Jason WA Tucker: Actual Contact
When I heard Terence McKenna relate the DMT experience to the twenty-fourth fragment of Heraclitus, “the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls,” while describing entities offering the gift of new language, I was surprised at the synchronistic connection to the images that had been pouring out of me.
This notion of the aeon has literally intersected with my own experience of psychedelics, art, and language. In these images I can see an Other “coming into being” wanting to participate. The act of creation becomes an act of pure participation, an emotional connection with some nearby dimension, or an engagement with something other than what I would normally call myself.
Early on I yearned to express what it was that I felt and not necessarily what I thought. And now I carry with me a strong feeling that I’ve experienced art as a living being – like a human being – both complicated and ever evolving. I have come to see these beings as anthropomorphic entities, made of language, each one performing an act of transformation – a visible linguistic dance expressing infinite possibilities.
In his book The Archaic Revival, McKenna said “The entire species is passing into adolescence and becoming aware of the possibility of something like a sexual completion with an Other, with an intelligent, nonhuman species.” And “the potential for an alchemical wedding with the alien exists now. It is a tribal phenomenon that is happening as an experience at the individual level.”
This places the individual experience of an inner nature into the more prophetic realms where you are quite possibly participating in a union with something alien or involved in the creation of a new archetype.
Prior to embracing the Mayan calendar, the author and art historian José Argüelles once espoused that a collective shift in consciousness would come in the form of a new archetypal language. In one of his earliest books, The Transformative Vision, he connects the impending shift in consciousness to the realization of a “language of renewed archetypal significance.”
“Symbols may be described as compressed information… Because the language of the new vision is symbolic, it is capable of conveying immediately through simple forms a multiplicity of meaning; because it is androgynous, it evokes the marriage of heaven and hell, the physical and the psychic, man and woman, the archaic and the evolving, the terrestrial and the celestial, the sacred and the profane. What is coming into being is a language of renewed archetypal significance based on a profoundly religious orientation.”
Paint Rock petroglyphs
I can also remember my parents taking me to an area outside my hometown called Paint Rock to see the drawings left behind on rock formations by people who had lived there long before us. While looking at these mysterious pictographs and petroglyphs, I felt a deep urge to participate, to draw, to communicate.
Drawing became a natural process for me, consisting of several stages of development. I began with symbols and abstract patterns, discovering that beauty and meaning are connected to the form and function of the line. This encounter with creation opened my eyes to the actuality of a common visual language in which expression is not a consciously creative act but an impulse “which is produced by internal necessity.” It was now possible for me to see the language of the soul expressing itself outwardly through all the visual arts.
Burning Man, 2008
The creation of these drawings is tied to a state of heightened sensory levels brought on by a steady and disciplined use of LSD, Psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, and Ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, from 1990 up to around the middle of 2004. During this time I found myself going through a radical shift of perspective, breaking free from my past in an unnerving unraveling of new thoughts and new metaphors, and new drawings. From out of an abstraction of lines and triangles that I had been drawing for more than a decade, ghostly cellular entities sprang into the foreground and began to amass, and the whole experience coalesced into some kind of strange and profound discovery for me.The act of drawing became not only an act of creation, but an act of participation.
Looking down at a blank piece of paper I would think, and think, and then think of nothing and then begin to draw, concentrating only on the beauty of the line, focusing on the movement, the symmetry, the vibration of just the line. I have often sensed that the same amount of concentration and surrender is happening on the other side of the line, as if another is on the other side drawing the same image at the same time. A fantastical projection from the unconscious, as well as a magical conjuring of something spiritual in nature. In a primitive sense, each drawing is an attempt to commune with a spirit world just beyond the cave walls. I was entranced by a narrative that was developing in my drawings from one day to the next. I definitely connected with them as a new exploratory language, but it wasn’t very clear, the message.
I found the images to be disorienting, kinda familiar, but not explanatory. I saw it as something completely alien, or ‘us’ in the future, or spirit, or ancestors, as far back as the cellular anthropos growing out of the primordial protoplasm. As my awareness grew with each drawing, so did the intensity of my life. For me, I had embarked upon a strange and desperate path going deeper into the wild notion of making actual contact with an ‘other’ by drawing. A true reality bender as the drawings did come alive in this way. A circus of cellular entities had emerged out of my early abstract drawings. In hindsight, I now see that I was in a full-on religious experience of passage, ecstasy by way of animistic drawing.
I had fully embraced a connection with the life blood of the drawing, as just that, a living thing involved in continual transformation. My drawings are never pre-planned. The role of chance comes from focusing on just the line, not knowing what image will be drawn. The experience is one of total control, but with no control at all. The images you see here are but a fraction of the total output. Each drawing is part of a larger whole. In using my intuition, listening to my heart, taking psychedelics, and fast losing the rigidity of past imprinting, the act of creation – the invention of images – became an experience of communion.
The Buzz
- “Jason W.A. Tucker’s impish designs transform the art of the figure into an inspired invocation of alien presence: a pattern place deep in the universal mind where magical sigil, extraterrestrial code, and cosmic cartoon fuse and inform. Rock art of the distant future, when even the rocks have learned to communicate.”
• Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, and The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape - “Jason Tucker’s work is evocative of the visual layer of the tryptamine worlds. By themselves, or entering through them into the deeper realms, we remember the ecstatic portentousness lying in wait for the appropriate spark.”
• Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies - “Jason WA Tucker presents an elegant visual code suggestive of petroglyphs, pictograms, or a psychedelic proto-language where forms and figures emerge from chaos, referencing shamanic adventures on the edge of logic, meaning, and consciousness.”
• Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head, and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl - “Jason Tucker’s images display a kinetic energy which almost make them leap from the canvas. They’re a joy to behold.”
• Mark Pesce, author of The Playful World: How Technology Transforms our Imagination, and The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century
Jason can be found on Facebook, of course.
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Thank you for sharing. I have long known that we are all connected to (are part of) another world. I have been studying our spiritual realm for many years and have had the pleasure of meeting over 40 people who have had Near Death experiences (some clinically dead for over two hours) when I worked as a Cardiac Ultrasound technologist.
Last week my mother had multiple massive strokes following a debulking abdominal cancer surgery. I had to assist in her comfort care which means to support the patients wishes. In this case it was to take my mom off all life support and advise the medical staff on pain and comfort control with medications even if this accellerated her physical death.
This process was the hardest thing I have ever done and now has made me evaluate my actions and revisit the end of life experience. I came across the documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule on NetFlix. I became immediately intrigued by how DMT allows the being to reconnect to the “Source” of life and am interested in experiencing that journey to reconnect with my mother to know that she is OK. Why? You see I have been at many peoples dying moments and have always felt their spirit leaving or coming back to their body. But this time when my mother died myself and another friend of my moms (spiritual guide) never got that “feeling” of the departing spirit from my mom. We even went back to “talk” to her after she died (before she was cremated) to let her know that it is OK to go to the light. We both felt like she didn’t want to leave her body or life yet and might be stuck and needed to encourage her to “grow”. I still don’t really know that it worked but we both have a sense that she heard us.
Your sharing your experience comforts me that we are all connected and that there are ways that we can reconnect with our loved ones. I just wish our society was a lot more open about allowing us to reconnect openly, even if that means placing the mind/spirit in the correct state by using assistive measures.
Thank you again for your beautiful work/experience and reconnecting me to our true reality.
Namaste.