IT: CROSS THE DOOR OF IMAGINATION™
™ {Terence Mckenna} was an ethnobotanist, a mystic, a master of the English language, and had a vast knowledge of human history, culture, and philosophy. His speech: Opening the door of creativity℗ 10.1999 (sponsored by Carnegie Museum of Art), which I coin “The prequel into Dimensional Design Theory” has been redirected and rebooted into an essay that fits into our frame of time.
Next to the figures Michael and David he was the IIIrd important figure, working on the fringes of the known, the dawn of imagination. Imaginational Theory, [5] will be built on the discoveries these 3 Men made, and a 4rd particular person; Alfred, which will be discussed in a future essay.
Illustrations are added from the book Super Abstraction – Volume 5th Dimension:
Banach ~ Tarski states that a 3D solid sphere can be decomposed into a finite number of pieces that can be rearranged—without stretching or distorting any of them—and reassembled into two spheres, each the same size as the original. From there, it follows that any 3D shape can be cut up and reassembled into any other 3D shape, irrespective of volume. They have an infinitely fine structure.
You could blow through the pieces of the spheres, as if they did not exist at all!
Nature : Art-making-machine
The theme that unites IT series is creativity, and the techniques by which the artist can refine his or her vision, expand the vision as well as communicate vision.
Before I get into these topics, I would give a small introduction on my notion of creativity per se, what is it itself. When I think like this, I cast my mind back to nature. Nature is the great visible engine of creativity, against which all other creative efforts are measured.
Creativity in nature has a curious distribution, it is something which accumulates through time. If we stand back and look at the universe at its earliest moments it is very simple. It was a plenum, it was without characters or characteristics, in Hindu mythology is called the Thuraya (attribute-less).
Naturally if something is without attribution you cannot say much about it. It takes a while for it to undergo a declension into more creative realms. These creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference, the precondition for creativity is disequilibrium, what mathematicians call chaos.
Through the life of the universe, as temperatures have fallen, more and more complex-compound structures have arisen. There has been a slipping back in this process, over very large spans of time we can say that creativity is conserved: the universe becomes more creative. From that point of view the universe is almost an art-making-machine, an engine to produce ever more novel forms of connectedness. An ever more exotic juxtaposition of disparate elements. Out of this we believe implicitly a set of principles that we can then apply to the human artist in the human world.
Nature's creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity, we emerge from nature. Almost, and this idea was present close to the surface of the medieval mind, we emerge from nature almost as its finest work of art.
The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature, this is a phrase you hear as late as the 18th century; “the productions of nature”. Human creativity emerges out of that. If you have a model of the Aristotelian great-ladder-of-being, or a more modern evolutionary view where we consolidate emergent properties and bring them to the focus of self-reflection.
Creation of Art : Understanding
I am sure that we could not carry out a discussion of this sort without observing that the prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist is the shaman. The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist, and the artist, into a single notion of caregiving and creativity.
To whatever degree art over the past several centuries has wandered in the desert…, is because this shamanic function has been either suppressed or forgotten. Different images of the artist have been held up at different times, the artist as an artisan, the artist as a handmaiden of a ruling class or family, the artist as designer to produce integrated objects into a civilization.
The notion of the artist as mystical journeyer: as one who is going into a world unseen by others and then returns to tell them of it, was pretty much lost in the post medieval and renaissance conception of art.
Until the late 19th century, where beginning with the romantics, there is a new permission to explore the irrational, this really is the bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist. A permission to explore the irrational, the permission for the irrational imagery of the unconscious. Surrealism and German expressionism make use of this permission. This idea began by destroying the idols of the tribe, dissolving the conceptual boundary of ordinary expectation.
There is a precondition for the Creation of Art : Understanding. I do not mean this in an intellectual sense, I mean it in the sense that A. intended.
A.: The apperception of pattern as such.
If we were to look at this room and we were to squint our eyes, I see that the room divides itself into people dressed in red and people dressed in blue. This is a pattern, and it tells me something about what I am looking at. I shift my depth of field; I am looking at where men are sitting and where women are sitting. This is a different pattern, and it tells me more about what I am looking at.
