thought feeds

i'm finally nearing the end of terrence mckenna - food of the gods. it is impossible for anthropologists to be more rigorous than speculative, but his argument is well thought out and while it doesn't provide an answer to everything, it does a magnificent job of connecting historical dots and placing humans and our weird ideas in a sensible context.

there's one note, however, that i'd like to make regarding his description of the dmt experience and external intelligence. in order to make sense of the world, we create internal representations based on external stimuli. in particular, we construct reflections of all of the people we've ever met, read about, or invented and interact with those, which explains why we expect certain behaviour from certain people without being familiar with their every motivation: we flesh out characters based on a tiny fragment of theirs that we have perceived through their words or actions, and our mappings are invariably off the mark.

selected components of these character reflections will be expressed as a person's self [i'm not even going to try to use words like "ego" and "superego"] and everything else will be considered "other". so it seems to me that the dmt experience might more likely be an interaction with one's internal other than with an external. in other words, when confronted by one's ancestors, one is confronted by personifications of one's own perception of history.

this confrontation is no less important, no less mystical, and no less authentic for all that it is internal: the human brain perceives and stores far more information than our puny consciousness can focus on, and so we can expect to be shocked, surprised and enlightened by what we've ignored when we go exploring inner space.

that sentiment also covers for our increased ability to communicate - what mckenna refers to as telepathy - because the opening of the gates allows us to capture more from the outside allowing for greater cognitive contamination.