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Table of Contents:

Eros and the Eschaton Terence McKenna, 1994 . 5

Terence McKenna Live at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall April 25, 1996 24
Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Terence McKenna 49
Appreciating Imagination by Terence McKenna, 1997 72
Terence McKenna live at The Fez in New York City, June 20, 1993 90
Imagination In The Light Of Nature by Terence McKenna . 111
Opening the Doors of Creativity by Terence McKenna 133
Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness by Terence McKenna 142
Terence McKenna at Wetlands Preserve, NYC July 28th, 1998 .. 157
The World and Its Double by Terence McKenna .. 167
Riding Range with Marshall McLuhan by Terence McKenna ... 177
Light of the Third Millennium by Terence McKenna .. 192

Eros and the Eschaton Terence McKenna, 1994

What I wanted to talk about tonight, simply because its the thing that is moving me to the edge
of my chair at the moment, is I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton, and what I could have
called it is Eros and the Eschaton: What Science Forgot, because somebody asked me recently,
Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people
to hope?! I mean, its easy to hope if youre stupid! but is there any basis for intelligent
people to hope? And I wanted to deal with that, because I think so. I mean, it was to me

Eros and the Eschaton these are the two areas that I think compromise the old paradigm and
give permission to hope; and strangely, neither of these words is that well known, which gives
you a measure of how completely the dominator position has squelched, subverted and
downplayed any opposition to its worldview. Eros, we know about, in some kind of devalued,
schticky kind of glitzy way, because we get it in the eroticisation of media and society. But
really, what Eros means in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature, a kind of all-pervasive
order that bridges one ontological level to another. This is not permitted in the official
worldview of our civilisation, which is science. The world of inorganic chemistry is not thought
to make any statement about the organic world, and the organic world is not thought to be
extrapolatable into the world of culture and thought. There are imagined to be clear breaks in
these categories. I had a biologist tell me once, If genes arent involved, it aint evolution. So
that means you cant talk about the evolution of the Earth as a physical body; you cant talk
about the evolution of human social institutions; evolution is somehow a word appropriate to
biology and appropriate nowhere else.

And this brings me, then, to the first factor easily discerned by anybody who has their eyes
open, that compromises and erodes the hopeless existential view of the world that were
getting from science. And that is the idea that nature is in fact, across all scales and all levels of
phenomena, a unity. Its not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus
and planets going around a star, and star clusters orbiting around the gravitational centre of a
galaxy its no coincidence that these systems exhibit the same kind of order on different
scales. And yet science would say that is a coincidence. You know, P.W. Bridgeman, who was a
philosopher of science, defined a coincidence as what you have left over when you apply a bad
theory! It means, you know, that youve overlooked something, and what jumps out at you as a

coincidence is actually a set of relationships whose casuistry whose relationships to each

other, are simply hidden from you.

And what Ive observed and I think it is fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for
this what Ive observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.
This is a great general natural law that your own senses will confirm for you, but that has never
been allowed into the canon of science. What I mean by that nature builds on complexity is the
following: When the universe was born, in the dubious and controversial circumstance called
the Big Bang, it was at first simply a pure plasma of electrons. It was the simplest that it could
possibly be. There were no atoms, there were no molecules, there were no highly organised
systems of any kind. There was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy. And as the universe
cooled, simply cooled, new kinds of phenomena we say emerged, out of the situation. As the
universe cooled, atomic nuclei could form, and electrons could settle into stable orbits. As the
universe further cooled, the chemical bond became a possibility. Still later, the hydrogen bond,
which is a weaker bond, which is the basis of biology.

So as the universe aged, it complexified. This is so obvious that its never really been
challenged, but on the other hand its never been embraced as a general and dependable
principle, either. Follow it through with me. Out of atomic systems come chemical systems. Out
of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond, the carbon bond, the complex
chemistry that is prebiotic or organic. Out of that chemistry come the macrophysical systems
that we call membranes, gels, charge transfer complexes, this sort of thing. These systems are
the chemical preconditions for life. Simple life, the life of the prokaryotes, the life of naked
unnucleated DNA that characterised primitive life on the planet. Out of that life come
eukaryotes, nucleated cells, and then complex colonies of cells. And then cell specialisation,
leading to higher animals; leading to social animals; leading to complex social systems; leading
to technologies; leading to globe-girdling electronically based information transfer-oriented
cultures like ourselves. (Someone said, Whats so progressive about media? Its the spreading
of darkness at the speed of light. *laughter and applause+ It can be... it can be.)

