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Millennium Tour - Alien Dimensions

Terence McKenna / video 5:18 ~10 MB 320x240 av1+opus 288 kb/s

A short segment from the Millennium Tour, kept in the video archive. McKenna opens by sorting the popular aliens - Pleiadians, Arcturians, Zeta Reticulans, Grays - into the same slots once held by angels and demons, arguing that people so cut off from their own soul mistake it for a visitor from another star. From there he folds in virtual reality, calling language the original VR technology and the shaman simply the person who knows how the world really works, and closes on the eschaton as the unspeakable climax toward which the whole human project is straining. Worth it as a dense five-minute statement of several of his large themes at once.

transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited

Perturbing your brain in another dimension. First of all, there are many aliens haunting the popular mind at the moment

For instance, let's go through the four generic classes of aliens. Okay

The Pleiadians, the Arcturians, the Zeta Reticulans and the Grays, all right?

And the Pleiadians are all white light. Evidently Maui is filled with Pleiadians, all right?

The Arcturians are sort of more mischievous, but basically good. The Zeta Reticulans are the ones who probe the people.

Who also have the alien voice inside the mushroom.

So you've got two nice species and two evil species.

And if you think about it, and authors have written about this, the way we used to think about the spirit world of angels and demons

has roughly been transposed into modern, quasi-scientific language, into what we think of the alien.

You know, people are so alienated from their own soul, that when they meet their soul, they think it comes from another star system.

Beyond the expectations of linear reality, under the stimulation of psychedelic substances, we find that the world appears very much like Aboriginal people say it is.

It's a world of spirits, invisible forces, languages of power, intuitive revelation.

The logic of a virtual world is closer to the logic of the dream, time, and the magical state of being.

For thousands of years, we've had virtual reality. Once you have language, language is the technology for the creation of virtual reality.

I mean VR for a number of things, but I think that's one of the direct functions of VR is to act as this catalyst.

In the same way that psychedelic drugs can act as a catalyst, or some sort of visionary or shamanic experience can act as a catalyst.

When you take mushrooms, it's the equivalent of taking a certain piece of software and running it on an operating system.

Imagine the shaman sitting around the campfire telling the old stories, and everybody follows him in, and it's dark, and they see the pictures in their mind.

This is virtual reality, run by its voice-directed VR.

So you think language is the way we see?

Yes, language is the way we are. It is the way we are.

We are linguistic creatures first and foremost. Language shapes the world. All of magic works by language.

Computers work by language.

You mean the stew of information in which the world is slowly being boiled?

Virtual reality is like magical reality in the sense that you can cast a spell and change the world.

That spell might be written in C++ or Java, but it's no different.

While we're on this idea of changing the world with a spell or a code, do you consider yourself a shaman?

The shaman is the person who knows how the world really works.

If you know how the world really works, you're a shaman.

If you don't know how the world really works, then you're a citizen of some culture.

What's your definition of a shaman?

I've got a couple. Certainly one is Terence's definition.

Someone who's been to the eschaton and looked it in the eye and is not so worried about it.

Now, for you that don't know what the eschaton is, it's kind of the end.

The shaman is the guy who is permitted to look under the board because he's been to the end and because he's been to the other side.

What is the end?

It's the impending climax of what we think of as human civilization, although I would argue it's probably the organization of life on earth, into a global self-awareness.

The eschaton does not contain category. It does not contain boundary.

The eschaton cannot be described in words. It's one of those things.

If you could describe it in words, you would be after the eschaton.

It's as if humanity is struggling to find a new word.

And the root of that word is love. I know that.

But the word itself has not been spoken yet.

And that word, when it's spoken, changes the way we think.

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