McKenna in New Maps of Hyperspace wrote: 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.
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.
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.more:
http://dmt-nexus.com/Files/Books/DMT/Ne ... rspace.pdf