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Hyperbolic: Divining Ayahuasca


Web link: muse.jhu.edu/content/c...

Pages: 6 - 33

Abstract

‘‘The universe is a way of tricking itself. Next question.’’ This trickster ontology might remind us that the cosmos is capable of transforming itself in suddenly novel ways, forgetting its own premises, breaking symmetry, and suddenly experimenting with an increased capacity to degrade entropy and hence compress information, again, hyperbolic. By 1973, Roland Fischer would write of his investigations of the effect of psilocybin on the visual field, ‘‘Thus far, our studies suggest that certain hallucinogenic drug induced transformations in visual space may be regarded as an optimization of information’’ (‘‘Induction’’ 258). In this context, the capacity of human consciousness to explore and actualize the morphogenomic field of the imagination is no more astonishing an invention by evolution than canis familiarus learning to hang its head out the window at 35 miles per hour for the sheer haptic gaze smack of it, and no less so. By continuing to divine it, we create novel dissipative structures for dissipation of ever more information, information we can perhaps sustain if we tune into the totality of all living creatures, Gaia.