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Shamanic Approaches to the UFO

Transcript

Terence McKenna


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Transcription of: [Shamanic Approaches to the UFO]

Host: Terence is an expert in Amazonian shamanism, a philosopher, and an explorer of altered states - the sort of thing we all do when home in the evening - but I think he does it rather better than most, Terence Mckenna. Please welcome Terence...

Terence: Well I'm aware of how late in the day it is and I know some of you must be double-parked so I'll make this is as succinct as possible. This morning's discussion caused me to wonder how much we would understand about electricity if our method of studying it was to stand on the tops of high hills and wait to be struck by lightning. It seems to me that's sort of the position that we're in visavee the UFOs.

We have no real theory. We have conjectures, we have fiercely-defended hypotheses, but we have very little that is concrete to go on. It's almost as though the issue of the UFO were an onion, and as we peel the layers of the onion we discover when we get to the center that there is nothing there whatsoever left. It reminds me that if you cross an onion with a UFO what you get is a flying saucer that brings tears to your eyes.

What I would like to do is - just based on the notes I took today - to review what the options available to us are in terms of trying to get some kind of intellectual handle on this phenomenon and I'll move through them rather quickly. One possibility that I suppose is now out of fashion because it wasn't mentioned here today, other than what Jacques said about ball lightning and plasmas, is that the UFOs are somehow natural phenomena - perhaps piezoelectric forces that have an ability to interact with the delicate electrochemical machinery of the human nervous system to create an impression of hallucination, or visitation, or abduction. That's one possibility.

The more serious contenders, as explanations, I think fall into three categories: (i) is it "us", (ii) are we being visited, or (iii) is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of? My own feeling about this tends to vacillate. I have had contact experiences, I have seen a UFO very close, I have met with entities from other dimensions, and it has not impelled me to take a strong position. I've paid very close attention when these experiences were happening to me, and there always seemed to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive.

Though Jacques didn't mention it today, I recall in his book, The Invisible College, he stressed the absurdity that seems to attend the contact experience. That if the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron. In other words, the invalidation of the experience is a an inimical apart of its structure, almost as though the entities were saying, "well you may tell this story if you wish, but if you tell it truthfully you'll be taken for a fool." Well there's nothing wrong with being taken for a fool except that it does seal the phenomenon rather nicely away from the very sober ladies and gentlemen who are making their careers in some branch of science. They are not interested in investigating the kinky, the anecdotal, the possibly pathological.

In preparation for this conference I re-read Carl Jung's book published in 1954 called Flying Saucers: a modern myth of things seen in the skies, and to my mind, no one has really gone beyond Jung. He understood very clearly that saying that something is a denizen of the psychic realm no way precludes its also having efficacious force in the physical realm, through the phenomenon which he called synchronicity. Some of the points which Jacques made today about the nature of the medical examinations that are reported. They are absurd. They are unnecessary to be performed at our level of technology, let alone any future more advanced level that we might be asked to believe in.

So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what is it, and what is it for? I've given a good deal of thought to this question over the years because I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem, like many subtle problems, is haunted by our own naivete concerning language. If I were to randomly choose - and don't worry I shan't - five of you to come up here and each one of you would have 40 seconds to explain to the rest of us what an atom is, it would be preposterous. None of us know - I doubt there's a person in this room who can give an account of the atom that tallies with the "Orthodox" description of the atom.

So there is a curious fuzziness about the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them in the clear light of consciousness. How much more ambiguity there is then, naturally, attendant upon the examination of any kind of phenomenon - phenomena which are rare, or tend to be fringy. So it isn't a matter of achieving consensus over the UFO. We can't even achieve consensus about what constitutes a decent souffle. So this passionate desire to drag us all under the umbrella of a single explanation is, I think, missing the point.

To my mind, if the UFO phenomena is something arising out of the super-ego of the human psychic organization then we should ask "why"? What is it doing? and... I don't want to sound like a public relations agent for Jacques Vallee but to my mind, with the exception of Jung, Jacques is the only commentator on the phenomenon who has really pushed the frontier back. To my mind, in The Invisible College, when Vallee says in looking at the effect, not asking the question "what is it", but "what does it do", you very quickly see what the flying saucers are doing. What they are doing is eroding faith in science. They are an antidote to the scientific paradigm that evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe.

So the notion being developed here is, that within the structure of the human psyche, there is something like a governor, something like a monitoring circuit, which when a society begins to evolve in a pathological or lethal direction, phenomena can be induced, not by the egos of men and women, not by their institutions, but by the Overmind - collectivity of the human species. Phenomena can be induced which are so corrosive to the ideologies currently in place that their underpinnings are cut away, their validity is called into question, and their programs for social development and control are invalidated and destroyed.

