Angels Aliens & Archetypes

Terence McKenna, I asked a number of people and they looked puzzled and loped off.

Finally, I managed to get a consensus, which is this, that Terence is an expert in Amazonian shamanism,

a philosopher and an explorer of altered states, the sort of thing we all do when we get home of an evening.

So, but I think he does it rather better than most.

Terence McKenna, please welcome 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 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 puzzling.

To me, that's sort of the position that we're in vis-a-vis 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.

And so 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.

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.

Is it us? Are we being visited?

Or is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of?

And 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 paid very close attention when these experiences were happening to me.

And there always seem to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive.

And 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 an inimical part of its structure.

Right?

Right.

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 reread Carl Jung's book, published in 1954,

called Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.

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 us from understanding that something is a denizen of the psychic realm.

No way precludes us from understanding that something is a denizen of the psychic realm.

It precludes its also having efficacious force in the physical realm

through the phenomenon which he calls 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?

And 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 quote-unquote 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 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,

coming out of the superego 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 Vallée,

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 Vallée 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 has evolved over the past 400 years,

and which has led us to the brink of the end of the world.

And we are in a world 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, the 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.

Now, a perfect example of this is the rise,

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 democracy and atomism.

In other words, they are thoroughgoing materialists.

Their social theory is drawn from a pictetist in 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 a Roman household have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk,

talk among the help, he would have just dismissed it with a sneer. What a 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 120 years after the enunciation of the

birth of Christianity, its missionaries were beating on the gates of Rome, attempting to

convert the emperor. Now, 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,

a kind of dissent into the underworld, a necheia, 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. And 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. So 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.

Science announced thumbs up or thumbs down.

Now there is another possibility which can be dovetailed into the first.

It is that it is not so much the oversoul or the superego of the human species

which is responsible for stopping scientific masculine paternalism in its tracks,

but rather that unbeknownst to self-absorbed,

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 toxic,

sanctifying,

ruining,

raping,

and perverting the planet.

And at that point this thing springs into action

with similar end result as the previous scenario,

the invocation of the superego.

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,

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 comparative DNA sequencing and this 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,

and they are extremely viable candidates for extraterrestrial intruders,

into the environment of this planet.

And 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.

No.

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 was 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,

or 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 cannot, 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 foisted 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 evolved 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 mention only in the interest of thoroughness,

which is that these entities and their vehicles are not spacecraft at all,

but are in some sense timecraft,

and 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 at them from a different perspective.

We're looking at them from a different perspective.

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.

It's 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,

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,

of,

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 a neurotic 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.

And 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 an unfettered 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 be,

they will continue to be haunted by flying saucers and their denizens,

because they are symbols of our infantilism,

of our sense of loss,

of our incompleteness.

And 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. Thank you.

That's a hard act to follow. I won't even try.

That was very pretty. Thank you so much.

I asked a number of people how they would describe Terence McKenna.

Do you have a sense of deja vu about this?

And they said that he was an expert in Amazonian shamanism,

expert in alternative states,

and a philosopher.

And you heard him this afternoon

completely knock the bejesus out of science.

So what he's going to do this evening, I really don't know.

But please welcome once again Terence McKenna.

Well, it is late.

And my voice is fading.

But my talk this afternoon was fairly brief

and 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 Elise Agar and the Omega Foundation.

Stand up, Elise.

I think Elise and her people have done a tremendous job

and this is definitely

the most glittering New Age event

that I have ever had the privilege of attending.

I said to someone,

does the fact that the backdrops

are beginning to look like the Russian Revolution

mean we're making progress?

I don't know.

Can you all hear me?

How's that?

Ah, yes, yes.

Okay.

The area that I want to just talk about,

the area that I want to just 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?

And 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 that is an artifact of the childhood

of our species.

And that in fact the ending of childhood,

anticipated brilliantly in Arthur C. Clarke's novel

Childhood's End,

the ending of childhood

is what we are experiencing

in relationship

to 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

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 to do

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 the 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 freighted

with linguistic momentum.

The power of our own metaphors

to carry us past

the opportunity to listen

to what other people were saying.

And so 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 on

culturally sanctioned dictionaries

but that 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 world view.

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

toward 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

to linguistic intent.

I think that the main legacy

of the 1960s into the 80s

was a legacy of language transformed

in the direction of 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 emotion.

Each one of us is a swim

in a concatenation

of emotionally subtle

wave phenomena

that come and go

just below the surface

of our awareness.

But if any one of us

turns 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

ad verbum

ad verbo caro facta mest

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 human beings

of organized organic life.

What you would see instead

is a gene swarm,

a language frenzy,

the coding of meaning

in genes,

in words,

in 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 my 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 have to go

into the deep,

deep,

we could refine

our channels of communication,

we would coalesce

into the kind of omnipotent

extraworldly 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 burgeoning

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 being 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 planet that gave

us birth is a necessity for the survival of both parties and like any bird it is

a moment of crisis it can end in catastrophe and perhaps the saucers

stand off to perform a necessary cesarean if things really turn into

chaos many contactees report an apocalyptic

scenario in the future.

involving the saucers taking everybody away in the wake or in the eminence of a thermonuclear

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 into the

fate of our species and the overwhelming image of self transcendence flight of

return to a mandala unity the

sense, 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, and good night.