Page's Folly

                   I had initially intended the following section to be included in last weeks dissertation on the modern formulations of myth, but came across “Duel in the Sun” and that, I felt was far easier to comprehend. (Heck it's so easy it may be a little too much so.)

                        Plus one of the characteristics of modern writing is to put the sections out there with intentional “gaps” and leave it to the reader to fill in those gaps. Older writing even as recent as the nineteenth century is very linear; one thing follows another and it's difficult to lose the authors train of mind even if you should want to.

                        (For all you English majors out there, Flaubert, who Vonnegut described as the father of all modern novelists lays his claim to that title not so much because of his plots, subjects or even viewpoints – all of which are fairly predictable – but rather because of the way he wrote – his style which some would go so far as to say is a disjointed prose. Unfortunately I don't read French very well and in the English translations one gets only a taste of that.)

                       We can also see evidence of this evolution of language in religious evolution. Tribal religions are based on stories about how animals or the elements came into being, where as the newer religions, especially the messianic ones increasingly are comprised of a series of commands or laws that are to be obeyed. Religion is about behavior and thus yesterdays custom is todays law and tomorrows religion.

This brings us to the pharmo – ethno- socio- anthro- biologist, Terrence McKenna – who is certainly better known to the younger audience and the global audience then in the United States where he is considered a radical and spent much of his time avoiding drug laws. For our purposes his thesis is that evolution of the human species was often accompanied by the intake of psychedelic hallucinogens.

It does him a disservice to avoid that particular issue; to try to display a McKenna lite version.

He's nowhere near as strong on the history of language evolution as his counterparts in the more respectable academia but his experiences with DMT and more so with Ayuhuasca give him a lot more to say. Much of it is bizzare, strange and new but take away those things and language is going nowhere.

This is why I find his studies invaluable. Perhaps it is only amusing that he must describe his inner voyages in terms of space ships and bubble creatures – but that is not the point.

Okay now on to Terrance McKenna : was he a major thinker of the twentieth century equal to Schillinger and Mandlebrot, or a nut case?

As it happens I’ve been rereading his ‘Invisible Landscape” for the forth time. The thing is most writings I give up on are illogical and unfactual, whereas “Invisible Landscape” is simply mostly incomprehendable.

What salvages his credibility is that the very weird stuff, which is only the one early theory called Timewave is more then balanced out by a lifetime of both research and fieldwork in subjects that although speculative he had made his own,

The Timewave Zero hypothesis may be extremely complex mathematics, or bad math - I am not fit to judge since it’s all over my head. It’s a little like, if yu are familiar wth the subject, “The Bible Code” of twenty years ago in that the alleged instructions from the creator being seem to exist more in the mind of the interpreter then the creator. ( See Appendix for the Pyschological “lure of code”)

(As an aside Finnegan’s Wake for instance becomes far more comprehendible as one ages : especially if you learn a few European languages. “Gödel Escher Bach” is to my mind very much a book of the present era, but like “The Golden Bough” it tends to be encyclopedic.)

McKenna suffers the fate of many extraordinary men in that he made a controversial discovery early on, which cast him outside the norms of science, but then over the next twenty or thirty years wrote so well and extensively about tangential aspects that even the disbelievers are impressed.

In his case the ball and chain he refused to renounce was TimeWave Theory, aka TimeWave Zero. I’m willing to consider waves of probability as possible but nevertheless unproven, and what is more I am not willing to speculate as to exactly what the effects on the present such waves may create.

In some regards he is not completely beyond the bounds of speculative physics, eg, gravity waves which would evidence fluctuations in the time/space continuum. The immediate problem is he hasn’t done the basic work in the field and a lot of his so called research involves taking some very powerful psychoactive hallucinogens such as DMT or Ayuhasca.

What science yearns for in it’s horny little heart is predictability. To say an eclipse will happen and have it happen is what science is about. McKenna can only deliver on this partially.

If I may, Jefferson said it’s better to admit one doesn’t know then to have a bad idea and cling to it. Yet could it not be better to have a stupid idea then no idea? To establish definitions here. A good idea can be proven. A bad idea can be disproven. A stupid idea can’t be either. It just hovers out there- unconnected.

Terrence did take his theory to a respected scientist

And asked the big question “valid thought or speciousness?” The answer? “Does not reach the level of speciousness”

That had to hurt.

Fortunately Terrence did not allow his believing in Time Wave theory to overpower his life. He died of a cranial tumor a few years ago but in an ordinary lifetime he’d have lived to see on of the aspects proven or disproven since he believed that the I-Ching indicates something big will happen in late 2012.

It is my hobby to look for the correlations of metaphysics and measurement. One tries to be unbiased and oftimes, when successful, the results are extremely rewarding. The reality of the unconscious means that all of us, however good intentioned or brilliant are capable of substituting that which we would believe for that which is and to undo the substitution is edifying.

