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- From: chrisv@wink.io.org (Chris V.)
- Newsgroups: alt.drugs
- Subject: The DMT Experience - Terence McKenna
- Date: 12 Jan 1995 22:31:08 GMT
- Message-ID: <3f4ajd$f4g@ionews.io.org>
-
- -Terence McKenna
- "Food Of The Gods"
- pp. 257-260
-
- THE DMT EXPERIENCE
- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
- What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own
- spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting
- tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society
- before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about
- it?
- What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the
- world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have
- escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The
- experience that engulfs one's entire being as one slips beneath the
- surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The
- mind and the self literally unfold before one's eyes. There is a sense
- that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had
- just been recast in the furnace of one's birth. Breathing is normal,
- heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world?
- What of incoming sensory data?
- Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth,
- a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood
- the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a
- reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense
- of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more
- wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this
- experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that
- seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness
- between the stars, is the Aeon.
- The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play
- with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there--the tykes,
- the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children
- destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering
- into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively
- call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of
- ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves
- lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a
- tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here
- is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. here is the
- mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors
- lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the
- gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as
- colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and
- such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional
- connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real
- and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small
- world we have gone so ill in.
- This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from
- lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing
- through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of
- our irrational illusions. What we experience in the presence of DMT is
- real news. It is a nearby dimension-- frightening, transformative, and
- beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way.
- We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore
- and to report on what they find.
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