Rushing tunnel of light like hyperspace in Star Wars, and each bead is a frozen liquid angel, a condensed vibrational being, another drop in the cosmic ocean all around. And the angels are alive, they pulse with welcoming light-love, they caress and become me as I enter the DMT space and everything becomes infused with holiness, with a sacredness beyond words, felt in every fiber of my being. This is what the saints say, what the enlightened ones experience, the lower bar-dos and the shores of the heavenly realms. ... All I have to communicate it to you, dear reader, is these poor words, these little niños.. . . The vehicle of the Word is like a freshly minted wave packet to contain energies that are burst open here as I swim through—in—become one with the core, the Source of all things, the Logos that creates and is pure Creation itself.
—RAK RAZAM, AYA AWAKENINGS: A SHAMANIC ODYSSEY, 2013
I have, in my career as an “experiential journalist” covering issues around technology, spirituality, counterculture, and the global shamanic resurgence, been exposed to many illuminating states of mind and mystic traditions of indigenous tribal people and esoteric Western mystery cults, old and new. An invisible landscape has opened up for me that is every bit as real and potent as the baseline reality we experience around us in the material world. Indeed, this inner dimension seems inextricably bound and intertwined with the world we know, underscoring and perhaps animating it with a spirit or consciousness—as one paradigm would have it; others might use equally exotic terms like coherent quantum processes and entanglement. However we define it, consciousness is still at the heart of our reality, and it is a mystery that is yet to be fully explained.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once defined consciousness as the “awareness of awareness, or the apperception of pattern as such.” The mind-brain relationship has been debated all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and around the turn of the 19th century, philosophers like Henri Bergson and psychologist William James were still debating the brain's relationship to consciousness. James himself also famously experimented with another consciousness alterant of the time, nitrous oxide, and the use of other psychoactives like mescaline, opium, and peyote was prevalent in the medical underground and the bohemian intelligentsia. These substances also paralleled a rise in spiritualism, alternative religions, and interest in psi phenomena that seems to eerily parallel the later psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.
In 1898, James delivered a lecture at Harvard University that opposed the idea that consciousness is solely produced by the brain. Like Bergson before him, he believed that the “fangs of cerebralism” alone could not explain the full function of the brain and consciousness, which was, “as far as our understanding goes, as great a miracle as if we said, thought is ‘spontaneously generated,’ or ‘created out of nothing.’” He went on to say, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)
Richard Maurice Bucke was a contemporary of James's, a Canadian who worked with the American Medical Association. In 1901, he wrote the book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, in which he explained that “cosmic consciousness is a mystical state above and beyond self-consciousness . . . which is man's natural state, which is in itself above pure sentient animal consciousness,” and so on. This stepping-stone gradation of consciousness itself is something that modern science usually says ends with the current human condition, perhaps recognizing flashes of difference with geniuses like Einstein or Hawking.
But instead of just an increase in intellect, Bucke envisaged a type of consciousness that was itself conscious of “the life and order of the universe,” an interconnected perspective “which is more of an intuitive knowing than it is a factual understanding.” While it was evidently only possessed by a select few in his day, the increase in this awareness in the species over time promised a stage of human evolution where it would be eventually shared by all humanity.
The idea that consciousness continues to aggregate above our current plateau, and parallel to it, is deeply intuitive. We can recognize consciousness in ourselves, in animals, and in the shamanic paradigm, in plants as well. There are all different levels of consciousness in the indigenous understanding of the world as a living organism, and in that macro organism, there seems to be a cascading effect where one state of mind can build upon another for an interdependent whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Indeed, we can see the stratum of collective consciousness at work in different species in nature, as with many insects that work synergistically together, even though individually they might only have a rudimentary self-consciousness, or in partnership with plant species. Together they act in a synergistic way to actually perform more as a collective than they can individually, and that lesson is reflected in examples of collective consciousness developing in 21st-century human culture as the drive toward retribalization increases and a collective gestalt emerges in the social media-nonlinear-mesh-networks of the Internet.