As in any good investigation, when we seek to discover how and why a person is deluding themselves we have to look at who will gain from the illusion.

It’s possible that McKenna sees a parallel between the 2012 date and the day the theory of relativity was verified- but that is a very weak connection so lets move on.

Kurt Vonnegut suggested that an Alien Race of his invention, the Trafalmadorians saw Time as a whole. Like looking at a distant mountain range where the left hand end was the beginning of the universe and the right side, the end.

Things that happen at the same place on this mountain range cannot be said to cause one another – maybe – or it maybe that the condition of one part of the “slice” of space time has an effect on the other parts.

People in public health services, policemen, nurses, ER orderlies know that when the moon is full the activity in the night will be more then ordinary. Suffice to say this increase in activity is also cyclical, relating as it does to the phases of the moon.

In the same way sun spot activity varies on a cyclical basis. It’s a stretch for example, but should the atmosphere of the earth been sufficiently charged sunspot activity may have preceded the electrical charges that activated the nutrient soup to the level of carrying some sort of DNA precursor.

To restate this if it so happened that the initial spark that moved the surface of the earth from a chemical rich bath to one that held molecules capable of sustaining life happened at a time of intense sunspot activity a connection might be made.

How this could translate into a mathematical pattern that predicted activity over time is even more difficult to see. For the record one way we can experience sunspot activity is to listen between channels to an AM radio. The variations in noise are effected by sunspots.

But actually Terrance goes a good deal further. He mixes into his theory holograms consciousness and mental health as well. This needs to be seen in context. The late sixities and early seventies represented, in America, the waning of a belief in the curative powers of psychology and ultimately science.

In some regards this notion, of a return to primitive superstitions had a political aspect as well, Government became evil, the work of the devil and the Keynsian economics which had worked so well were cast aside in favor of the plainly self serving so called “supply side” paradigm.

Hence the emphasis in psychology became one of sustaining and not curative actions. It was as if it was not good enough to prove the “Age of Aquarius” wrong. It had to be smashed to pieces and shown to be a dangerous concept.

The irony, or perhaps virtue, of this, is that when systems are compromised by aggressive behaviors the truly dedicated will either go underground or move out and this leaves them far less inclined to attempt to compromise with those for who compromise is a bad word.

So while McKenna first published in the seventies and worked continually he came to renoun during the nineteen nineties with the resurgance of psychoactive drug taking at raves which occurred almost exclusively outside the United States

While it’s likely he would have remained little more then a footnote to the counterculure if the Time wave was his only discovery he continued to write and explore and essentially invented a new field of science, pharmological anthropology

Even more popular then the writing, which for the average person could be a little dense, his recorded talks made him the Shaman of the Post Reagan generation.

The valorization of someone like Terrance McKenna in a way I suppose was inevitable – like Micheal Jordan in the NBA – he was the guy who escaped! He got out. He did not have to bend the knee before cretins. He did not have to partake in the communal fiction that the largest transfer of wealth in human history was anything but a criminal enterprise. He could just roll a joint or smoke a bowl and whoosh – the multidimensional universe appears!

As it happened the grateful dead were on the road and hardly ever getting busted anymore. But it was not the same.

As we know western math is predicated on the number ten whereas computer’s prefer decimal systems using eight. The I-Ching is also based on the number eight. If sunspots and the I-ching were both comprised of units of eight and had nothing else in common there might appear coincidences.

An incidentally the big day – the day it all comes to a head is Dec 21, 2012. Yop , this year.

Were we even to begin a study of predicted end times, of apocalypses forgone I’d never get off this merry go round. Besides which – it isn’t the being there that counts – it’s the getting there.

At this level I still can’t buy into the notion. It’s a little too close to intelligent design for my taste. What I can go along with is the mathematical constraints placed on one part of an equation (the strange attractor) being able to modify the relative components of the environment (the fractals)

Allowing oneself total speculative freedom McKenna claims there is a way to correlated variations in the I-ching with major events in world history, which would apparently be mirrored on smaller scales by individuals asking about business decisions, etc.

And it all goes round and round and round.

Objections abound. First the correlation between occurrences of the Time wave and world events isn’t that great. One could say that numerical “Wolf tones” could exist that we are not factoring in- but we have to work with what is known and not speculation.

Even more to the point, the Chinese are the experts in this method of divination and theres no indication they are paying the slighted heed to these things

Appendix : The Lure of Code

I’ve mentioned, in varying degrees of depth over the years, my suggestion that the reason for the revival of magic and sorcery movies in the current era is that for the contemporary person one potential explanation for the computer age is magic.

Even I , who refer to computers as machines, am not immune to this in some degree. The journey of the strange attractor, like the arrow of time, permeates the known universe and transforms chaos into order via fractal motion and infinite regressions. This idea, which perhaps you’d be more likely to believe if Arthur C. Clarke told you, is mind boggling.

It is a true alchemy, even as it is further disguised by those who misuse it for personal gain.

