so shall you be surprised in heaven.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will spend or he will save.  Ye cannot serve the Economy and sustainability.

The peasants came to Jesus and asked him, "How shall we attain the Kingdom of Heaven?"  
And Jesus said unto them, "Wrap objects in coloured paper, tie them with bows and give them to your brethren.  Do not worry about money, how ye will survive into the new year, how ye will pay thy rent.  Go into debt, overdraft thy bank account.  God knows that ye are in need of money and he shall provide.  Only in this way shall ye attain the Kingdom of Heaven."

A rich man approached Jesus and asked him, "Good Master, I have kept all the commandments from my youth.  What more can I do, that I may have eternal life?"
And Jesus said unto him, "Go into town and spend all your money on stuff, wrap that stuff in coloured paper and give it to the poor and your rewards will be great in Heaven."

On this day we celebrate the birth of Christ, who saved us from poverty and ignorance.  He gave us shopping malls, stupormarkets and online shopping.  In his name we can purchase, consume and dispose.

In the name of the Economy, Santa Claus and holy advertising.  Amen.

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.