This collective consciousness in nature may be a stepping stone for Bucke's idea of cosmic consciousness itself, which Wikipedia defines as: “The concept that the universe exists as an interconnected network of consciousness, with each conscious being linked to every other. Sometimes this is conceived as forming a collective consciousness which spans the cosmos, other times it is conceived as an absolute or godhead from which all conscious beings emanate.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_consciousness) This theory has echoes and resonances with the Buddhist concept of Indra's net, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, and James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, amongst others.
While many mystics and seers both exhibited and talked about the concept of cosmic or expanded consciousness, Bucke was one of the first Victorian-era gentlemen to tease new ground with the concept by mapping it across the history books with individuals who achieved altered states. Bucke graphed and compared the experiences of saints and mystics like Jesus, Mohammed, William Blake, etc.—the list was pretty well-developed for a pre-20th-century demographic, but it raised a lot of questions, like whether or not some of these people were actual historical figures, and did they, in fact, have an elevated consciousness?
Still, perhaps because of his Victorian-era prejudices, one thing that Bucke didn't comment upon was shamanic cultures. Bucke's mapping of manifestations of cosmic consciousness in individuals across history ignored the sacramental use of indigenous peoples and the plant sacraments that connected them to the divine, however temporarily. Indigenous peoples the world over have used entheogens (Greek for “substances which evoke the divine within,” usually natural plants and fungi, as opposed to psychedelics which are made-in-the-lab chemicals). Preeminent amongst modern entheogenic use is Ayahuasca and San Pedro in South America, peyote in North America, and psilocybin-magic mushrooms through Mesoamerica and Siberia—and all of the above in the Western-led Shamanic Resurgence that is currently blossoming across the world.
The altered state of consciousness of shamanic culture also provides a deep connection to the great green-mind of nature, developing a sense of cultural equilibrium and sustainability for man's place in the web of life. In many instances, it also provides brief flashes of contact with an exploration of higher-dimensional realms for the tribal shamans and their patients. In higher doses, especially with the right entheogenic keys, locks are said to open to deep states of core consciousness and a perception of unity with all living things—that is, an awareness of the individual as an emanation of the Godhead, or as Bucke would call it, cosmic consciousness.
But this is still largely an individual affair, a global subculture protected from the mainstream in the West, although rapidly gaining in popularity and mainstream media attention. Traditionally, plant-based gnosis has often been sanctioned as part of village life in the old world, mediated by the village shaman in indigenous societies. Sometimes it was something the entire tribe would do—other times, depending on the dogma of the tribe, it was used by the hunters or other specialists. With the Shipibo-Conibos tribe in Peru, the shaman himself would take the Ayahuasca on behalf of the patient and go into the realms as a medicinal tool. So these states of higher consciousness have often been compartmentalized within the larger village life, until the mid to late 20th century, when modern Western culture “discovered” altered states en masse via LSD.
In the 1950s, psychedelics like LSD were still legal and were widely used in experiments by psychiatrists, corporations, the military, and the intelligentsia to boost creativity, remove mental blockages, and experiment with a reliable “truth serum.” Writer Aldous Huxley helped coin the term psychedelic (Greek for “mind-manifesting”) in letters with Dr. Humphry Osmond, who suggested the term in counterpoint to Huxley's phanerothyme. Huxley was also one of the first modern intellectuals to continue the idea that the function of the brain and the nervous system was as a filtering agent of consciousness. He argued the brain was not just an epigenetic nodal point where thought originates from; rather, he thought the brain was actually something that filters down the tsunami of overwhelming sensory information on all the different frequencies to make it more palatable for down here on the baseline level:
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind At Large . . . [but] to make biological survival possible Mind At Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet . . . temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises” . . . or by the means of drugs. (Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954).
