What’s so progressive about our Politics?

It’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.

The domain of the Strange, the Marvelous and the Fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness.”

Suzanne Cesaire 1941, Tropiques

At the Locks of the Void

by Aime Cesaire

In the foreground and in longitudinal flight a dried-up brook drowsy roller of obsidian pebbles. In the background a decidedly not calm architecture of torn down burgs of eroded mountains on whose glimpsed phantom serpents chariots a cat’s-eye and alarming constellations are born. It is a strange firefly cake hurled into the gray face of time, a vast scree of shards of ikons of blazons of lice in the beard of Saturn. On the right very curiously standing against the squamous wall of crucified butterfly wings open in majesty a gigantic bottle whose very long golden neck drinks a drop of blood from the clouds. As for me I am no longer thirsty. It gives me pleasure to think of the world undone like an old copra mattress like an old voodoo necklace like the perfume of a felled peccary. I am no longer thirsty. All heads belong to me. It is sweet to be gentle as a lamb. It is sweet to open the great sluicegates of gentleness:

through the shaken sky
through the exploded stars
through the tutelary silence
from very far beyond myself I come toward you
woman sprung from a beautiful laburnum
and your eyes wounds barely closing
on your modesty at having been born

It is I who sings with a voice still caught up in the babbling of elements. It is sweet to be a piece of wood a cork a drop of water in the torrential flood of the end and of the new beginning. It is sweet to doze off in the shattered heart of things. I no longer have any sort of thirst. My sword made from a shark’s-tooth smile is becoming terribly useless. My mace is very obviously out of season and out of play. Rain is falling. It is a crisscross of rubble, it is a skein of steel for reinforced concrete, it is an incredible stowage of the invisible by first-rate ties, it is a branchwork of syphilis, it is the diagram of a brandy bender, it is the graphic representation of a seismic floodtide, it is a conspiracy of dodders, it is the nightmare’s head impaled on the lance point of a mob mad for peace and for bread.

I advance to the region of blue lakes. I advance to the region of sulphur springs.
I advance to my crateriform mouth toward which have I struggled enough? What have I to discard? Everything by god everything. I am stark naked. I have discarded everything. My genealogy. My widow. My companions. I await the boiling, I await the baptism of sperm. I await the wingbeat of the great seminal albatross supposed to make a new man of me. I await the immense tap, the vertiginous slap that will consecrate me as a knight of a plutonian order. I await in the depths of my pores the sacred intrusion of benediction.

And suddenly it is the outpouring of great rivers
it is the friendship of toucans’ eyes
it is the fulminating erection of virgin mountains
I am pregnant with my despair in my arms
I am pregnant with my hunger in my arms and my disgust in my mouth
I am invested. Europe patrols my veins like a pack of filariae at the stroke of midnight. To think that their philosophies tried to provide them with morals. That ferocious race won’t have put up with it.

Europe pig iron fragment
Europe low tunnel oozing a bloody dew
Europe old bag Europe
Europe old dog Europe worm-drawn coach
Europe peeling tattoo Europe your name is a raucous clucking and a muffled shock

I unfold my handkerchief it is a flag
I have donned my beautiful skin
I have adjusted my beautiful clawed paws

Europe
I hereby join all that powders the sky with its insolence all that is loyal and fraternal all that has the courage to be eternally new all that knows how to yield its heart to the fire all that has the strength to emerge from an inexhaustible sap all
that is calm and self-assured
all that is not you
Europe
eminent name of the turd

From: 

Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry

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Framed by Surrealism the scholar and entheogen enthusiast as Botanist Terence McKenna is quite interesting as a resource to return to, lespecially due his public discourses, and most especially in 2024. This quote from a workshop-https://www.organism.earth/library/document/eros-and-the-eschaton

Roughly 10:14 minutes in—Someone once said, “What’s so progressive about media? It’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.” It can be. It can be. So this is very interesting: that, apparently, the way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity—chemical, electrical, social, biological… whatever—new forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry, but it is more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life, and yet it is more than animal life. So this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science: that, out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe—nature—is a novelty-conserving or complexity-conversing engine. It makes complexity and it preserves it, and it uses it.

https://mckenna.academy/the-experiment-at-la-chorrera-a-50-year-retrospective/

By the time 1970 drew to a close, we had decided it was time to get serious about pursuing this investigation. Nothing else seemed more important. We were both dealing with the grief and trauma of our mother’s death, intermixed with a good dollop of guilt, as we irrationally felt that our thoughtlessness, selfishness, and insensitivity for our mother’s concerns for us had at least contributed to her early death if not caused it. And we struggled with that guilt in a way only good Catholic boys can do (even though by then we were barely Catholic, but one never escapes Catholic guilt; it is built into one’s soul).