The number of patterns theoretically present in any construction is infinite. The depth of understanding cannot be known, everything is imminent. Understanding is the precondition for creativity, and this understanding is not so much intellectual as it is visual.
T ~ M: The point is that a good-art-education begins with the manual crafts; hand-drawing, sculpting. To see into nature, to see into the patterns present as such is the precondition for a kind of approach to the absolute.
Out of this process of seeing, understanding, the creative process ushers in novelty. In the context of nature, as a novelty producing engine, and ourselves as the handiwork of nature, but this same handiwork of nature which we represent we also internalize and re-express through the novelty of the human world.
If we take the shamanic model as a basis for authentic art, then certainly in the modern context we see missing from the repertoire of the artist, these techniques.
Sound light and dance : Hierophany
I want you to cast your mind back to a great germinal moment in the history of human thought which was about 25 000 years ago. The great glaciers that had covered most of the Eurasian landmass began to melt, and human populations that had been islanded from each other for about 15 millennia began to re-contact each other and reconnect, out of this came the Magdalenian revolution, from 18 000 to 22 000 years ago. A tremendous explosion of creativity and aesthetic self-expression on the part of the human species.
We find for the first-time bone-&-antler technology along with stone technology, musical instruments appear over a wide area. Cave paintings pop-up in areas so remote that it takes several hours to reach them. Painted and set up in dramatic tableaux specifically designed to bring together sound, light and dance: Hierophany. For the first time human beings are trying to come to grips with and make a cultural statement.
This pulling into matter, of the ideas of human beings in the forms of bead work and chipped stone and carved bone within 20 000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us. It points us toward the kind of extraplanetary mega civilization that we can feel operating on our own present.
This whole intellectual adventure in exteriorization of ideas is entirely an aesthetic adventure. Until very recently utility is only a secondary consideration, the real notion is a kind of seizure by the other which then forces us to take up matter: clay, bone, flint. A mental process where we then excrete these objects that have lodged within them ideas. This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal.
Abstract : Reality [Language]
The production and condensation of ideas that made it possible for the human animal is language. On the myriad phenomena that compose life on this planet. To my mind the place to look is human language. Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude.
“Yes, bees, dolphins and chimpanzees do what they do, but it is a hell of a step from there to Shakespeare.”
Language is the unique province of human beings and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language.
It is the synergy and catalysis of language that lies behind the emergence of human consciousness out of animal organization, but then its ability to set a course for a transcendental dimension and pursue that course against all the facilities of biology and history over 15 000 years.
Language has made us more than a group of pack hunting monkeys. It has made us a group of pack hunting monkeys with a dream, and the fallout from that dream has given us our glory and our shame. Our weaponry, our technology, our art, our hopes, our fears. All of this arises out of our own ability to articulate and to communicate with each other. The glory of the human animal is cognitive activity, song, dance sculpture, poetry. We cross from the domain of animal organization into the domain of the transcendent.
Artists, in all times and places, gain their power through relationships with helping spirits. Sometimes they call them ancestors, sometimes nature-spirits. The acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate intelligence is the precondition for authentic artistic practise.
Nowhere in our world do we have an institution that cannot be considered pathological, except in the now very thinly spread tradition of the Muse. Artists are given permission to talk in terms of; my inspiration, or a voice which told me to do this, or a vision that must be realized.
The thin thread of shamanic descent into our profane world leads through the office of the artist. If society takes hold of itself at this penultimate moment, then the artist following her thread out of the labyrinth, is going to have to follow this shamanic thread back through time.
The thread back into time
The most disempowering thing that has been done to us by the male dominant culture is to brush out our footprints into the past. We do not have a clue as to how we got here, most people cannot think further back than the latest election, let alone you know the arrival of the Vikings, the melting of the glaciers, so forth and so on. We have been disempowered by a rational tendency to deny our irrational roots. These roots are a kind of embarrassment to science because science is a special domain, art is that other special, separated domain.