One of the key attributes of psychedelics and entheogens, and perhaps the reason they are often approached with trepidation, is that they dissolve the ego. In a 2013 presentation, by Brazilian neuroscientist Dráulio Barros de Araújo, he argued that fMRI brain scans proved that the hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca reduces neural activity in what is called the Default Mode Network (DMN) regions of the brain. (http://maps.org/conference/ayahuascafriday/) Science is still grappling with the DMN's role but believe it may trigger our sense of being itself, our identity and ego. Similar tests by the Beckley Foundation in the United Kingdom in 2012 found that psilocybin mushrooms also inhibit the DMN, which suggests this is how psychoactive substances tune us in to that mystic sense of oneness with all things.
As our paradigms deepen and seem to parallel, the scientific, spiritual, and psychedelic experience all present valid models to understand the world around us and find the meaning we so desperately crave. And yet, as philosopher and raconteur Terence McKenna once said: “The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal.” As increasing attention is focused on the use of both manmade psychedelics and plant-based entheogens as potent psychological tools in legal medical studies across the world, a wider context must also be established to integrate the proper understanding of these substances in the role of consciousness itself.
Investigations into the suppression of the DMN by psychoactive substances could be crucial to finding the truth about consciousness in general. Current models of how consciousness works includes the “electromagnetic field theory,” which states that the brain produces an electromagnetic field that orders neuronal activity into coherence. Other theories posit a “quantum brain dynamic” interpretation where water molecules in the brain create a “cortical field” that interacts with quantum coherent waves in the neuronal network. Both of these dominant models still propose an unresolved assumption—that the brain itself creates consciousness within the brain-mind dynamic.
If consciousness isn't simply created from the “hardware” of the brain itself, the inverse possibility is that it is received and filtered through the quantum-neuronal interface. The original analogy for this was of that of a radio and the signals it receives—if the radio is destroyed, the data it transmits is not lost; the music and audio signals are, of course, broadcast from an external source. The radio is simply the receiving and filtering mechanism to convert radio signals to audible sound. In the same way, William James and others argued that when the brain is damaged and consciousness is impaired, this does not mean that the full spectrum of consciousness is destroyed, merely that the receiving device is debilitated.
This, of course, then raises the larger question of where does the stream of consciousness that is being broadcast originate from? If it's not local to the hardware of the brain, it must be “nonlocal.” Dr. Larry Dossey, in his book The Power of Premonitions, also reminds us that the radio (or even the updated analogy of a TV set) picks up electromagnetic (EM) signals that weaken according to distance and can be blocked, whereas consciousness does not appear to be limited in the same ways the EM bandwidth is.
Dossey goes on to say that:
My conclusion is that consciousness is not a thing or substance, but is a nonlocal phenomenon. Nonlocal is merely a fancy word for infinite. If something is nonlocal, it is not localized to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, or to specific points in time, such as the present. Nonlocal events are immediate; they require no travel time. They are unmediated; they require no energetic signal to “carry” them. They are unmitigated; they do not become weaker with increasing distance. Nonlocal phenomena are omnipresent, everywhere at once. This means there is no necessity for them to go anywhere; they are already there. They are infinite in time as well, present at all moments, past present and future, meaning they are eternal. (The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives, 2009)
Here we start to delve into the territory of quantum physics and the ideas of leading physicists like Einstein and David Bohm. Einstein famously posited in his Theory of General Relativity that space and time are not separate but are actually parts of a larger time continuum. Bohm went further than Einstein, saying that everything in the universe is part of this continuum and that on the “Explicate” level (the manifested world that springs from a primal “Implicate,” or Source) everything is seamlessly connected. “The universe may be nothing more than a giant hologram created by the mind,” said Bohm. He further argued that consciousness itself is a subtle form of matter that is intrinsically embedded in all things on the Implicate level.
This model of a “conscious universe” changes the typical Western view of reality and what consciousness is. There is no longer a need for any distinction between living and nonliving things, as everything is alive and has consciousness, including energy itself and everything made from it. This announcement has immediate parallels to the worldview of shamans, mystics, and the indigenous wisdom of tribal people. Still, if consciousness is a field of being not just broadcast but “on,” underlying and perhaps animating the material world, through what interface does it work? How does the brain then receive this omnidirectional signal given off by this Implicate Source? How do other living creatures without a centralized brain structure—for instance, plants—receive this signal?
