The planetary Other

plant technology

Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin.

Terence McKenna, Plan / plant / planet

What you repeatedly do

almost taiwan

Doing a big clean ahead of house guests arriving, listening to two old Mark Pesce talks on the same topic, around the same time [Fall 2002, see links at the end]. He mentions Wolfram's A New Kind of Science [whole book online here] and gives the executive summary as there are no formulas for some processes, but rather only processes that need to be followed from start to end, giving the example of a rose.

The same thing is the basis of wisdom vs. knowledge. Knowledge, as facts, can be downloaded / learned at high speed. For many things it's possible to jump over the process directly to the outcome, which enables people with almost no technological know-how, like myself, to function in a society surrounded by engineering marvels that are essentially black magic boxes. As a user, the process is unimportant and more or less invisible.

So back to Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit."

The first talk, Memes to an End, is slightly more scholarly, while the second, Bios and Logos, is the same material through a psychedelic lens, and several references to Terence McKenna, with my angle reminding me of this idea from somewhere in his work: most people take 40 years or so to see through the shit, if they ever do, that is culture, and now more people are living longer than ever. I don't really believe the supposed implications of this, as I think the mediated reality is so pervasive and deep that the cognitive dissonance of a mass awakening in middle age would be a break down of society, one that may well be happening, but expressed as alienation and substance / behavioral abuse rather than real recognition and communion. At 40 yrs old there's too much skin in the game to throw it all up for something authentic and better. Absurd, until you look around at what people do day after day after day.

The Pesce talks:
Memes to an End, via Future Hi
Bios and Logos from 2002 [text form here]

Slightly related post, on health:
The process not the outcome

cone shell via wikidepia

No small amount of practice

Mishima and bodybuilding

The reviews of the Murakami book were mixed, but I enjoyed it, and am not a runner. I liked it for the same reasons that I keep going back to Mishima's Sun & Steel - the idea of coupling mental and physical discipline to reach a state of purity and blankness. This idea is with me a lot.

I have this new life wherein I get to set my own hours and do what I want, so long as the amount of work that I choose to accept gets done. I know that many people need to commute and work in offices, or - closer to home - stand up in front of classes of demanding students and perform. I need to be careful that I don't lose this life, which means I need to wake up and reflect on my luck as I make coffee in the morning, because it would be easy enough to lose this, either by performing badly and losing clients, or some greater misbehavior that would jeopardize my permanent visa, with the probability balanced fairly evenly between the two, propped up on either side by whatever discipline I can cultivate and then maintain.

My natural discipline is not so good, but I form habits very easily, and try and focus on good ones rather than bad ones. The last 10 days or so have been a refreshing proof of concept. I wake up early and start work by 07:30, and work until I lose concentration in the early afternoon.

The modafinil was both efficient and effective, with no obvious changes in perception or physical reaction, just clarity and focus. I want to use it to train myself into better habits. The interesting thing will be to see if I can use chemical scaffolding to build something new, and then have it as a free-standing structure, rather than rely on the drug. The values of psychedelics can be internalized and integrated with no small amount of practice, but is this true for other substances?

And on that note, here's two clips of Terence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin walking and talking together:

1/2

2/2

Related links:
My most popular post: Mishima's head on a plate [with picture]
All posts tagged Mishima
An interesting site that has other people's daily routines

The most hopeful thing

So why hope? Isn't it just a runaway train, out of control? I don't think so. I think the out-of-controlness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place.

Terence Mckenna, in the clip above

chemical brothers + bernard sumner: out of control

Human Evolution and the Environment

An interesting talk by Paul Ehrlich at the Long Now Foundation called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

The first four steps on our path to dominance:
1) Living up in the trees [binocular vision, judging distance, grasping hands]
2) Down from the trees
3) Up on two legs
4) Language with syntax

A considerable gap, then the next four, which are rather obvious, but added for completeness:
5) Agriculture
6) Writing
7) Printing
8) The Industrial Revolution


Related. An overview of Merlin W. Donald's theory of How our mind, brain and culture evolved. Many of the actual papers, which I've yet to dig through, in pdf form here.

"The story you tell yourself is largely the story you're living"

Terence Mckenna in his farewell speech to the community, Posthumous Glory, via Lorenzo

Feed me to plants when I die

Dran via Who killed Bambi?

Sitting by my tiny garden this afternoon, in only a sarong and sweating heavily, proofreading, looking at the plants and trying to work out what's going on under the soil, the network of roots and how they interact, the chemical messages sent out among them, the accumulation of dumb facts that leads to the sudden emergence of something approaching intelligence, which is all I'm working with at this end. There's the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, which does what you'd expect, but whatever their findings it wouldn't affect my admiration one way or the other. Plants don't do what we do, but we don't do what they do. Two different means to the same end, and they're doing well.

