5/30/96
Terence,
conversely, when we've just begun we've said it all, taking for granted
that we're speaking of the um. . . er. . . infinite. Nasty word, should
be stricken from the language and replaced with "linoleum" which,
to my ear, is the most gracefully evocative word I know, on a par with "Eloim."
"God" is another ugly word; leave it to the Anglo-Saxons to manufacture
a brutal set of phonemes for the All. Fortunately we also have "Lord"
which most people instinctively substitute. No one ever says "Lord
Damn it!" do they? Just warming up here. Before anyone gets unduly
upset (not you certainly) remember "God" is a categorical term,
not the name of Supreme Being, which, it seems safe to assume, Kabbalah
notwithstanding, is patently nameless - or "all name" which is
pretty much the same thing. Does this conflict with one of the 10 commandments?
Probably a matter of translation. I would expect the commandment would translate
into something more like: "Thou shalt not swear falsely by that you
hold most high." Excellent advice.
My particular trepidation about further DMT use is not a timidity about
the substance per se. I reckon I've taken it a thousand times before receiving
my emphatic cut off notice. My preferred method was intravenous. No nasty
taste. First time I tried that I X'd growing out of a flowerpot on Venus
beneath a great dome.
The comedy quotient is indeed "ridiculous." I remember one sublime
journey which ended with a funny little train belching, farting and boogying
off into the distance . . . then a Warner Bros. Loony Toons circular rainbow
logo descend, upon which was written "That's all folks!"
You noted that what happens on DMT is often "impossible." That
sure does say it. Reality just doesn't bend that way - yet it does. Multiple
contradictory viewpoints manifesting at once give the truth to Whitman's
utterance "I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am
large. I contain multitudes." The most usual manifestation of that,
characteristic of almost every journey I can recall, is the sensation of
moving at what, I presume, is the speed of light while remaining stationary.
You can't figure it out, so you just "relax" and let it rip. The
stars congeal into one immense circumference of light, and bingo - you're
somewhere else.
Another notable feature of DMT is the "aliveness" of everything
out there. Nothing apprehended which is not entirely, vividly alive, including
dust. Nothing is inanimate. Nothing is incapable of rapid and utter transformation.
The most stable item I ever experienced was the living water pouring from
the Holy Grail in the Sanctum Sanctorum. There, I'd have been content to
dwell forever. I still treasure that vision above all others and am largely
content to know it exists in the heart - that love is REAl, not just a term
for getting along with one another and making nice.
But I enthuse. A little of someone else's reported extasis goes a long way.
Guess I'm compensating a little for the earlier impression I might have
given that "DMT beats you up." Yes, it can and does, but that's
the nature of the spiritual journey. Is DMT "the way"? No. Because
you come back. Because, at least in my case, the gates of Eden can be slammed
in you face and presided over by an angel with a flaming sword. But one
thing you never forget: the spiritual world is more real than this one,
by a country mile.
Anyhow, I went, I saw, was seen, and I'm still sane enough to operate a
computer and string words into grammatically correct and hopefully coherent
statements - and to realize I'm walking the edge of big cultural no-no's
in reporting what I found. In fact, bucking the enforced status quo is probably
inherently more dangerous, innit?
rh
Ps: just ran a spell checker on this and got:
Not in Dictionary: aliveness
Change to: aliens
so help me God!
1 Jun 1996
Hi--
I am back at it. Yes, it does beat up on you, it does and it doesn't.
Everything about it seems to come packaged with its opposite. One of the
weirdest impressions that I have, and it took me a number of trips to put
this all together, but in my own experiences at any rate, it became clear
that weird as the place I was carried off to was, nevertheless it was
someone's notion, someone very peculiar, of just what a human being like
me
would prefer. It was an alien effort to make an environment that was
comfortable and reassuring to human beings, but as if they/it had only
studied human beings from a very different perspective than the one from
which we know ourselves. This feeling of important process with grown up
overtones and yet with an element of the childish and silly came to remind
me of the vibe of a maternity or pediatric ward; high tech, life and death
stuff is going on. But they have closets full of teddy bears and the wall
paper patterns are all dancing bears and mice in tutus. I have wondered
if
the wondrous objects offered by the tykes in the DMT encounter, for all
their power to stand our world on its head, may be, in that world, no more
than plastic geometric shapes strung on a rope and hung over an infant's
bassinet for its amusement and to teach it spatial and color coordination.
They are no more than toys. But the maternity ward metaphor goes deeper.
There is a feeling of arrival, of anxious doctors, and a sense of enormous
decompression and relief. Come to think of it, decompression is a good
metaphor for how DMT makes me feel, it is as if I has returned at last to
my natural medium of existence, having left a zone of constriction and
pressurized limitation, hence I feel inflated in every sense in that place.
And then there is the language lesson that they always insist on giving
me
and insist is the entire point of our little meetings, though no else has
ever described the stress on language and poetics and linguistic skill that
seems to fill my trips. More on all that later. Don't want to shoot my
wad in one go.
Best,
T
Terence McKenna
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