Interiorizing The Body, Exteriorizing The Mind

High Frontiers launched in 1984 and was the publication that eventually became MONDO 2000 in 1989 via Reality Hackers.

Interiorizing The Body, Exteriorizing the Mind

by Terence McKenna, from Issue #1 of High Frontiers, 1984

Through electronic circuitry and the building of a global information-system, we are essentially exteriorizing our nervous system, so that it is becoming a patina or a skin around the planet. And when you telephone people, and when you watch TV, when you do all these things, you’re essentially projecting your consciousness over great distances. And as technology becomes more miniaturized, less physically and spatially obtrusive, we are going to naturally lose the distinction between the body-image, and the technical projection of the body-image, which is all this information transfer technology.

I think eventually there will come into being a kind of globalized state of informational oneness which will be experientially available as an alternative to ordinary ego-consciousness. In other words, people will have the option of experiencing a true mass-mind, a global mass-mind. And phenomena like group drug-taking and rock-and-roll concerts and this sort of thing… these are simply cultural anticipations of this coming age of electronic pooling of-identity which will become a viable alternative. It’s an extension of the sexual revolution, the information revolution, all of these things. When it’s finally realized we will live in the human imagination. The human imagination will have been erected in a dimension of electronic circuitry.

That’s what I mean by interiorizing the body and exteriorizing the mind, turning it around so the body is thought of as the locus of being, the way we now think of the mind as the ground of being. But the vehicle of being will no longer be the body. It will be the mind and the imagination. Switching these two roles from base to vehicle will completely change mans’ conception of himself and the space which he inhabits.