From the talking book
True Hallucinations
by
Terence McKenna
Chapter 20: The Oversoul as Saucer
There is building in global society an increasingly intense
expectation of the intervention into human history by UFOs. It is very
similar in tone to the buildup of messianic expectation in the
Hellenistic world in the several centuries preceding the birth of
Christ. The leaders of Roman society may have been caught off guard by
the appearance of Christ, but they had no one to blame but themselves
since milllions of people in the ancient world were expectantly awaiting
some kind of messiah. So today, science and govenment koo-koo the idea
of world contact with the UFOs, while the contact cults grow ever larger
and more insistent that contact is about to occur.
Imagine, therefore, what you may never have seriously imagined
before. Imagine what would happen if the UFOs were to appear. Imagine a
spaceship of the close encounters of the third kind variety suddenly
appearing in orbit around the Earth. Television and mass media would
carry its image to every man, woman and child on the planet. Governments
would be paralyzed. Science would be helpless to explain where it came
from or how it got here. Millenarian hysteria would break out
everywhere. The UFO would be hailed as savior and denounced as
antichrist. The end of the world would appear imminent, and all this
would occur before the contact was more than a visual image. Then the
UFO would begin its revelation. Vast displays of beneficent power can be
expected. Perhaps it would mysteriously neutralize all weapons of mass
destruction, or it might use some sort of ray to cure all terrestrial
cancer. Whatever it does one may be sure that its actions will be
impressive. Its actions will convert millions to the UFO religion in a
space of hours. Indeed, its actions will be specifically designed to
overwhelm us with the reality of its power and presence. That will close
the first stage of the revelation.
The second stage will be the teachings. Telepathically imparted,
the specifics of the teachings cannot be anticipated, but they will urge
love, voluntary simplicity, concern for one another, renunciation of
war, perhaps renunciation of the destructive application of science.
Whatever the teachings, the UFO will promise immense reward to those who
follow them and dire consequences for those who do not. And the
teachings will be delivered in so poetically perfect a way, so rich in
understanding and appealing nuances that no one will doubt their origin
in a being wise and good and immensely superior to ourselves. The
delivery of the teachings will set the stage for the third and last and
most shocking phase of the revelation: the departure.
The saucer, promising vaguely to return, will simply disappear.
The entire process could take less than a month. If this seems a short
time recall that the entire public career of Christ lasted only three
years. Christ's career occured in a world where information could move
no faster than a horse's gallup. Yet three years in one small part of
the world was all that was necessary to launch a world religion that was
vital for 1500 years. In a world of electronic communication the impact
of the saucer's arrival, miracles, teaching and departure would be
incalculable - even if it all occured within a month. The saucer would
leave in its wake a science utterly unable to provide any answers to the
important questions concerning what had gone on. The vast majority of
people would be fanatical converts to the teachings of the saucer, and
any institution in opposition to those teachings could expect to be
swept away almost overnight. The departure of the UFO would create a
sense of abandonment, the agony of which could be expected to echo in
the human psyche for centuries. The only panacea would be the religion
of the saucer, the religion left behind. Science would be discredited
and soon abandoned in favor of a thousand or more years of exegesis of
the saucerian message. Is it not a familiar pattern in the light of our
discussion of Christ and Rome?
What will never be said in the wake of such an event and so must
be said now while there is still time for all of the above to occur and
yet still be deception. A benign deception designed to save us from our
advanced science and infantile ethics, but a deception nevertheless. The
saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no matter how advanced its
demonstrations of power, is NOT a vehicle from some other star system,
it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest trick. If one knows this
one can live through the revelation and the destruction of our
scientific world and yet evade the immense power of this most powerful
of all transference phenomenon and thereby maintain the integrity of
one's own soul and spirit. Remember, I am not a debunker of flying
saucers or a defender of science, I am a contactee, and this book is the
painstakingly told story of my own involvement with the UFOs. I am one
of those Vallee has pinpointed as being a carrier of ideas that pave the
way for the scenario I have just described. Yet from it all I have
learned that there is no religious revelation more satisfying than the
hard won fruits of simple understanding. And there is no liberation to
compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age
in which one lives.
I reach these conclusions through my use and familiarity with
psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs. They immerse their user in the
world of the oversoul and make one privileged to at least a part of its
mechanics of operation. They allow a private dialogue with the oversoul
that is outside the context of the struggle between science and
revelation that leaves no choice between the alienation of the
rationalist and the tired formulas of the fanatic believer. Psychedelic
drugs hold out the possibility of healing the breach between science and
morality at the level of the individual, thus freeing one to evolve
independent of the chaos and transformation the UFOs may soon bring to
humanity.