X.: How seriously are we to take this obligation to follow the shamanic thread back into time?
This is the real challenge.
Still true and sad is the notion that very few of us pick up our sculpting tools, or our airbrush, knocking with fear, because we know we are invoking and acting with the Muse. I think the artists need to recover this inert sense of mystery.
M: One of the most depressing things to me about the art-scene, as I had a chance to reconnect with it because I was for a time in Paris, is that it now has a kind of directionless quality.
You can go into a gallery and you cannot tell whether it is 2021 or 1960, because a kind of cultish malaise has settled over art. All notion of any forward movement toward a transcendental ideal has been put aside for the exploration of visual gimmickry ingrained with political statements. What we need is a situation where “the school”, if you want to put it that way, or a tendency toward a coherent vision expressed by many artists is spontaneous.
Each artist imagines that they are pursuing their own vision, yet obviously they are in the grip of an archetype which is rising through the medium of the collective unconscious. The last time we saw this was in Abstract Expressionism. Probably in terms of tension and the amount of emotional gain between one artistic moment and another, the break between Abstract Expressionism and what preceded it, was the most radical break in American Art in this century.
Abstract Expressionism carried us into a confrontation, which was what the quantum physicists were telling us; the universe is filled upon by a field of integrated vibration. There is no top level, there is no bottom level. The ordinary structures of provisional space-time are simply that.
If we can rise out of the human dimension then we discover these larger more integrated dimensions where mind and nature somehow interpenetrate each other, a vision like that, a coherent vision has yet to announce itself.
I have a kind of reactionary side when I think about creative endeavours. Art is the endeavour to leave the animal domain behind, to create another dimension, orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history. We assume that consciousness is channelled between tremendously deep walls, that there is no way to force a confrontation with the unconscious.
X: This is our message to artists and to anybody else who cares to notice; hypermodern culture is moving against the expansion of consciousness and this plot prosecutes its goals through the limiting of language. Language is the battleground over which the fight will take place because what we cannot say, we cannot communicate.
By say; I mean dance, paint, sing, sculpt, compose.
TM: What we cannot say, we cannot communicate, we can conceive of things that we cannot communicate, yes. The inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before and no human being will ever see again, but in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collective mind.
We do not have centuries of gently unfolding time ahead of us, in which to gently tease apart the threads of human endeavour and create a bright new world. That is not our circumstance, this is a fire in a burning house, and to get a hold on the situation I think we are going to have to force the issue.
We ought to catalyse consciousness, to move faster toward its goals, whatever those goals may take shape. I believe that to the present moment language again in the broadest sense, speech, dance, musical composition. Language has just been allowed to grow, every man for himself.
The Birth of Transcendental Men
M: Our decisions affect every life form on the planet. With the rise of integrated A.I and robotics the birth of a new kind of humanity is going to take place, but there are still a lot of decisions to be made. How violent shall this birth be, what toll shall it take upon earth, what shape shall it be.
These are the decisions that artists can mediate and control. Most people are afraid of the unconscious. The failure of moral courage is most evident in our own community, the community of the artists. The poets have not provided a vision yet that we could all move in concert to.
Now we are in the absurd position of being able to do anything, and what we are doing is fouling our own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction. The poets, the artists, have not articulated a moral vision. The moral vision must come from the unconscious, it has nothing to do with these post-meaning movements in art: Post-Pop, Post-Post-Modernism, Post-Conceptualism.
Basically putting out a very exciting program for art. That art's task is to save the soul of mankind and that anything less is a trickery. If the artists who are self-selected are able to journey into the 5th dimension.
Ideology is extremely alien to art, political ideology I mean, and if you notice it is political ideology that increasingly has been calling the shots for the last seven or 5-10 years.
TM: I believe that a world without ideology could be created if what were put in place of ideology were the notion of the realization of the good, the true, and the beautiful; the three-tiered canon of the Platonic aesthetic. Reconnect the notion of the good, the true and the beautiful. Artists that go into this vast dimension that surrounds human history.