On the political front, we were disillusioned. The late 60s and early 70s were turbulent times on a scale similar to what is happening in our own troubled era today. It seemed like politics would never yield any sort of viable solution to the challenges of the times. And although we identified with the counterculture, we never really fully bought into it; many of its memes seemed superficial and anti-intellectual and we thought of ourselves as intellectuals. These were complex times; and we were complex people, desperately seeking answers, while not really knowing what the questions were. So these were the circumstances that motivated us to drop whatever we had been doing and make preparations to leave for South America in pursuit of what we had come to call “The Secret.”

==

Articles

NEW MKULTRA DISCOVERY: Terence McKenna admited that he was a “deep background” and “PR” agent (CIA or FBI).

by logosmedia • August 23, 2013 • 227 Comments

Agent_McKenna_2

This explosive audio clip that was just brought to my attention today by "Scott" reveals, in Terence McKenna's own words, that he was in fact an agent.

The audio clip comes from Dec. 1994 from his lecture at the Esalen Institute, which may be found below in full.

As I wrote on August 28, 2012, in my article: How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history. Some brief notes. (Here I've added most of the pertinent quotes from Mckenna's True Hallucinations):

"...here is an interesting episode regarding McKenna being chased by Interpol and the FBI – from which no conclusion is ever mentioned. As Henk from Europe emailed me after this original article was published:

[Henk] In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his “interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.”[6] During his time there, he studied the Tibetan language and worked as a hashish smuggler, until “one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs.”

True Hallucinations, p. 22ff:

Late in August of 1969 fate turned me from hash smuggler to fugitive when one of my Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U.S. Customs. I went underground and wandered throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia, viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the later. Then came my time in Japan. Whether this gave me an edge on the others in experience seemed unlikely.

True Hallucinations page 166:

This decision to depart California (Henk:and return to the Amazon) was hailed by my circle in Berkeley. Concern for my mental state was rife among my friends, and rumor had reached us that the FBI was aware that I was somewhere back inside the country and had begun looking for me. The Bombay-to-Aspen hashish blues were catching up with me. It was, as they say, time to make a move.

True Hallucinations pg. 179

In February of 1970, a year before I arrived at La Chorrera, my fugitive wanderings had taken me to the island of Timor in Eastern Indonesia. Under indictment in the States for the heinous crime of importing hashish, I traveled and lived under the dramatic assumption that international police agencies were combing the globe looking for me. My cover, that of a graduate student in entomology doing field work for a degree—a butterfly collector—had worked well over the previous six months

True Hallucinations pg. 186

I swallowed hard. He didn't look like the sort of person who would appreciate my stories of fighting the police at the Berkeley barricades shoulder-to-shoulder with affinity groups like the Persian Fuckers and the Acid Anarchists. Nor did my participation in the Human Be-In or the rolling orgies of the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury seem appropriate to mention. And my recent stint as a hashish smuggler in India and my subsequent move undercover to avoid capture by Interpol also seemed out of place in this particular interview.

I decided to go with the usual half-truth reserved for straight people. "I am an art historian turned biologist. I went to Nepal to study Tibetan but found that I am no linguist when it comes to Asian languages. I have returned to biology, my first love. Specifically, I am an entomologist.

I am collecting butterflies here in Indonesia retracing the route of Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace was the real discoverer of the theory of natural selection, but Darwin got all the credit. I identify with his underdog status. Wallace was shafted by Victorian science because he was of the wrong class and didn't know how to play politics the way Darwin did. Wallace explored the Amazon Basin as well and if all goes well, I hope to travel and collect there too. Eventually I will write a monograph on speciation among the butterflies of Amazonas and Eastern Indonesia, which will get me a degree. Then, who knows. Teaching perhaps. Hard to say.

[Henk] He was forced to move to avoid capture by Interpol. He wandered through Southeast Asia viewing ruins, collected butterflies in Indonesia, and worked as an English teacher in Tokyo. He then went back to Berkeley to continue studying biology, which he called “his first love”.[6]

Note he fled to avoid capture by Interpol but then after a time he casually returns to Berkeley?

First of all, why would Terence friends hail the idea of him returning to the Amazon because they were concerned about his mental state while the cause of his mental state was his prior trip to the Amazon? That’s a contradiction. Why would Terence make up a reason to go back to the Amazon? Him being wanted by the FBI should be plenty reason I think.

