I Am A Meme Replicator

Note: I wrote this post last week, and then the ebb and flow of life grabed my attention away. I had to take care of some personal stuff. So now that I am able to shift my attention back to this post. I found it necessary that perhaps this thread of thought needed to ferment. But at any rate back to the cosmic show...

Terence McKenna is something of a digital wizard, a disembodied shamanic poet from hyperspace, a cosmic ripple of the unspeakable on the invisible landscape. I wrote about this Terence McKenna Dream and I been using him as a muse. But like most of my Dreams, if you dig deeper, you see signs of what the probable future that might unfold.

Just the other day I got a message from my partner in art crime Nikki 'Hey can you tell me what remix shows feature me and you plus Terence McKenna. I know you’ve mixed in Terence Mckenna but can’t think which ones feature me and you as well. I want to share it with one of my friends'

I like to say that Ideas are networks and there are deep network connections. This is probably a good example as what I mean when I say this. Nikki out of the blue messages me about some old remix show about Terence Mckenna, our relationship like most goes in ebb and flows. That we talk for weeks on end and then out of nowhere one or both are MIA for weeks. Nikki has been radio silence for the past two weeks. So its a bit of cosmic giggle that out of the blue I get this message from her.

The Old Remix Show feat. Terence McKenna that Nikki asked about

There are moments in this ebb and flow of our creative relationship that I get frustrated, I might be in a good creative flow and would like to bounce some ideas out of somewhere, and she nowhere to be found. But at the same time, I don't want to bug her and she has her life to live. I understand as most do that are honest with themselves, life happens and gets on top of us all. So I'm always understanding that she gots to do what she gots to do. But time and time again because of this 'deep network' connection, even though we are not communicating we are still on the same page, somehow someway.

One way I like to view my intention with this post because it seems like a direct and worthwhile intention/connection is that "I want to spread Terence McKenna's memes." I mention this because McKenna said something in 1990 about himself and memes:

I used to think of myself as simply a cunning linguist, but now I realize that I am actually a meme replicator. A meme, as I'm sure you all have been told many times, is the smallest unit of an idea that still has coherency. Memes are to ideas what genes are to proteins.

In one talk, describing one narrative of his life, McKenna recalled some questions he had as a 14-year-old: "What are we? Where did we come from? And where are we going?" His response, a reasonable one, was to check the cultural database. "Surely there are answers to these questions," he thought.

He found that:

Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence. What does it mean? What does it mean, first of all, to be a biological creature—to be, as an animal—what is that? And then—what is it to be that, embedded then in a culture with histories and languages and aesthetic canons and literatures and scientific hypothesis about the cosmos, so forth and so on.

And my personal journey, if you want to put it that way, lay through a successive series of, um, I almost would—I almost said "disappointments" but "awakenings" could be another word, as I realized that nobody has their finger on what's going on. These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses. And science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category "matter and energy."

In my dream that spark this current musing of Terence, he told me that I was tainting my research with my own B.S.(Belief system), this quote is the root of that aspect of the dream.

"My technique, which I recommend to you, is, don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite" ["Under the Teaching Tree"]. "My technique, which I recommend to you, is, don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite" "Under the Teaching Tree".

Not believing was crucial to McKenna's thinking and life. "In order to be free I must not believe anything," he said. "Then all things can be freely commanded in the mind" "Bootstrapping Ourselves". And: "I once said to the mushroom: Why me? Why are you telling me all this stuff? And it without hesitation said 'because you don't believe anything.'" (McKenna called the voice he dialogued with after eating psilocybin mushrooms "the mushroom." I will explore this in week 6 of this column.)

He said in an interview in 1996. "I don't believe in anything. My anti-ideological stance makes it very important to believe nothing." A final quote on this frequent misunderstanding:

I have been vehemently accused by people who didn't understand me of not believing in anything. I don't believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a candle for me at night. It's a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip. After all, what is the basis for believing anything? I mean, you have to understand: You're a monkey. In some kind of a biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the economy of survival—this is not a philosophy course. So belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn't to be believed, it's to be dealt with—experienced and modeled "Gathering Momentum for a Leap".

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.

McKenna says this after observing:

One of the reasons I like to make this argument about the mushroom and the extraterrestrial is to show people how one can see things differently. If things can be seen that differently, how many ways can they be seen differently? Try to get people to stop waiting for the president to enlighten them. Stop waiting for history and the stream of historical events to make itself clear to you "Transhuman Encounters".

The mushroom said to me once, 'For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another' "Appreciating Imagination".

McKenna explains why this characteristic of psilocybin, the psychedelic substance found in Stropharia cubensis and other mushrooms, is significant:

[If] you have a molecule useful in a biological system, then in other biological systems you will get that same molecule or tiny variants; methylated or o-methylated... Well now, they search for extraterrestrial life with radio telescopes waiting for a signal. Fine. Another way would be to search the biological inventory of this planet for something that looks like it did not evolve from the main, broad flow of animal and plant evolution... I've never seen anybody discuss this kind of thing Interview with James Kent.

We have a symbiotic relationship with a non-material being that we call language

The new vision of nature is not as matter or energy, but as information, and information is expressed in the DNA. It's expressed epigenetically in culture. What's happening is that information was running itself on a primate platform, but evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense we have a symbiotic relationship to a nonmaterial being which we call language. We think it's ours, and we think we control it. This isn't what's happening. It's running itself. It's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving toward its own conclusions [The Evolutionary Mind]

The world is made of language

The world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language. Language is replicating itself in DNA, which, at the evolutionary apex, is creating societies of civilized beings that possess language and machines that use languages. Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us The Archaic Revival

The body is the nexus of the mystery of life

No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. I mean, that's mind over matter: That's the violation of every scientific principle in the books... The body is the nexus of the mystery of life. And our culture takes us out of the body, and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us; that's why it's called escape, because it's escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what's on the tube, from consuming trash media—it's escape from all of that, into the authenticity of the body ["Eros and the Eschaton"].

Life lacks a dimension that death will give it

I often like to think that our map of the world is so wrong that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. In the sense that a book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something which lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that, for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable degree of freedom "Philosophical Gadfly," 1:09:55.

A plan in the mind of the world soul to survive

When I look at human history, I see the accumulation of a sense of urgency long before anyone started worrying about ecocide or population. It's almost as though the world soul is the thing that wants to live and, sensing instability, it is trying to build a lifeboat out of the clumsy material of protoplasm. The world soul may actually sense the finite life of the sun, and it may be trying to build a lifeboat for itself to cross to another star. How in the world can you cross to another star when the only material available is protoplasm? Well, it may take fifty million years, but there are strategies. They have to do with genetic languages, and with developing a creature who deals with matter through abstraction and analysis, eventually creating technology. This is all an enzymatically mediated process, a plan in the mind of the world soul to survive Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness.

A mystery will not collapse into solution

The myths of science and religion and shamanism all represent a polarity between the mystery of the Self and the mystery of the Other—and remember a mystery is not to be confused with an unsolved problem; a mystery is by its nature mysterious and will not collapse into solution. We are unfamiliar with that kind of thing. We think that if there's a mystery, then experts of whatever kind can get it straightened out and issue a report. But this approach only works for trivia The Archaic Revival.

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), a British geneticist, wrote in Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927): "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." McKenna paraphrased this often, observing, also in True Hallucinations, that life is stranger than "even the strangest among us" can suppose.

To paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane: Our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose; it may be stranger than we can suppose True Hallucinations.