Well, so this is very interesting: that apparently, the way the universe works is upon a platform
of previously achieved complexity chemical, electrical, social, biological, whatever. New forms
of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean
by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry, but it is more than complex chemistry.
Social systems are based on the organisation that is animal life; and yet it is more than animal
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life. So this is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science that out of complexity
emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a noveltyconserving or complexity-conserving engine. It makes complexity, and it preserves it. And it
uses it as the basis for further complexity.

Now, theres more to this than simply that. I think we all observationally could agree with what
has been said so far. The added wrinkle, or an added wrinkle, is that each advancement into
complexity, into novelty, proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very
profound, because if accepted as a serious first principle it ends the marginalisation of our own
species to the level of spectator status in a universe that knows nothing of us and cares nothing
for us. This is the most advanced position that modern science will allow us: spectators to a
drama we didnt write, shouldnt expect to understand, and cannot influence.

But I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game, if in fact the conservation and
complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human
enterprise, previously marginalised, takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently
players in the cosmic drama, and in this particular act of the cosmic drama we hold a very
central role. We are at the pinnacle of the expression of complexification in the animal world,
and somehow this complexity, which is concentrated in us, has flowed over out of the domain
of animal organisation and into this mysterious domain which we call culture, language,
consciousness, higher values. Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly
than the stage which preceded it. After the initial Big Bang, there was a period of billions of
years when the universe cooled, stars condensed, planetary systems formed, and then the
quickening process crossed an invisible Rubicon into the domain of animal and biological
organisation.

Well, you see, since the rise of Western monotheism, the human experience has been
marginalised. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now
know, from the feedback that were getting from the impact of human culture on the Earth,
that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the
atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the planet; so forth and so on.
A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and
created a new world, an epigenetic world meaning a world not based on gene transfer and
chemical propagation and preservation of information, but a world based on ideas, on symbols,
on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretised
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in three-dimensional space as choppers, arrowpoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers,

space craft, what have you all of this complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate.

And this brings me, then, to the second quality, or phenomenon, that science has overlooked,
which is the acceleration of complexification. That the early history of the universe proceeded
with excruciating slowness; then, life took hold, in the oceans of this planet. A quickening of
process and evolution; but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions of years to clock
major change. Then, the conquest of the land. Higher animals, higher exposure to radiation,
faster change, species following species, one upon another. Then, fifty thousand, a hundred
thousand, a million years ago anyway, recently! the cross-over into the domain of culture,
tool-making, myth-making, dance, poetry, song, story and that set the stage for the fall into
history the incredibly unusual and self-consuming process that has been going on for the past
fifteen or twenty thousand years. A biological snap of the finger; and yet, in that time,
everything that we call human everything that we associated with higher values has been
adumbrated, elaborated, created, set in place, by one species: ourselves.

This acceleration of time, or complexity, shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, within the
fabric of our own lives, we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute, feel it speeding up, taking
hold. Its a clich that time is moving faster and faster a clich of the mass media but I want
to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion, or a cultural mirage: that this is actually
happening to the spacetime matrix, that time is in fact speeding up. That history in which we
are embedded, because our life of 5080 years is so ephemeral on a scale of 1015,000 years
but nevertheless, history, is a state of incredible destabilisation. Its a chaostrophy in the
process of happening. It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection, and it ends
with a global internet of electronic information transfer and a language-using species purling its
instruments toward the stars.

There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is ever going to slow down
or be deflected. It has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature, that this
acceleration was built in. What poses a problem, to us as thinking individuals, is that the speed
of involution towards concrescence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it within the
confines of our own lives. There has been more change since 1960 than in the previous several
thousand years. There has been more change since 1992 than in the previous thousand years.
Change is accelerating. Invention, connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematical algorithms,
connectivity of people, social systems, this is all accelerating furiously, and under the control of
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no one not the Catholic church, the community party, the IMF, no one is in charge of this
process! This is what makes history so interesting: its a runaway freight train on a dark and
stormy night! This is why Im not particularly sympathetic to conspiracy theory because I cant
make the leap of faith that would cause you to believe anyone could get hold of the beast
enough to control it! I mean, conspiracies, of course, we have conspiracies up the kazoo; but
none of them are succeeding! theyre all being swept away, compromised, astonished by new
information, and endlessly agonised!

So, two factors relating to Eros: the movement into complexity, and the fact that that
movement goes ever-faster. And the second quality, the acceleration of the movement into
novelty, leads me to the third point, which is I suppose more controversial and I am frankly
willing to admit that my sensitivity to this third point is based on my psychedelic experience. I
mean, science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I
propose therefore to expand that enterprise an say we need a science beyond science: we need
a science which plays with a full deck. And the reason the psychedelic experience is so
important here is not some namby-pamby notion that it expands consciousness, or it makes
you more perceptive, or something like that I mean, that is all true; but it isnt strongly
enough put.

