The experiment at La Chorerra
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
When I started this blog, the idea was to post a record from my collection every day. Three years ago that seemed still like a pretty good idea. But nowadays there is hardly any record that isn’t already featured on a blog somewhere. I think that in my collection are still enough un-blogged records to make a few more years of this Soundtrack-of-my-life, but even then: how interesting is that? I must admit that I am beginning to loose my interest in the other music blogs that I used to enjoy very much up until only a year ago.
The past few days I feel a growing desire to write about esoterics. There is so much interesting stuff that is hardly covered, or still completely obscure. I would love to write more about the ideas of Terence McKenna. In a comment to a recent post on McKenna ( here ) Matt sent me a link to the “True Hallucinations” audio book, read by Terence himself. The description of the experience that Terence and his brother have in the Amazon jungle is one of my all time favourite tales. It is one of the weirdest stories I have ever heard. I must have read it at least fifteen times, but listening to it made me hear all kind of details that I had not noticed before. Here is the 11th chapter, in which Terence describes the incredible trip that he and his brother had. The experience lasted several weeks and there are many details that scream for more research.
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In this story Terence McKenna describes phenomena that cannot be explained by the models of how-Life-works that we learn in school and at university. Like how his brother seems to have access to information that only exists in the minds of others. And boy, do I love the part where he starts making mental phone calls to people in the past!
Of course, there are millions of people claiming that they have experienced things that are beyond logic and reason, but most of these experiences seem psychological. I mean, it seems to me that inner and outer experiences easily mix under certain circumstances, and many people don´t seem to be aware when this blurring occurs.
The best stories are the ones with hard proof. Like the breaking of the knife in the household of Carl Jung. This story is related in every book about Jung, but last week a friend gave me two of her Jung books to read and in one I found this photograph of the broken knife:
As I see it, our minds are infinite. Like Terence McKenna said: the mind is a universe sized mystery that we all carry inside our head. At one end the mind ends as the thoughts that we register on our mental screen. Sad to say, but in our culture this is for many people all they seem know about the mind. But I think that this layer is only the most superficial one, and beyond this layer are several other layers. Carl Jung made a model for these layers and gave them names. The deeper layers are part of what Jung named the “collective unconscious”. I sometimes see them as libraries to which all individuals have access. But in fact I think that this is not a good image: the mind is a continuum that is open at both ends. And these ends meet: both ends end in what we experience as Reality, the physical world that we live in.
When a mind is overflowing, things can show up in Reality through the back end. Here is where you get unexplainable phenomena. But they are rare: in most so called miracles or mysteries the explanation seem to be that people are not aware that they are projecting inner images on their outside world. In a state halfway between dreaming and being awake this can easily happen, as I have verified many times myself. But a metal knife breaking in four parts while it is laying in a drawer, that is different stuff. And being able to stay awake for three weeks without feeling tired or going mad, like McKenna did at La Chorerra, that is something else too.
I would love to compile al my favourite unexplained stories in a book one day.