United Public Domain Gold 2/United Public Domain Gold 2.iso/utilities/pu729.dms/pu729.adf/Hyperspace.txt

Text File | 1995-03-09 | 35KB | 474 lines

[from a 1989 edition of "Magical Blend" magazine; also found in McKenna's
"Archaic Revival"]

NEW MAPS OF HYPERSPACE by Terence McKenna

In James Joyce's *Ulysses*, Stephen Dedalus tells us, "History is the
nightmare from which I am trying to awaken". I would turn this around and say
that history is what we are trying to escape from into dream. The dream is
eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history. We wish to
escape into the dream. Escape is a key thing charged against those who would
experiment with plant hallucinogens. The people who make this charge hardly
dare face the degree to which hallucinogens are escapist. Escape. Escape from
the planet, from death, from habit, and from the problem, if possible, of the
Unspeakable.
  If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience as
it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the phenomenon of death and
the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications - Neoplatonic, Christian,
dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a
light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life
and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate. One
part loses its *raison d'etre* and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops.
The other part goes we know not where. Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does
not exist; but then one has the problem of trying to explain life. And, though
science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic
systems, the idea that science can make *any* statement about what life is or
where it comes from is currently preposterous.
  Science has nothing to say about how one can decide to close one's hand into
a fist, and yet it happens. This is utterly outside the realm of scientific
explanation because what we see in that phenomenon is mind as a first cause.
It is a example of telekinesis: matter is caused by mind to move. So we need
not fear the sneers of science in the matter of the fate or origin of the
soul. My probe into this area has always been the psychedelic experience, but
recently I have been investigating dreams, because dreams are a much more
generalized form of experience of the hyperdimension in which life and mind
seem to be embedded.
  Looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes
to the realization that for these people dream reality is experientially a
parallel continuum. The shaman accesses this continuum with hallucinogens as
well as with other techniques, but most effectively with hallucinogens.
Everyone else accesses it through dreams. Freud's idea about dreams was that
they were what he called "day-residues", and that one could trace the content
of a dream down to a distortion of something that happened during waking time.
  I suggest that it is much more useful to try to make a geometric model of
consciousness, to take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and to say
that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a
higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep, one is released into the real world,
of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric
sense. There is a plenum - recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back
this up - a holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere.
Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time
in a kind of eternity - an eternity that does not have a temporal existence
about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal
duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with
mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher
levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort
that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.
  At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases.
Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very
localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting
energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected.
These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic
tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream
state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they
reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing
being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.
  The metaphor of a vehicle - an after-death vehicle, an astral body - is used
by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga,
claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with
this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in
the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and
one will make a clean break. Yet there deos seem to be the possibility of a
problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life.
One can muff it through ignorance.
  Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth
- the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of
incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one
starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden
track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment - a crisis of
passage - and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to
strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so
that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position.
  I want to include an abyss in this model - one less familiar to
rationalists, but familiar to us all one level deeper in the psyche as
inheritors of the Judeo-Christian culture. That is the idea that the world
will end, that there will be a final time, that there is not only the crisis
of the death of the individual but also the crisis of death in the history of
the species.
  What this seems to be about is that from the time of the awareness until the
resolution of the apocalyptic potential, there are roughly one hundred
thousand years. In biological time, this is only a moment, yet it is ten times
the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in the balance,
because it is a mad rush from hominid to starflight. In the leap across those
one hundred thousand years, energies are released, religions are shot off like
sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all of
these concerns that control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical
constancy appear. Ever present is the possibility of aborting the species'
transformation into a hyperspatial entelechy.
  We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final historical seconds of that
crisis - a crisis that involves the end of history, our departure from the
planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from the
body. We are, in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a
planetary ecology can encounter - the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis
of matter. The old metaphor of psyche as the caterpillar transformed by
metamorphosis is a specieswide analogy. We must undergo a metamorphosis in
order to survive the momentum of the historical forces already set in motion.
  Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an unevolving species. Some
time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the
biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic,
cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but
the human somatotype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much
like people of a long time ago. But technology is the real skin of our
species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred
years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a
low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude
jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. Rhis is what we do. We are like coral
animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our
tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying
saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. The body can
become an internalized holographic object embedded in a solid-state,
hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through a true
Elysium.
