How to Speak With the Most Alien Thing in the Universe

Terence McKenna met beings he called machine elves. Then he worked out what the most alien thing in the cosmos really is, and it isn't them. It's the human soul. Here's how to speak with it.

You logged into a virtual reality when you were about two years old, the day someone pointed at a shimmering thing and said "bird." You've never logged out. Terence McKenna said he once saw what's underneath, and the machine elves he met there had instructions.

In The Archaic Revival (1991), McKenna described culture and language as "the first virtual reality": a mosaic of words we tile over everything we perceive, until we forget it's virtual. He also described the self-transforming machine elves he met in the DMT state, and what they told him: "Don't be alarmed. Remember, and do what we are doing." This video takes the lessons hidden in those encounters and turns them into practices that need no substance: the sixty-second unnaming, breaking the loop of wonder, auditing the voice in your head ("what can you show me?"), meeting the part of you that feels most alien, and seeing what you mean, every night, through dreams. Each one comes with why it works even if you believe none of the hyperspace talk.

This video describes McKenna's accounts of psychedelic experiences for educational purposes. It does not encourage or instruct drug use.

Book: The Archaic Revival — Terence McKenna (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991)

CHAPTERS
00:00 – Introduction & The Nature of the Alien
02:30 – Defining "Alien": Beyond Human Cognition
06:15 – The Communication Barrier: Language vs. Concept
11:00 – Mathematical & Physical Universal Languages
16:45 – High-Dimensional Thought & Non-Human Logic
21:30 – Practical Thought Experiments & Contact Scenarios
25:40 – Final Thoughts & Conclusion

What's one thing in your life you stopped seeing the day you learned its name?

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