The modern science of quantum biology examines how the theories of quantum physics interact with biological life forms, and in recent years, plants have played a central role in deepening our understanding of these processes. A 2007 paper in Nature magazine saw “evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems.” (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7137/full/nature05678.html) Plants have long been posited as conscious entities, and as far back as 1966, Cleve Backster, an ex-interrogation specialist for the CIA during the infamous MK Ultra days, conducted his now-infamous plant intelligence experiment. Backster attached polygraph electrodes to a Dracaena cane plant and was amazed to see that it was alive and was reading out in much the same way a human polygraph readout would display. He went on to experiment with biocommunication in plant and animal cells, which led to his theory of what he called “primary perception,” or extra-sensory perception by plants to external stimuli.
This interspecies communication becomes more possible as our understanding of energetic frequencies increases. We currently know that the human brain has five different frequencies it operates at: Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta, and Gamma, measured in cycles per second (Hz), each of which have their own set of characteristics and produce a specific brain function and type of consciousness. Beta (14–40 Hz) gives us waking consciousness and reason and logic; Alpha (7.5–14 Hz) is a state of deep relaxation, light meditation, and intuition; Theta (4–7.5 Hz) is present in the REM dream state, deep meditation, and spiritual and psychoactive states of unity and oneness. Delta (0.5–4 Hz) is the slowest brain frequency, manifesting in deep, dreamless sleep or egoless meditation; and Gamma (above 40 Hz) is the fastest frequency, thought to produce insight, flow, and rapid information processing.
Gamma was only discovered with the advent of EEG machines that read the brain, and that in itself proves that states of consciousness can and do exist that we are sometimes unable to measure. Modern scientific tests have also proven that plants respond and improve their growth when exposed to signals of consciousness in the 0–15 Hz frequency range (Delta through Alpha), the same bandwidth as ecstatic states, meditation, and out-of-body experiences.
Modern science has discounted Backster's experiments as misinterpretations of galvanic skin responses (and indeed, later testing hasn't been able to replicate his extreme findings), but the idea of plant sentience, and a larger reservoir of consciousness embodied in nature herself, is at the heart of the indigenous perspective of the Amazon. The shamans, brujos, vegetalistas, tobaqueros, ayahuasqueros, et al., all work with unseen entities and forces of embodied consciousness that do not have discreet corporeal form. These medicine people say they are in direct communication with the plant and earth spirits that animate their jungle canvas. The vegetalistas in particular work with thousands of medicinal plants and understand the delicate ecosystem as a living entity. The ayahuasqueros work with the power plant Ayahuasca and a number of other plant additives in the Ayahuasca brew to produce an astounding visionary entheogen that is also a remarkable physical purgative and emotional cleanser.
While Western science has proven that Ayahuasca is a rich source of serotonergic agonists and reuptake inhibitors, the effect of the Ayahuasca brew is not just a neurochemical one. The shamans believe it is the relationship with the spirits both in the plant (“madre ayahuasca”) and in the astral or consciousness ecology that engage with their patients to aid in their healing, often mediated through the shaman's use of icaros, sacred songs transmitted by the plants themselves that are, in essence, vibrational codes. By singing the vibration, or essence, of a plant into the patient, the shaman connects the energetic bodies of plant and patient in a symbiotic gestalt. All of this is part of the deeply researched, tested, and proven efficacy over hundreds of years of knowledge (within their culture) of their science of curanderismo.
Stephan Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants, wrote an article in the Journal of Shamanic Practice titled “What Do the Spirits Want from Us?” In it he said:
Shamans in the Upper Amazon have established a relationship of trust and love with the healing and protective spirits of the plants. To win their love, to learn to sing to them in their own language, shamans must first show that they are strong and faithful, worthy of trust. To do this, they must go into the wilderness, away from other people, and follow la dieta, the restricted diet—no salt, no sugar, no sex—and ingest the sacred plant that is the body of the spirit. . . . The spirits are all here, with us, right now. This world is as magical—as filled with ogres and allies, signs and mysteries—as the miraculous world of the vision fast.