  This is a kind of Islamic paradise in which one is free to experience all
the pleasures of the flesh provided one realizes that one is a projection of a
holographic solid-state matrix that is microminiaturized, superconducting, and
nowhere to be found: it is part of the plenum. All technological history is
about producing prototypes of this situation with greater and greater closure
toward the ideal, so that airplanes, automobiles, space shuttles, space
colonies, starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type are, as Mircea
Eliade said, "self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about
man's aspiration to self-transcendence."
  Our wish, our salvation, and our only hope is to end the historical crisis
by becoming the alien, by ending alienation, by recognizing the alien as the
Self, in fact - recognizing the alien as an Overmind that holds all the
physical laws of the planet intact in the same way that one holds an idea
intact in one's thoughts. The givens that are thought to be writ in
adamantine are actually merely the moods of the Goddess, whose reflection we
happen to be. The whole meaning of human history lies in recovering this piece
of lost information so that man may be dirigible or, to paraphrase James
Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* on Moicane, the red light district of Dublin: "Here
in Moicane we flop on the seamy side, but up n'ent, prospector, you sprout all
your worth and you woof your wings, so if you want to be Phoenixed, come and
be parked." It is that simple, you see, but it takes courage to be parked when
the Grim Reaper draws near. "A blessing in disguise", Joyce calls him.
  What psychedelics encourage, and where I hope attention will focus once
hallucinogens are culturally integrated to the point where large groups of
people can plan research programs without fear of persecution, is the modeling
of the after-death state. Psychedelics may do more than model this state; they
may reveal the nature of it. Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of
appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within
the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experiences of the
Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed through
light-years of three-dimensional universe, and the interior mental universe.
They are adumbrations of the same thing.
  We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the
code we customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has
built-in dualisms. This is a problem of language. All codes have relative code
qualities, except the Logos. The Logos is perfect and, therefore, partakes of
no quality other than tiself. I am here using the word *Logos* in the sense in
which Philo Judaeus uses it - that of the Divine Reason that embraces the
arhcetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As
long as one maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems
of code quality. The dualism built into our language makes the death of the
species and the death of the individual appear to be opposed things.
  Likewise, the scenarios that biology has created through examining the
physical universe versus the angel- and demon-haunted worlds that depth
psychology is reporting is also a dichotomy. The psychedelic experience acts
to resolve this dichotomy. All that is needed to go beyond an academic
understanding of the plant hallucinogens is the experience of the tryptamine-
induced ecstasy. The dimethyltryptamine (DMT) molecule has the unique property
of releasing the structured ego into the Overself. Each person who has that
experience undergoes a mini-apocalypse, a mini-entry and mapping into
hyperspace. For society to focus in this direction, nothing is necessary
except for this experience to become an object of general concern.
  This is not to suggest that everyone should experiment with mushrooms or
other naturally occurring sources of psychoactive tryptamines. We should try
to assimilate and integrate the psychedelic experience since it is a plane of
experience that is directly accessible to each of us. The role that we play in
relationship determines how we will present ourselves in that final, intimated
transformation. In other words, in this notion there is a kind of teleological
bias; there is abelief that there is a hyperobject called the Overmind, or
God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience of this
shadow. As one draws clsoer and closer to the source of the shadow, the
paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that
the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.
  One way of thinking of this is to suppose that the waking world and the
world of the dream have begun to merge so that in a certain sense the school
of UFO criticism that has said flying sources are hallucinations was correct
in that the laws that operate in the dream, the laws that operate in
hyperspace, can at times operate in three-dimensional space when the barrier
between the two modes becomes weak. Then one gets these curious experiences,
sometimes called psychotic breaks, that always have a tremendous impact on the
experient because there seems to be an exterior component that could not
possibly be subjective. At such times coincidences begin to build and build
until one must finally admit that one does not know what is going on.
Nevertheless, it is preposterous to claim that this is a psychological
phenomenon, because there are accompanying changes in the external world. Jung
called this "synchronicity" and made a psychological model of it, but it is
really an alternative physics beginning to impinge on local reality.
  The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons,
which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world
of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one
approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view
of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is
that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. There is
an experience of time zero. So if one imagines for a moment oneself to be made
of light, or in possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light,
one can traverse from any point in the universe to any other with a subjective
experience of time zero. This means that one crosses to Alpha Centauri in time
zero, but the amount of time that has passed in the relativistic universe is
four and a half years. But if one moves very great distances, if one crosses
two huindred and fifty thousand light-years to Andromeda, one would still have
a subjective experience of time zero.
