"Childhood's End", the Evolution of Humanity Into HyperSpace, and Terence McKenna's UFO Encounte

Terence McKenna was a brilliant thinker who contributed many revolutionary ideas to humanity. His lifestyle may be deemed controversial or taboo by many - as he was a strong proponent of shamanism and the altered states of consciousness associated with the ingestion of sacred plants and fungi. But if you can forgive him or understand his point of view about enhanced cognition or consciousness, I think you can benefit a great deal from his ideas.

I think his greatest achievement was a new understanding and model of time - a model of time with a spiral structure.



His book The Invisible Landscape goes into great detail regarding his theory of time and the methods by which shamans are able to gain access to information outside themselves.

His radical and revolutionary ideas about time came to him in the wake of an intense UFO encounter in the Amazon in 1971. He says he felt compelled to understand what happened to him and was led to uncover many startling and new ideas that challenge the current materialistic paradigm of Science. His original auto-biography that details the adventures and discoveries in the Amazon - True Hallucinations - started and ended with the theme of the so-called flying saucers or UFOs. It was eventually re-written to exclude the emphasis on UFOs and was widely published, but in his first copy - which he read and recorded for an invigorating audiobook production - there are an additional two chapters devoted to understanding humanity's relationship with the UFO phenomenon.

In one of McKenna's last recorded interviews in 1999, a direct question about technological change and our collective future was put to him. He responded with a rare public acknowledgment of some of the specific visions and ideas of spacecraft and UFOs that he had an admitted strong attraction to. I have shared this segment and another clip of his from 1987 in a YouTube collage video - but I will also share a transcript of the excerpt from his 1999 interview here as well:

The vision I always saw as inevitable - and I still do and I'm very attracted to it and shall be sorry to miss it if I do - and that is, I can imagine the 21st century defined by huge spacecraft that cycle from the inner to the outer solar system. That seems to me the way to do it. To create these worlds which have like 80 year orbits that carry them clear out to Uranus and all these places - and to the inner solar system. And that these things are just self-constructed hives of human activity and they invent their own raison d'être at each point in these voyages. And there's travel between them, but largely they are city sized or larger constructs - and that must be how it will work. I would really like to see a break-out in the 21st century. How long can we wait for star flight? I mean how long before the contradictions in terrestrial existence just become too tearing and you either have to go to some kind of fascism and really turn the screws or things fly to pieces. But I really always felt as a science-fiction fan and all that that star-flight and galactic citizenship was what you're aiming for. But yeah, this flinging around the solar system - that's obviously all do-able. In other words, it doesn't require any rearrangement of the laws of physics. It just requires that we don't all murder each other and we continue to pursue commerce. So this is reasonable on some level to expect.

reply to post by corsair00


First, you use of the term "Childhood's End," the title of the best of Arthur C. Clarke. That book is a fictional compression of our destiny. It is a book that I recommend to anyone that interested in where human evolution is going. However, I regret your use of the term "hyperspace" because it tends to confuse the issue.

Second, you give no sign of it, but as you report it, McKenna has perfectly, perfectly described comets and the orbits they make as the abodes for some ETs.

Since, evidently, you have access to his book with the UFO material, I would be greatly interested if he ever mentioned comets and the book's ISBN number and original publishing date.

I have a 42k unpublished MS in my files that I worked on for several years back in the 1980s trying to show that comets were "cometships" as I called them. I may dust it off....

reply to post by Aliensun


Yeah, I was only given 2 shots at a title before the ATS edit bot prevented me from making one last change. The original title was Terence McKenna - Visions of the Future [Star Flight of Fascism?] - but I think most people only click on threads with the word UFO in them - on this forum. I'd prefer a different name myself - but I cannot change it now.

