THE INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
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To inquire about Time Wave software in both Macintosh and DOS versions please contact Blue Water Publishing at 1-800-366-0264. fax# (503) 538-8485. or write: P.O. Box 726 Newberg, OR 97132 Passage from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman. Commentary by Harold Bloom. Copyright © 1965 by David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom. Published by Doubleday Company, Inc. Used by permission. THE INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. Copyright © 1975, 1993 by Dennis J. McKenna and Terence K. McKenna. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. Interior design by Margery Cantor and Jaime Robles FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1975 BY THE SEABURY PRESS FIRST HARPERCOLLINS EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1993 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McKenna, Terence K., 1946- The Invisible landscape : mind, hallucinogens, and the I ching / Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna.—1st HarperCollins ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-06-250635-8 (acid-free paper) 1. I ching. 2. Mind and body. 3. Shamanism. I. Oeric, O. N. II. Title. BF161.M47 1994 133—dc2o 93-5195 CIP 01 02 03 04 05 RRD(H) 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 In Memory of our dear Mother Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling into the Abyss. Each took his station and his course began with sorrow care. In sevens tens fifties, hundreds, thousands, number'd all According to their various powers, subordinate to Urizen And to his sons in their degrees to his beauteous daughters, Travelling in silent majesty along their order'd ways In right lined paths outmeasur'd by proportions of number, weight And measure, mathematic motions wondrous along the deep, In fiery pyramid, or Cube, or unornamented pillar square Of fire, far shining, travelling along even to its destin'd end; Then falling down a terrible space, recovering in winter dire Its wasted strength, it back returns upon a nether course, Till fir'd with ardour fresh recruited in its humble season, It rises up on high all summer, till its wearied course Turns into autumn. Such the period of many worlds. Others triangular, right angled course maintain. Others obtuse Acute, Scalene, in simple paths; others move In intricate ways, biquadrate, Trapeziums, Rhombs, Rhomboids, Parallelograms triple quadruple, polygonic, In their amazing hard subdu'd course in the vast deep. Contents List of Figures and Tables x Foreword to the 1994 edition XI Preface to the 1994 edition XVII Acknowledgments to the 1975 edition XXI Acknowledgments to the 1994 edition XXII Introduction to the 1994 edition XXV PART ONE: Mind, Molecules, and Magic 1 Introduction 3 1 The Figure of the Shaman 9 2 Shamans and Schizophrenia 19 3 Organismic Thought 29 4 Toward a Holographic Theory of Mind 41 5 Models of Drug Activity 57 6 An Experiment at La Chorrera 95 7 Psychological Reflections on La Chorrera 109 PART TWO: Time, Change, and Becoming 119 Introduction 121 8 The / Ching as Lunar Calendar and Astronomical Calculator 123 9 Order in the / Ching and Order in the World 135 10 The King Wen Sequence as a Quantified Modular Hierarchy 151 11 The Temporal Hierarchy and Cosmology 167 12 Toward a Physics of Concrescence 181 13 The Wave of Time 193 14 Evolution and Freedom 201 Epilogue 207 Appendix 211 Bibliography 221 Index 225 List of Figures and Tables 1 How a hologram is made 43 2 Diagrammatic representation of mind-world interaction 49 3 Structural types of principal hallucinogens 60, 61 4 Actions of neurotransmitters at the synapse 63 5, 6, and 7 Reduction in fluorescence values of drugs 72,73 8 A proflavin molecule 74 9 Intercalation of drug molecules into DNA 76 10 and 11 Aspects of electron spin resonance 83,84 12 Banisteriopsis caapi and harmala alkaloids and their analogs 96, 97 13 Stropharia cubensis 99 14 Structures of hallucinogens related to tryptophan 102 15 The King Wen arrangement of the sixty-four I Ching hexagrams 124,125 16 Permutations of I Ching hexagrams (Table I) 128 17 Change in the King Wen sequence (Table II) 142 18 Graph showing the first order of difference of the King Wen sequence 144 19 The eschaton 148, 149 20 The levels and durations of the temporal hierarchy (Table III) 154 21 Thirteen line lengths comprise the wave shown in figure 18B 157 22 Quantification of the degree and direction of skew of the simple wave of figure 18B 159 23 The seven types of divergence, congruence, and