A perfect example of this is the rise of infant Christianity. If you'll cast your mind back to the situation in the early years of the Christian era and imagine the mentality of a Roman aristocrat, a person of power in Roman society. Their physics is drawn from democritean atomism, in other words they are thoroughgoing materialists. Their social theory is drawn from Epictetus and Plato. They are in fact extremely modern people by our own standards. However, among the gardeners and kitchen help and stable boys, there is news of a momentous event in the Middle East - a Jewish rabbi has triumphed over death and risen after three days in the tomb. Should the master of the Roman household have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk among the help, he would have just dismissed it with a sneer: "What preposterous idea!" And it is a preposterous idea. Nevertheless, the fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts, and within a 120 years after the annunciation of the birth of Christianity, its missionaries were beating on the gates of Rome attempting to convert the Emperor.

I see a similar situation in the modern context. That rationalism - scientific technology which began and came out of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the quite-legitimate wish to glorify God through an appreciation of his natural world - turned into a kind of demonic pact. A kind of descent into the underworld and [Nakia] if you will, leading to the present cultural and political impasse that involves massive stockpiles of atomic weapons, huge propagandized populations cut off from any knowledge of their real histories, male-dominated organizations plying their message of lethal destruction and inevitable historical advance. Into this situation comes suddenly an anomaly, something which cannot be explained. I believe that that is the purpose of the UFO. To inject uncertainty into the male-dominated paternalistic rational solar myth under which we are suffering.

I suppose if you had to categorize this point of view you, would say I'm taking a depth psychological psychoanalytic point of view. What I'm saying is that the UFO is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history saying to science and paternalistically-governed and driven organizations, "You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is: nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children." That's what science is good for. It is not some meta theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.

There is another possibility which can be dovetailed into the first. It is not so much the Oversoul or the super-ego of the human species which is responsible for stopping scientific masculine paternalism in its tracks, but rather that, unbeknownst to self-absorbed and myopic human beings, we have always shared, or at least for a very long period of time, have shared this planet with an other. Another intelligent species. Another entity which may have been perfectly content to allow us to abide in our ignorance of its presence until the point where it came to its awareness that our style was toxifying, ruining, raping, and perverting the planet. And at that point, this thing springs into action with similar end results as the previous scenario - the invocation of the super-ego.

It's astonishing to me that in the 45 years that the UFO are-we-being-visited question has been kicked around, I have never seen, in any UFO book or publication, the suggestion made that if we believe we are being visited by organic intelligent life-forms from some other dimension or place in the galaxy, then we should very very thoroughly examine the ecology of this planet for traces of its presence. What assurance do we have that the several million life forms that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here? Do we have any assurance? There are ways to gain that assurance by doing a comparative DNA sequencing and the sort of thing. Some of you may know my own position, or one of my positions, which is that plants and fungi containing psychoactive compounds are extremely viable candidates for extraterrestrial intruders into the environment of this planet.

This is not to put down Whitley's story, which is a very interesting story, but had he prefaced his story with the comment that before it all happened he took five grams of mushrooms, I doubt he could have sold it to his mother. Because in the world where mushrooms and other psychedelic plants are imbibed, such stories are commonplace. It's no big deal. So I'm always amused by UFO investigators and compilers of data who will tell you, "well the first thing we did is we got rid of all the stories told by anybody who is intoxicated on anything". It seems to me that move has probably absolutely precluded any possibility of understanding what is going on.

You see, culture is something that we wear like clothes. We're very much at ease with culture. Our mind is very much at ease with culture and we gather the language of a given culture around us. Culture is the mind unperturbed. When a shaman or an ecstatic visionary goes into the wilderness, and through ordeal, or yogic practice, or breath control, or the taking of a psychoactive substance, perturbs the mind, then we see what the mind is out, naked, undressed from the clothing of language and convention. That's why I've made this point over and over again: There can not - there will not be a serious discussion of the origin of UFOs, or for that matter, of the nature of consciousness itself, until we leave the utterly culture-bound provincial and hick-like attitude that science has hoisted on us about perturbing the mind. Without the use of psychedelic substances, I think solving the UFO dilemma is going to be as thankless a task as attempting to understand the nature of the universe without availing yourself of the use of a telescope. It is simply tying our hands behind our backs.

Now, there is a third possibility, which is the one that is the more commonly entertained notion, which is simply that we are being observed by intelligent life-forms that evolve somewhere else in the galaxy, they have quarantined our planet to keep us from being agitated by their presence, and they will eventually reveal themselves. I find this an extremely odious notion, especially the part about how much chaos there will be if the truth is ever revealed. This is nothing more than the reassertion of masculine paternalism. It's right to keep secrets from the rest of us. It's belief that there is a privileged all-male class of people who can be let in on what's really going on and the rest of us poor dears have to be shielded from these tremendously shocking facts. I discussed this once with an entity and it said to me, "well you know we've disguised ourselves as an extraterrestrial invasion so as to not alarm people with what's really going on."

