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.
edit on 8-1-2011 by corsair00 because: (no reason given)