Which leads me to this link:

Researchers Resurrect Extinct Judean Date Palm Tree from 2,000-Year-Old Seed

I don't believe the following for a moment, but I like to flirt with ideas:

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

Terence McKenna

Body chemistry

John C. Lilly

I'm big on body chemistry. I used to get in bad moods easily, and they could mostly be traced to eating too much bread. Since I moved onto a low carb diet I've had zero mood swings, but yesterday I ate a loaf for lunch and by 4pm I was feeling bad. It was a good test of the system.

I still drink too much coffee, it's my one true addiction. I used to run it in cycles, upping my consumption until I got the shakes and then cutting it out for a week or so, moving back to tea. Lately that system's been abandoned, but I cut down by moving from a pot to twin Vietnamese drippers, a fast and slow one, and let my obsession with details run wild with new combinations of beans. Around the corner is a coffee wholesaler, and when I die I'll be riddled with caffeine.

My coffee use echoes that of John C. Lilly and ketamine, although in truth I show more moderation. He'd stay up for three weeks injecting more as the last dose wore off, and even shot up while conducting classes (albeit at Esalen).

Lilly with the Janus equipment, getting ready to communicate with dolphins

It's my birthday soon, and I got some books as gifts. One of them was The Scientist by John C. Lilly, the other was On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, and I'll be surprised and rather disappointed if the latter doesn't turn out to be more of a trip. I read about what I'm eating, drinking, and it's another way to become closer to things.

The many different ways of seeing an apple: culinary, nutritional, botanical, economic, chemical, aesthetic, metaphorical, and so on. The idea being to extrapolate as much meaning as possible from what's already present, to see things much more as they really are. But it'd be hard to do this without giving in to madness for a while, and then no way to talk about such things without boring the hell out of others and giving the game away.

The only [formerly] legitimate guy with comparable psychedelic experience to Lilly was probably Timothy Leary. Shuglin and others are names to conjure with in the first rank of the community, but Lilly and Leary are the two who are best known for taking too much, too often.

I read the two recent biographies of Leary, caricatured as the pro and the con versions of his story. In neither does he come out very well, more like a Hugh Hefner wannabe who hooked up with drugs rather than porn, but for much the same ends. If you look at them, they're like brothers, always the same big smile on their faces, and probably with good reason, but their aims and ends are not what it was supposed to be.

But then here I am, setting limits like a puritan. Still, a smile can be faked. It was Marshall McLuhan who told Leary to smile beatifically at cameras in order to sell his message more convincingly. But I don't like his smile, it annoys me like a commercial. It's the smile that I do when I have to.

That said, I came across Leary's 1964 Cooper Union address the other day and it holds up very well. Part of the background is that he's just come back from Mexico after an early experiment in psychedelic communal living. He's already way gone into the 60s lifestyle, but the rest of the world doesn't know a thing about what's looming. He can still be welcomed as a public speaker to a group of students. In this talk he's lucid, charming and doesn't oversell the stuff, while also kicking off the whole scene. A rewarding hour from another time and place.


Now Lilly is a very different character. While Leary went off and set out to become an international playboy, Lilly shut himself away in an isolation tank and tripped hard, and I feel quite an affinity for the guy, for his need to get further away from people and further into something else. Will be dipping in and out of the autobiography over the next week or so, and posting things as necessary. I doubt there will be as many anecdotes as with Leary. Floating alone, in lukewarm water, in the dark, doesn't really lend itself to narrative. But so what? Life isn't a work of fiction.

A methodology for studying alternate reality

A Methodology for Studying Various Interpretations of the DMT-Induced Alternate Reality

An interesting study proposal from May 2006, but haven't been able to find any follow up. Excerpt follows:

This section discusses three interpretations of the DMT-induced alternate reality. These interpretations run the gamut from DMT being a psychoactive molecule that provides a complete hallucination (i.e. a full sensory hallucination) to DMT acting as a gateway to a co-existing alien reality. First, the DMT experience can be interpreted as a hallucination where the human subject synthesizes the elaborate experience each time DMT is administered (i.e. an inconsistent subjective reality). In this sense, the DMT-induced reality is not persistent in that the alternate reality cannot exist without the momentary perception of the DMT inebriant. Furthermore, it is inconsistent in that repeated doses of DMT do not have correlated responses within the individual human subject (e.g. recurrent experiential themes). In this case, the DMT induced perception would be akin to the states perceived while on other psychoactives such as LSD and psilocybin. However, unlike LSD and psilocybin, the subject is experiencing a complete hallucination (i.e. a purely synthetic world) and not simply a distortion of their perceptual mechanisms (e.g. ‘melting walls’ and visual trails).