To go into an infinite depth and return from that world with the transcendental images that can lift us to a new cultural level.
The dull maps that rationalism has given us are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard. You must use the shamanic tools to rediscover nature. A nature that is not mute, not as JP Sartre said, a culmination of the modern nihilistic viewpoint.
“Nature is not mute; it is man who has become deaf.”
TM: I think the art community might produce more visionary breakthroughs if we would think of ourselves as an environment modelled after the natural environment. More appropriate adapted and suitable ideas would gather and link together into higher and higher organisms. For this to happen there is an obligation upon each one of us to carry our ideas clearly.
X: What is this new level of creativity?
You may be familiar with the theme that was very big in medieval religious art, the apocalypse of Saint Somebody, there are a number of those. Many of us may come out of a kind of secular background or have not given this kind of a religious idea too much consideration, but human history is on a collision course with a transcendental-object.
“A primate that has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity and gone into the business of running stock markets.”
A new historical landscape
Nano-biology-labs & Art-museums indicate to me the nearby presence of another dimension of a hyper-organizing-force, or what TM calls; the transcendental object. This transcendental object is casting an enormous shadow over the human historical landscape.
TM: Back in ancient Judea we were anticipating a Messiah, at Eleusis at the height of the practice of the eleusinian mysteries we were anticipating the Dark God. These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality are always clothed in the assumptions of the individual artist.
You do not have to give yourself over to fundamentalist religion to connect with the fact that human history is an adventure. This adventure has startling reverses and sudden plot shifts are very difficult to anticipate.
A civilization created out of the collapse of the medieval world…, it has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable.
We see that the ordinary linear expectation of history is breaking down and that the truth of the imminence of the mystery is breaking through all the structures of denial of the male dominator paradigm that has been in place so long.
TM: The way to bring it to a conclusion that will not betray the thousands of generations of people who suffered disease and migration, starvation, and a lonely death, so that we could sit here this evening, the redeeming of the human enterprise all lies then in helping this thing come to life.
Each artist is an antenna to the transcendental other. As we dive with our own history into that thing and then create a unique confluence of our uniqueness, and its uniqueness, we collectively create an arrow out of history, out of time, perhaps even out of matter, that will redeem then the idea that man is good. This is the promise of art and its fulfillment is never more near than the present moment.
Gnosticism : Simulation Theory
X: Is it that we are to transcend this world and go into some monumental dimension of energy or spirit that we can scarcely imagine? Is that the spring of art?
X2: Is the only way we can grant peace to this planet, to turn ourselves into moving electrons in a ytterbium cube that we bury on the Dark Side of the Moon?
Y: I would like to keep it all together. I would like to see us as a part of nature.
TM: Concerning the historical adventure that is called Gnosticism, is a very strong strain in the human animal, especially in western thought.
M: Simulation Theory (Gnosticism) in its most severe form can be boiled down to the proposition that we are strangers here, we do not belong here. This is not our world, we come from a place made of light and we will never rest until we return to it. The problem with that formulation is it sets us up for tremendous discontinuity and unhappiness, until we achieve that return to the realm of light, a Faustian bargain.
ELI67: A Faustian bargain states that what the people sacrifice–their time and intellectual curiosity– was far more valuable than the worldly benefits they received.
X: Yet the other possibility which I, as a lover of nature inclined to think, is there is not some way that we can make our peace with the earth. Is there not a way that we can have archaic and eat it too?
More and more, to my own discomfort I conclude that there is not, the human adventure is a forward-going adventure. We do close off options.
We are never again going to be a small tribe of hunter, hunter-gatherers with our flocks on the plains of Africa. Long ago that option was cut off. If we are going to storm around as tourists, at least we should do it with a sense of what has been left behind, and not just turn ourselves into a mechanical technocrat. The living spirit must be brought with us, and this is really the high task for artists.
X: How can we, who have always had a relationship to the spirits of the earth, of the waters of the sky, if we are setting out to Mars, or into artificial nature, not leave our human soul behind?
