After obsessively listening to dozens of hours of lectures from Terence Mckenna, I feel inspired to write about DMT and the archetype of the Circus. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Terence Mckenna and his work, he made a living by talking about the psychedelic experience, human history, magic, language, alchemy, aliens and other peculiar subjects. He was an author, pothead and explorer of the unkown.

DMT is one of the strongest psychedelics known to man. When smoked, it lasts between 5 and 15 minutes and people from all backgrounds experience similar weirdness. They report being blasted into another world with small elf like creatures showing them all sorts of magic.

I would like to talk about the magic of the circus and what it means to me. The circus is basically a fictional immaterial world or a set of ideas manifested in the material world. A traveling dream, for people to be in awe with when it lands in town. For me it is associated with ‘living on the edge’ or ‘a dance of the dead’. Circus performers often go to great lengths to make the seemingly impossible possible in the form of a dreamlike show.

Apparently a DMT trip can be described like the archetype of the circus. The weird, kinky, risky, scary and somehow funny without understanding why. They bring extremes or seemingly contradictory things together and present it as a unity. This reveals the power of a paradox. Reggie Watts, a professional comedian and allround creative genius said that he believes jokes work, because of this paradox. It elicits a certain tension in people, because of awakening an underlying mystical truth in the subconscious of the audience. Laughter is a great way to ease this tension and cope with the unkowable.

Well, that’s one theory that makes sense to me.

One principle for performing powerful magic is to ‘combine extremes and express them as one’. When you truly understand this, a whole world of possibilities opens up. For example, when someone who is big, looks strong and maybe even mean acts like a nice and empathic person, they create the power of appearing charismatic, mysterious and interesting. Again, two extremes expressed as one.

Magic is the bridge between the immaterial and material world. This definition is the common thread of this magical enterprise.

I hope this gives you some idea’s to create more possibilities for yourself and explore the world of magic. Eveyone is doing it, so you might as well use it willfully, skillfully and hopefully wisely!