I will have to find out more information from his book True Hallucinations about comets. There was one particular story about one that had a lot of synchronicity with a certain date and his TimeWave theory. As for the idea of space craft making specific orbits around the solar system - this was the first time I had heard this idea articulated and I find it rather interesting. The videos shown in the YouTube video - as far as I can tell - are not comets, and were just added as a more interesting visual aid than a random motionless picture. Most YouTube audio clips are shared with no video added - just to share the audio excerpt or whatever else. I decided to add atleast a few different things to look at. I am not sure which specific thing McKenna said about comets that piqued your interest.

But the publishing information for True Hallucinations is:

# Paperback: 256 pages
# Publisher: HarperOne (April 22, 1994)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0062506528
# ISBN-13: 978-0062506528

This is the more easily readable book that details his UFO encounter and developing ideas on time and reality etc. His other book, The Invisible Landscape, is a lot more complex and difficult to read - but the publishing info for that is:

The Invisible landscape : mind, hallucinogens, and the I ching / Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna.—1st HarperCollins ed.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-06-250635-8 (acid-free paper)
1. I ching. 2. Mind and body. 3. Shamanism. I. Oeric, O. N. II. Title.
BF161.M47 1994

I will post the part of his book that talks about comets here.

These are excerpts from True Hallucinations - Chapter 16: Return

Until the I Ching timewave was quantified with more data, its way of integrating seemingly meaningless and unrelated factors made it very easy to become psychologically entangled within. It seemed to operate like a kind of bottomless inkblot test; one could see whatever one wished to see in it. Even though my twenty-fifth birthday came and went with very little shift toward the novel, either in my own life or in the world, I continued to propagate the cycles of the chart forward into the future. I felt that the idea of a hidden structure of time was correct but that this could not be argued for until the correct alignment between that structure and human history had been found and confirmed. I began looking for a date with special features related to the wave, a date that would be a good candidate for the emergence of a special event.

Here is a part of my story that I found most puzzling: After the seeming disconfirmation of the cycles by my birthday, I looked at other future dates on which the three-hundred-and-eighty-four day cycles would end if I continued to assume that the sixteenth of November, 1971, was the end of one such cycle. That meant that the next ending date of the three hundred and eighty-four day cycle would be the fourth of December, 1972. I consulted several astronomical tables, but the date seemed unpromising. The closing date of the next three hundred and eighty-four cycle was immediately more interesting, as it fell on the twenty-second day of December, 1973.

I noticed this was the winter solstice. Here was a clue. The winter solstice is traditionally the time of the rebirth of the savior messiah. It is a time of pause when there is a shifting of the cosmic machinery. It is also the time of the transition of the sun from Sagittarius to Capricorn.

I consulted my star maps and added another coincidence: where the ecliptic crosses the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn, at 23 degrees Sagittarius, is the very spot to within one or two degrees
where the galactic center is presently located. Over twenty-six thousand years the galactic center, like all points on the ecliptic, slowly moves through the signs, but now it was on the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn on the winter solstice day.

This seemed an unusual number of coincidences and so I pressed my search. Consultation with the almanac of the Naval Observatory brought a real surprise. On the very day that I was researching, December 22, 1973, a total, annular eclipse of the sun would occur and the path of totality would sweep directly across La Chorrera and the Amazon Basin.[edit: Place of UFO contact experience] I was dumbfounded. I felt like a person in a novel; this string of clues was actually real! I researched the eclipse to determine exactly where it would achieve totality. This would occur, I learned, almost directly over the city of Belem in Brazil, in the delta of the Amazon River. The vertiginous elf chatter of hyperspace rose squealing in my ears. Was it mocking me or egging me on?

...

"Finally, in the early spring of 1973, an event occurred that offered perfect proof that something larger than my unconscious, seemingly larger even than the total collective consciousness of the human race, was at work. This was the discovery of the comet Ko-hotek, heralded as the largest comet in human history, dwarfing even Halley's Comet.