  The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time that
is created by one's own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian
universe there is no time whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become
eternal, the universe is aging at a staggering rae all around one in this
situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe - the way we
perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into
the eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the
completion of eternity.
  I believe that this is what technology pushes toward. There is no
contradiction between ecological balance and space migration, between
hypertechnology and radical ecology. These issues are red herrings; the real
historical entity that is becoming imminent is the human soul. The monkey body
has served to carry us to this moment of release, and it will always serve as
a focus of self-image, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world
made by the human imagination. This is what is meant by the return to the
Father, the transcendence of *physis*, the rising out of the Gnostic universal
prison of iron that traps the light: nothing less than the transformation of
our species.
  Very shortly an acceleration of this phenomenon will take place in the form
of space exploration and space colonies. The coral-reef-like animal called Man
that has extruded technology over the surface of the earth will be freed from
the constraints of anything but the imagination and the limitations of
materials. It has been suggested that the earlioest space colonies include
efforts to duplicate the idyllic ecosystem of Hawaii as an ideal. These
exercises in ecological understanding will prove we know what we are doing.
However, as soon as this understanding is under control we will be released
into the realm of art. This is what we have always striven for. We will make
our world - all of our worlds - and the world we came from will be maintained
as a garden. What Eliade discussed as metaphors of self-transforming flight
will be realized shortly in the technology of space colonization.
  The transition from earth to space will be a staggeringly tight genetic
filter, a much tighter filter than any previous frontier has ever been,
including the genetic and demographic filter represented by the colonization
of the New World. It has been said that the vitality of the Americas is due to
the fact that only the dreamers and the pioneers and the fanatics made the
trip across. This will be even more true of the transition to space. The
technological conquest of space will set the stage; then, for the
internalization of that metaphor, it will bring the conquest of inner space
and the collapse of the state vectors associated with this technology deployed
in Newtonian space. Then the human species will have become more than
dirigible.
  A technology that would internalize the body and exteriorize the soul will
develop parallel to the move to space. *The Invisible Landscape*, a book by my
brother and myself, made an effort to short-circuit that chronology and, in a
certain sense, to force the issue. It is the story, or rather it is the
intelectual underpinnings of the story, of an expedition to the Amazon by my
brother and myself and several other people in 1971. During that expedition,
my brother formulated an idea that involved using harmine and harmaline,
compounds that occur in *Banisteriopsis caapi*, the woody vine that is the
basis for *ayahuasca*. We undertook an effor to use harmine in conjunction
with the human voice in what we called "the experiment at La Chorrera". It was
an effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of harmine molecules
metabolizing in the body in such a way that they would bind preferentially and
permanently with endogenous molecular structures.
  Our candidate at the time was neural DNA, though Frank Barr, a researcher
into the properties of brain melanin, has made a convincing case that there is
as great a likelihood that harmine acts by binding with melanin bodies. In
either case, the pharmacology involves binding with a molecular site where
information is stored, and this information is then broadcast in such a way
that one begins to get a mental readout on the structure of the soul. Our
experiment was an effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the cat,
if you will, to hang a superconducting, telemetric device on the Overmind so
that there would be a continuous readout of information from that dimension.
The success or failure of this attempt may be judged for oneself.
  The first half of the book describes the theoretical underpinnings of the
experiment. The second half describes the theory of the structure of time that
derived from the bizarre mental states that followed the experiment. I do not
claim that we succeeded, only that our theory of what happened is better than
any theory proposed by critics. Whether we succeeded or not, this style of
thinking points the way. For example, when I speak of the technology of
building a starship, I imagine it will be done with voltages far below the
voltage of a common flashlight battery. This is, after all, where the most
interesting phenomena go on in nature. Thought is that kind of phenomenon;
metabolism is that kind of phenomenon.
  A new science that places the psychedelic experience at the center of its
program of investigation should move toward a practical realization of this
goal - the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the Overself so
that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the Overself. Then the
anxiety of facing a tremendous biological crisis in the form of the ecocrises,
and the crisis of limitation in physical space forced upon us by our planet-
bound situation, can be obviated by cultivating the soul and by practicing a
new shamanism using tryptamine-containing plants.
