Residency is a four-part weekly journal entry brought to you by one of our favorite artists every month.

This month, the Brooklyn-based psych-rock outfit Woodsman—who recently released their new self-titled album—will be sharing unique pieces each and every Friday throughout the month of February. Their first installment features mind-bending visuals accompanied by some illuminating words from psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna.

Woodsman: This is a Portal - One

Psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was to the redefining of astronomy. You can meet the alien. You can meet the alien tomorrow night if your connections are good enough. And you can meet the alien over and over and over again—you said this is what you wanted, baby. It’s on its way, it’s being served. Society feels anxiety about psychedelic drugs, which do not cause addiction, ruin lives, or inspire people to rob banks. Nothing has ever been adduced against them except that they give you funny ideas. Well, I think this is a crowd familiar with being stigmatized for dealing in funny ideas. They haven’t made UFOs illegal, but they certainly have made psychedelic drugs illegal. This is because they are the portal.

You are not to be a consumer of the UFO it is not for your amusement—it is for your transformation, and you can play the game of waiting with the uninitiated, or you can simply go look at the end of the movie. Shamans have been doing this for at least a hundred thousand years. It is a process of opening to an experience, not an ideology. Now you need to take it one vibratory level over and cut your teeth on what we’ve been putting up with for years, which is these alien entities that are so easily contacted and dealt with.

They are doing something. They use a language you can see. They can condense meaning before your very eyes. For them, syntax is not acoustical rules, it’s pictorial rules. They will scramble forward elbowing each other jumping up and down very excited and they will say look at this, look at this! And these objects themselves emit sound… Don’t give way to amazement… Just pay attention…

—Terence McKenna