"What Is the Unconscious?" Part 6 - Terence McKenna

Hi All,

This is the last part of the "What is the Unconscious" seminar. Eli is providing the topic. Here's his write-up:

Before we start exploring the idea of hyperspace and how it links to the unconscious, there are a few preliminary ideas I feel the need to preface this conversation with. Psychedelic drugs are not essential to the ideas being brought forward, but they played a critical role in their initial formation. That fact naturally and typically raises a healthy skepticism.

The central impetus for defining hyperspace were the entities and alien landscapes that come from the many and varied reports of individuals after high-dose trips. Users describe meeting entities that move and speak in a way completely other than them, i.e. meeting a distinct intelligence. Users also speak of alien landscapes, buildings of great magnitude and impossible geometry, strange cities. Most reports are unique, but the entities tend to fit into certain familiar archetypes: the Judge, the Father, the Mother, the Trickster. This is the part — where aliens from another dimension are introduced — where skepticism turns into dismissal. At this point people say something like: "People taking these drugs at such high doses must already be aware of these reports, so they are influenced by others. These are not true unique entities but merely drug-induced fragments of the user's mind." In other words, they must have read or heard about it somehow.

At the surface I believe this claim sounds empirical, but in actuality it isn't, quite. Reports from naive users and non-Western subjects (Rick Strassman's DMT work at the University of New Mexico, and more recently in the 2020 survey of over 2,500 DMT users by Alan Davis, Roland Griffiths) don't diverge the way cultural priming would predict. If prior exposure was the catalyst you'd expect reports to fragment sharply if that exposure was absent.

Secondly, ordinary perception produces an environment that feels external day to day, driving to work, watching a movie, what have you are all experiences that feel external to use but are in a sense just chemical signals stiched together by our human instruments of perception. So the fact that meeting these entities could be an "internal" experience doesn't end up holding a lot of weight.

Lastly, users repeatedly report being shown new information: being taught something they didn't know, being corrected in something they previously thought, encountering content that feels like a separate intelligence authored it. You, the skeptical reader, can write this off as the unconscious being creative. But notice what that concedes. A region of the mind that routinely generates novel ideas, teaches the user things, corrects them, and behaves as if it has agendas independent of theirs. This can be called "unconscious," but it doesn't stop acting like its own intelligence just because we've put a familiar label on it. However, if you've made it to the end and are not still not "on-board" with the idea of entities or you just don't buy it, I kindly ask that you play along.

In the way "hyperspace" has been described so far — an external dimension populated with entities — there is a key distinction between Jung and McKenna worth naming. McKenna was willing to use Jungian vocabulary, but Jung focused on decoding symbols: "what does this archetype mean to me?" McKenna focused more on "how can I hold a conversation with this archetype?" i.e. Hermeneutic versus real encounter. (Jung got more open-minded about real encounters in his later years.) McKenna used "hyperspace" and "collective unconscious" loosely, and often interchangeably, but underneath he made an implicit ordering: hyperspace came first, and the collective unconscious was its shadow in us. Hyperspace was the origin and progenitor of symbols, languages, myth — the place the material was coming from, not just the place it was stored. To get even more radical, McKenna believed the Logos — the structuring word or intelligence behind reality, for example in the Bible the Logos is described as the Word of God — was something you could literally see and hear. To McKenna hyperspace exists outside of time and it influences the present to assemble itself.