Sunday, January 23, 2005

Hyperborea...

... the Eschaton, and the Transhuman Dimension

You have entered an Alchemical Garden at the Edge of Time. There is haze upon the distant hills, spreading Acacias bend low over reflecting pools. The air is filled with an all pervasive hum; these are the reveries of the Proustian bees. Your guide will be gardener/curator Terence McKenna....

These web sites contain the precious archives of Terence McKenna's writing and thinking. No one in modern times attempted such profound acts of syncretism as McKenna, which made his lectures (if you could call them that) utterly engrossing. I met him once during "A Weekend With Terence Mckenna" held at Seven Oaks in Virginia in 1996 under highly amusing circumstances, but that's another story. Let's just say that McKenna has become a trusted guide through the murkiness and confusion of the times we live in. Whenever I am depressed, I think of McKenna's lifelong mission to bring just a sliver of comprehension to the masses, who, it seems, know not wither they go nor why, and I feel uplifted. He was a true hollow bone in the Sioux spiritual tradition, a conduit through which the Old Ones speak to us anew. He died in April, 2000.







TerenceMckennaLand
Hyperborea

See also:
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension


Here is my favorite McKenna quote:


"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had 5- or 6-billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance."


"The Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set."

"If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed"
.

I love the optimism of this statement. If only we could drag people away from their fucking "reality" shows and the 1001 other idiotic distractions of "consensus reality" and reveal to them the magic lantern shows in their own heads, we would make real progress. "Consensus," as a source of guiding constructs for humane and compassionate action leading to enlightened society, is dribbling away before the onslaught of religious fanaticism, paranoid governments, and an oafish disregard for the environment; what Dale Gowin has called the "hypnotic somnambulism of American consumer culture." There will be no such thing as "early adapters" of the brave new world we are creating.

And here, free of his usual impossible jargon comes this real nugget of wisdom:

"Use your lifetime for the sake of Divine Self-Realization. If you use it for anything less, then what is less becomes your destiny....." Adi Da Samraj