And , of course analysts who have actually spent time with patients can tell you that schizophrenics adopt whatever terms are contemporary to describe their maladies.

In the past that was blue devils and hell hounds an today it’s aliens and the CIA.

Personally while I can objectify the inside “outness” of polydimensionality I still am terrible when it comes to remembering phone numbers

This is one of the keys to assuring ourselves that although the written word is rapidly going to become obsolete, we still will have to think and analyze our situations.

Modern life comes down to two things. Remembering or knowing where we keep strings of numbers and solving puzzles. In the social spheres especially solving puzzles, the “traps for troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay”(Mick Jagger) is critical.

An ape upon finding food may go to the periphery to keep from sharing it and so too modern man seeks to camouflage whatever boons he achieves

The DaVinci Code was indicative of this way of thinking – only added to it was the notion that someone in the past could be bothered to elucidate the future in such a way = but other then in the arts there’s little evidence this is so.

Appendix two Conditioning and Myth

Conditioning and myth are similar processes. I use the advertising paradigms because essentially, it is in terms of advertising that the battles for economic supremacy are being fought and it is in terms of advertising; whether or not we succumb to the conditioning that will determine whether we live or die.

Conditioning In axiomatic terms is formulated as such. “Negative stimulus (pain) introduction of desired belief (cure) – removal of negative stimulus. “

If we were rational creatures we’d realize that the removal of the negative stimulus is only something done by the ones who set up the conditioning formula in the first place – but we are not and so, unconsciously at least, we believe that the removal of the negative stimulus is the result of the presence of the thing that the advertiser wants us to believe.

Myth is not so simple to describe. Often it is thought of as an idealized or metaphorical reality – but that doesn’t tell you much, especially when it comes to counter programming mythic intelligence. One interesting, workable definition is a case where the medium and the message are interwoven. Germans heard the magic of radio and assumed the words spoken were equally magical.

Likewise, in the modern era, through the extensive censorship and information control available to centralized media, one is able to grant the quality of truthfulness by the simple omission of information contrary to ones desired belief structure. To accuse such systems of lying is therefore incorrect. They are simply “forgetfull.”

I’ve been trolling youtube recently looking for info on economics. There’s the usual assortment of right wing apocalyptic doomsayers but more then I had suspected also a large cadre of over verbose liberals. In particular Chris Hedges speaks from a perspective I go along with. Probably as Catholic, upper middle class, post industrial males we are among the most pissed off (See Micheal Moore)

Likewise, Clinton was supposed to be a Democrat but if you look at the legislation signed during his Presidency it’s all right wing stuff, as even the Republicans will admit. At the time they [ut on a show of trying to impeach Clinton which amounted to nothing. Essentially what we now realize is that the idea that the two parties represent different approaches to government is a myth.

The hammer that has been used to control the former middle class is the idea that there’s no alternative to the Democrats, but this seems to be a coy bit of playacting on the part of both parties. To use a medical analogy if one medicine doesn’t work why must we assume another will?

Nevertheless the reason I draw you attention to Hedges in the immediate context is he, like I call our attention to the fact that the world is increasingly run by symbols and not words

This process has been going on for well over a hundred years and will have profound implications for the away we live. Two other periods to which it can be compared are the invention of writing and he invention of the word, or language.

Technos, the invention of the city, the invention of the word and the monogamous marriage all came into being in Europe about five thousand years ago. Plato, who was on the tail end of things lamented the fact that people’s memories were never the same after books were invented.

The only other invention in that magnitude was the invention of language. Two things First, we can go with the idea that evolution is not slow and steady, but , as Steven J Gould points out, sporadic. The evidence indicates this. Secondly there may well have been some sort of social innovation that accompanied the growth of language.

One of Terrence McKennas many ideas that seemed to be more likely then the other was the notion that the advent f language was the result of drug induced orgiastic ritual dance ceremonies. The fact that he delivered this message to large groups of persons raving on DMT and Ecstacy. Certainly did not hinder it’s communication.

He suggests that people learned to speak by hanging out together , getting stoned, eating, dancing and having sex. This was long before the notion of individual monogamy was a common thing.

There’s a story I tell often, so bear with me if you’ve heard it already.

Once upon a time apes lived in the forest. Then came a hot, dry period and essentially the larger apes pushed the smaller ones out of the forest to the savanna. The smaller apes became scavengers, eating whatever they could find including, weeds, grubs and meat. That branch of the primate species became the human race, whereas the ones that stayed in the jungle remained apes.

The point being that the change over from non verbal animals to humans with the gift of speech ought not be dismissed. And it is very likely that in the next thousand years, a drop in the bucket of evolutionary time, the physical as well as mental definitions of what it is to be human will change.

We must be careful who we label as mutants

 New Mutations

                      The central theme of Darwins theory of evolution, after all is that a mutation

that remains long enough without being made extinct thereby becomes the new norm

and all other characteristics are then called mutations

Grs Apr 20 2012