Rational Gaze Lyrics

Movie: Blueberry/Renegade In 1998 Jeremy Narby published The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. In it he proposed that shamans may be able to access information at the molecular level through the ingestion of entheogens, specifically ayahuasca. He believed that the twin-headed serpent from ancient mythology was a symbol for DNA, and the limitless information it contains. Many report seeing giant serpents, including Narby, after ingesting Ayahuasca. These serpents then proceed to disseminate information in a very etheric and intuitive form. This, Narby believes, is the act of accessing your own DNA, and extracting bits of encoded information for use in your conscious mind. “There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It’s just hard as hell to talk about!” ― Terence McKenna The disseminated information appears to be blatantly abstract. Perhaps this is due to a translation error between the substance and the person. DNA is encoded using a four letter language that combine into 3 letter words in much the same way the English language uses letter combinations to form words. Our written language works based on agreed upon associations, and not natural molecular encoding however. So when shamans, or Narby, see snakes instead of the common computer generated representation of DNA, and this DNA then proceeds to use metaphorical imagery to present concepts, perhaps it is a result of our unconscious mind (working on the language of ATGC) translating the information into our conscious mind (written/spoken language). “What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?” - Jeremy Narby “All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision. ” - Jeremy Narby If this is true, we can then conclude that the unconscious mind is not limited to our body. The genetic coding our body is a subject to is the same all throughout nature, and in the act of interacting with it through the use of psychoactive substances, one can enter communion with it. Limited, of course, to the metaphors you muster. Narby even hypothesized the large segments of “junk DNA” are in fact bioluminescent transmitters and receivers, implying possible communication at a distance, much like the modern radio. Like that radio, one can defocalize, or tune, to frequencies that your conscious mind usually is not aware of. “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” ― Terence McKenna Since we do not speak the language of the subconscious, we are limited to use of our modern languages. In modern western civilization the predominate form of sensory analysis is rationalization. This is in its self, not reality, but a model for explaining reality. It is merely a map of the “desert of the real”, much like the Matrix was for its inhabitants. Rationalization is an agreed upon cultural filter that acts exactly like an operating system for the masses. With this filter comes dogma, and with dogma comes exclusion. Valid information will either subconsciously, or consciously, be discarded if it does not meet the standards of the prefabricated manmade mold. “I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze. It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from it’s field of rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.” - Jeremy Narby “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.” ― Terence McKenna