VISIONARY by GRAHAM HANCOCK : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW : NOTES and QUESTIONING (PART THREE)

DNA... the understanding that we all have a biological code. That code identifies us as belonging to a family, bred by parents, grandparents, all our ancestors as well as to ethnicities and r,aces.  As author Graham Hancock attempts to understand and explain the nature of consciousness, and therefore the nature of hallucinogenic effects on consciousness, he takes us from the Upper Paleolithic to the Space Age.  As we read further into his book Visionary, the author asks us why we humans must connect to and depict supernatural (not worldly) beings. It seems that rock art from many thousands of years ago proves that some humans were involved in making art, depictions of real or extraordinary experiences. 

Our DNA code can be uncoded, and now we know what indicators there are when it comes to our eye color, and what diseases we may inherit. But is there some reason to think that DNA also determines our psychic ability?

Does a small percentage of humanity have more sensitivity, intelligence, and intuitive ability?

DMT is not just a substance made from a couple plants that were discovered to create hallucinogens thousands of years ago, perhaps as humans tried various concoctions, but exists all over the world in many plants.  It's also in animals and it is naturally in us, in our blood! It is when the amount of DMT is raised that humans begin to have visions - and sensations - that are supernatural. One study in which the participants were given injections and remained in hospital beds, the reportage was the same as that of UFO abductees.

Lourdes (the miracle location in France) and the Virgin Mary as a "little lady."

Bernadette going into trance in the Pyrenees where there was a belief in fairies.

How did DNA come to be in the first place? (Junk DNA is not junk at all!)

Bacteria spread around the universe?  Miracle?  But if we are talking about coding, language, then what about books?  What about Moses or the Prophet Mohommed and the books they were given, such as the Ten Commandments or a perfect Koran? Or Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon? So many Shamanic Vestiges in the stories that are central to world religions and the depictions and experiences of saints...

A saint performs a healing or has visions... Sebastian, Ursula, Joan of Arc.  

Fatima - Ezekial - Lourdes

The Hindu's Soma; just one mushroom candidate fits the description.

As we begin to see Hancock's thesis being braided together, we wonder as he did, what came first?  Spiritual ideas or the experience of hallucinogens?

***

This book, which includes Graham Hancock's personal experiences with hallucinogens, is one I will not forget as I continue to give time, as time allows, into my personal inquiry into spirituality that comes with being human. I wonder if years ago when I thought to do a paper on rock art and hallucinogens as my term paper for an anthropology class (which I abandoned as too broad for the assignment time and length) I would have, in my research, ever found any books or graduate student papers that got close to Hancock's thesis.

I also now question what I did find, focusing on the initiation into adulthood rites of Tongva boys versus girls. The girls were supposed to lie on a a structure woven of branches over a pit where tobacco was being burned to be "smoked." They were to show no sign of irritation, to lay still. Perhaps a strong native tobacco plant was given to them instead of the Datura mixture given to the boys, who were said to enter and stay in a special hut dedicated for that purpose. Perhaps the girls were not just proving their womanhood by not being bothered by being smoked, perhaps they were not able to move or disinclined to because they were also having a hallucinogenic experience. Perhaps this was an ingestion through smoke, rather than what appears to be a ritual of making clean or new or renewed. There would have been far more smoke than is used to clear or clean using a simple wand of dry sage.

I also ask myself how the hallucinogenic experience and creativity tie together, for it is true that a number of musicians and artists have remarked that LSD or mushrooms or some other hallucinogen did effect them that way. 

If you are a creative, are you using and exercising and expanding your vision naturally without any help from substances?

C 2023  Christine Trzyna

QUICK BOOK REVIEW : TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL by TERENCE MCKENNA

TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL
Tales and Speculation About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience
Two Classics in One Volume by Terence McKenna
MJF Books New York (in arrangement with HarperCollins)

Copywrited by the author in 1991 and 1993 the material in these two books was written in the early-mid 1970's.

QUICK BOOK REVIEW by Christine Trzyna
I've never read Terence McKenna before, having only heard him on the old Art Bell Coast to Coast AM show being interviewed by Art, prior to his death from a brain cancer. I find that it interesting that his avocation was hallucinogens and their effect on the brain and that he died of brain cancer.


These two books reveal McKenna to be extremely sophisticated in his thinking about his hallucinogenic experiences particularly with mushrooms. McKenna seems to have suffered from not being an academic. I hasten to remember when I was taking an Anthropology course about the Native Americans and wished to produce a spectacular paper on the local Tongva and rock art and /or the use of local hallucinogens - which proved to be Jimsonweed. There wasn't enough time for the research I wanted to do, but when I mentioned the name of Terence McKenna as a possible resource to a grad student, she urged me that my research would not be acceptable to academia if I referenced him.


The excerpts chosen below have to do with memory, a subject that I as a memoirist like to explore.


EXCERPT :

Page 135
(Re his brother Dennis McKenna circa about 1971)

..."Dennis announced a new teaching. He said that one could see any point in time by closing ones' eyes, visualizing an eight, turning it on its side so that it approximated the sign for infinity, and then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle,. shrinking the circle to a dot, and thinking the word "please." and target the point in space-time. Usually I knew not whence these images came to him; however, this time I was amazed. I recalled with perfect clarity that six weeks before, shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia, I had gone to a dentist as pat of the standard pre-travel tune up. While int he waiting room, I had read a several-months old journal of some Canadian education association. In that journal, which I had not discussed with anyone, was a very short article about teaching machines and very young children. The "Picture This" scenario with which the article opened was of a child looking at a figure-eight on a television screen, rolling it on its side, squeezing it together, etc. It was a bit of media flotsam that my brother, or something working through my brother, was lift right out of my mind weeks after I had forgotten it. Something was able to refashion and use our memories in whatever absurd way that it wished."


page 196
"...Destruction of up to 95% of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part. Similarly, one can take a holographic plate of Mount Fuji and cut it in half; when a half is illuminated, the entire image is present. One can do this again and again: the holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny images, each of which in combination with its fellows presents one image."