"Brightest Comet Ever Headed Toward Earth" was the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. As I scanned the article, I actually let out a yell of amazement. The comet would make its nearest approach to the sun on the twenty-third of December! A non-periodic comet, unknown to anyone on earth until March of 1973, was hurtling toward a rendezvous with the sun within a hundred hours of the solstice and the eclipse over the Amazon. It was a large coincidence, if we define a coincidence as an improbability that deeply impresses its observer. This coincidence is not diminished by the fact that Kohotek never really lived up to expectations, for the expectations alone became a wave of millenarianism and apocalyptic restlessness among the fringes of the population that would die only as the comet returned to the darkness out of which it emerged. Did anything happen in Belem on the day of the eclipse? I do not know; I was not there. I was by then a prisoner of mundane obligation. But I do know that the compression of events that occurred around that date, and the way in which the charts predicted this, were uncanny.

Only with the development of personal computers was I able to understand the way that the timewave describes the ebb and flow of novelty in time over many different spans of time: some last scant minutes, others endure for centuries. Now anyone who becomes operationally familiar with the theory can join me in this intellectual adventure and see for themselves the immense challenge involved in predicting a concrescence. I have not been content to merely understand the theory: I have continued efforts to apply it specifically to predicting the course of future events. If over years of study one becomes convinced that the wave does
show the future course of novelty, then the ordinary anticipation of the future is gradually replaced with an almost Zen-like appreciation and understanding of the complete pattern.

reply to post by Aliensun


I had forgotten about this synchronicity with the comet and Winter solstice, in the context of UFOs - and I am very interested in the work you did regarding comets and cometships. I think you are onto something very intriguing, to say the least. I encourage you to find that disk and make the text available online at some point in the near future.

childhoods end is about religion and a screw up long ago.

not anything else.

reply to post by fooks


Have you made it to 20 posts yet?

Perhaps we need to all read or re-read Childhood's End. If I were Spielberg I would be making this into a movie right about now.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke was on the inside track regarding the UFO phenomenon and covert ops. At least there seems to be a lot of circumstantial evidence to show that he was "in the know" and revealed certain details in his books of fiction. The meme propagated within Childhood's End is also a very profound metaphor for our times.

At any rate - the title is misleading. This thread is about Terence McKenna and his ideas about UFOs.

reply to post by Aliensun


Sounds like a great book, I'm going to read it!

I've read all of terrence mckennas books !

Im a great fan of his works

something which happened to me recently which kind of freaked me out a bit , I've been astral travelling if you can call it that for a while and Ive never had a bad experience .

However when "astral travelling" with my friends I had an experience which really did strike me as unusual , never before has this happened to me

we were sitting talking , then decided to watch tv , then for some reason I was talking to them telepathically through the tv , as each character on the tv was one of us , then we were all watching the program and it started to explain the origin of our species ,, and that we were created by an alien race , it also went on to tell us that an alien race would come to earth to enslave us , and that lots of people would suffer , however lots of us would survive underground , furthermore another alien race would come to free us from the invading alien race.

needless to say , i was freaked out big time

Terrence McKenna was definitely well, a shaman. I wish this forum had more discussions of interesting ideas like his, or Jacques Valles' ideas, instead of blurry YouTube videos. To my mind, we are not going to learn anything about the nature of reality from Believer-ology.

One of McKenna's most challenging ideas was that Psilocybin, the magic mushroom itself, was the extraterrestrial, intradimensional being. Or its manifestation in our reality. That by taking it, you could communicate with - something else.

He was hardly alone in this, you can go down the line of spiritually attuned people who used psychedelics not carelessly, but in a careful, shamanistic manner, mimicking ancient spirit quests, preparing beforehand and after for the encounter. And of course, this communion with the Other was central to almost all pre-technological, pre-monotheistic human cultures.