Second, the alternate reality could be a consistent subjective hallucination in that the DMT experience is persistent only to the individual human subject. This means that the subject may return to the DMT-induced alternate reality and perceive recurrent themes (e.g. same beings, similar conversations), but that perception is privy only to the isolated individual and does not occur across all subjects. This interpretation could imply that there exists some subconscious mechanisms facilitating the persistent personal experience. Whether that mechanism is solely biological (e.g. stimulating particular fundamental, or low-level, areas of the brain associated with the representation of humanoid beings) or psychological (e.g. stimulating high-level cortical regions associated with one’s life experiences) are two potential sub-hypothesis of the falsification of the consistent subjective reality as being a co-existing objective alien reality.

Finally, the DMT-induced alternate reality may be an objective reality that is persistent irrespective of the perceiving individual and therefore is the same reality being experienced by all DMT inebriants (i.e. a co-existing world, a true alternate reality). Though being the most extraordinary interpretation, as will be shown, this interpretation may be the easiest to validate.

The test for the second option is two give the entities a math problem, come out of the trip, and return and get the answer. The test for the third is to go in, give the problem, come out, and then send someone else back in to get the answer. Failure seems assured.

Skeptic / experienced psychonaut James L. Kent comments:

The fact remains that DMT entities do exist, but it is my belief that they represent subjective personifications of alien archetypes within our own minds. We all have the elf/alien archetype embedded within our structure; and we utilize subconscious processes which are so autonomous and foreign to our "executive" consciousness that we cannot even identify them as "self" when we see them. Imagine, for instance, if the neural network responsible for making "snap decisions" -- a little pocket in the medial pre-frontal cortex -- suddenly took visual form due to hyperactive excitation of your visual cortex. Instead of receiving feedback counseling via internal voice or "gut feeling", that voice would suddenly have a body and a face and a costume, and perhaps a fully choreographed dance routine to go along with whatever it was telling you.

Now part of me is a sucker for the sci-fi thrills of another dimension inhabited with intelligent beings existing in the same space as our own, and I certainly think that research on inner space should be undertaken with all the seriousness of research to outer space, but with regard to the search for intelligent life...we have it all around us. Working with cetaceans - in the vein of John Lilley - should be a priority, but also hacking into other life forms, ways of being.

So, being conservative, skeptical and generally in awe of the brain and what how little we know of what it does, I'm inclined to follow Kent, above. I think consciousness is an aggregate of many processes - a society of mind, and from here to DMT elves is not such a leap. Without much reflection I'll pull in Julian Jaynes and his theory about the bicameral mind. Basically this is that long ago humans were not subjectively conscious, and heard voices in their heads giving them orders which they took to be gods, but which in fact came from the subject's own head...it's late, it's complicated, you can find more online if you want to. From what I've read I'm not convinced, although I am certain - as a naive and easily swayed layman working only with the raw material of my own experience - that consciousness is environmentally constructed, and so vastly different societies would produce vastly different minds. But keeping with Jaynes, the bicameral mind, and gods inside the head - does DMT cause a mental split, and does this produce the entitiess? We're hard-wired to find faces in clouds, why not to voices in our head? No homunculi are needed, just whispers and shadows. But at some point I'll have to write some posts about salvia.

Further comment on the study, more sympathetic to the idea of autonomous entities, can be found on another new blog, one rather more devoted to this topic than mine: psychopraxis.blogspot.com

Misguided enthusiasm

I have a lot of experience with misguided emotions, but I'm getting better at channeling my energies and hope the most I can be accused of these days is misguided enthusiasm. I had 18 months, two years, when I was all about cacti and drove my wife crazy with trips to plant markets each weekend and hours spent mooning over the them. But now I've made my peace with cacti, and they're no longer an obsession.

Rode out to the country listening to a Terence McKenna talk from 1995, The State of the Stone. Some good things, but I find his attitude to science annoying, or I would if he wasn't such a good speaker. To be generous, what I take from him is a conscious interplay between fiction and nonfiction, a sci-fi thrill that extrapolates and bends to amaze. There's also no direct references to 2012, which is a plus, as I find that talk tiresome.

John Horgan's Rational Mysticism has a good chapter on McKenna, entitled The Man in the Purple Sparkly Suit, which acknowledges that he's less a philosopher, and far less a scientist, but rather a performance artist, jester and poet. Horgan falls for his charm gets what I think is the essential point of his riffs - that life is weirder and more wonderful than we suppose, that humanity is something interesting, important and good. Which may not be true, but that's no reason not to entertain such lines of thought for the feelings and internal images they inspire, the connections that they set up or uncover.

McKenna presented all of this with a michievous grin, daring us to take him seriously.

p182