We're getting close to the end folks. There is a fourth possibility, which I mentioned only in the interest of thoroughness, which is that these entities and their vehicles are not spacecraft at all, but are in some sense "time craft". That we may be the tremendous sense of empathy with these quite physically unusual beings may arise out of the fact that we're looking into the faces of our great great great grandchildren who may be emanating back through time carrying the message. A message about some sort of future event or situation that lies many centuries downstream from us but that is of such import, that from that point, agents are moving backward and possibly forward through time spreading the news of some kind of mode shift. This doesn't seem to me to be impossible. However, based on my own experience, which is what I think this thing really comes down to - because what we have in the UFO issue is an official position supported by scientists whether they be neanderthal right-wingers or doctrinaire Marxists or whatever - a conspiracy of consensus against the personal experiences of individual human beings who are told, "well what you're saying happened to you can't have happened, you are insane, you are mentally ill, you are mistaken."

So what we really have here is a political issue: Which do you believe? Your perceptions, memories, and expectations aided by your intellect, or some kind of utterly abstract official doctrinaire sexist philosophy laid on from above? So I think really what the saucers do, if you accept their presence, is they empower us. They empower us to see science, for the shell game that it is, to see the past 400 years of Western culture for the pathetic narrowing of the spectrum of allowable phenomena, that it is to the point where people think that if you can't bang on something with a hammer it isn't real, which to me is just wild talk. I can't even imagine where that kind of thing is coming from. So, I think - and I'll just leave you with this final thought - that in lieu of the repression - and it is a repression throughout this century of legitimately available ways of exploring the modalities of consciousness, and by that I mean psychoactive compounds - the repression of those compounds and their use by science has created an erotic energy dynamic in the mass psyche, and the mass psyche has begun to hallucinate because because the destiny of human beings is to live in the imagination in the hands of the goddess. Wherever that thrust is impeded, psychopathy will result, there will be neurosis, there will be psychic epidemic, there will be confusion.

So I believe that until we form a resolution to conduct and on battered and mature exploration of the human psychology using all the tools available to us that the skies of Earth will continue to be haunted by flying saucers. They will continue to be haunted by flying saucers and their denizens because they are symbols of our infantile-ism, of our sense of loss, of our incompleteness. We can heal that breach by simply recognizing that the true mystery lies within us. The true mystery is in the mind, and its historical promise is the transformation of our society through the abandonment of reason as it has been narrowly defined by this extremely solar masculine paternalistic materialistic legacy that we are the victims of.

Well I could talk for a long time but I think that's it in a nutshell. Thank you.

--- Break ---

There were a couple of points I didn't cover. Before I get into that though, I would like to thank and call attention to the magnificent accomplishment of the [...] Omega Foundation. It's definitely the most glittering New Age event that I have ever had the privilege of attending. I said to someone - just the fact that the backdrops are beginning to look like the Russian Revolution we're making progress.

The area that I wanted to spend a few minutes on tonight that I didn't touch on this afternoon is, what then is to be done? Tolstoy's question: Once we reach this level of admitting the phenomenon, experiencing the phenomenon, trying to talk with each other about it... What is to be done? How are we to translate the message coming from the other side into a concrete reality that works for all of us? Or is that a good thing?

My take on this, which is nothing more than my take on it, is that what we are involved in and with in the UFO phenomenon is an extremely poignant and intense effort to end our alienation from the unconscious. That we can no longer have the luxury of an unconscious portion of the human psyche. That is an artifact of the childhood of our species, and that in fact, the ending of childhood - anticipated brilliantly in Arthur C. Clarke novel Childhood's End - the ending of childhood is what we are experiencing in relationship the alien archetype. As a species, we are coming into a kind of pubescent awareness of the presence of the other. Our childish historical concerns that were self-directed and self-indulgent no longer satisfy, and a deep kind of yearning has come upon the species. A yearning for the confirmation of the presence of an "other" in the same way that an adolescent child did that becomes aware of and develops an extremely intense highly charged and ambivalent attitude toward the opposite sex. I think we are discovering in our own psychic structure the potential, the possibility, of a relationship with an intelligent species outside ourselves, and this raises for us all the tensions all the issues that accompany an adolescent love affair.

How are we to eliminate the human unconscious and come into our birthright as fully conscious enlightened beings? What is to be done? Again my opinion is that what we need is to concentrate on the phenomenon of communication and the evolution of language. We have been far too naive about the role that language has played in the construction of reality at its center, let alone off on the fringes with the elves and fairies and the UFOs. We need to test the envelope of language. We need to perfect the fine idea of being able to communicate with each other. At the moment - and I think we proved it at this conference - it's nothing more than a fine idea. I felt before I came to this meeting that we would all sit down in a room and make great progress in about an hour toward understanding the phenomenon, and then I discovered that we were all, including myself, heavily rated with linguistic momentum. The power our own metaphors to carry us past the opportunity to listen to what other people who are saying.

