He was fascinated by history.
To him it was a finite process,
ten to twenty-five thousand years,
only to end in a phase shift,
like caterpillar to butterfly.
Understanding is dizzying,
a complexity of history, art,
languages, magic, he liked
the complex, well-wrought
patterns turned in on themselves.
The shamans and archaic ecstasy.
Are psychedelics a decadent shortcut?
Or were fasting, flagellation, mutilation
and religion corruptions of the original
sacred passage?
The I Ching breaks time into elements,
like chemical elements compose matter.
And at the heart of it all, resonance,
the zinging subatomics,
the hum, the om.
Heraclitus, the crying philosopher,
said everything flows, pante rhea,
and Taoist sages still ride
as children at play
with colors.
And there's more:
When Plato remarked that “Time is the moving image of Eternity,” he made a statement every voyage into the DMT space reinforces. Like the shift of epoch called the apocalypse and anticipated by religious hysterics, DMT seems to illuminate the regions beyond death. And what is the dimension beyond life as illuminated by DMT? If we can trust our own perceptions, then it is a place in which thrives an ecology of souls whose stuff of being is more syntactical than material. It seems to be a nearby realm inhabited by eternal elfin entelechies made entirely of information and joyous self-expression.
5. Wei Boyang (2nd century AD)
McKenna often referenced Wei Boyang, “a semimythical figure from the Kuaji area of modern Zhejiang believed to have been active in the middle of the second century,” according to Taoism and the Arts of China (2000) by Stephen Little, on the topic of worry. In “Stop Worrying or Being Anxious, It’s Pointless,” McKenna said:
You know, Wei Boyang, a great Chinese Taoist who wrote many, many commentaries on the I Ching—he was asked, at the end of his life, what was his conclusion of a life of studying the I Ching, and he said “worry is preposterous.” That was it.
6. A True And Faithful Rendition (1658) by John Dee
In “Hermeticism and Alchemy” (1991), McKenna described John Dee (1517-1608/1609) as “the greatest magician of his age and the greatest scientist of his age” and called A True And Faithful Rendition, whose full, page-long title can be read here, “One of the most astonishing books in all of English literature.” McKenna noted: “And until the last ten years, the 1658 edition was the only edition ever published.” Dee’s book, McKenna wrote in The Archaic Revival, is comprised of diary entries spanning ten years and recording "hundreds of spirit conversations, including the delivery to Dee and Kelley of an angelic language called Enochian, composed of non-English letters, but which computer analysis has recently shown to have curious grammatical relationship to English."
7. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He co-wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) with Bertrand Russell, who had been his student at Trinity College, Cambridge. “I base a lot of what I think and feel on Whitehead,” said McKenna in “Touched by the Tremendum” (1990). In "The Evolutionary Importance of Technology" (1989), McKenna discussed Whitehead and feelings:
Whitehead, who I take as my mentor, created a mathematically formal metaphysic in which the primary datum of experience is feelings. I mean, that's a direct quote from Whitehead. The only thing you can trust at this point--and some of you have heard me say this before--is the felt presence of immediate experience, otherwise known as feelings, and mathematics. And mathematics is something that most of you have been denied in order to keep you marks. So all you have are feelings. And so it's very important to empower this dimension, which Husserl or Merle Ponte or somebody called the felt presence of immediate experience. Everything proceeds from that. Even thought is subsequent to feeling.
8. A Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans
In The Archaic Revival, McKenna called Against the Grain, as it’s titled in English, “an amazing novel about a man who is so sensitized to perception that he can’t leave his apartment.” McKenna elaborated:
He has his walls covered in felt and keeps the lights very low. He collects Redon when nobody had ever heard of Redon. He buys turtles and has jewels affixed to their backs. Then he sits in a half-lit room and smokes hashish and watches the turtles crawl around on his Persian rugs. Let’s all go home and do this.
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