Vallee's recent book 'Messengers of Deception' vibrates with fear
of the unconscious and alienation from the matrix of the larger psyche
out of which rational thought has emerged. He fears the destruction of
rationalism and scientific thought, yet never once does he mention the
potential world wrecking crisis that the undirected development of
science and technology has brought into being. He paints himself as an
open-minded investigator of UFOs, yet never questions the motives of the
retired and unnamed intelligence officers in which he places so much
faith. It is impossible that the CIA is unaware of the social impact
belief in UFOs is having? If they were unaware of it before then surely
the recent writings of Vallee himself must have alerted them to the
potential challenge UFO beliefs pose to orthodox institutions. Based on
Vallee's own ideas of an informational struggle between rational and
irrational elements, how was he able to ignore the possibility that the
mutilations which he is so eager to connect with UFOs are nothing more
that a govenment agency's clumsy attempt to discredit the genuine UFO
phenomenon? It is a typical method of the intelligence community to
discredit human groups it opposes by faking atrocities in such a way
that they appear to have been committed by the group whose discrediting
is sought. Vallee gives examples of this but never suspects that some
government agency might be using this technique to impede the transfer
of loyalties from political institutions to the UFOs. He mentions the
proximity of animal mutilations to high-security government
installations but never suggests this might be because such
installations are the source of these mutilations. Few UFO sightings
involve confusion among witnesses over whether or not what they saw was
aUFO or a helicopter. Yet in the animal mutilation cases many witnesses
insist a helicopter was involved. Vallee is at pains to say no physical
evidence of a UFO has ever been collected. Yet later he passes over the
fact that a quite ordinary surgical scalpel was found at one cattle
mutilation site. It seems possible to me that some people in government
have read Vallee and are familiar with his theories regarding UFOs as a
factor introducing shifts in belief systems and institutional loyalties
on a global scale. Without knowing what UFOs really are these persons
and agencies have launched smokescreen operations designed to cast doubt
on the motives and harmlessness of UFOs and so to retard or halt the
shift of loyalties and beliefs now reaching epidemic proportions. I
suspect that Vallee's book may be the opening shot in a media war whose
purpose will be to connect the occult, right-wing fanatacism, and animal
mutilations to the UFO, all in an effort to cast doubt on the vast
power and benign intent of the saucer phenomenon. Vallee's title
'Messengers of Deception' bears a curious resemblance to J. Edgar
Hoover's 'Masters of Deceit'. There the boogey man was communism. In
Vallee's book we are told the new boogey man is UFO phenomenon. Who
chose the title for Vallee's book? Was it Vallee or the mysterious major
who was so helpful in guiding Vallee down these new avenues of
speculation? I believe that Vallee whether wittingly or unwittingly is
himself a messenger of deception and has become the spearhead of a
conscious effort to sow even deeper confusion in society regarding UFOs.
We might say it is an effort foredoomed to failure. The collective
overmind of our species is the source of the UFO and its designs cannot
be deflected or turned aside. Its viewpoint is one of thousands of
years and its means visionary and charismatic belief systems which act
to restore the balance between understanding of and reverence for the
universe is a message more powerful than any offered by the profane
materialist societies that have grown so foolish as to imagine
themselves the stewards of human destiny. Humanity alone and each of us
individualy is the steward of human destiny. This is the real meaning of
the UFOs and the experiment at La Chorrera.
My own ideas concerning the mechanics by which the oversoul
creates the UFO encounters might take the following form.
Dimethyltriptamine when smoked, snuffed, or injected induces a brief and
extremely intense psychedelic experience whose overwhelming sense of
contact with the Other is unparalleled. For the last decade or so this
extraordinary property of DMT has made it seem to many who sought a
chemical basis for schizophrenia as the long sought schizotoxin. Studies
have proved inconclusive however. DMT concentration has not been proven
to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls. Studies
have established the presence of DMT in the human body, however the
origin and significance of the DMT is unknown. Although it may reflect
endogenous synthesis, it could also result from diet, bacterial
byproducts, human laboratory error, or other sources. Bearing in mind
the bizarre power of the DMT experience, its presence and unknown role
in human metabolism, add one more fact: the strange aura of
suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense hallucination
phase of the DMT experience. This period of suggestibility may last 15
seconds to a minute, and is a time during which the assumptions which
the experient projects concerning the unusual shift of sensory input
acquires enormous power. A few moments later the power of the now
numinous assumption overwhelmes the consciousness of the observer with a
scenario while totally bizarre and outrageous nevertheless is somehow a
complete psychological fulfillment of the expectations formed in the
few minutes of transition that preceded the visionary engulfment.
