Beyond the Anguish of Impossibility
But such assertions of the existence of specific dimensions of impossibility evade the radical ubiquity of impossibility as the hallmark of existence tout court. Impossibility is always and everywhere. There is no relation of any kind—not just sexual. Even friendships are based on illusion. No colleagues are really in the same league. Our words are riddled with ambiguities, our desires with unconscious conflicts and counter-desires. Our identities are inauthentic. We are imitations of imitations. Finding oneself is impossible. Discovering truth is impossible. There is no credible knowledge. No scientific theory lasts for very long (although its lifespan can be prolonged by being turned into an ideological given; in other words, a religious belief, as has happened with Darwinism—which cannot explain a long list of scientific observations, ranging from the Cambrian explosion to the fact of eco-systems to the irreducible complexity of even the most apparently simple microbiological structure). The impossibility of understanding the world or each other or oneself is at least useful in deflating the arrogance and grandiosity of the narcissistic ego. Unfortunately, narcissists can easily remain in denial of their own impossibility for a long time, until karma catches up with them.
Beyond the Singularity: This is the End of What World?
In one of the late Terence McKenna's most famous discourses about a DMT trip he took, he emphasizes how elvish voices kept telling him, "don't abandon yourself to amazement." I found that amazing, in fact utterly astonishing. He goes on to say that they commanded him to pay close attention. But one can both pay attention and be in a state of full-on astonishment at the same time. Some have taken literally his advice not to give way to amazement. But that is more often the command of the superego. How can we not be in amazement, astonishment, at every moment? Astonishment is what creates natural DMT in the brain. In fact, there is a lovely book that emerged from the Kashmir Shaiva yoga tradition, probably a thousand years ago, recently translated into English, and given the title The Yoga of Delight, Wonder, and Astonishment. In this teaching, otherwise known as The Vigyana Bhairava, it is revealed that the most direct path to Liberation is precisely through surrendering to astonishment.
The Real and the Merely Realistic
The Real is thus always unrealistic. The Real is what is beyond both imaginary concerns and symbolic concepts. The Real cannot be captured by symbolism. The Real is what is repressed from mundane, realistic discourse. To be on a spiritual path is to be on a path toward the Real. To be on a spiritual path is thus inherently to be unrealistic.
The Seven Stakes of the Alien
The Ascendancy of Psychotic Knowledge
We have entered a period of epistemological chaos. The true condition of our world, indeed the very nature of our phenomenal reality, including agreement regarding the meaning of knowledge itself, is completely up for grabs. Not only are we witnessing rapid paradigm shifts and schisms within mainstream science, but also, and more dangerously, the politically motivated suppression of authentic discoveries and insights has led to epistemological blowback on every front. Every established authority has been de-legitimized. This has led to the rise of a new and unprecedented kind of discourse, which can be categorized as psychotic knowledge.
To call it psychotic is not to disparage it, but to recognize that such knowledge is produced by ripping apart the fabric of consensual reality. What pours through that tear in the discourse of conventional sanity may be brilliant with lucid transcendental insight and it may equally be speckled with nuggets of paranoid fantasy and archetypal imagery serving the narcissistic ego. It is psychotic from the perspective of the hegemonic paradigm that cannot permit multiple realities that elude the control and deny the legitimacy of the materialist construct. Coping with the accelerating explosion of psychotic knowledge, and the general contamination of the current information deluge with every sort of misinformation and disinformation, will become ever more challenging. It may, therefore, be useful to establish some guidelines that will enable us to maintain our sanity while remaining open to new horizons of possibility.
We can trace this problem back to the period immediately following the Second World War, when the government of the United States created a national security establishment and a general secrecy state. The geostrategic push to gain total hegemony over all global political actors had to remain covert. More and more information became classified as top secret, not only in areas of normal politics, but also in the sciences. Some of this rush to restrict the flow of information was a response to the intrusion of alien spacecraft into our skies. Since the government had no adequate response to this threat, the existence of such entities had to be denied and ridiculed. Many careers of honest observers of such phenomena were destroyed by that disinformation campaign.