A cultural point of view is like a crystal: you have an amorphous cultural medium which at
certain temperatures will form a crystal of cultural convention, if you will, and within the
geometry of that crystal certain things make sense and certain things are excluded from making
sense. Science is a condensed cultural point of view that is a rigid crystal of interlocking
assumptions assumptions such as, Matter is primary. Mind is tertiary. Causality works from
the past into the future so forth and so on. What psychedelics do, in terms of impact on the
physical brain and organism of human beings, is they withdraw cultural programming. They
dissolve cultural assumptions. They lift you out of that reassuring crystal and matrix of
interlocking truths which are lies, and instead they throw you into the presence of the great
Who Knows? the mystery the mystery that has been banished from Western thought since
the rise of Christianity and the suppression of the mystery religions.

Now, the model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience is not that it makes you smarter
a kind of simple-minded idea, paradoxically or the idea that ([laughs] you are paying
attention, huh?) the idea that its some kind of magnifying glass into the personal unconscious
your trauma, your childhood memories, the satanic abuse your parents laid on you, so forth
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and so on the model which I like is a geometric model, and says simply that since the rise of
the Greek alphabet, print, linear thinking, and science, we have become imprisoned in a causal
universe of material connectivity; and that this is a cultural myth, as much as believing that we
are the sons and daughters of the great father who got out of his canoe at the second waterfall
to take a leak; I mean, these are just cultural myths. What is revealed through the psychedelic
experience, I think, is a higher-dimensional perspective on reality. And I use higherdimensional in the mathematical sense: literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural
assumptions and can look down, with a kind of god-like understanding that one obtains when
one flies in an aeroplane over a landscape previously only viewed from the ground. In other
words, from the vantage-point of the psychedelic experience, the cultural landscape is seen
more nearly in its correct perspective. Seen as historically bounded, spatially and intellectually
bounded.

Now, its no coincidence that if you analyse biology, what it is, its a kind of conquest of
dimensionality. The earliest forms of life were probably slimes of some sort, stabilised on a clay
surface: immobile, unable to perceive light, with no sense of time, merely a fingernail or a
toehold in existence; and then if you look at the entire fossil record, what you see is the
evolution of senses sensory preceptors, and organs of locomotion. The preceptors the eye,
the hand bring into the cognitive field the sense of things at a distance, and then language
provides models for these things at a distance. Similarly, fins, legs, so forth means of
locomotion carry us through space. This is a journey of dimensionality, and essentially what
animals are that plants are not are life-forms mobile, in a very conscious way, in a spatial
dimension. This is why, from the point of view of evolutionary biologists, animals are somehow
more advanced than plants.

Well, if conquest of dimensionality is the criteria, then notice that we again occupy a special
and privileged position in nature, because we can not only run with the best of them, see with
the best of them, but we can remember and anticipate like crazy; and other animals are not
doing this. Other animals may imprint past situations of danger or opportunity, but they do not
analyse experience and extrapolate it toward the hidden domain of the future. And
consciousness is the generalised word that we use for this coordination of complex perception
to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future; and then suspends
a perceiving organism in this magical moment called the Now, where the past is coordinated for
the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it driving with the rear view mirror, and
the only thing good about it is its better than driving with no mirror at all!

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Right, now What this conquest of dimensionality comes to be, in the presence of
psychedelics, is an anticipation of the future. We can anticipate the future: we know to within
microseconds when the sun will rise; we know within a few percentage points where the prime
rate will be in six months; some things we can predict fairly closely, some things with less
precision. But the perception of the future is very important to us. When we marry the need to
perceive the future with the psychedelic experience, I believe we come up with data that is very
very difficult for science to come to terms with. And this is the third item, or really the second
item, in the list: What Science Forgot. Its what I call the Eschaton.

Now, Eschaton is a rare word, until very recently unheard outside schools of theology, which I
understand were a dying enterprise. Eschaton comes from the Greek word esch, which just
means the end. The Eschaton is the last thing, the final thing. And its very important to science
to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this Eschaton might exist. Because if it were to
exist, it would impart to reality a purpose, you see. If the Eschaton exists, then its like a goal, or
an attraction point, or an energy synch, toward which historical process is being moved. And
science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose. If you are not involved in the sciences,
this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you; if you are a workbench scientist or a
theoretician, you know that this is whats called the problem of teleology. It is because modern
science defined itself in the 19th century, when the reigning philosophy was deism, and deism
was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God, and God wound this clock and has
walked away from it, and the clock will eventually run down that theological construct was
poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century, and so they said, We must create a
theory of reality that does not require a goal does not require a purpose. Everything must be
pushed from the past. Nothing must be pulled toward the future.