What I am proposing is that something like this happens during a
UFO close encounter and the cause may very well be something which must
be partially sought in the human organism. Imagine a person wandering
alone in unfamiliar country: suddenly there's a hackle-raising sense of
weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the limbs, followed by a
clearing of vision and a loud crackling sould. At this point the sense
of strangeness within and without the body would trigger a fear reaction
in most people. The fear reaction causes a rapid and automatic search
for a culturally-validated explaination of what is going on, and an
explaination will always be found. It may range from, 'I am being
bewitched by a demon,' to 'Surely it is a visitation of the Holy
Mother,' to 'My God! It must be a UFO!' In each case the abandonment of
the ego to a culturally prescribed explaination of the experience of the
Other causes the experience to exfoliate, exploit and elaborate all the
themes that the culture's current myth of the Other entails. It is
known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced
into the human body. Is it not possible that we human beings are
occasionally susceptible to a kind of visionary seizure? When for
reasons of stress or diet these factors combine with psychodynamic
factors to initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT? Pheremones may
play a part in this experience and isolation may be its trigger.
Whatever its cause, our conditioning as individuals causes the
experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the
deepest concerns and yearnings of the current culture toward the Other.
In our own time this has given rise to the hope of friendly visiting
extraterrestrials. As late as 1917 the miracle at Fatima was interpreted
wordwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today it would surely
be hailed as an extraterrestrial contact. If my suggestion regarding DMT
were found to be correct, it would provide insight into the way in
which the cultural feedback thermostat explaination of UFOs put forth by
Vallee and others actually works. Those people who experience the DMT
seizure and are plunged into the current myth of the Other actually
return as apostles of that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by
those means to exert the tuning and control of historical development
that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs.
Stress, generalized as an impending sense of historical crisis,
may be the factor that induces the UFO/close-contact experience. As the
historical crisis deepens the number of contacts will increase until the
atemporal portion of the mass psyche has effected enough individuals
that there is actually a turning away from the stress-causing course of
action. How well is the Superego able to play the role of God? Can it
come in saucerian splendor to save the world from the flames at the end
of time? Or can it only beckon and warn with visions and dire prophesy?
These are questions that we might answer if we diligently explore the
states of mind that DMT and psilocybin make available. Perhaps the UFO
encounters involve nothing more than an autonomous and negative psychic
complex able to emerge during the situation of unusual energy dynamics
induced in the psyche by psilocybin. However, a different explainatory
approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum whose
modalities bisect each other with equal ease. This is the approach which
grants the phenomenological existence of the constructs seen in the
Stropharia trance and in UFO encounters. Indeed, the vast and dreamy
world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may merge
imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call
'hyperdimensional', indicating the paradox of their simultaneous
invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a
presence which belies the term hallucination.
Ahead of us lies the future, where we can expect the ingression of
the alternative dimension to intensify. It is therefore important for
us to have a sense of the powers in that Other world and their shifting
agencies. In a traditional society, our exploration of these matters
would be firmly imbedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these
forces. Techniques tried and true would be available to fortify our
psychic constitution. Since we are members of a profane society whose
relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have no such
consolation. No dispelling ritual or words of proven self-empowerment.
By reason and intuition we must attempt to conquer the fears that attend
journeys into the unknown. But reason and intuition need data with
which to construct maps of reality. If we outdistance the inflow of fact
we move beyond the safety zone of the conjuring rod of intuition and
reason. For these reasons we move slowly and steadily. We are human
factors in a multi- variable equation where the shift of unseen
parameters can trigger large perturbations and resonances of unexpected
types. Knowing this, and knowing how little we do know, we should be
excused for this defense of caution when taking to ourselves the visions
which the Stropharia brings.
Carl Jung's 'Mysterium Coniunctionis' reminds us of the reality of
the situation that insues once the psyche is hooked into making the
transference to the alchemical or saucerian goal. Jung, citing Gerhart
Dorn, stresses that the materialization of the stone is only a prologue
to the experience of the perfected self in a state of illumination. Jung
wrote, 'Though we know from experience that psychic processes are
related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this
relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because
the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been
conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present
experience.' Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and
it is only a hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimension - of a
co-dimension inclusive of our continuum - allows a hologram of other
realized forms of organization, far distant, to become visible at
certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels
have been damped by selection in favor of more directly relevant lines
of information relating to animal survival. Evolution does not reinforce
selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance since
such an ability has no selective advantage, unless the information it
conveys falls upon the receptors of an organism already sophisicated
enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts for later application
in different contexts.
Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a
distance only begin to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has
already achieved sufficient sophistication to be called conscious and
mind-possessing. The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at
medical engineering which amplifies, for inspection by consciousness,
the quantum resonance of the other parts of the spatial continuum
holographically at hand. This experience is the vision which the UFOs
and psilocybin impart: visions of strange planets, life forms,
perspectives and societies, machines, ruins, landscapes. The
hierophanies all unfold in a 'nunc-stans' that has all space -standing
in it- like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens
by human beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as
one advances through the primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow
focusing on the phenomenon of imagination. Imagination being the
deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually
existing in the present at hand.
The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the
ideological content of specific visions that empirical attention should
center. What are the working details of the worlds whose presence
impinges on ours so strongly? What of the beings sometimes confronted
often furtively sensed, who seem to have some existence in a world of
their own revealed by the psilocybin and in UFO contact? There may exist
a vast communication network in the topological nature of things. A
network that becomes a fact only for those species or individuals who
will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by
them be found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives
in a climate of such ideas. To validate the idea of the worth of the
visions of worlds at a distance one must emerge with some idea spawned
by the visionary Other but with a utility in the here and now. The wave
quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I
personally have glimpsed in completeness. It took years to elaborate and
its relation to the here and now is still elusive. Fragmentary themes
abound: symbiosis, saucer-lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the
higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference
and fantasy. In the classical sense of the word the experimenter with
hallucinogens pursues gnosis: privileged knowledge concerning nature and
vouchsafed by her in ecstacy.
The history of consciousness is the halting exploration of the
once irrational images and processes met in dreams and trace. Such
images become concepts and discoveries as information flows through the
multiple-continuum of being seeking equilibrium, yet paradoxically
carrying everywhere images of ways the flow towards entropy was locally
reversed by this being or that society or phenomenon. We are immersed in
a holographic ocean of places and ideas. We can understand this to
whatever depth we are able. The ocean of images and the intricacy of
their connections is infinite. It is perhaps why great genius preceeds
by apparent leaps. Because the revolutionary idea which inspires the
genius comes upon one complete, entire by itself, from the ocean of
mind. History is the story of the search for the intuitive leap that
will reveal the very mechanism of that other dimension. The need for
such a leap by humanity will grow as we exhaust complexity in all realms
save the microphysical and the psychological. My own method has been
immersion in the images and self- examination of the phenomenon of
tryptamine hallucinogenesis. This means taking the Stropharia psilocybe
and pondering just what this all may mean. With confidence that as more
people come to share this experience time will deepen our understanding,
if not answer all questions. For psilocybin argues that hallucinogens
are windows into higher dimensions. That even as a cone can yield
circle, ellipse or parabola to an act of two-dimensional sectioning and
yet remain intrinsically a cone, so reality is something that changes
according to the angle of regarding. It argues that human beings are
many forms over vast scales of time, that all life is unified at some
level, and all intelligence in the universe are but facets of the
mystery called humanness. In probing the Other we shall always come back
with images of ourselves. In probing ourselves we shall return with
images of the Other. In the phenomenon of being itself no less than in
the phenomenon of the UFO encounters we are merely privileged observers
of a relationship between what is naively called the world and the
transpersonal portion of the human psyche. How this relationship came to
be, and what its limitations are, we cannot know until we gain access
to the transpersonal and atemporal part of the psyche. Of what this
consists we do not know and no hypothesis can be ruled out. My hunch is
that if we could really comprehend death then we could understand the
UFO. But that neither can be understood unless they are looked at in
light of the question, what is humanness? I believe that the
transpersonal component of the human psyche is not distinct from matter
and that therefore it can literally do anything. It is not subject to
the will of any individual. It has a will and an understanding that is
orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals
who compose it as cells compose a body. It has a plan, glimpsed by
individuals only as vision or religious hierophany. Nevertheless, the
plan is unfolding. There will be many more UFO sightings, many more
close contacts. Our belief systems are undergoing accelerated evolution
via increased input from the other. Somewhere ahead of us there is a
critical barrier where we will at last have enough data to obtain an
integrating insight into the riddle of humanity's relation to the UFO. I
believe that as this happens the childhood of our species will pass
away and when this is done we will be free to use the staggering
understanding that humankind and the UFO are one.
|