psilocybinetic brain. As voluminous torrents of information “struggle” to integrate and coalesce, evermore elaborate forms and patterns emerge, and these are experienced as the felt presence of the Other actively communicating in a language of potent symbolic visual imagery.
The Many Guises of the Other
As Terence McKenna repeatedly pointed out, it is quite common, for Westerners at any rate, to perceive UFO or extraterrestrial motifs in psychedelic visions. McKenna has suggested that the UFO is the Other in the guise of a contemporary symbol. According to McKenna, the Other is normally so remote from us that it dons the mask of the UFO in order to express itself, its Otherness.
Since the 1950s, a plethora of sci-fi films have focused on alien visitations to Earth. The predominant theme in these sorts of entertaining fantasy is the incredible impact that an alien presence would have on humanity. It is a modern reworking of the ancient religious idea of divine intervention. Some great alienesque force suddenly erupts in the midst of our culture in a way that upsets, or radically alters, human destiny. Everyone would have to take notice. People would, willy-nilly, be forced to cease their everyday business for a spontaneous alien-inspired holiday or two. Everything would have to change. Alien visitations are dramatic. They negate everything else.
Obviously, then, the UFO can be understood as a modern icon, an immensely powerful Western symbol packed with meaning. It also highlights the way to think about information, for, in terms of information, the archetypal UFO is the center of a whole web of psychological relations and associations. It embodies a concentration of information. It expresses a powerful set of psychological associations. As a simple word,
In
An autonomous psychic entity that has slipped from the control of the ego and approaches laden with the “Otherness” of the unconscious. As one looks into it one beholds oneself, one’s world information field, all deployed in a strange, distant, almost transhumanly cool way, which links it to the myth of the extraterrestrial. The extraterrestrial is the human Oversoul in its general and particular expression on the planet.{32}
Here may lie the explanation for the rampant and often far-fetched stories of actual UFO sightings and alien encounters not reserved to closed-eyes visions. Perhaps for some people the Other emerges into the perceived world of external reality, although this would more than likely represent a genuine hallucination.
McKenna’s use of the term
To sum up the far-reaching speculations presented thus far: whether personal or universal, information becomes incorporated into entheogenic visions in a novel and creative way such that a definite message or meaning is conveyed, or at least appears to be conveyed. The resulting overwhelming confrontation with a spiritual intelligence is the result of information integration to the point where the integrative process appears to be alive, purposeful, and distinct from the self or ego. This is the transcendental Other, a sentient informative entity that is not us but something very closely related to us.
Can, or Should, We Banish the Other?
Alternatively, a cool, restrained, and skeptical approach might be to suggest that the self-organizing patterning of neuronal information does not reflect an information-composed Other at all, but is just the result of some incidental property of information. Just as gravity is a property of the Universe acting everywhere (on a macroscopic scale) to draw physical material together, so too might there be some inherent but incidental property of psychological material (or neuronal information) that acts to organize it. Although this organizational process can, if boosted by psilocybin or endogenous brain chemicals like DMT, result in the perception of a communicating Other, this Other will in fact be just a kind of illusory side effect promoted by the experience.
Having said that, however, in terms of the visionary shamanic experience, it is clearly so powerful and so emotionally charged that the inference of a transcendental Other is historically well established and seems indicative that something important and hitherto unknown to psychological science is occurring. As many Westerners who have sampled entheogenic flora will readily attest (this includes those brave anthropologists who have taken Amazonian psychedelic brews and experienced numinous visions), it is not simply “primitive” inference or hearsay that has led native shamans to speak of a perceived contact with gods or spirits. It is rather the case that the sacred nature of the entheogenic experience appears so dramatic, so persuasive, that the inference of an Other becomes unavoidable.
Even if we did still opt for the restrained armchair-bound explanation, it is not incompatible with the notion of the Other, but merely a kind of clever avoidance and reluctance to invoke a “big idea” that we are not accustomed to. For to reduce the Other to merely an incidental organizing principle inherent in information, with no real purpose, is like saying that normal consciousness is merely an incidental neuronal effect without any real purpose. But since we know that normal consciousness is purposeful (we have will, more or less), then it is tenable that the Other represents a kind of purposeful will above and beyond that of the individual ego. Indeed, if we also consider the many other self-organizing properties of the Universe—which are deemed fundamental—then the Other might well represent a similarly fundamental aspect of Nature, one that “comes alive” when conditions in the human cortex are appropriate.
Yet, if pushed, is it really necessary to speak of a dissociated communicating presence when a less fanciful explanation will at least partially suffice? Aren’t we in danger of becoming overtly religious by invoking a kind of superintelligence dissociated from the individual self? Maybe so. But if the notion of an intentional Other still seems too bizarre to the critical reader, the idea can be further defended by examining a common analogous situation in which we infer a non-self-based other. After all, do we not all assume without any doubt whatsoever that other conscious minds really exist? And yet this is also a big inference based solely on subjective experience. Let us pursue this, because it is, strangely enough, relevant to the validity of inferring purposeful entities.
Big
To posit a transcendental communicating Other is really no different to the tacit inference that other human minds exist. Both these sorts of other, the big