The modern world is too caught up at a denser energetic state to hear the singing of the plants, the shamans say. It is fixated to computer screens, TVs, iPhones, and the like, trapping consciousness at Alpha levels. But when you take entheogens like Ayahuasca, the DMN is subdued, and the transmission of higher consciousness is revealed and remembered.
Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist known for his work with Ayahuasca and its effect on the brain with pioneering studies like the Hoasca Project (1990), and brother of psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna, has also had his fair share of mind-expanding shamanic experiences. Integrating them into the Western scientific paradigm forced him to examine many basic concepts anew, such as: “If the brain is a receiver of consciousness, then perhaps consciousness itself is a singularity point much like black holes, where energy is compacted so densely in on itself that it collapses. That collapse in the brain may be what causes consciousness.” (Dennis McKenna, quoted in Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey, 2013) Is this what psychoactives do when they subdue the Default Mode Network? I once posited that “adding an injection of DMT to the endogenous levels of DMT already in the brain . . . may act like the collapse of a star into a black hole, as the brain receiver tunes into an ultra-dense state, reading deeper than ever before.” (Rak Razam, Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey, 2013).
The science of black holes is still an evolving field, and despite recent headlines by Steven Hawking claiming black holes don't exist (he was actually proposing a hypothesis that the event horizon around a black hole doesn't behave the way models suggest), the relationship to black holes as singularities in space time, and consciousness as a singularity, is an intriguing one. Astrophysicists have recently used computer simulations to model how the universe evolved, with visual representations of that growth showing clusters of young galaxies surrounded by stars, older galaxies and dark matter in a complex web eerily identical to the synaptical pathways of the brain, with individual neurons in the same place as galaxies. Ancient alchemical wisdom had an axiom “as above, so below,” and in this, and so many other examples, nature may use the same principles in unfolding her creation on different scales.
Interestingly enough, there is another culture that believed the source of consciousness was in the center of our galaxy—the ancient Maya. The Maya had an amazing ability to map the stars and create calendrical systems that proved astoundingly accurate over vast periods of time, but for them, it wasn't a dry, scientific affair. The spiritual intimacy of their science is reflected in the language they used to describe the stars—for them, galactic center, which they knew about and revered as the source of their knowledge and of all consciousness in our galaxy—they called Hunab Ku, which translates as “the womb of the great mother.” The Maya, and many of their contemporary Mesoamerican cultures, were also entheogenic based and used San Pedro cactus, Ayahuasca, and DMT-containing plants and snuffs both in their consciousness exploration and to facilitate the underpinnings of their science and culture.
Interestingly enough, since the launch of the latest generation of space telescopes like the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst mission in 2004 and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope in 2008, our understanding of black holes has deepened. NASA has confirmed that the center of our galaxy is actually a supermassive black hole, which according to current theories doesn't just suck matter into its event horizon but also spits out jets of ionized gas into space. The jets are bits of matter accelerated by the event horizon they entered, rebounded so fast, they give off gamma rays, converting energy to light. This then heats space and changes the cosmic environment, which may help spark new stars into being. So black holes are not just a source of death, but—like the Maya said about Hunab Ku, the womb of the great mother—they are a source of life.
So what if the Maya were also right about the center of the galaxy being the seat of consciousness, a “pan-galactic cloud computer,” if you will, that creates, stores, and transmits consciousness itself ? Other exotic theories also posit the potential for black holes to be wormholes to other points in spacetime or to parallel universes or higher dimensions. Like our current mapping of the structural similarities of the galactic star structure and neuronal pathways in the brain, could the galactic superstructure itself be the macroreceiver for higher dimensional consciousness from an Implicate Source? And like the way different regions of the brain filter and modulate consciousness for specific tasks, does the distribution of consciousness in the form of energy blanket the galactic-neuronal pathways to activate subprograms, i.e., life forms?