The problem with this is that it does not fulfil our intuitions about reality. We can see that
evolution, biological evolution, has built on chemical systems. We can see that social and
historical systems build on biology. As people with open minds or as open as they can be,
inside this culture we nevertheless have this intuition of purpose. And it is dramatically
underscored by the psychedelic experience, which takes the raw material of your life, your
culture, your history, and tells you this is not an existential mish-mash to be lived out with
dignity because theres nothing else to be done with it some kind of Camusian Why not?
affirmation it says, No; it says, you know, Your reality is a coherent cosmos. And embedded in
your own sense of identity, embedded in your own sense of purpose, is a microscopic reflection
of the larger purpose that is built into the universe.

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Now and this is not just blowing smoke, in the sense of its a nice idea, or its like a religious
idea, like saying Jesus loves you, and so feel all right about yourself; it isnt like that its a
theory about reality that has teeth, because reality is actually following the script that this
particular version of reality dictates. Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable omega
point. We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems, our philosophical
and scientific and technological approaches to the world. Because were driving the historical
vehicle with a rear-view mirror, it appears to us that were headed straight into a brick wall at a
thousand miles an hour. It appears that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere,
wrecking the oceans, dehumanising ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so
on. I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges, one by one. We are
burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, or
the canopied rainforests of five million years ago. We cant even go back to the era of the
Houston six-shooter [??] of two hundred years ago. We have burned our bridges; we are
preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.

And this question, you know, Is there cause for optimism? the answer is, it depends on
where you placed your bets! You know, if you placed your bets on male-dominated institutions
based on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classism and materialism, then God help you, you
should call your broker! If, on the other hand, youve recognised that a lifeboat strategy is
involved here, that what is really important is empowering personal experience, backing off
from consumer object fetishism, freeing the mind, empowering the imagination, then in that
case I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on.

You know, theres a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement, and its usually
couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest, or in Tajikistan making their
rugs, or milking their camels or something, and isnt it too bad that their culture is being blown
up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote; but in fact, all culture is being
destroyed. All culture is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the
entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse! And thats not the victory of
somebodys culture over somebody elses culture; nobody ever had a culture like that! Thats
just the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense!

Well, if I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull us out of
the ditch, I would be very despairing. As I said, nobodys in charge not the IMF, the Pope, the
communist party, the Jews, no, no, no, nobody has their finger on whats going on. So then,
12

why hope? Isnt it just a runaway train, out of control? I dont think so. I think the out-ofcontrolness is the most hopeful thing about it! After all, whose control is it out of?! You and I
never controlled it in the first place! Why are we anxious about the fact that its out of control?
I think if its out of control, then our side is winning!

To me, the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience is this thing, which I call the
Eschaton. And I want to talk about it a little bit this evening, because I think it is the hardest
thing for people to grasp about my particular rap. And, you know, sometimes Ive talked to
many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism, techniques, chemistry, approaches, so forth
and so on Im approaching this this evening as a graduate seminar: I figure everybody has
their little mojo kit, and their particular way of approaching these things, and then the question
is, you know, what kind of conclusions can we draw? And the conclusion I draw is and this is
sort of pulling together what I said before we are central to the human drama, and to the
drama of nature and process on this planet.

The opposition, which is science well, first let me say this: Every model of the universe has a
hard swallow. What I mean by a hard swallow is a place where the argument cannot hide the
fact that theres something slightly fishy about it. The hard swallow built into science is this
business about the Big Bang. Now, lets give this a little attention here. This is the notion that
the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Well, now before we
dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you believe this or not,
notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed!
I mean, I defy anyone its just the limit case for unlikelihood, that the universe would spring
from nothing in a single instant, for no reason?! I mean, if you believe that, my family has a
bridge across the Hudson River that well give you a lease option for five dollars! It makes no
sense. It is in fact no different than saying, And God said, let there be light. And what these
philosophers of science are saying is, give us one free miracle, and we will roll from that point
forward from the birth of time to the crack of doom! just one free miracle, and then it will
all unravel according to natural law, and these bizarre equations which nobody can understand
but which are so holy in this enterprise.

Well, I say then, if science gets one free miracle, then everybody gets one free miracle. And I
perceive that it is true, when you build these large-scale cosmogonic theories, that you have to
have a kind of an umbilical cord, or a point to start from that is different from all other points in
the system. So if we have to have a singularity in our modelling of what reality is, lets make it
13

as modest and as non-unlikely a singularity as possible. The singularity that arises for no reason,
in absolutely empty space, instantly, is the least likely of all singularities. Doesnt it seem more
likely, if we have to have a singularity, that it occurs in a domain with a rich history, with many
causal streams feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity? In other words, to put it
simply, if you have to have a singularity, doesnt it make more sense to put it at the end of a
cosmogonic process, than at the beginning?

And I think this is the great breakthrough of psychedelics and shamanism, that science got it
absolutely wrong: the universe didnt begin in a singularity who knows how the universe
began, or would even presume to judge? but the universe ends in a singularity. It has been
growing more singular, more complex, more unique, more novel, every passing moment since it
burst into existence. And if thats true, then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal
intent. Were not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some side show, or the Greek
chorus to the main event: the human experience is the main event. The coordination of
perception, of hope, of dream, of vision, that occurs inside the human heart/mind/body
interface is the most complex phenomenon in the universe.

Now, even the physicalists will agree that the human neocortex represents the most densely
ramified matter known to exist in the biological world; and you dont have to be a rocket
scientist to see that human society, human history, human art, human literature, represent
things for which there is no analogue in the world of wasps, groundhogs, killer whales, and so
forth and so on. In our species, complexity has turned inward upon itself. And in our species,
time has accelerated; time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that
characterises biological evolution, and instead historical time is generated. And so I believe that
science and its reluctance to deal with the psychedelic experience, and the way in which
science has used, then, law, to suppress its rival in this case, arises out of a profound
discomfort on the part of science about this future state of complexification that is clearly the
grail, the dwellpoint, the endpoint, of the human historical process.

No one of us, I think, can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years. I mean,
what would it look like? At the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic disease,
rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere it is impossible to
conceive of another thousand years of human history. History, then, is ending. History is a kind
of gestation process; its a kind of metamorphosis; its an episode in the life of a species. If you
think of the simple example of metamorphosis that of caterpillar to butterfly we all know
14

that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is, for all practical purposes,
enzymatically dissolved, and then reconstituted as an entirely different kind of organism, with
different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing; with
wings, where no wings were before; with a different kind of feeding apparatus this is whats
happening to us! History is a process of metamorphosis. Its a pupation stage. It begins with
naked monkeys, and it ends with a human machine planet-girdling interface capable of
releasing the energies that light the stars! And it lasts about fifteen or twenty thousand years,
and during that period the entire process hangs in the balance. Its a period of high risk. Its like
what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon, or what is happening to a child in the womb: its a
gestation process, where one form of life is being changed into another.

Well, this would all happen naturally, and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine, as history
builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo, and we would all be ignorant, or very
baffled, about whats going on, were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism.
Remember, I said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption?
Well, one of the strongest symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that gathers
around the concept of past and future. The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and
future are different areas on the same topological manifold. This is not a metaphor; its whats
really going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment, it is about
predicting weather; predicting game movement; and curing disease. If you had a prescient or
extraordinary understanding of the future, each one of us would be able to do these things.
Predicting the weather? you just look into next week, and there it is. Predicting the
movement of beings? same deal. Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice of
your patients, with a pre-knowledge of who will get well and who will not get well.

So its as though the members of a culture are imprisoned in linear time, and the shaman is not.
And why not? Because the shaman has perturbed the brain states sanctioned by the culture
sanctioned by its educational processes, its habits, its attitudes. And into that vacuum created
by the perturbation of these cultural values rushes the raw, unanalysed datum of reality. This is
what Aldous Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness. And suddenly, culture
is seen to be a relative phenomenon, the stockbroker no different from the rainforest shaman,
each somewhat similar to the Trobrian islander, or the Eskimo. Culture is simply clothing upon
the human experience; but the human organism, outside the confines of culture, in a direct
relationship to nature, transcends time and space. This was a fact, I believe, that was known in
prehistory, and in fact was the source of paleolithic values, which were not material, not linear,
not surplus-oriented, not class-oriented, not power-oriented; but rather, oriented toward a
15

kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity. And human

beings lived like that for probably half a million years with poetry, with dance, with
mathematics, with magic, with story, with humour; but not with the paralysing and toxic
artefacts of the late-evolving, machine-worshipping, monotheistic, linear, phonetic-alphabet
tight-assed straight culture that we are a part of.

So now, at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for Western civilisation,
which has for a thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down everybodys throat
whether they liked it or not, - in the last hundred years, through the science of anthropology
and ethnography and ethnomedicine and botany, the news has arrived that these primitive
people are in fact master technicians of journeying into a world of the neurological imagination
a world we didnt even know exists; a world that is as distant to us as the world at the heart of
the atom is from the rainforest fishermen. And because our own cultural values seem a little
shoddy at this moment, those on the fringes of Western civilisation have begun to seek
alternatives, begun to look at alternative religions (yoga, tantra, Buddhism, Zen, whatever),
alternative approaches to diet (vegetarianism, macrobiotics, so forth and so on) and alternative
approaches to authentic experience, which means psychedelics.

In the early stage of psychedelic involvement, everyone was sort of flying under the banner of
hands-on Freudianism, or hands-on Jungianism, you know: Were gonna see those archetypes.
Were gonna confront those sexual repressions. Were gonna journey into those traumatic
childhood memories. Now, its understood, I think, that those metaphors were fairly
inadequate, and that actually we stand on the brink of an unexplored landscape of planetary
size: the word of the high paleolithic, which is a Gaian world, a world of feeling not analytical
intellectual constructs, but a world of empowered feeling empathy; and intuitive
understanding, an understanding that doesnt arise in a context of Greek logic, but in a context
of animal knowing the in the authentic mode of the body.

So, just to bring it all around here, the great exhibit which we must always keep in front of
ourselves and our critics, is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is
that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. I mean, thats mind over
matter: thats the violation of every scientific principle in the books. And yet it is the most trivial
experience any of us have; we expect to command our body. We expect the mental will to
order the monkey flesh into action, and it will follow. The body is the nexus of the mystery of
life. And our culture takes us out of the body, and sells our loyalty into political systems, into
16

religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt
experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us; thats why its called
escape, because its escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing whats on the tube,
from consuming trash media its escape from all of that, into the authenticity of the body.
This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society. Theyd make it illegal if they could but figure out
how! Its the one drug they cant tear from our grip, and so they lay a guilt trip about it.

But sexuality and psychedelics are carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body. Carry us
back to the domain of authentic values. And more and more, the message that people are
getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the
human unconscious, or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilisation; its s journey into the
presence of the Gaian mind, that the Earth is a coherent whole: it is a thinking, feeling,
intending, being that in terms of our value structures, it would be foolish to image as anything
other than female. And when cultural values created by male dominance and science and
linearity and so forth and so on when those values are dissolved, what it waiting there is this
incredibly poignant experience of the matrix what James Joyce called the Mama Matrix Most
Mysterious: nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came.

History, as we have lived it in the West, has been a turning of our back on that; and now history
has failed. Western cultural institutions, having become global institutions, now show
themselves to be inadequate to inspire, lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in. At
this moment, then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative. So
this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates or about untaxed billions,
or about the mental health of our youth, or any of that malarkey; I mean, God, the most
destructive drug thats known to the species is peddled on every street corner, without
restriction. The real issue is what kind of mental world shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope
shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed? And the value systems that
aggrandise the possession of things, the tearing up of the Earth, competition, classism, racism,
sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe.

Now, I think we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of
the body in connection with the plants. Thats the seamless web that leads us back into the
heart of nature; and if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be
navigated. Very little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines, the systems of
monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little
17

of that can be saved. But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring, and mutuality, that
we all put into and take from the human enterprise. You know, theres a Grateful Dead song
that says You cant go back and you cant stand still. If the thunder dont get you, then the
lightning will. And we now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the
human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them we can deconstruct the lethal
vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and
redesign it into a kind of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry
galaxy we know to be awaiting us.

But its a cultural test. Nature is pitiless. Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great
deal has been writ; but if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same kind of
cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and the trilobites and the crossopterygian
fishes, and all those other folks that came before. So what we must do, I think, is see our future
in the imagination. Catalyse the imagination. Form symbiotic relationships with the plants.
Affirm archaic values. And spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact
dying, is a world that had become too top-heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false
value systems, and too dehumanised to care about what happened to its own children. So I say,
good riddance to it! Bring on the archaic revival, and lets create a new world! Thats it! And
[applause] if this wasnt perfectly clear, Im sure the questions and answers will make it so.
Lets take a half-hour break Ill sign books if anybody wants me to, and then well get together
here for the hard core. Thank you very, very much.

18

Question from audience

Good question. Well, the answer is, I think, pretty obvious. Yes: how do we emancipate people
from the foolishness of the drug war? How do we, as a community, as a point of view, how do
we gain legitimacy? This is a really important question. I mean, if you look around yourself
tonight, you dont see the uneducated, the unhealthy, the demented or the deluded; and yet
this is the stereotype of our subculture. Instead, what you see are well-dressed, creative people
holding down positions in society, the parents of children, the heads of departments, the
authors of books, the painters of paintings you may not have noticed, but in this society
theyre not handing out rights. Ask black people! Ask the members of any sexual minority! They
dont hand out rights in this society. And we meaning we psychedelic people, by and large,
this isnt always true but by and large we tend to be white and middle-class. A translation of
those two terms into gutless would not be inappropriate. We have the most to lose; and so
were not given to hurling ourselves into the breach or building barricades in the street to hurl
our bodies against the machine. Nevertheless, if you dont claim your political birthright, it will
never be given to you; and black people and gay people and American Indians, Native
Americans all of these people have learned that you dont go on bended knee to petition the
official culture for your rights. You have to take them.

