And I Began To Speak

I remember the very, very first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark, you might say, and I remember this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff that looked like orange mothballs. The only question I asked was "How long does it last?" and he said "About five minutes." So I did it and...(long pause, audience cheers) there was something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully socketed indirect lightning, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was there were alot of ahh...beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed, not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making objects by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back that nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered "Where Am I? And What Is Going On?" It occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek into the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt...and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said "Don't think about it. Don't think about who you are. Think about doing what we're doing. Do it! Do it now. DO IT!!" And what they meant was use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf-tykes jumping in and out of my chest. They like to do that to reassure you. And they said "Do it." And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from English, and I began to speak.

--Terence McKenna (from Alien Dreamtime)