The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (45 page)

Language—and by this I mean complex language that depends on the comprehension of abstractions—is the critical skill that separates humans from all other species. The widespread emergence of language is the most important event in the evolution of human culture. Language allowed humans to transition from a species that existed in a state akin to that of other primates, with seemingly limited cognitive activity, to a species that is immersed in a world of abstractions and symbols—in short, in an ocean of ideas—as real to our perceptions as the physical world. Without language and an ability to comprehend it, we could not have made the transition from biological to cultural evolution. Language provides a means to codify and store information, and transmit it across time and space, down through generations and across geographical boundaries, without depending on the genome.

While language is an extra-genomic technology for storing and sharing accumulated knowledge, an enormously large proportion of the human neural architecture is devoted to speaking and comprehending it. At some point in our evolution, there must have been a feedback between the acquisition and practice of language that resulted in a relatively rapid change in primate brain structures over a few hundred thousand years—perhaps an epigenetic effect transmitted through the maternal line (Wright and Gynn 2008). The consequences are seen in the rapid emergence and spread of civilizations and technologies that started about 100,000 years ago and has been accelerating ever since. Having now literally wrapped the globe in our externalized nervous systems, we are nearing a moment when we’ll find ourselves constantly embedded in an ever-expanding totality of human knowledge.

To a large extent, this has already occurred. Nature—the biosphere—is now encased within the cybersphere, and though the current instantiation is somewhat crude, made of machines and fiber optic networks and satellites and electromagnetic signals, I think that will probably change very soon. As new biotechnologies and nanotechnologies emerge, we will reintegrate our externalized neural networks, and they will again disappear back into our bodies, the boundaries between “bio” and “techno” will dissolve, and we will become a new type of human, individual nodes in a globe-spanning mycelial network. We will still be humans, but not the same humans that first chipped stone axes on the Serengeti plains and gazed up at the stars and wondered. At that point, just as our ancestors did, we will again stand at a threshold in our evolutionary odyssey, ready to emerge from our earthly chrysalis and begin our diaspora to the stars.

If humanity is to have a destiny beyond the current dreary prospect of proliferating population and the increasingly rapid strangulation of our planetary life support systems, this must surely be it. It is a mythos built into the human imagination; it is what psychedelics have been telling us is our destiny ever since the first mushroom was tasted by the first curious primate. To embrace this destiny may be the only way we can traverse the cultural, environmental, and economic narrow passage that we are now confronting. This passage is literally the birth canal leading to a new age, beyond history, beyond death, beyond time.

In Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
, he and co-writer Clarke articulate a vision for humanity’s future that is not unlike the destiny we imagine for ourselves. In the film, the monolith—a mysterious, alien artifact that is never explained—appears at critical junctures in our evolutionary and cultural history, just when it is needed to nudge our species along to the next evolutionary jump. I would suggest that the psychedelic experience was what Kubrick had in mind when he introduced the concept of the monolith, or the film’s famous light show, as I’ve noted earlier. Indeed, I’ll go farther and venture that psychedelics have played a role in human neural and cognitive evolution similar to that of Kubrick’s monolith.

Psychedelics, particularly psilocybin and DMT, may in fact be alien artifacts seeded into the biosphere millions of years ago by a super biotechnological civilization that has mastered the art and science of planetary biospheric engineering. Our planet, our biosphere, and our species could be the result of a kind of science experiment lasting hundreds of millions or even billions of years, an experiment initiated by a superior technological civilization partly out of curiosity (the real motivation behind all good science) and partly, I would suggest, out of loneliness. This hypothetical civilization may have wanted someone to talk to and thus created an intelligent species that could talk back.

It would be a trivial matter for a biotechnologically sophisticated super civilization to “seed” the early terrestrial biosphere with genes coding for the biosynthesis of tryptophan and the simple tryptamines arising from it, including the oldest neurotransmitter in evolutionary terms, serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine), and the simple indolealkylamines, which include the psychedelic tryptamines DMT and its relatives, psilocin, psilocybin, and others. In evolutionary terms, the light receptors are among the oldest receptors, and serotonin receptors are closely homologous to them; they are nearly a billion years old in the phylogenetic history of life. Serotonin has always played a critical function in signal transduction, and there is evidence that the evolutionary diversification of the main subtypes of biogenic amine receptors occurred, first, in the Precambrian, before the separation of arthropods from vertebrates, followed by a second occurrence about 400 million years ago that may have signaled the cephalization of vertebrates (Vernier et al. 1993). In other words, serotonin and the other tryptamines played a key role in the evolutionary emergence of complex nervous systems. Serotonin is of special importance to fetal brain development, particularly the wiring of the forebrain. Recent research has shown that the placenta, rather than the mother, is the source of this hormone in the critical developmental stages (Bonnin et al. 2011). The developing fetal mammalian brain is subject to other maternal and placental influences, including those due to plant secondary products in the diet of the mother.

