Subject: "Re: Evolution" by T.McKenna
From: "Bartley R. Troyan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 04:17:09 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.drugs

Well, somebody else posted a snippet of Terence McKenna's
writing, and I was bored tonight so I finally decided to
transcribe this. I think many of you will enjoy this...

The following is from a song on Shamen's album
_Boss Drum_, called "Re: Evolution", written by McKenna, Angus,
and West (Colin Angus is the leader of Shamen, I think, I don't
know who West is). Anyway, this is reproduced without permission,
but I really don't care, because these are the lyrics to what is
IMHO the best track on the album (not that the others are bad,
far from it). Imagine a psychedelic techno/ambient backbeat that
constantly varies in style, instrumentation, and tempo, with
McKenna reading this in the background:

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

Human history represents such a radical break with the natural
systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must
be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies
ahead in the temporal dimension.  Persistently Western religions
have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end
of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic
experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn't
going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox
religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks
closure in a kind of omega point of transcendance, is confirmed,
it's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in
hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually
ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that
saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of
eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the
universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind
of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been
about, a shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone
who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world
really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the
dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually
seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of
learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the
domain of what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable", the
transcendental presense of the other, which can be absanctioned,
in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can be
brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the
community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture,
the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman
learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the
domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is
somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily
occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery I
believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are people who have
been able to de-condition themselves from the community's
instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go
into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge,
recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls,
cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on.
Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the
principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What
psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence
of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one's eyes
to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the
consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator
culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of
the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do
is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain
of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of
art to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of
intelligence, that it can actually open a channel of
communication with an individual human being. The message that
nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy
between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a
synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding
and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has
sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I
mean I think it's fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic.
History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that
witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is
the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of
eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live
through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be
privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change
probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century
is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time
over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to
be swept.

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

The emphasis in house music and rave culture on physiologically
compatible rhythms and this sort of thing is really the
rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that sound,
properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually
change neurological states, and large groups of people getting
together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a
telepathic community of bonding that hopefully will be strong
enough that it can carry the vision out into the mainstream of
society. I think that the youth culture that is emerging in the
nineties is an end of the millenium culture that is actually
summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely
different direction, that we're going to arrive in the third
millenium, in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean a
revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm signatures, a
new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to
feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and not a
moment too soon.

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Comments,etc???  Apologies for any misspellings, I've never heard
some of the more unusual words in there anywhere else...    --Bart

--
Bartley Troyan     [email-masked]
"The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye"