Drugs, art and the aliens who lit our way to civilisation
We pick up the story just after the shaman began the ritual ceremony by singing the icaros, ancient chants which draw the spirits around the circle. Hancock then took a sip of the drug, which he describes as a "vile-tasting liquid, so strong and bitter-sweet and salty, so dark and concentrated as to be repellent". His muscles involuntarily relax, he closes his eyes and then the visions begin.
In "Transformation," Whitley Strieber recounts being forced to drink a similarly nasty-tasting liquid prior to an encounter. And in his self-published "The Key," he remembers drinking a strange milky beverage prior to speaking with the person he's taken to referring to as the "Master of the Key."
Consciousness-altering fluids aren't unknown among other reports of "alien" contact, leaving the impression that this particular rite of initiation is in some sense integral to close encounters with nonhumans (regardless of their origin). Whatever its nature, it triggers a breakdown in the normal flow of awareness and induces heightened receptivity.
Hancock continues:
"I had a very scary beginning to that trip," he says. "I saw incredible transformations of different animals and beings glowing with light that appeared directly in front of my field of vision. It was a typical scene which many describe as an alien abduction. They were very anthropic, and definitely wanted to communicate with me. It was rather like going to a strange new country, where I had to start learning the rules of communication."
[. . .]
What he has found - and what forms the basis of his new hefty tome - is a theory that to many will sound absurd. He believes that when shamans and drug users experience these hallucinations, they are actually tapping into a parallel universe. The visions - be they of fairies, elves or aliens - are real, they exist all the time, and they want to communicate with us.
I don't find Hancock's theory all that bizarre. Perhaps unfortunately, we've been trained to think of parallel universes as exotic realms accessible only via the might of high-tech physics. But our brains are themselves a fledgling technology: organic quantum computers that have undergone countless evolutionary "upgrades" over the course of mammalian occupation of this planet.
The notion that we can hack reality with the assistance of mere organic chemicals -- known to shamans of "primitive" cultures for thousands of years -- is both staggering and empowering. If true contact occurs, I predict it will be most unlike that envisioned by exponents of "exopolitics" and "UFO disclosure"; dialogue with the "other" will be far more robust, infinitely more rewarding . . . and even more difficult to integrate with consensus reality than the sudden, irrefutable appearance of extraterrestrial spacecraft in our skies.
If Hancock is right and the denizens of unseen worlds wish to communicate with us, one may rightly ask what they want to talk about. That question may well form the backbone for a new era of scientific inquiry.
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