And people ask me, you know, how can you stand up and say the things you do? Why dont
they take you away? They dont take me away because theyre more chicken-shit than you
think! Theyre more off balance than you think! Theyre more uncertain of themselves than you
think! The legitimacy of this point of view is established in their minds. The reason drugs are
illegal and suppressed, and bla bla, is because you can make a shitload of money off them in
that context. Its a money issue. Do you think a loving government is trying to keep you from
jumping out of third-floor windows and thats why LSD is illegal?! I mean, give me a break!
for crying out loud, if this government felt strongly enough about certain issues, all of us
between 18 and 26 would be sent off to die for that policy decision; so the government is not
interested in your health. The government is artificially interested in inflating the prices of
certain substances in order to create a focus for clandestine money that is used then to
destabilise unfriendly governments, murder labour union leaders, kill and blackmail the editors
of left-wing newspapers, so forth and so on.

Drugs are enormous big business. But not the psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic drugs the only
one that ever amounted to anything as a financial enterprise was cannabis. And cannabis is
19

many things besides psychedelic. The deep, dramatic psychedelics, which are all Schedule 1, the
most repressed Schedule dont produce great amounts of money at all. What they do produce
is questioning minds. They cause people to ask questions. They cause people to ask for
clarification. They cause people to challenge cultural values, because they decondition you. It
doesnt matter whether youre a Hasid, a communist apparatchik, a rainforest shaman, if you
take psychedelics you will question your first premises; and that is a business that all
governments right, left, middle are in the business of repressing. They dont want to have to
explain why things are done as they are. But if we dont begin asking for that explanation,
theyre going to run this planet right into ruin.

And we are the generation responsible. You are the generation that is responsible. You cant
claim that you grew up in a village in Nigeria and you didnt know. You cant claim that you are
the child of poor Bangladeshi parents and you had no opportunity. The responsibility rests upon
the educated and the financially capable of doing something about it; and by that measure, you
and I are probably in the upper 3% of people on this planet, and if we dont take responsibility
then that responsibility will devolve to others beady-eyed others, with an agenda that would
stand your hair on end.

Yes, over here. This will be the last question, so make it hit.

Question from audience

Well, lets go back and talk about schizophrenia for just a second. The question is, you know,
schizophrenia involves basically breaking with ordinary value systems, and how does it relate to
the psychedelic state; and people who have schizophrenic relatives in their family tree, how
should they relate to the psychedelic experience, and so forth, I mean Im extrapolating, but
thats the basic thing.

Well, there are different things to be said about this. I mean, first of all, how many psychiatric
residents who are the people who come most in contact with schizophrenics, whatever that
means how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an undrugged schizophrenic? Very,
very few. Because the very first thing that happens is, for the convenience of physicians and the
20

nursing staff, some outlandish drug is brought into the picture, which then deflects this healing
process from ever reaching any kind of natural conclusion. Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term
for forms of mental behaviour that we dont understand. In the 19th century, there was a term
melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression, so forth and so on. But all forms of
sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, so forth and so on, were poured into this label
melancholia.

Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing. I can remember an experience I had years ago, it was in
the Tolman Library at the University of California, which is the psych library, and I was looking
up some drug or something, and I just saw a book and I pulled it off the shelf, a book about
schizophrenia. And it said, the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining,
marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes,
content to drift in their own self-created value systems. Thats it! Thats it! Now I understand!
We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental
worlds. We are terrified of madness. We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards,
and the people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified of madness.

Tim Leary once said or I gave him credit for saying; he later told me he never said it but
whoever said it, this was a brilliant statement; someone once said, LSD is a psychedelic
substance which occasionally causes psychotic behaviour in people who have not taken it.
right? And I would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behaviour from not
taking LSD, but just thinking about it, than ever exhibited it from taking it certainly in my
family. I watched my parents both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed; they would
never have taken it. There is a great phobia about the mind: the Western mind is very queasy
when first principles are questioned. Rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad,
because we cant come to terms with that.