  Psilocybin is the most commonly available and experientially accessible of
these compounds. Therefore my plea to scientists, administrators, and
politicians who may read these words is this: look again at psilocybin, do not
confuse it with the other psychedelics, and realize that it is a phenomenon
unto itself with an enormous potential for transforming human beings - not
simply transforming the people who take it, but transforming society in the
way that an art movement, a mathematical understanding, or a scientific
breakthrough transforms society. It holds the possibility of transforming the
entire species simply by virtue of the information that comes through it.
Psilocybin is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in
the Western mind for at least a thousand years.
  When the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth
century, they immediately set about stamping out the mushroom religion. The
Indians called it *teonanacatl*, "the flesh of the gods". The Catholic church
had a monopoly on theophagia and was not pleased by this particular approach
to what was going on. Now, four hundred years after that initial contact, I
suggest that Eros, which retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity,
retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca. Finally, pushed into
seclusion there, it now reemerges in Western consciousness.
  Our institutions, our epistemologies are bankrupt and exhausted; we must
start anew and hope that with the help of shamanically inspired personalities,
we can cultivate this ancient mystery once again. The Logos can be unleashed,
and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus can speak
again in the minds of modern people. When it does, the alienation will be
ended because we will have become the alien. This is the promise that is held
out; it may seem to some a nightmare vision, but all historical changes of
immense magnitude have a charged emotional quality. They propel people into a
completely new world.
  I believe that this work must be done using hallucinogens. Traditionally it
has been thought that there were many paths to spiritual advancement. In this
matter I must fall back on personal experience. I have not had good results
with any other techniques. I spent time in India, practiced yoga, visited
among the various rishis, roshis, geysheys, and gurus that Asia had to offer,
and I believe they must be talking about something so pale and removed from
closure with the full tryptamine ecstasy that i don't really know what to make
of them and their wan hierophanies.
  Tantra claims to be another approach. Tantra means "the short-cut path", and
certainly it might be on the right track. Sexuality, orgasm, these things do
have tryptaminelike qualities to them, but the difference between psilocybin
and all other hallucinogens is information - immense amounts of information.
  LSD seemed somehow to be largely related to the structure of the
personality. Often it seemed to me the visions were merely geometric patterns
unless synergized by another compound. The classic psychedelic experience that
was written about by Aldous Huxley was two hundred micrograms of LSD and
thirty milligrams of mescaline. That combination delivers a visionary
experience rather than an experience of hallucinations. In my opinion the
unique quality of psilocybin is that it reveals not colored lights and moving
grids, but places - jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic forms of
incredible complexity. There is no possibility that this could be construed as
neurological noise of any sort. It is, in factm the most highly ordered visual
information that one can experience, much more highly ordered than the normal
waking vision.
  That's why it's very hard with psychedelic compounds to bring back
information. These things are hard to English because it is like trying to
make a three-dimensional rendering of a fourth-dimensional object. Only
through the medium of sight can the true modality of this Logos be perceived.
That is whyy it is so interesting that psilocybin and *ayahuasca* - the
aboriginal tryptamine-containing brew - both produce a telepathic experience
and a shared state of mind. The unfolding group hallucination is shared in
complete silence. It's hard to prove this to a scientist, but if several
people share such an experience, one person can describe it and then cease the
monologue and another person may then take it up. Everyone is seeing the same
thing! It is the quality of being complex visual information that makes the
Logos a vision of a truth that cannot be told.
  The information thus imparted is not, however, merely restricted to the mode
of seeing. The Logos is capable of going from a thing heard to a thing seen,
without ever crossing through a discernible trnsition point. This seems a
logical impossibility; yet when one actually has the experience, one sees -
aha! - it is as though thought that is heard does become something seen. The
thought that is heard becomes more and more intense until, finally, its
intensity is such that, with no transition, one is now beholding it in three-
dimensional, visual space. One commands it. This is very typical of
psilocybin.
  Naturally, whenever a compound is introduced into the body, one must
exercise caution and be well informed with regard to possible side effects.
Professional psychedelic investigators are aware of these factors and freely
acknowledge that the obligation to be well informed is of primary importance.
  Speaking for myself, let me say that I am not an abuser. It takes me a long
time to assimilate each visionary experience. I have never lost my respect for
these dimensions. Dread is one of the emotions that I feel as I approach the
experience. Psychedelic work is like sailing out onto a dark ocean in a little
skiff. One may view the moon rising serenely over the calm black water, or
something the size of a freight train may roar right through the scene and
leave one clinging at an oar.
