The Great Timestream Bifurcation
by Terence McKenna
Originally appeared in Psychedelic Illuminations #6
Here is a true enough myth of our world. It begins with the notion of a
soliton of improbability. Let us imagine that these are events which only
happen once, and since they only happen once they are not legitimate objects
for scientific inquiry because objects of scientific inquiry must happen at
least twice. But this is a phenomenon which happens only once and we can
visualize it as a kind of particle. These solitons of the utterly improbable
crisscross the universe occasionally colliding with an existing event
system. When they collide with an existing event system, that event system
bifurcates into two event systems in order to preserve a kind of parity of
probability - a term I invented that need not be taken seriously. But in the
pursuit of the preservation of the parity of probability, the soliton
creates a temporal bifurcation.
OK, we have reached the top of the steep learning curve in this concept system. Now here's the good news: the soliton of improbability which interacted with our world occurred two thousand years ago in the phenomenon of the Immaculate Conception. An event that I think you and I can agree is highly improbable! But let us take it at face value and see if we can work with it. When the Immaculate Conception occurred through the collision of the soliton of improbablility with this Galilean village girl called Marian or Mary, in one world she became impregnated with a figure destined for a great religious and political future: our world. The world in which Christ was born, became a young man, taught his message, and went to his execution around 27 AD. Another world sprang into existence at the moment of the Immaculate Conception and in that world nothing whatsoever happened to this young Galilean girl. She continued to live with Joseph. He continued to make fine furniture. Eventually they were able to move to the better side of Nazareth. And that was their story.
So you see I'm suggesting that at the time of Christ, a parallel world came into existence that knew nothing of Christ. And consequently the forces which shattered Roman civilization never came into existence in that parallel world. Instead, Greek science and mathematics continued to enrich Roman engineering, government, and theories of civil polity. Roman civilization continued to develop. The wonderful female mathematical genius Hypathia was able to complete her career. She was stoned to death by Christians in our world, yet in the parallel world she lived to old age and was able to elaborate the calculus some thousand years before Newton. This meant that by the sixth century or so this Greco-Roman world had ship building and navigational techniques that were possessed in our world only by Elizabethan times. Roman navigators inspired by the perfection of their science set sail to explore the world, and in that parallel continuum they discovered the Maya just as they were reaching their classic climax in the jungles of Central America. Approximately nine hundred years after the bifurcation into the two time streams, a Greco-Roman-Mayan civilization came into being in the parallel continuum. The great influence on the Greco-Roman psychology from this cultural adventure was the sophisticated use of psychedelic drugs for the purposes of religion and self-exploration. In the vision in which this idea was shown to me by the powers of the other side, I actually saw a Roman imperial administrator and his retinue arriving at Tikal for the coronation of Three-Flint-Knife in the ninth century; a great confluence of imperial majesty as the greatest king of the Mayan cultural climax received his European counterpart, and documents, codices, mathematicians, instruments of navigation, and pharmacy were traded.
Well to make a long story short, the parallel world continued to develop, and with its sophisticated psychology based on psychedelic drugs they soon became aware by studying the dreams of psychotics in their world, they slowly became aware I should say, of our existence. They figured out what we do not know, which is there was a world bifurcation and that there is a parallel time stream with a different situation evolving in it. They further, by extension of their more advanced understanding of atomic and particle physics, came by around the year 1900 in our continuum to the hypothesis that major releases of hard radiation would penetrate across the energy barrier of the two time streams. They conducted an experiment to test this hypothesis. They decided to set off a small atomic device in their continuum, and to monitor the dreams of sensitive people in our continuum to see if there was evidence of an awareness of this explosion. The experiment was actually carried out in 1906 by our time reckoning. This is what we call the Tunguska blast that occurred in Siberia. After the blast in the parallel continuum those who had conducted the test were able to monitor the dreams of Siberian Shamans and they saw hundreds of square miles of trees smashed flat by a mighty explosion. Hence they realized that their theoretical assumption that explosions in one continuum would affect life in the other were in fact true. Then they became quite alarmed because as they continued to monitor the dreams of human beings in the parallel continuum, they came to slowly understand that primitive though we may be in our world we were coming to a grasp of atomic chemistry and thermonuclear fission and fusion.
Fearing for the destruction of their own world they began, and have in fact carried out through this century, a massive scientific research project to attempt to reach us to communicate to us the true situation, and to depotentiate our nuclear arsenals in order to save their own world, which is now in fact the administrative center of some sixteen integrated star systems in this part of the galaxy. In other words, they are some twelve hundred years in advance of us technologically and in the use of psychedelic substances because they never experienced the history-freezing eschatology that the rise of Christianity created in our world. The last part of the myth relates to the Mayan calendrical date...
...And UFOs are aspects of this technological effort to reach us. In other words they are experimental vehicles attempting to penetrate the time barrier..to reach us with this news. I believe that in 2012 this technology will be perfected and they will no longer need to send unmanned probes or experimental devices, rather they will actually be able to open a domain perhaps as much as several thousand kilometers in diameter, which will be coexistent both in our time stream and in their time stream.
...People from this beknighted time stream will be able to reach the more
advanced and perfected culture of the alternative time stream. It's not
unlike the situation with East Germany and East Berlin. All that we're saying
is that this advanced civilization is about to pull down the wall and invite
us to leave the beknighted world bequeathed to us by rampant monotheism and
participate in the higher life of the great stellar civilization created by
the Greco-Roman-Mayanists, who avoided the rather tawdry ideological path of
development that we were victim of.
...Psychedelic compounds amplify the very slight leakage of information
from this other dimension. In the same way that they found us, we can find
them by taking psychedelic mushrooms and opening ourselves to the information
pouring through from the alternative time stream.