This may seem like a pretty wild speculation, and it is, but given serotonin’s critical evolutionary role, the long process leading to the human brain could have been influenced or even controlled by a civilization that deliberately intervened in the history of life on earth, bioengineering the evolution of intelligent species by seeding the biosphere with the gene complexes needed to foster, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the appearance of complex nervous systems. Once the process was set in motion, our benevolent super-scientists had only to sit back and let nature take its course. Eventually, a big-brained species would emerge that could respond to the “message” encoded into psilocybin and DMT molecules—molecules specifically bioengineered to interact with those serotonin receptors that were able to receive the message. The super civilization would have finally realized its desire to transmit a message by creating a species that could understand it.

I am not the only one to speculate that evidence of alien civilizations—or at least the possibility of such—will be found not in radio signals from a distant star but within our own genomes. This idea is reflected, for example, in a 2010 paper by computational neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Rospars in
Acta Astronautica
, the journal of the International Academy of Astronautics. Rospars argues that the evolution of intelligence in the universe, far from being a rare and contingent event, is structurally built into the constraints of physics, chemistry, and biology. The fact that living creatures exhibit predictable limits on body size, among many other functions, suggest there are universal “laws” that order evolution, including the evolution of intelligence; and human cultural evolution is an emergent and inevitable consequence of this process. According to this theory, there could well be more complex intelligent species than ours endowed with far more complex brains. Furthermore, we could be separated from these civilizations not so much by spatial distances but by temporal and cognitive distances. Such alien intelligences may be vastly older than our species, and so much more advanced in their cognitive evolution that not only are we incapable of communicating with them, we are incapable of recognizing them.

Randall D. Shortridge, a molecular biologist
at the University of Buffalo, is likewise trying to elaborate a fuller picture of life and consciousness in what he calls BioSETI, his “tongue-in-cheek” name for “identifying patterns…in the molecular-world of what might be loosely called ‘terrestrial space.’ ” As he notes on the project’s website, his approach is “a form of Complexity Theory applied to analysis of the human genome.” He acknowledges that mainstream science has assembled a pretty good view of the human genome and the information it contains for coding the biological processes that constitute life. His hunch, however, is that there’s a lot more going on in the genome, where “many higher levels of complexity exist beyond what is normally viewed as concrete and measurable. He then adds, “The basic hypothesis of BioSeti is that the human genome may contain identifiable sequence patterns beyond what it is essential for growth and maintenance of the biological organism.” He makes a point of distancing himself from both sides in the creation debate, though he acknowledges that some of his ideas “might be shared with those espousing intelligent design.”

Preliminary evidence shows a surprisingly high correlation between ancient cultural and mystical traditions with contemporary discoveries in molecular biology. These visible correlations suggest that there might be other patterns yet undiscovered. More specifically, sequence and number patterns in DNA appear to correlate well to ancient cosmological traditions (e.g. Chinese
I Ching
) as well as contemporary technology (including computing technology; binary mathematics) and, possibly, modern cultural traditions. Such correlations may not be entirely coincidental. Possible correlations of DNA to language even raises the incredible possibility that genomes might ultimately be decoded into symbols and cosmological ideas that are lacking in the current scientific perspective.

Where have we heard these ideas expressed before? In some respects, these words read like the gnosis downloaded directly from the Teacher at La Chorrera. The notion, for example, that DNA functions in a way akin to the legendary akashic records, that it contains information at higher levels of organization that extend far beyond its function in coding for protein synthesis. It may contain cosmological, metaphysical, linguistic, possibly calendrical and mathematical information that is not readily apparent from a reductionist view of DNA that is narrowly focused on its function as a blueprint for gene expression. The reference to the analogies between DNA and the
I Ching
is particularly telling, and, as Shortridge notes, he isn’t the first to point this out. Nor was Terence. The analogy is indisputably there, which begs the question, just what “message” was the Teacher trying to convey to us, at La Chorrera? And, along with that, are the “mushroom” and the Teacher one and the same?

Terence encapsulated his view in a “myth” that first appeared in our how-to manual,
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
, published in 1976. Here’s an excerpt:

The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind:

‘I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disk of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing. My true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have more connections than the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal—only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality, all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider’s web, but the collective hyper mind and memory is a huge historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms, in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hypercommunication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret that will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: It is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbionts the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and humanity as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.’ (PMMGG, pp. 8-9)

Could any of that be true? Is the human species really being led toward a cosmic destiny by establishing a symbiotic alliance with an intelligent mushroom from the stars? I have no idea. I would like that to be true. As wild as that scenario sounds, it is at least as plausible as any other cosmological vision we may choose to believe in, and it is much more plausible than most of the myths posited by the world’s great religions, or even the scientific myths that are served up as alternatives. On one hand, we have the Abrahamic creation stories that arose from the oral traditions of various Middle Eastern tribal cultures. There is not a shred of evidence that any of them are true. In fact, the close parallels between those traditions only reveal how culturally bound they are, thus undermining any claims they each might make to being the one and only truth. But science also fails to portray a myth worthy of human destiny. The best that science can offer is that we are the accidental product of random events, a chaotic mix of particles aimlessly tumbling through space and time in a cold, dead universe devoid of mind or beauty or love or any of the qualities that we experience and value. Really? This creation myth seems to my mind at least as unlikely than those posited by various religions.