  The dialogue with the other is what makes repetition of these experiences
seem worthwhile. The mushroom speaks to you when you speak to it. In the
introduction to the book that my brother and I wrote (under pseudonyms) called
*Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide*, there is a mushroom monologue
that geins: "I am old, fifty times older than thought in your species, and I
came from the stars." Sometimes it's very human. My approach to it is Hasidic.
I rave at it; it raves at me. We argue about what it is going to cough up and
what it isn't. I say, "Well, look, I'm the propagator, you can't hold back on
me," and it says, "But if I showed you the flying saucer for five minutes, you
would figure out how it works", and I say, "Well, come through." It has many
manifestations. Sometimes it's like Dorothy of Oz; sometimes it's like a very
Talmudic sort of pawnbroker. I asked it once, "What are you doing on Earth?"
It said, "Listen, if you're a mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I'm telling
you, this was a very nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control."
  "Monkeys out of control": that is the mushroom voice's view of history. To
us, history is something very different. History is the shock wave of
eschatology. In other words, we are living in a very unique moment, ten or
twenty thousand years long, where an immense transition is happening. The
object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into
eternal tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO. It is that
mystery that casts its shadow back through time. All religion, all philosophy,
all wars, pogroms, and persecutions happen because people do not get the
message right. There is both the forward-flowing casuistry of being, causal
determinism, and the interference pattern that is formed against that by the
backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyperobject throwing its shadow
across the temporal landscape. We exist, yet there is a great deal of noise.
This situation called history is totally unique; it will last only a moment,
it began a moment ago. In that moment there is a tremendous burst of static as
the monkey goes to godhood, as the final eschatological object mitigates and
transforms the forward flow of entropic circumstance.
  Life is central to the career of organization in matter. I reject the idea
that we have been shunted onto a siding called organic existence and that our
actual place is in eternity. This mode of existence is an important part of
the cycle. It is filter. There is the possibility of extinction, the
possibility of falling into *physis* forever, and so in that sense the
metaphor of the fall is valid. There is a spiritual obligation, there is a
task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of
somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward
being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical
texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most
people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we
intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is
gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act
of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
  We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of
pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity
is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance,
poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm
of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-
engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This
is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be
approached through cognitive activity.
  Time is the notion that gives ideas such as these their power, for they
imply a new conception of time. During the experiment at La Chorrera, the
Logos demonstrated that time is not simply a homogeneous medium where things
occur, but a fluctuating density of probability. Though science can sometimes
tell us what can happen and what cannot happen, we have no theory that
explains why, out of everything that could happen, certain things undergo what
Whitehead called "the formality of actually occurring." This was what the
Logos sought to explain, why out of all the myriad things that could happen,
certain things undergo the formality of occurring. It is because there is a
modular hierarchy of waves of temporal conditioning, or temporal density. A
certain event, rated highly improbable, is more probable at some moments than
at others.
  Taking that simple perception and being led by the Logos, I was able to
construct a fractal model of time that can be programmed on a computer and
that gives a map of the ingression of what I call "novelty" - the ingression
of novelty into time. As a general rule, novelty is obviously increasing. It
has been since the very beginning of the universe. Immediately following the
Big Bang there was only the possibility of nuclear interaction, and then, as
temperatures fell below the bond strength of the nucleus, atomic systems could
be formed. Still later, as temperatures fell further, molecular systems
appeared. Then much later, life became possible; then vrey complex life forms
evolved, thought became possible, culture was invented. The invention of
printing and electronic information transfer occurred.
  What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what
Whitehead called "concrescence", a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing
together. The "autopoetic lapis", the alchemical stone at the end of time,
coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are
obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound
plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to
cast a shadow into *physis* as its reflection. I come very close here to
classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which
change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that
concrescence will occur soon - around 2012 A.D. It will be the entry of our
species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws
accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination.
  All these images - the starship, the space colony, the lapis - are
precursory images. They follow naturally from the idea that history is the
shock wave of eschatology. As closes distance with the eschatological object,
the reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing itself. In
the final moment the Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more
reflections of the Mystery. The Mystery in all its nakedness is seen, and
nothing else exists. But what it is, decency can safely scarcely hint;
nevertheless, it is the crowning joy of futurism to seek anticipation of it.