Crasses et Voluptés

Robert Anton Wilson who coined the term Chapel Perilous. This is when something happens in your life and it all begins to fit together and make sense, too much sense. Because it’s coming from the exterior and it seems to either mean that you’re losing your mind or you are somehow the central focus of a universal conspiracy that is leading you toward some unimaginable breakthrough.

Along the way to the mystery lie the realms of loving everybody, moving fields of geometric color, past lives, you name it. But these are just milestones on the way. When you finally get to “the thing”, the way you will know that you’ve arrived is that you will be struck dumb with wonder. That you will say “my God, this is impossible. This is inherently impossible. This is what impossible was invented to talk about. This cannot be!”. Then we’re in the ballpark. Then we’re in the presence of the true “coincidentia oppositorum”.

There are all kinds of drugs, and techniques, and hot water and massage and this and that and vitamin therapy that moves you all over the map, makes you feel all kinds of different ways. I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about. I think we’re talking about something profoundly other that it is very hard to get this thing out into the mainstream because literally words fail us. It is a trans-linguistic object accessible to us here and now.

And it’s a complete puzzle to me why there is so little talk about it. We live in a society completely obsessed with sensation. You know people shoot cocaine, jump out of airplanes, go on tiny rafts across the Pacific, cross the North Pole on a roller skate, whatever it is… all in the name of adventure. Well, you know, by God if you want adventure there’s adventure out there. There’s adventure that will sink you to your knees with tears of joy streaming down your face. It isn’t far away. It isn’t for people you’ve never heard of, or universities, or you don’t need a lot of funding, you don’t have to be a professional, all this stuff. Everybody talks about the mystery within and how it’s all right here, but I don’t think people realize how literal all this stuff is.

Terrence McKenna