Damn, I've been wanting to read
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss since it came out. I was thinking the quote didn't read like it was from
Bicameral Brain or Ramachandran's text corpus.
Let me try a breakdown for you:
"The hexagram patterns derived from the I Ching in response to a question are meaningful (usually) because they resonate with
something that pre-exists in the mind, below conscious awareness. The I ching clarifies that relationship and triggers an "ah ha"
moment. Or one`s horoscope is meaningful, not because the stars and planets control human destiny, but because the archetypal
processes they symbolically reflect correspond to subjective interpretations of character. In this respect, the notion of synchronicity
is quite profound, in that it asserts a correspondence between the mind and the external world- the so-called "real" world. The
Hermetic philosophers said it well: As above, so below."
The "ah-ha," or insight, moment is something that hasn't been heavily researched but in the past (decade?) the beginnings of work has been done to discern just what is happening in the brain during these moments. I think I agree with the bold standing alone but then McKenna's following statement makes his overall assertion unclear.
It's actually been a dream of mine to create a Tarot deck based upon modern neuroscientific understanding (because I have very little belief in the supernatural), especially as self-interpretation is key (the cards represent static archetypes that are created by our sociocultural interactions but it is the way they are internalized - applied to one's own life - that gives people insight into their lives)... almost as if by taking a person's questing emotions and all the circumstances involved, sticking 'em in a bag, and pulling them out in a new, random order is what provides a person with insight.
"This mirroring of inner consciousness and the outer world still poses a conundrum for neuroscience and most Western philosophy.
Why, and how, do external events meaningfully relate to inner, psychic events? It is as if consciousness, or mind, forms the primary
ground of being, while the physical world is secondary- a construct created by the mind. Any eastern spiritual tradition or philosophy
will tell you this is the case. Western thought, with its emphasis on materialism, is uncomfortable with that notion. I am not aware of
any finding in current neuroscience that resolves this question, at least not yet; but we do know enough about brain function to say
with fair confidence that , to some extent, the world we call "reality" is a construct of our brains. The brain assembles a coherent story
(more or less) by combining sensory experience with memories, associations, interpretations, and intuitions, then presenting the result
as the movie, or perhaps more accurately the hallucination, we inhabit. If psychedelics teach us anything, it is how fragile this
constructed reality is, and how profoundly it can be distorted."
Unfortunately, here, while it reads nice, McKenna is essentially saying whatever he wants to. "We don't know, they say Y, we say X, and so Z."
Again, as a stand-alone statement I agree with the bold. We definitely live in a hallucination. Does that support McKenna's overall contentions? Probably not. I mean, there is a far amount of research and imaging that has been done now to visualize what happens in the brain when we ingest mushrooms (and/or other psychedelics). Does that imply that drugs necessarily have something to teach us? Not really. If anything, the argument that follows is that psychedelics (or any drug really) may or may not randomly provide a person with insight. Is it an insight that would have been denied to them had they not taken drugs? Possibly, but probably not - it would simply have a taken a different configuration of circumstances to trigger the aforementioned insight.
I'm really probably the wrong person to talk to if you wanted validation of McKenna's thoughts from a neuroscientific perspective.
