The Psilocybin Solution

information transfer, and it runs the very real risk of total failure through plant extinctions. If an ET intelligence were indeed able to build sophisticated probes with which to scour the Universe, then surely when the probes have encountered an intelligence worth contacting they would use some direct and unambiguous method of communication rather than having to construct “tailor-made” genes. And then there is the problem with the age of the probes and the distance of the probe senders. If such an intelligence were a million light years away, is it really feasible that a useful contact could be made? Unless faster-than-light technology has been developed (which immediately introduces paradoxes), then any hope of interstellar communication across really vast distances is all but futile. And if the ETs had telepathy or some kind of advanced capacity like that, then why bother with cumbersome probes in the first place?

On other occasions, McKenna concedes that the alien is merely the Other in one of its many symbolic guises, and I think that this is more likely to be the case. As I discussed earlier, the alien or the advanced ET is a major symbol peculiar to the modern era. Perhaps this is one of the Other’s “favorite” metaphors with which to express its nature. If this is so, we can dispense with all notions of ET civilizations millions of light years away and concentrate upon our final option, namely that the Other is somehow built into reality like ourselves and that its intelligence is not far away but all around us. What follows is a prelude to the final option.

Is the Reality Process Intelligent?

One scientist who believed the Universe to be home to a vast and highly evolved intelligence was the late unconventional British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. However, the intelligence conceived by Hoyle and outlined in his little-known book The Intelligent Universe does not belong to some ET species existing elsewhere, nor does it refer to God, for Hoyle was at heart an atheist. Rather, Hoyle believed that a non- omnipotent intelligence preceded us in existence and helped to create life on Earth. Let me explain.

Hoyle suggested that life did not start in the turmoil of the soupy primeval oceans of the Earth as is commonly accepted. Hoyle argued instead that pre-life molecules and simple microorganisms might exist throughout the Universe amid interstellar dust clouds and within the interior of comets and meteors. Comets often contain the same proportion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen as the Earth’s biosphere and are therefore potentially capable of giving birth to primitive replicating microorganisms. Through their “free lift,” such microorganisms could be dispersed onto the planets that lie in the path of their cometary hosts. Because the Earth and indeed any planetary body is continuously bombarded by cosmic bodies, it would only be a matter of time before the microorganisms and molecules surviving their trip found themselves in a sustainable environment in which to further evolve. Hoyle reckoned this is how life started on Earth—that the Earth has been seeded by simple life forms and organic molecules.

To bolster his theory, Hoyle pointed out that what appear to be fossilized microorganisms have been found inside some of the various meteorite fragments that have been recovered here on Earth. In addition, many microorganisms have evolved such a hard protective layer that they are able to withstand massive doses of radiation (some bacteria have even been found living contentedly within nuclear reactors!). This form of protection is an essential requirement should microorganisms have formed in interstellar space but an inexplicable adaptation according to the conditions here on Earth. It has also been found that microorganisms exist up to forty-five miles above the Earth’s surface, which is consistent with the theory that the Earth is being continually bombarded with life-bearing cosmic debris.

Hoyle went further. He claimed that not only did life originate from space, but that the evolutionary process on our planet has since been “directed” through the continuous arrival here of microorganisms. Hoyle suggested that some of these “invading” microorganisms are able to attach their own DNA to the host organisms that they encounter, much as viruses function by incorporating their own DNA into the host’s genome. While some of these viruslike interstellar microorganisms might be harmful, some would be sure to confer an advantage should their DNA successfully incorporate itself into the DNA of a compatible host organism. (Think of mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles inside animal cells that have their own DNA and are thought to have once been free- living bacterial organisms that developed a symbiotic relationship with animal cells.) In this way more and more genetic information is integrated from the basically unending source of DNA reaching the Earth from space.

Hoyle did not give up there either. In accounting for the unbelievable series of cosmic coincidences that have facilitated the emergence of organic life, Hoyle speculated that the microorganisms in interstellar clouds also serve to influence the formation of stars and planets (by means of physical processes). In other words, the creative cosmic processes we observe are the result of an active intelligence that is forever striving to survive— with the added difficulty, according to Hoyle, that the physical laws of the Universe are always changing. In The Intelligent Universe, he writes:

The apparent coincidences which allow carbon-based life to exist throughout our galaxy and in other galaxies might well be temporary possibilities in a Universe where the applications of the physical laws are changing all the time. This point of view… suggests that in the future the Universe may evolve so that carbon- based life becomes impossible, which in turn suggests that throughout the Universe intelligence is struggling to survive against changing physical laws, and that the history of life on Earth has only been a minor skirmish in this contest.^{43}

Are we to believe then that the laws of Nature gradually change and that at some distant time in the past a powerful intelligence engineered things so that in the future, carbon-based life would utilize the newly prevailing cosmic conditions? This is indeed what Hoyle asked us to believe. He summed up his thinking in the following singularly profound sentence in which he states this about our species: “We are the intelligence that preceded us in its new material representation—or rather, we are the re-emergence of that intelligence, the latest embodiment of its struggle for survival.”^{44}

When I first encountered Hoyle’s radical panspermia theory (the notion that life is being seeded throughout the cosmos), I was naturally curious. Shortly after this, new scientific evidence coincidentally emerged that seemed to support at least part of his theory. A news flash in New Scientist declared that “molecules of life” had been detected in space. Hawk-eyed American radio astronomers had spied glycine—an amino acid and a potential building block of organic life—in a dense interstellar dust cloud near the center of our galaxy. This kind of finding is totally in line with Hoyle’s speculations. Indeed, a few years later, the comet Hale- Bopp was analyzed as it passed near the Earth, and it too was found to contain the molecules of which amino acids are made. Therefore, we cannot rule out all of Hoyle’s theory, and we must consider his assertions more closely.

The compelling aspect of Hoyle’s proposal is that it is assuredly grand, employing as it does a mix of science and near-mystical speculation. Hoyle attempted to account for the fortuitous nature of the Universe by arguing that the initial widespread presence of microorganisms somehow influences star and planet formation. Everything was engineered by some previous intelligence. However, we are still left without an explanation as to how this previous intelligence emerged. In fact, Hoyle appealed to the so-called steady state theory of the Universe that he himself helped to develop in the late 1940s as an alternative to the big bang scenario (it was, in fact, Hoyle who originally coined the term big bang in order to make light of such an explosion- from-nothingtheory). The steady state theory holds that there was no big bang at all (only “little bangs”), and that the Universe has existed indefinitely. Within this eternal Universe an intelligence has been forever modifying itself in order to survive the subtly changing laws of physics. Hoyle even concluded that the religious impulse of our species arises because we are born with an instinct that leads us to remember our origins, an instinct written into our DNA by the intelligence that preceded us.

It all seems very neat and tidy, and I am sure that there is some grain of truth in Hoyle’s “eternal intelligence” theory. However, the element that is lacking is the role and effect of entheogenic agents, unless of course they were also engineered by the intelligence that preceded us. If they were, then Hoyle’s theory might well offer us the ultimate truth about reality. Then again, we must accept that the Universe has been in existence forever with the caveat that the laws of physics continually change and force the intelligence to re-create itself. To my mind, this is not an aesthetically “clean” solution. As I said, how did the intelligence develop such sophistication