"The Mundane Shell is a vast Concave Earth,
an immense Harden'd Shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth,
Enlarg'd into Dimension and deform'd into indefinite Space,
In Twenty-seven Heavens and all their Hells,
with Chaos And Ancient Night and Purgatory.
It is a cavernous Earth Of labyrinthine intricacy,
twenty-seven folds of Opaqueness,
And finishes where the lark mounts."
William Blake, Selection From Milton
There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an
external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an
internal instrument, such as one of these...drugs. If they are an affront to
the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the
eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these
drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives
knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the
extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole
pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge. Alan Watts in
The Joyous Cosmology
"right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active
intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien."
Terence McKenna
DMT and Hyperspace
by Peter Meyer
In this section and the following one I shall present a view which
elaborates on interpretations 2, 6 and 7. This is speculation but
nevertheless provides a preliminary framework for steps toward an
understanding of what the use of DMT reveals to us.
The world of ordinary, common, experience has three spatial dimensions and
one temporal dimension, forming a place and time for the apparent
persistence of solid objects. Since this is a world of experience it belongs
more to experience than to being. The being, or ontological nature, of this
world may be quite different from what we experience it as.
Psychedelic experience strongly suggests that (as William James
hypothesized) ordinary experience is an island in a sea of possible modes of
consciousness. Under the influence of substances such as LSD and psilocybin
we venture outside of the world as commonly viewed and enter spaces which
may be very strange indeed. This happens as a result of changing our brain
chemistry. Why then should we not regard ordinary experience too as a result
of a particular mode of brain chemstry? Perhaps the world of ordinary
experience is not a faithful representation of physical reality but rather
is physical reality represented in the manner of ordinary brain functioning.
By taking this idea seriously we may free our understanding of physical
reality from the limitatons imposed by the unthinking assumption that
ordinary experience represents physical reality as it is. In fact physical
reality may be totally bizarre and quite unlike anything we have thought it
to be.
In his special theory of relativity, Albert Einstein demonstrated that the
physical world (the world that can be measured by physical instruments, but
is assumed to exist independently) is best understood as a four-dimensional
space whch may be separated into three spatial dimensions and one temporal
dimension in various ways, the particular separation depending on the motion
of a hypothetical observer. It seems that DMT releases one's consciousness
from the ordinary experience of space and time and catapults one into direct
experience of a four-dimensional world. This explains the feeling of
incredulity which first-time users frequently report.
The DMT realm is described by some as "incredible," "bizarre,"
"unbelievable," and even "impossible," and for many who have experienced it
these terms are not an exaggeration. These terms make sense if the world
experienced under DMT is a four-dimensional world experienced by a mind
which is trying to make sense of it in terms of its usual categories of
three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time. In the DMT state these
categories no longer apply to whatever it is that is being experienced.
Some persons report that it seems that in the DMT experience there is
information transfer of some sort. If so, and if this information is quite
unlike anything that we are used to dealing with (at least at a conscious
level), then is may be that the bizarre quality of the experience results
from attempting to impose categories of thought which are quite
inapplicable.
The space that one breaks through under the influence of a large dose of DMT
has been called "hyperspace" by Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham and by
Gracie & Zarkov. I suggest that hyperspace is an experience of physical
reality which is "closer" to it (or less mediated) than is our ordinary
experience. In hyperspace one has direct experience of the
four-dimensionality of physical reality.
Parenthetically we may note a mildly interesting case of historical
anticipation. In 1897 one H.C. Geppinger published a book entitled DMT:
Dimensional Motion Times, Development and Application (reprinted Wiiley,
1955), an appropriate title for our current subject. However, he was, of
course, quite unaware of what the initials "DMT" would later come to mean.
When reflecting upon his mescaline experiences Aldous Huxley suggested that
there was something, which he called "Mind-at-Large," which was filtered by
the ordinary functioning of the human brain to produce ordinary experience.
One may view the human body and the human nervous system as a cybernetic
system for constructing a stable representation of a world of enduring
objects which are able to interact in ways that we are familiar with from
our ordinary experience. This is analogous to a computer's production of a
stable video display -- for even a simple blinking cursor requires
complicated coordination of underlyng physical processes to make it happen.
In a sense we are (or at least may be thought of as) biological computers
whose typical output is the world of everyday reality (as we experience it).
When our biocomputational processes are modified by strange chemicals we
have the opportunity to view the reality underlying ordinary experience in
an entirely new way.
Einstein's four-dimensional space-time may thus turn out to be not merely a
flux of energetic point-events but to be (or to be contained in a
higher-dimensional space which is) at least as organized as our ordinary
world and which contains intelligent, communcating beings capable of
interacting wth us. As Hamlet remarked to his Aristotelian tutor, following
an encounter with a dead soul (his deceased father), "There are more things
in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Should
we be surprised to find that there are more intelligent, communicating,
beings in the higher-dimensional reality underlying our ordinary experience
than we find within that experience?
The "elves"
Hyperspace, as it is revealed by DMT (revealed to some, anyway) appears to
be full of personal entities. They are non-physical in the sense that they
are not objects in the three-dimensional space to which we are accustomed.
Some of the beings encountered in the DMT state may once have been living
humans, but perhaps such "dead souls" are in the minority among the
intelligent beings in that realm.
In his classic The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, W.Y. Evans-Wentz
recorded many tales provided to him by local people of encounters with
beings, variously called fairies, elves, the wee folk, the good people, the
gentry, the Sidhe, the Tuatha De Danann, etc., who inhabit a realm normally
beyond our ken. The belief in this order of beings was firm among the Celtic
peoples of Britain and France at the time Evans-Wentz conducted his studies
(c. 1900), but has since been largely supplanted by the beliefs instilled in
the public by the rise of materialistic science and technology. Evans-Wentz
collected numerous reports of elf-sigting, such as the following (which is
part of an account given by a member of the Lower House of the Manx
Parliament):
...I looked across the river and saw a circle of supernatural light, which
I have now come to regard as the "astral light" or the light of Nature, as
it is called by mystics, and in which spirits become visible... [I]nto this
space, and the circle of light, from the surrounding sides apparently, I saw
come in twos and threes a great crowd of little beings smaller than Tom
Thumb and his wife. All of them, who appeared like soldiers, were dressed in
red. They moved back and forth amid the circle of light, as they formed into
order like troops drilling (pg.113)
Reviewing his data, Evans-Wentz writes:
We seem, in fact, to have arrived at a point in our long investigations
where we can postulate scientifically, on the showing of the data of
psychical research, the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods,
genii, daemons, all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied [i.e., deceased]
men. (pg.481)
He then goes on to quote an earlier researcher:
Either it is we who produce these phenomena [which, says Evans-Wentz, is
unreasonable] or it is spirits. But mark this well: these spirits are not
necessarily the souls of the dead; for other kinds of spiritual beings may
exist, and space may be full of them without our ever knowing anything about
it, except under unusual circumstances [such as a sudden change in brain
chemistry]. Do we not find in the different ancient literatures, demons,
angels, gnomes, goblins, sprites, spectres, elementals, etc? Perhaps these
legends are not without some foundation in fact. (Flammarion, quoted at
Pg.481)
Evans-Wentz concludes (pg.490) that a realm of discarnate, intelligent
forces known as fairies, elves, etc., exists "as a supernormal state of
consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams,
trances, or in various ecstatic conditions," such as, we may add, the
condition produced by smoking DMT.
I suggest that the fairie world studied by Evans-Wentz and the objective
space into which one may enter under the influence of DMT are the same.
>From Psychedelic Monographs and Essays #6, p50
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