Attempts to get an answer from Terence’s brother, Dennis, regarding the above episode have failed. It seems they want us to believe that Terence just went from being wanted by Interpol and the FBI to just casually lecturing about psychedelics. What happened in the interim? Someone must know the answer."

We finally have the conclusion to what happened to Terence after the FBI had caught him:

Questioner: I’m real curious about one thing. Why is it important for you to do this?

Terence McKenna: I wonder myself. You mean am I the alien ambassador whether I like it or not? [laughs]. Well, often when asked this question, I've said it beats honest work. I mean, my brother is a PhD in three subjects and works in hard science and yet I don't think it's brought him immense happiness. Not that he's despondent. But I was always kind of a slider. You know?

And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then they recruited me and said, "you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization". And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.

I think ideas get me high. And I like the feeling of understanding and I love diversity to the point of weirdness.

Questioner: It seems that there's more to it than that for you. Because, you know, being tuned in to ideas and turned on by ideas is one thing, but you can keep that just to self. The sharing of it is something else. I think that's what we’re getting at. [??

Terence: well one thing is, I'm really fascinated… I think of myself as a pretty savvy person, and not easily led into false dogma…

The question remains: which agency did he work for? Was it the FBI, or the CIA? Since it was mostly the CIA doing the psychedelic studies on the masses, I think it's likely that he was CIA and is why the Agency was blocking my requests for his files several months ago: https://logosmedia.com/urgent-release-the-cias-terence-mckenna-foia-request-response-positive-affiliation/

However, in Acid Dreams, Marty Lee, states (pg. 173):

It was a typical sixties scene: a group of scruffy, long-haired students stood in a circle passing joints and hash pipes. The setting could have been Berkeley, Ann Arbor or any other hip campus. But these students were actually FBI agents, and the school they attended was known as "Hoover University." Located at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, this elite academy specialized in training G-men to penetrate left- wing organizations. To cultivate the proper counterculture image, they were told not to wash or bathe for several days before infiltrating a group of radicals. Refresher courses were also held for FBI agents who had successfully immersed themselves in the drug culture of their respective locales. For months they had smoked pot and dropped acid with unsuspecting radicals, and now the turned-on spies had a chance to swap stories with their undercover comrades. Former FBI agent Cril Payne likened the annual seminar to a class reunion. Between lectures on the New Left, drug abuse, and FBI procedure, the G-men would sneak away to the wooded grounds to get stoned while American taxpayers footed the bill.

So there is also the possibility that he was FBI.

Lastly, some have actually tried to claim that the mushrooms recruited McKenna. To this we must apply some logical deduction and critical thinking:

1) Do mushrooms have organizations, deep background and public relations (propaganda)? Or does a spy agency?

2) What would mushrooms need with a public relations or propaganda department? Or is that something a spy agency would have?

3) Would mushrooms tell him the less said the better: “deep background positions about which the less said the better”, or is that something an agency would do?

4) Do mushrooms have "positions"? Or does an agency?

5) Are the mushrooms able to pay him because he’s out of money? Or is that something an agency could do? (remember he's in trouble for smuggling)

6) Are mushrooms able to get him out of trouble with Interpol and the FBI for DRUG SMUGGLING? Or is that something an agency like the CIA or FBI could do?

7) Do mushrooms answer the story of what happened to him after his arrest? Or is that something that his employment as an agent would do?

The irony is that many don’t understand that someone who is in public relations, or propaganda, would use sophism to fool people who don’t understand logical fallacies and such manipulative tricks. Actually, that’s the entire point of propaganda in the first place.

When we understand that he was an agent, as he admits, then the contradictions are removed we don’t have to twist things into believing that magical mushroom beings or UFOs hired and paid him to work in their organization in public relations and deep background to the present – which he wasn’t allowed to discuss. These are things agencies do, not mushrooms or UFOs. Such a claim that the mushrooms recruited him is clearly ridiculous. The false claims of mushroom or aliens recruiting him is clearly a case of psychological cognitive dissonance and reaching for anything to avoid facing the facts which make one feel uncomfortable when they're faced with new information that might reveal that they were fooled. Rather than dreaming up magical beings to avoid the facts and issues, just laugh it off and admit you were fooled by those people. This way the next time it's less likely to happen to you again.

Hear the entire lecture here (See hours 4:21:50 - 4:24:05):

Hear only McKenna's audio clip that is quoted above:https://logosmedia.com/McKenna-Agent

Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity