Dynamics of Hyperspace & The Cut Up Method

The other day I got a message from my new friend @columbadubh "I'm wondering about your collage work, how did you make this? with some special program?" I found this interesting that he asked about my collages, because I had both Thus Spoke Teonanácatl and Into the Trenches of Hyperspace written and ready to go way before I posted them. They were held up because I didn't have the images.

As I was searching for the images, I asked myself questions. How do I express the unspeakable? How do I show the invisible landscape? So I tried to create new dimensions for images and landscapes, so I can cut up and build the collages.

As I kept working on these new collages and effects, that's when some new things started to emerge. I began to create tons of content that I couldn't possibly post with the two poems. I made a vast mosaic of cut-ups and collages. This is when the Cosmic Giggle happened. I was literally thinking I should put together at Cut-Up Method Process for all this hyperspace work, just before I read the message.

At the same time I was reading Dynamics of Hyperspace, a dialogue by Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, Santa Cruz, CA, June 1983. At the beginning of the dialogue, Terence tries to explain what he means by new maps of hyperspace, which I used as somewhat of a north star, in creating the images and also used in Into the Trenches of Hyperspace.

Terence: What I mean by a new map of hyperspace is this: I think that we've come to a place with the psychedelic experience where the validation of the maps of inner space that Freud and Jung put forward in the first half of this century are not valid or complete enough. In other words, LSD validated very well the Freudian concept of the inner universe; it seemed to validate ideas about repression and trauma and the need to dredge material out of the unconscious.

Ralph: And that's what you were thinking of as the old maps? Freud and Jung...?

Terence: Exactly. And more recent data that comes out of the psilocybin and DMT experience doesn't seem relevant to the human superconscious, unconscious or subconscious. It seems to be more like an objective manifold that lies beyond the personality or any human dimension, yet is accessible through these compounds.

Ralph: Are these old maps like Sanskrit, Tibetan tantric texts? One could call those antique maps. Those antique maps are closer to what you're talking about, I guess.

Terence: Well, maps grow more and more complete. Some of these older maps are badly torn and worn by time; some of them are not really maps but more almost like journals of explorers saying, "Today at noon we passed the mouth of a river, we know not from where it was flowing, but it was a mile wide where it entered the river we are navigating". Now we are going back and hoping for more complete maps of this area.

Wiley Wallace: “Impossible Call”

When Terence and Ralph were talking about Hyperspace, I had this flash of an artwork that was posted on minds by a friend(above). They wrote,

Art has its own value and should stand on its own, separate from the artist and time; Judged apart from any themes which it might touch on, such as morality, religion, history, or politics.
It teaches that judgments of aesthetic value should not be confused with those proper to other spheres of life. "l'art pour l'art"

After that I looked up the Artist Wiley Wallace, Phoenix-born visionary artist. He has a lot of interesting and amazing work. I start noticing these hyperdimensional shapes that keep showing up.

When it came time to try to express Hyperspace, the work of Wallace was in my mind's eye. I decided to put this art thru the Cup-Up Method and see what weird things will emerge.

Cut Up #1

Cut Up #2

Cut Up #3

Cut Up #4

I called the book I wrote with my brother The Invisible Landscape because someone once said to me that psychedelic drugs were like magnesium flares dropped from aircraft; they would briefly illuminate a landscape and then darkness would reclaim everything.(Terence McKenna)

Visionary Artist like Wiley Wallace to my mind illuminates this Invisible Landscape, along with the disembodied shamanic poetics of Terence McKenna. It just makes sense to my mind to mash these things up.

My guiding artistic philosophy let's cut-up the past so that the future can leak out. The art of literally cutting up text and images in a random fashion and then reassembling them to form new, unexpected patterns. By doing so, one could destabilize language, perception, and reality and get closer to the truth.

Let's see what strange mysteries started to emerge.

Cut Up #5

Cut Up #6

Terence: Yes, perhaps hyperspace is not really what we want to get at, but the idea that there are occult (in the classical sense of hidden), dimensions to reality that are now accessible through the use of these psychedelic compounds. Obvious occult dimensions in reality are the future, the afterdeath state, and then the idea that there are occult or hyperdimensional organs of the human body, specifically the human mind. The human mind is like a fourth-dimensional organ because it seems to come tangential to the body, perhaps only at one point, and yet we feel its imminence as the most overwhelming fact of being. In fact, it is the experience of the fact of being. Right?

Cut Up #7

Cut Up #8

Cut Up #9

Terence: But I like to think of it not so much as a diffuse field but actually more along medieval lines like the soul, and to actually try to imagine that there is an organ attendant upon the living human body that is invisible under all normal conditions but is, in fact, the raison d'etre that holds the whole fact of metabolism together. Then when the connection between that hyperobject and the body is broken, the body ceases to be a four-dimensional object; it ceases to have this life in time that we call metabolism, and it becomes merely a lump of matter whose organization is steadily falling away from it, then it's not active any more and it's not interesting.

Ralph: Well, the incarnation of the spirit in a body or the association that we have in our consciousness of our being in the body is a terrible limitation that comes from an over-addiction that spirit has had with incarnation over the centuries. It is perhaps a part of the fact that the earth is a dark planet, but in our travels we frequently have found that the body is left behind. Isn't it so? The experience of consciousness that we have during trips in hyperspace may not involve bodies or anything body-like in the sense of a kind of limitation in spatial or dimensional extension. There may be an increased clarity in a smaller location or something, but the experience of our consciousness in hyperspace is fairly diffuse. So it could be that the body is something like a computer terminal in its relationship to the host computer--that it's a probe for sensing data experience on planet Earth in common space in a lower dimensional reality, piping it back up to wherever. I have never been able to really buy the idea that consciousness is in the head or in the body or even necessarily nearby.

Wiley Wallace: “Holding Connection”

The Disembodied Poetics of Perception,
The Raw Feed of Reality
and The Disinherited Mind
Chaos is the Rhyme,
I'm piecing together Space & Time

Cut Up #1

Cut Up #2

Cut Up #3

Cut Up #4

Ralph: Well, since my first distant trip I have totally rejected the idea of explaining or showing why, as you would challenge them to show why. Because those theories, Bell's Theorem, quantum mechanics, mathematics, that is all the efforts to make very low-dimensional, almost common-space dimensional conceptual models for an experience which is much richer than these models. So I couldn't take that seriously. I think that people should take their experience more seriously and try to evolve from this experience models, maps, simple metaphors, or whatever, so that we could make an atlas out of local charts. In this room are people who have travelled extensively and analyzed their experiences using all kinds of knowledge of all the cultures on the planet. It's very difficult for any two of us, for example you and me, to compare our experience of hyperspace in order to see whether or not there is some kind of overlap where we could agree that this part of experience was the same, so that your map and my map could then be overlapped a little bit. Then I could have confidence that your experience expands this piece of my mind, or my experience expands that piece of yours. With the rest of us working together, if we had any sort of common ground between any two of us, we could build an atlas for the group experience of hyperspace. But even after ten years or more of doing this, I find it very difficult to use any metaphors of ordinary reality to overlap our experience, much of which is obviously identical, but as far as representation in common ground metaphors, no. So, Bell's Theorem may show the way, but from that experience we have to evolve new consciousness which should grow so as to be able to deal with experience verbally, visually, space-time multimedia musically, to share.

Cut Up #5

Ralph: It's very difficult. I'd like to try this out and see if anybody finds that in travelling you experience hyperspace, or whatever you want to call it--you experience life there. It is not that this is the structure of the room; the walls are there in ordinary reality. We have a very low-dimensional thing here, even though in, say, computer technology, you need enormous memory to record a single instant in very low resolution. In our own perception of life in this room the walls and many things stay fixed, everybody is sitting while one person moves, so this is a very low dimension of reality, and life on this planet is interactive. When you travel in hyperspace, everything is interactive. The whole universe is as a person and we are relating or dancing with everything. The child says "Mom, I danced with a rock". The reply is "Rock's don't dance." We know that everything dances. You poke it; it pokes back. So we don't have the metaphors for this experience. When we move, we have practiced our conceptual, our cognitive reality with this. Most everything is fixed and one thing moves. We fasten on the thing moving and record that in the log book. In hyperspace travel these metaphors are no good. Where we project down to too low a dimensional representation, we lose things.

Cut Up #6

Ralph: All maps are vibrations, are projections. In the map of Paris, for example, many different people occupy the same spot--what I call a spot--on the map of Paris. Much information is lost through mapping reality to a map. So the dynamics of life in hyperspace exceeds what we can deal with cognitively. This is, I think, the reason why we have a great deal of trouble describing it to each other. Is it anything like that for you?

Cut Up #7

Cut Up #8

Terence: Yes, it's like that. I think that while we experience it fully we are repressed by the content of the experience. The reason it is so hard to communicate it is because language is a creation of habit, and our habits are all of this lower-dimensional space. So everything is referred downward. Everything in the psychedelic dimension is like this, like that, and yet there is this tremendous sense of inadequacy. Even as you say it is like this or like that, you know that you're betraying it. And I don't think that is necessary; it isn't that there is something magical that makes these realities state-bounded so that they can never be brought back to experience. It's simply that we have a problem with developing a language that is suitable to the subject and the only way to overcome that is to make the psychedelic dimension more and more a part of our reality, however multidimensional it is. This is essentially what poetry is attempting to do, but doing it very inadequately or very badly, even when it's doing it at its best. A William Blake or a John Milton says "Well, yes, you like what I wrote, but if you could only have seen what I saw, you wouldn't even bother with it". So it's a task of building new dictionaries and new languages and bootstrapping ourselves by transforming our language so that, finally, it maps onto the thing beheld in the psychedelic state. And this is a task of a lifetime or many generations, perhaps. Certainly it's happening now among many people, but it is incomplete and it's frustrating in its incompleteness. Our language for reality, for what you call the low grade reality, is by no means complete. Many lyric poets have exhausted themselves without ever reaching for the heights, so the difficulty of mapping these higher order states is very great.

Cut Up #9

Terence: Maybe that's why, though we can't exactly articulate it, I gravitate to you as a mathematician, hoping to hear something that will illuminate the problem, because mathematics is a language too and a very different language from the language of ordinary experience. Perhaps both mathematics and ordinary human languages are inadequate to the psychedelic dimension. But this is then where we are in the cultural task. We need to create a meta-linguistic meta-mathematical, metaphorical language in order to behold these things. I think it must be possible because people who are loaded together with a very few words do understand these things.

Cut Up #10

Terence: Because the fact of the matter is, though we've talked of hyperspace and used this geometric model which signifies clean breaks between levels, actually this hyperspace that we're talking about is present all the time in the here and now as an aspect of the here and now that is simply not perceived by us. Think about the reality that we do perceive through the mediation of language and the way it differs from, say, the next highest primate. Obviously our tremendous awareness of our history, our apitition (???)for our future, our baggage of all these abstractions--scientific, cultural or mathematical, this is itself an aspect of being in this linguistically- created space that is different from the space of the experience of an animal. If you want to think of history as pointed toward a moment in time when it will enter hyperspace, then realize that the fact that history exists at all means that this process of entering into hyperspace is well advanced.

History is the shock-wave that precedes the entry of a species into hyperspace. A lemur or any creature, even a social insect, cannot enter into hyperspace without entering into history first, perhaps for ten or fifteen thousand years. That is the aura that precedes the entry into hyperspace and it's a domain of accumulating language and metaphor and experience.

As I got lost in cutting up Wiley Wallace Artwork and was pondering The Dynamics of Hyperspace, I had to let things fergment. I decided to get away from this project and do other things.

I really never know the why of things until after the fact. I'm like some kind of drunken moth flying to whatever strange light attract me. The I get shocked and confuse, trying to put the pieces together and make sense of everything.

Now I start buidling my collages and see what fits the words.

Hyperspace Collage #1

Hyperspace Collage #2

Hyperspace Collage #3

Hyperspace Collage #4

Hyperspace Collage #5

Hyperspace Collage #6

Hyperspace Collage #7

Hyperspace Collage #8

Hyperspace Collage #9

It was at this point it was becoming clear to me where I wanted to go for Thus Spoke Teonanácatl:

I also went back to something interesting I found in Wiley Cut Up and blended it into Screaming Abyss:

Still, in Search for Hyperspace, I keep trying to destabilize language, perception, and reality by cutting on.

Hyperspace Collage #10

I noticed the hypercube and was finally feeling like I was on to something.

Hyperspace Collage #11

Hyperspace Collage #12

Hyperspace Collage #13

Hyperspace Collage #14

And there it was my HyperCube and now I just need space. I went looking back to the Screaming Abyss and found what I was looking for:

I used Gimp: GNU Image Manipulation Program and Mosh to mash up, cut up and piece together my visions of hyperspace.

The Disembodied Poetics of Perception,
The Raw Feed of Reality
and The Disinherited Mind
Chaos is the Rhyme,
I'm piecing together Space & Time

In an effort to Destabilize the Coincidence Control Office,
let's cut-up the future, so that the Dreamtime can leak out
In order to storm the reality studio and destabilize language,
perception and reality, break open the mind
Language is a virus from outer space.

Imagination is almost an extension of the visual faculty.
Imagination is something that one beholds,
the imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present.
A future that might be. It is taking the raw data of experience and
giving it, a maladaptive spin. Program or be programmed,
Hacking possibilities.

By slicing into messages of McKenna from books,
images of Wiley Wallance, articles & lectures,
mind-bending coincidences emerge
that otherwise would have remained invisible

Art, sculpture, poetry, painting, dance is like
the footprint of where the imagination has been.
its not about the process, the process is about
making, being, the act of creation.

What the rest of us have been left with is,
a husk, a tracing, something left behind which says
“Imagination was here, imagination acted in this place,"
and this is, this is what it left.

The great bridge between art and science that was supposedly built in
the 20th century hinged on “What is the imagination?”
is a different way of asking the same question
“What is the origin of consciousness?”

There is below the ordinary surface of space and time,
ruled by relativistic physics there is this strange domain of
instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomena.
It raises the possibility then that the imagination is, in fact,
a kind of, organ of perception. Not an organ of creative,
of unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception.
And what is perceived in the imagination
is that which is not local and never can be.

I’m looking at poetry as coding.
I’m looking for source code.
I’m looking to mainline ideas, images, and visions
in order to be able to express them in ways
that speak to directly to the core
and essence of something that we already know
and that we are already connected to.

Also Check Out:

Into the Trenches of Hyperspace

There's a whole world there-
a whole new reality, which they can enter and even change
Each new opening leads to the discovery of an entirely
New world, each connected to countless other new worlds
broken through to an infinitely more complex
and rewarding network (Ideas are networks)

Thus Spoke Teonanácatl

I began as the unspeakable,
because the unspeakable has many dimensions
but the possibility of communication
creates the interface necessary to understand,
Perception, reflection, and projection
are intertwined faculties of consciousness that
are implicated in reality-formation. Extensions of perception
are features & functions of the invisible landscape

Mirror Mirror, Smoke And Mirrors

Enter psychosis,
I part the sea like Moses
Everything happens for a reason
as if I was chosen
Knowledge locked and loaded,
like a joint, I'm about to blow this
And you know this, so you best take notice

The Syntax of Psychedelic Time & Terence McKenna

You are an explorer, and you
represent our species, and the greatest
good you can do is to bring back
a new idea, because our world is
endangered by the absence of good ideas.
Our world is in crisis because of
the absence of consciousness.

Psychedelic Sundays: Misadventures in the Psychedelic Underground

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

My Mind To Your Mind

How do I express the unspeakable?
How do I show the invisible landscape?
From my Mind to your mind
My thoughts to your thoughts
I tried to create new dimensions
of images, sounds, and landscapes,
so I cut up the past and build the future.