Alchemical Poetry of Terence McKenna and "the last Renaissance Man"

"Awake is where the laws of physics are fully operable...I've found by observing sleep, and some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher...that's chiseled over the alchemist's doorway, I can't do it in Latin but it says, "While Sleeping, Watch' 

I've noticed that while going to sleep there is a barrier, a place in the process of going to sleep, that is like the mercurial edge, it's a river, it's a zone of hypnagogia...true hallucination...

At any given moment on the planet, because of the way the planet is, as a thing, some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake, it is never entirely asleep, it exists in...some kind of indeterminate zone...

The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one...It's like trying to control a dream, you see. 

The global vesting of the species is somehow unfolding the logic of a dream. Well now a Jungian would say, no surprise here, history is the collective dream of humanity, it is run by the archetypal energies of humanity...

You choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake...if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet, and if in fact in half or more of those minds in any given moment, the rules of the dream hold sway, then it is no surprise that when we make our way into society, or just when we live our lives there is an eeriness to it, there's a fatedness to it, there's a plotedness to it, we are inside some kind of engine of narrative...Greg Egan and others have suggested that this could even be a form of recorded medium...you can see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention...

...it is the plasticity of historical time and the acceleration, a sense of an out-of-control spin-up or spin-down into new domains of possibility, that is the strongest evidence at hand that we in some kind of dream.

 The world is made of language...reality can therefore be hacked...if it's code, then it is far more deeply open to manipulation than we ever dared dream."

I stared into the posthumous cyber webs of knowledge and insight, uncovered from the alchemical poetry of Terence McKenna and other renegade pop philosophers of the American psychedelic era. Often listening and reading through the dawn, I touched the cosmic giggle in the meeting of minds, my young sensitivities saturated by the egoless dreamscapes of the oft-unspoken myths of immemorial lifeways in the light of a kind of thought that assumes the entire body of Humanity and the World in a universal freedom of sight and meaning fruiting on the branch of the Tree of Knowledge as a clear and lucid dream of sensual immersion in the core and nature of mind. 

Visit the Alchemical Archives for a fantastic resonance of thought!

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the island forest, cycling with parents, where am I leading them? where are you leading me? they gaze interminably confused as we map out the vineyard over a restaurant stave, the dripping loss and upended commotion, a swill of pain in the forgetting distance, they follow diligently beyond manicured brush and antique streets. 

Crescent of Houses II (Island Town) by Egon Schiele

at a rest, I stop into a hotel, and serendipitously meet a band of world music ghosts, swimmingly seeking my attention in their anxiety, and they are old friends, I promise to return, yet with bigger gripes out front, my family argues over plates and glasses in their passive-aggressive fate, and I saunter off, towards a third direction, a middle way, of indifferent pastures in the awake forest of billions of gods

Burial place of Hone Heke, Bay of Islands by Alfred Sharpe

the damp leaves are cool in the thanksgiving autumn wind, as I step forward towards a drying pond, and above its shores, lounging in a rest chair, atop the indiscernible ground of multicolored arboreal death, my professor of ethnobotany, what eyes of fire and livable sight, she sees me above her book, and I admire her smiling countenance in all its simple glow 

Vali and Sugriva Fighting, Folio from the Dispersed 'Shangri Ramayana' by Unknown

and then, to my right, through to the thick of woods, a billow of smoke, and an old friend, luring me forth into the wilderness bed, yet with cooling head, I steam off in another direction, leaving his darkening crown of endless dreads and staggering worldview to dry with the faint bearing of the unreflective pond behind us

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The unwritten page, a calming exercise, a psychic intuitive drive measured by release

           

In the catalogue of words strung into structured grooves

     In our common sonic language,

     Yet to scalp the music in speech & create 

     Only the pale imprint and seed

...

     Mindlessly astir on into the human binge on space, land & foam

...

As we enjoy the insane destruction,

The chaotic living wilderness

Dreaming up deadly bared weak sleep into our holy lawless cast,

With land forsaken by mistreated burdens

And the murderous pride in a grieving home

excerpt from "A Gorgeous Nudity"