We do know that these galactic emissions affect the magnetic fields of both our sun, and through it the earth, and from there our brains directly. In 2008 New Scientist magazine interviewed Kelly Posner, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in the United States, who said: “The most plausible explanation for the association between geomagnetic activity and depression and suicide is that geomagnetic storms can desynchronize circadian rhythms and melatonin production.” The pineal gland, which regulates circadian rhythm and melatonin production, is sensitive to magnetic fields. “The circadian regulatory system depends upon repeated environmental cues to [synchronize] internal clocks . . . Magnetic fields may be one of these environmental cues.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13769-does-the-earths-magnetic-field-cause-suicides.html) The pineal gland in rats has recently been confirmed to secrete endogenous dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful psychoactive chemical that also exists in our brains as well as in most mammal and many plant species. The pineal gland is directly affected by sunlight and the magnetic fields tripped by the light, and through the pineal, the metabolism of the body is regulated.
So if this celestial daisy chain we are all embedded in has a verifiable effect on the earth, and the health of us as individuals, what then can we say about the alignment of our solar system with galactic center and the supermassive black hole in the cosmic circuit? To the Maya, it was 0.0.0.0.0 on their calendar, or the moment when the 26,000-year orbit concluded and a new cycle began. The grand 26,000-year galactic orbit took in a series of successive world ages, or quadrants, each of which they believed affected consciousness. Heading toward the super-information highway of galactic center, their cosmology suggests, should see a peak in the cosmic-consciousness-connection. You could make an analogy of a mobile phone: Halfway through the galactic orbit of 13,500 years, you go down to a one- or two-bar signal. And as you align closer to galactic center, you receive more consciousness signal, like getting four-bar reception on your mobile phone. And if you use up all your galactic bandwidth allowance, consciousness itself may be “shaped” until you roll over to the next installment, or world age. . . .
Which is just where we seem to find ourselves in the post-2012 Gregorian era, a critical turning point within history. The exponential march of consciousness has created a technological transformation that has simultaneously drained the planet of resources while creating an ever-complexifying web of interconnected information (the Internet), startlingly similar to Vladimir Verandsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's conception of the “sphere of human thought” they called the “noosphere.” A cross between atmosphere and biosphere, the noosphere was defined by Verandsky as the third phase after the geosphere and the biosphere, and was marked by the emergence of human consciousness transforming the environment.
But human consciousness is not the only one on the planet transforming the environment—in fact, humans, animals, plants—all the sentient species have different levels of consciousness that make up and transform the biosphere. Collectively, we may act as an organic mesh network, a terrestrial-DNA-receiver for the galactic signal, a “species satellite dish,” for receiving consciousness itself. To update the old analogy of the radio or TV set receiving signal, what if the planet creates the hardware (each species) to host the software (consciousness), downloaded like a bit-torrent from galactic center? What if the quantum entanglement of consciousness file-shares the source code from higher dimensional space on the other side of the black hole? And what if those clever plants, themselves deep in the egoless 0.5 Hz frequency of consciousness and connected to the broadcast signal, have been grooming us to come back to the garden, to balance with nature and four-bar Godhead consciousness through their entheogenic brethren?
Isn't that just where the resurgence of global shamanism and the popularity of entheogens like Ayahuasca and psilocybin is heading? A return full circle? These entheogens give us a brief flash of the interconnected web of life embodied in the DMT frequency, and in doing so, they may be training us for that experience of full-spectrum consciousness embedded in nature and connecting us back to the Source.
If there is some truth in these theories of consciousness that unites the macro-galactic with the micro-neuronal levels, mediated by the plants and the entheogenic frequencies they enable, it would reposition our understanding of consciousness in the same way that Galileo's discovery that the earth actually revolves around the sun changed our worldview centuries ago. It would take us from the egoic role of consciousness creators to consciousness receivers, and in a way, relieve us of at least some of the guilt the ego brings. For when we go into the egoless state and merge with a sense of unity consciousness, we're actually present in real time, outside linear time and inside eternity.
And in that moment you might, as William Blake said:
. . . see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.