The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and its seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of the imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own epistemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination. In space -- the physical space that surrounds the planet -- modalities of imagination will be the limiting cases of what man can be done. So I see man becoming an artist and an engineer. In other words, flowing into our ideas, perhaps more even than we dare to suspect. In other words, a possible end state of that kind of technical evolution would be the interiorization of the body -- of the human body, the individual body -- and the exteriorization of the soul. And this seems to me to be what the recovery from Adams fall, allegorically, is getting at: that the soul must be made manifest and eternal, and the body must be incorporealized so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination. What I mean by that is something like what William Butler Yeates is getting at in his poem Sailing to Byzantium where he speaks of the artifice of eternity, and talks about how beyond death he would hope to be an enameled golden bird singing sweet songs to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. In other words, its the image of the human body become an indestructible cybernetic object, and yet within that indestructible cybernetic object there is a holographic transform of the body, and it is released into the dream. In other words, the after-death state is actually the compass of human history. That we are attempting to undergo a complete death of the species, and as we struggle with this concrescence of amatos there are problems like nuclear stockpiles and all these things arise because the message that were trying to read is the message we most fear to hear, which is that you must die to experience eternal life essentially. What this death that were talking about is, is an understanding that the human, the docine, the being of human beings, desires to be released into the imagination. And until we confront death with the attitude that it is the after-death state that needs to enter history there will be a great deal of anxiety. ~ Terence McKenna, Psilocybin and the Sands of Time 1982
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 12:25:47 +0000
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