You could say that by embracing technology exclusively and limiting our intellects to a strictly materialist, scientific point of view, we cut ourselves off from our spiritual roots. Then, sensing this gap, we fill the skies with our aching, our spiritual longing - but since we are lost in a technological dream, we imagine the Spirit World as nothing more than mechanical machines, built by beings like us, for purposes of genetic research or bizarre bureaucratic "Galactic Federations" - then we are surprised there is no physical scientific proof of them and all Exopolitical efforts fail completely, and blame debunkers and vast conspiracies. But only a cursory examination of the phenomena of UFOs, as Jung and Valles gave, suggests strongly it's a psycho-social construct.

Childhood's End is a good novel but Arthur C. Clarke was deeply committed to the mechanical, scientific worldview. Philip K. Dick in books like VALIS seemed to me much more in tune with the almost unknowable larger reality that exists everywhere around us but beyond our limited human perception.

reply to post by Nicorette




Very good points. And yes - it seems obvious to me that one of the largest problems facing our Industrial civilization is our disconnection from the natural world. The Native Americans were the first to realize that there was a very large problem brewing when all of their land was "bought" and the buffalo were almost brought to extinction. Many of the most wise Chiefs tried to convey the message of being in harmony with nature to the white man over a hundred years ago.

It was really only after the revolutionary turbulence and discoveries of the 1960s that really brought the message home to our civilization that A: The Gaian Hypothesis of the Earth is true; and B: There are higher states of consciousness that bring individuals into a direct experience of Gaia or Earth and a profound understanding of reality. Central to this revolution of the 60s was the widespread use of '___' - which turned out to be very similar to such indigenous sacraments worldwide as the psilocybin mushrooms of Mexico and the peyote of America and the ayahuasca ceremonies of the Amazon etc. etc. Many very important scientific discoveries were made under the influence of '___' and other psychedelic compounds. For example, Francis Crick had his epiphany moment on the structure of DNA while on '___'. Steve Jobs and many of the Silicon Valley computer geniuses came up with their brilliant insights while in a higher state of consciousness brought on by these "drugs".

And eventually Terence McKenna discovered many important insights into such species as the psilocybin mushrooms that show that these fungi in particular are very meaningful to the development of humanity and the entire planet.

Not only has McKenna laid out a solid scientific hypothesis on the central role of psilocybin mushrooms on the evolution of consciousness and language in early man in Africa, but he has also shown that the chemical structure of this particular "magic mushroom" is absolutely unique in all of nature on Earth. Also, at high doses of this fungi a human being can have such an intense experience and be shown vast worlds and high technologies in their own mind with a speaking voice that can be asked questions.

Here are some excerpts from Terence McKenna's 1993 lecture "UFO: The Inside Outsider":

...

"Not all psychedelics are alike. And this very small family of compounds called the tryptamine hallucinogens bear careful examination if we're seriously interested in this question of extraterrestrial penetration of the human world. On two grounds immediately the mushroom bears looking at.

First argument - entirely a physical argument. Psilocybin is O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. What this means is that there is a phosphorous group substituted at the 4 position of the molecule. Now here's the headline folks: This is the ONLY 4-phosphorylated indole on this planet! On this planet. Now, if you were searching for extraterrestrial thumbprints on the biology of Earth, you would look for molecules that are unique - that don't have near relatives spread through other lifeforms. In psilocybin we have a perfect example of this. It is the only 4-phosphorylated indole known to occur in nature! Nature doesn't work like that folks, nature builds, always, on what has previously been accomplished. So this is a red flag saying at the molecular level this thing looks like an alien artifact - at the molecular level.