overlap that end points of line segments of the simple wave of figure 18B may display 159 24 The values generated when the right-hand series of point valuations of figure 23 are applied to the simple wave of figure 18B 160 25 Quantification values 162, 163 26 The eschaton mathematically formulated 164, 165 27 Quantification of novelty in human history 172 28 1512 years, from a.d. 500 to a.d. 2012 173 29 63 years, from January 1950 to December a.d. 2012 174 30 20 years, from January 1980 to January A.D. 2000 175 31 Heliacal rising of the galactic center, December 21, 2012 197 32 History's fractal mountain 209 Foreword to the 1994 edition When I was researching my history of the psychedelic movement, I pur- sued many odd and forgotten books. Most were easily obtained, either from libraries or used bookstores. One, however, proved elusive. Written by two brothers, Dennis and Terence McKenna, it was called The Invisible landscape, and it had great posthumous word of mouth. Now there's a truly heavy book, the owner of one bookstore devoted to mysticism and consciousness told me when I queried him about it. Haven't seen one in years. Which is about how long it took me to find my copy. In Boston. My cry of wild exultation lifting heads all over the bookstore. The bibliophiles among you will appreciate the keen anticipation I felt as I carried it to a nearby cafe and cracked it open and discovered that, in- deed, this was a truly heavy book. Dense. Technical. Fascinating. Infuriating. Marvelously weird. Mixed in with theories drawn from the study of schizophrenia, molecu- lar biology, and ethnobotany were pungent disquisitions on shamanism and psychedelic philosophy. Plus what seemed to be a story about an en- counter with an insectoid intelligence who had curious things to say about the nature of time\ The closest thing I could compare it to was an alchemi- cal text published (in the classic period—the seventeenth century—before the bonds linking science and magic were severed, when it was still possible to have a scientist magician on the order of Isaac Newton. Since that first reading, I have met the authors of The Invisible Land- scape. Though I have never seen them together, I'm told they're one of the great brother acts on the planet. Dennis is the scientific McKenna—the one with the doctorate in psychopharmacology—slow-spoken, factual. Terence is the quicksilver poet-philosopher McKenna. He's what I imag- ine George Bernard Shaw might have been like if Shaw had been born in the American West in the 1940s and educated at Berkeley in the psyche- delic '60s. Cast your mind back to that milieu as you begin this book. Back to those few months when there was a steep plunge into novelty, as Terence McKenna might say, that carried the most restless minds of the Baby Boom with it. Back to when the possibility that the world could be re- made sparkled in the sunshine of what will seem to be, as it recedes into history, a time of perpetual summer—the summer of love, of Woodstock, of massive spring marches through cherry-blossomed Washington to levi- tate the Pentagon. Our appetite for simplicity has caused us to compress the chaos of the '60s into one monolithic Youth Revolt. But there were two philosophies then among the revolutionaries on how the world might be remade. One path, endorsed by the political activists, advocated a traditional Western strategy: seizing political power and using that vantage to raise conscious- ness and save the world. The other path proposed an attack on con- sciousness itself using a controversial and soon outlawed family of psychochemicals—the psychedelics. Hippies and activists. Could a society heal its social ills without first addressing its own internal flaws? As Tim Leary, perhaps the most cele- brated spokesman of this second option, put it: If all the Negroes and left-wing college students in the world had Cadillacs and full control of society, they would still be involved in an anthill social system unless they opened themselves up. Opened up. There in a nutshell was the problem vis-a-vis a psychedelic politics: these substances opened up much too much. They were a doorway into a uni- verse of strange and sometimes terrifying information. These were not facile tools; rather, they were an invitation to explorers, and a percentage of the Baby Boom's best and brightest responded by turning into mind wanderers, seeking adventure in the unclaimed real estate of the imagination. Such was the case with our two authors, who were convinced that the future of the species could best be secured through a transformation of consciousness.