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Just finished Graham Hancock's "Supernatural" exploring what happened 35,000 years ago that made Homo sapien sapien all of a sudden start creating symbolic representations (art) on the inside of cave walls? More than that, why such strange images that can best be viewed as representing a shaman's journey?
Well, everything gets much funkier as Hancock compare's ancient cave art with modern "archaic" plant medicine practices from Siberia and the Amazon. Then throws in fairy lore and alien abduction. It sounds like a fringe mix of subjects, off-putting at best, but his deeper point becomes an study in how the structural aspects of these disparate experiences partake of a common matrix once the "skin" (surface symbology) is minimized thru a conceptual "x-ray" analysis. Ultimately, the book's conclusions about consciousness and alternative realities are something else quite unexpected!
One conclusion follows that of Jeremy Narby (The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge) ->our DNA consists of approximately 3% coding for genes and 97% which codes for ??? When mathematical analysis is performed on this so-called "junk", it shows statistical distribution characteristics identical to human languages in terms of the "code set" distribution. It has all the characteristics of a constructed semantic system. So it appears as if our DNA is an extended message. To whom? "Us" of the technological present able to decode DNA stands with our machines? Or any human, any where, anytime, in altered states - such as shamans or those who have taken plant medicines? These messages are from whom?
The proposition independently reached by Crick and Watson (co-discoverers of DNA) is that there was never enough time between the cooling of Earth's surface and the appearance of fully functional single celled organisms for the complex system of DNA/RNA replication to have evolved from random mutations and molecular collisions in the "primal soup". On top of that, the DNA system appears almost unchanged throughout all of the phyla of life. Evolution may change physical form, but an organisms genetic mechanism (the DNA/RNA system) has not evolved or changed. The only conclusion that can explain this is that life was introduced to the earth some 4 billion years ago from an outside source. (This is the theory of Panspermia.)
If life on Earth was an alien creation, then it is not a difficult step to envision that the semantic messages in DNA are part of an alien technology to store and transmit information, perhaps forming the basis of instinct, morphic fields, mythic stories, archaic knowledge, and flashes of insight. A technology that can create holographic (trance and dream) experiences. Perhaps teaching us to become human (directed evolution)? Teaching us to enfold ourselves into a symbolic awareness of the world.
Or...
The alternate conclusion (which Hancock leans more strongly towards) is based upon accepting the notion of alternate realities as real. We live in a quantum hyperverse and all it takes is to "retune" the brain (chemically or by ritual) to reach ("read") nearby alternate dimensions - the realm of the spirits, ancestors, plant teachers, fairies, aliens and so forth.
So in this case, the DMT machine elves of McKenna, the power animals and shape-shifting transmutations of shamans, the alien abduction encounters of the modern era, and the fairies of old are all culturally-inflected "skins" placed by consciousness on the extended range of (electromagnetic?) frequencies perceived during trance, trip, dream and death(?)... We are perceiving all of these beings residing normally in alternate dimensions in this multiverse.
The Buddhist vision of endless worlds with innumerable sentient beings is seemingly in agreement on this.
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