I think that what we are dreaming of is a common language, and what the saucers are attempting to teach is the modality of a linguistic transformation in the direction of a kind of communication that is not dependent culturally-sanctioned dictionaries, but it is in the bones, in the neurons, in the synapses, so that the ambiguity which attends all our discussions about reality will be purged from our worldview. This is the essence of falling in love. One definition of falling in love is nothing more than lifting the veils of misconception between two entities and still being able to go forward towards some kind of union.

So I really believe that we have moved so far from an awareness of the feminine portion of our psyche, that now the thing dearest to us and closest to us, must present itself in consciousness under the guise of an extraterrestrial or interdimensional invader. It's a comment on the alienation of our era, and the way this schism can be breached, the way this psychic wound can be healed, and a kind of species-wide individuality emerge, is through taking control - conscious control - of the evolution of language. This means paying a great deal more attention to what we say to each other through linguisit intent.

I think that the main legacy of the 1960s into the 80s was a legacy of Langly transformed in the direction of the feeling. To me, the most shocking part of the male dominance of our worldview is the paucity in our language of terms that convey emotion. We have 500 words for the components of a steering mechanism. We have five words for emotions. Each one of us is aswim in a concatenation of emotionally subtle wave phenomena that come and go just below the surface of our awareness, but if any one of those thanks to another and says "how are you doing?" the answer is "fine, fine yourself?"

This is presenting a tremendous barrier to us, to the expression of our wholeness, and I'm completely willing to line up behind Carl Jung on the notion that the UFO is an expression of our longing for wholeness, in principio erat verbum et verbum caro factum est. In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh. In other words, if you were an actual extraterrestrial standing off in a spaceship looking down on this planet, you would not see the strivings of individual species, you would not even see the great classes of organized organic life. What you would see instead is a gene swarm a language frenzy the coding of meaning in genes and words and architectonic productions in poetry.

What is happening on this planet is the self-reflecting genesis of communication for itself. It is language somehow that is loose in our species on our planet within and without the flying saucer. So communication, which we take astonishingly for granted considering the very basic kinds of needs that we communicate to each other is actually the great frontier of our spiritual becoming. It seems to have passed right by us that we already possess a form of telepathy. The miracle of communication involves the fact that I make small mouth noises, and you instantaneously consult the culturally-sanctioned dictionary, and out of your dictionary you construct a map of mind linguistic intent, and then through a series of grunts and nods we assure each other that we know what we mean.

So in a sense - I said this afternoon - that the UFO was here to confound us, to confound science. On another level like the psychedelics, it is here to catalyze a finer evolution of communication, to goose us toward a little tighter epistemic and ontological definition of the business of communicating with each other. If we could refine our channels of communication, we would coalesce into the kind of omnipotent extra-worldly organism that we anticipate in our vision of the flying saucer.

So I think, really, the flying saucer has become the guiding image of our own cultural evolution. We are going to live in the imagination. This planet is involved in a birth process. There is nothing unnatural about what is going on on this planet, and there is nothing unnatural or inappropriate about us. It's simply that the planet has carried us to term. We are now ready to leave the womb, and the womb is in danger of toxemia if we in fact do not leave it. We have passed into a new kind of time where the separation of our species from the plants that gave us birth is a necessity for the survival of both parties, and like any birth, it is a moment of crisis. It can end in catastrophe, and perhaps the saucers stand off perform a necessary cesarean things really turning chaos. Many contactees reported an apocalyptic scenario involving the saucer's taking everybody away in the wake or in the eminent of eminences of thermal nuclear exchange.

However the mature way, the self-reflective way, the dignified way, out of this cultural impasse, out of this global standoff, is for us to take seriously on a personal level the possibility of evolving our communications with each other so that we actually become the loving family of the goddess. The planetary organism that we all feel ahead of us in the future casting an enormous shadow back over the historical landscape eventually. And "when" is up to us - it will no longer be a higher dimensional object throwing a shadow into the flat dimensions of history. It will be instead a transcendental object made manifest.

We are in fact on the brink of great changes. Yes, the UFO phenomenon has been around for hundreds of thousands of years possibly, but nevertheless, it is somehow spun in to the fate of our species, and the overwhelming image of self-transcendent flight, of returning to a mandalic unity, that transcends space and time, is the guiding archetype of our peregrination through history. So I believe that the UFO waits at the end of time in the same way that the individuated personality waits at the end of the ontological development of the individual. And if we act in good conscience, and with great faith in each other, we can in fact realize the hope of the Irish prayer which says "may you be alive at the end of the world." Thank you.