Timewave Zero

Hello..alright. Have you ever noticed how ahh, there's this quality to reality which comes and goes, and kind of ebbs and flows and nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it except some people call it a 'bad hair day' or some people say 'Things are really weird recently.' And I think we never notice it and we never talk about it because we're embedded in a culture that expects us to believe that all times are the same, and that your bank account doesn't fluctuate except according to the vicissitudes of your own existence. In other words, every moment is expected to be the same and yet this isn't what we experience. And so what I noticed was that running through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty. And some days, and some years, and some centuries are very novel indeed, and some ain't. And they come and go on all scales differently, interweaving, resonating. And this is what time seems to be. And Science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature: that nature is a novelty conserving engine. And that from the very first moments of that most improbable big bang, novelty has been conserved because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields; there was only an ocean of free electrons. And then time passed and the universe cooled and novel structures crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms; atoms of hydrogen and helium aggregating into stars. And at the center of those stars the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen before which was fusion. And fusion cooking in the hearts of stars brought forth more novelty: heavy elements - iron, carbon, four-valent carbon. And as time passed there were not only then elementary systems but because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe, molecular structures. And out of molecules come simple subsets of organism. The genetic machinery for transcripting information, aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon complexity, and always faster and faster and faster. And then we come to ourselves. And where do WE fit into all of this. Five million years ago we were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five million years from tonight? What we represent is not a sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something-or-other on the edge of nowhere. What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity: writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth, into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the micro- physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necesary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the de-no-ma(?) of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.

You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focussed and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history. A return to the archaic mode. A rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000 years ago. A techno-escape forward into a future that looks more like the past than the future because materialism, consumerism, product-fetishism, all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence. If we have the dream, if we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimitable to the human condition.

That's what we're talking about here: psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language; because what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So what we need then is the forced evolution of language. And the way to do that is to go back to the agents that created language in the very first place. And that means the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious, beckoning, extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up in to the chakras of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the total other that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we do determines how well the experiment of life on Earth does, because we have become the cutting edge of that experiment, we define it, and we hold in our hands the power to make or to break it.

This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millenium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calender as a club. We can make the millenium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony. We...All these things are possible if we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it together which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point then we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend. Nine times in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles pushing human populations ahead of it and those people didn't fuck up. Why should we then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. And now with the engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millenium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. THIS IS THE MOMENT. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime, and we are ready, and we are poised. And as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own.

It's there. Go for it, and thank you.

[Excerpt from Space Time Continuum with Terence McKenna. Alien Dreamtime was a multimedia event recorded live on Feb 27th 1993]

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