TM: We must internalize the entirety of the biological world. If we solely pursue to become a cosmonautic species, we are going to get out there and discover that something vital was left behind. This is a great tension between us and the earth, between our destiny as an energy-using-space-travelling-species. That is all-male dominance and male mentality talking.
The need to fold that into a nurturing stance, a preserving stance, a stance that recognizes the conservation of our archaic values is really our only hope. Those two things exist in a dynamic tension. This issue must be clarified by the artistic community. It must be clarified before we can make a definitive step into the future. Right now, we are uncertain.
dMT (direct message): Well, there is no man in it, it is the convergence of the collective soul of humanity. I see history as an alchemical process, and the task of the artist to complete this alchemical fusion.
It is irritating, it is irrational, that mind and matter are approaching each other on a trajectory that will bring them together with no damage to the supreme nature of each. We cannot imagine it, because for us things are mind or matter, we cannot conceive of a unity of opposites (Coincidentia oppositorum), and yet it is that which we must hold in our mind if we want to see truth.
Even in quantum physics they teach you that the universe is composed of islands of Boolean algebra embedded in an ocean of ordinary algebra; it is both and. It is not a Nietzschean program of realization, it is an opening to ascent.
The promptings of our religions, with all the irrational and hysterical trappings that attend them, nevertheless have a core perception; Between man and nature is a compact.
This pact will be redeemed. We have descended into the inferno of matter to try and recover the pearl of immortality, a perfected and reconstructed earth. We are at the critical point in this equation. We are not acting for ourselves; we are the energy manipulating species that at this moment in time carries the hopes of all life on earth. All nature is watching this drama.
A Spark of Imaginational Theory
The life of our star is finite, the life of the planet is finite, but potentially self-reflecting understanding may be in fact immortal and yet it is breaking out of the trappings of matter. This is a process so large, so strange, that I do not think a single mind can encompass.
It is something that we triangulate repeatedly, and for me Dimensional Thought is literally rising into a higher dimension. From that higher dimension the artistic voyager carries out a transection of the lower dimensional object, which is this world.
In the same way we can build up an image of a cone out of an infinite number of ellipsoidal trans-sections, we can build up a true model of the world by carrying out a number of these trans-sections from a higher dimension. Then it shows us how parts of the intrinsic reality of our world really works.
X: How do I know if you start to understand how the world really works?
It works through love, dream, and intention to connect. These are ultimately irrational values, and they must be irrationally embraced. The momentum toward a rational conclusion is tremendous but unfortunately completely fatal. The invitation of the artist has always extended toward a radical break with the momentum of rationalism.
In this moment of global crisis, in pollution, diversion of wealth, rapid extinction of animal life and diversity. A time in which there is a lack of visionary political stakeholders, the artist is at last called upon to perform.
There must be no stitches dropped, because this dance is the dance of transformation of the planet itself. This is the moment of empowerment, this is what all the artists of the past built toward, this final magical invocation.
James Joyce: “Man will be dirigible”. – We will find a way to make our dreams, the dreams of the planet and the life that carries one dream.
To reconnect-up to the through the channels of communication that were always there, but that have not been really taken up since the late Neolithic.It is time for us to call home and deep in ourselves we know how to do it. It is just a matter of having the courage to act and have that empowering act spread back through the psychology of the planet.
I am very optimistic. We as a world-connected-generation are awakening to a new day, coming back from a long night of the dark soul. But it has been done collectively, gently, lovingly and with a complete faith that we are a mere infant in the arms of nature.
We are not anomaly, we are granted peculiarity, but we are a necessary oddness to the completion of the whole and therefore we have been graced with self-reflection and we can redeem that tremendous empowerment by going forward.
To create the world through art and the pursuit of meaning.
IT: CROSS THE DOOR OF IMAGINATION™ transcripted on Terrence Mckenna 1990 talk “Opening the door of creativity“ ℗ Images from Super Abstraction Vol 5th Dimension, M. Production. ©️ [EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY] Triple-A Society Published 05.2021