The Psilocybin Solution by Simon G. Powell

Author:Simon G. Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Spirituality/Entheogens
ISBN: 9781594779374
Publisher: Park Street Press
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Many Guises of the Other

As Terence McKenna repeatedly pointed out, it is quite common, for Westerners at any rate, to perceive UFO or extraterrestrial motifs in psychedelic visions. McKenna has suggested that the UFO is the Other in the guise of a contemporary symbol. According to McKenna, the Other is normally so remote from us that it dons the mask of the UFO in order to express itself, its Otherness.

Since the 1950s, a plethora of sci-fi films have focused on alien visitations to Earth. The predominant theme in these sorts of entertaining fantasy is the incredible impact that an alien presence would have on humanity. It is a modern reworking of the ancient religious idea of divine intervention. Some great alienesque force suddenly erupts in the midst of our culture in a way that upsets, or radically alters, human destiny. Everyone would have to take notice. People would, willy-nilly, be forced to cease their everyday business for a spontaneous alien-inspired holiday or two. Everything would have to change. Alien visitations are dramatic. They negate everything else.

Obviously, then, the UFO can be understood as a modern icon, an immensely powerful Western symbol packed with meaning. It also highlights the way to think about information, for, in terms of information, the archetypal UFO is the center of a whole web of psychological relations and associations. It embodies a concentration of information. It expresses a powerful set of psychological associations. As a simple word, UFO embodies information in the context of the English language, whereas as something visibly beheld in an entheogenic vision, the UFO, or indeed any kind of image of advanced alien technology, represents an utterance in the symbolic language of the communicating Other.

In The Archaic Revival, McKenna spoke of the UFO as:

An autonomous psychic entity that has slipped from the control of the ego and approaches laden with the “Otherness” of the unconscious. As one looks into it one beholds oneself, one’s world information field, all deployed in a strange, distant, almost transhumanly cool way, which links it to the myth of the extraterrestrial. The extraterrestrial is the human Oversoul in its general and particular expression on the planet.3

Here may lie the explanation for the rampant and often far-fetched stories of actual UFO sightings and alien encounters not reserved to closed-eyes visions. Perhaps for some people the Other emerges into the perceived world of external reality, although this would more than likely represent a genuine hallucination.

McKenna’s use of the term Oversoul is yet another way of referring to the Other. Whereas McKenna readily assumed the Other to be the creative source of sacred visions, I am being more specific by asserting that an experience of the Other results from an inherent property of information just as the individual mind results from an inherent property of information. Through the redemptive action of sacramental alkaloids like psilocybin, the Other is able to become manifest and flow through the neuronal architecture of the brain. The Other, or Oversoul, is information, or at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.