Now let's cut to the chase. What happens when you take 30 milligrams of this stuff? I don't know how sophisticated this audience is. People who have never taken hallucinogenic drugs but have some mild interest in it, or just in the course of generally educating yourself about reality - I think people who have never taken psychedelics think that it's sort of like dreaming while you're awake or geometric patterns. Colors - they always say "The colors, the colors!" - malarkey, the colors, forget the colors. It is not like that. Psychedelic experiences, at effective doses - not piddling doses, effective doses - are visionary scenarios. They are three-dimensional unfoldments of information that is extraordinarily complex, architectonically connected and ordered. That's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what is unique to psilocybin. What is unique to psilocybin is that overlaid what I just described is, big surprise: a voice. A voice. Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff. Gordon Wasson, Richard Schultes, Albert Hoffmann - the giants know that this stuff is animate. This is not a drug. It's something that is disguising itself as a drug in order not to spread alarm. There is a voice which speaks to you in the language of your homeland - whether that be Mazatecan or English - and the voice surprises you. In other words, you cannot anticipate it.

Now of course at this point, although I don't imagine many of them have forced their way in here, the psychological school will come forward and say "Well it's a voice, typical of mental aberration. Symptom 1 of schizophrenia, a voice". Yes, yes - we are not naive, we went to the same schools you did, thank you! However, the fact that this voice is accessible to non-pathological personalities, and on demand, is highly suggestive I think. This experience is available to anyone. The thing I love about psychedelics is: no guru, no method, no teacher. You don't need any of that crap. This will work. If it doesn't work the first time, you didn't take enough. This will work. It will work on YOU Mr. MIT engineer with your diagrams of your anti-matter propulsion systems. It will work on anybody. I started out from that place.

...

Look at stropharia cubensis - the psychedelic mushroom. Spores are the most electron dense organic material known. The electron density of the outer case of a spore approaches that of a metal. A single mushroom in the sporulation phase can shed up to three million spores a minute for up to six weeks. I maintain, following Bracewell, that a strategy for extraterrestrial contact carried on by a super technology would take the following form. Build a probe. Give the probe the ability to replicate itself. Start these probes out from your home planet and, say at every half Au [Astronomical unit] or something, the probe replicates so that the volume of probes stays constant as the volume of space increases. If you're carrying out an exhaustive search of the galaxy for life, it's very hard to imagine a civilization that could visit every star and monitor every star over long periods of time. A much more efficient strategy would be the "phone home" strategy. You send essentially a credit card which says "If you get this message call the enclosed toll free number and immediately report your location. We will come at that point". That's I think what's going on. Human history is the effort to phone home.



It cannot be without significance that the Mayan civilization which used these mushrooms became obsessed with 2012 A.D. I, who am absolutely phobic of obsessions in all form, am myself obsessed with December 21st 2012 A.D. That's the bottom line of the bar code. My notion of what's going on in the informational phase space of contemporary existence is that... - we are under the influence of a kind of attractor. This is this thing I mentioned which seized hold of us as a higher animal and steered us toward language, ritual, religion, the calculus, so forth and so on. This attractor is literally sucking the world of three-dimensional space and time into itself. This is what history is. History is biological time turning into some other kind of time. History is speeding up as we approach the omega point.

I think that this thread deserves more careful attention.

Therefore, I am going to give it a good bump.

BUMP!

nothing about the self transforming elf machinery?

www.disclose.tv...'___'_vs_M_Theory__Strange_Connections/

Originally posted by Aliensun
First, you use of the term "Childhood's End," the title of the best of Arthur C. Clarke. That book is a fictional compression of our destiny. It is a book that I recommend to anyone that interested in where human evolution is going.

Yeah thought of the book straight away too. I've not read it, but found out about it a week or so back and should be getting it shortly, sounds like an awesome story. (and is also said to be one of his best books.)

Am also interested in the thread too though, seems like McKenna was a decent guy and knew quite a bit.

And Nicorette, that was a great post.

Originally posted by Aliensun
reply to post by corsair00

 

I have a 42k unpublished MS in my files that I worked on for several years back in the 1980s trying to show that comets were "cometships" as I called them. I may dust it off....

edit on 6-1-2011 by Aliensun because: (no reason given)

If you happen to read this thread, then I´d be very interested about this kind of research.

And this thread is very interesting. Thanks for that