A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has
thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a
traditional society, if you exhibited schizophrenic tendencies, you are immediately drawn out
of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told, You are
special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society. You will cure. You will
prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions. Contrast this with what
a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our society is told. Theyre told, You dont fit in. You
are becoming a problem, You dont pull your own weight. You are not of equal worth to the
21

rest of us. You are sick. You have to go to the hospital. You have to be locked up. You are on a
par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society.So that treatment of schizophrenia makes it
incurable. Imagine if you were slightly odd, and the solution were to take you and put you
lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad. That would drive anyone mad! If
youve ever been in a madhouse, you know that its an environment calculated to make you
crazy and to keep you crazy. This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.

I wrote a book, I mean this has to be the wrap-up, because were over time but I wrote a book
called The Archaic Revival; I signed it tonight for some of you. The idea there is that we have
gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the
visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the
body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or
strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort
at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual
permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all
these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The
society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I
see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or
dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual
behaviour, I applaud all of this; because its an impulse to return to what is felt by the body
what is authentic, what is archaic and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the
very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of
feeling.

And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with
the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious,
living mystery. Thats what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or
sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment
these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration,
empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it
away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get
away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of
the body and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded,
exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.

22

The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are
the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful
adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the
living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and
thats what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a
future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human
imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as
the human imagination. Lets not sell it straight. Lets not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies.
Lets not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the
sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to
turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a
living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much.

23

Terence McKenna Live at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall April 25,
1996

New York, who loves you?

It's great to be here! It's absolutely great to be here. I think yesterday in Manhattan was as
beautiful a day as I've ever seen anywhere. I hope you all noticed. It's the kind of day that
makes you want to just... drop acid! And walk around in the park... Anyhow, I'm delighted to be
here. It's been awhile since I've been in this town.

What's new with me? (I'll get all that calm-us-down, make-us-feel-at-home stuff behind me.)
I've moved off the mainland; I'm living in the Free and Sovereign State of Hawaii now, loving it.
When the word reaches the mainland that we want independence, I hope all of you will
support that and help make it a possibility!

Before I was in Manhattan, I was in Heidelberg, Germany, for two weeks working on a film, and
this is the project that's been on my mind recently. We're doing a film called "The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment." It's an effort to use an incident in early 17th-century European history, right
before the 30-Years War, to make a kind of propaganda film, consciously using this earlier
historical episode -- which involved a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth of England and young
Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia, and their effort to build an alchemical kingdom in
central Europe, right before the 30-Years War. It's a wonderful romantic story -- alchemy,
magick, politics. But the purpose of it is to make a statement about our own politics and
circumstance. So that'll be coming down the pipe in awhile.

I'm doing a four-city tour, talking about the plunge into novelty that we are experiencing
according to me, and the challenge of the millennium, which we will experience according to
nearly everybody -- or at least everybody who keeps or cares about the Western calendar. And
these things are parallel.

24

Just a bit of background here... I'm the purveyor of a notion that is uniquely my own (basically,
no one wanted to steal it from me!): the idea that there is a quality in the world that has been
overlooked by Science, and overlooked by Western religions, as far as that's concerned -- a
quality which I call "novelty". (And I cribbed this from Alfred North Whitehead.) It's a very
slippery concept to define mathematically or precisely, but intuitively I think it's right there on
the surface; we all know what novelty is. Novelty is density of connection. It's that which is new
or never tried. It's the unusual, the statistically improbable, the interesting. I maintain that
Nature herself is a kind of distillery of novelty, that over any swath of time what we see is a
tendency to accumulate and preserve this connectedness. And this is a quality that affects
social systems, biological systems, physical systems -- it's a law across all scales of phenomenon
that Nature tends to become more complex through time, and tends to struggle against
entropy and habit to maintain that complexity.

Well, as a rap at that level, you can take it or leave it -- it's sort of a rescinscion of the idea of
Tao. But I went much further with it; I mathematized it, I made it into an algorithm that can be
run on computers. And what the output of this software then is are what I call "maps" of
novelty or "maps" of time. (I'm delivering this at light speed because I'm trying to get
somewhere.)

The point being, since late February, and until the middle of next week, the theory has
predicted an enormous plunge into novelty, whatever that is. And I have been anticipating this
particular dip toward the weird for many years because it is such a dramatic one; it's a test for
the theory. I think when you came in this evening you were given a card with my web site
address on it. There's extensive exhibits there -- you can learn more about this than most
people with lives would ever care to know, at the web site. But the question before the house
this evening is, one week or less than a week from the bottom of the novelty trough, how are
we doing? Is it simply an illusion of the psilocybin-addled minority, or is there in fact a kind of
concrescence underway, a kind of plunge into deeper and deeper connectivity that anticipates
somehow this much larger plunge into novelty that will inevitably accompany the calendar?
(The calendrical change at the turn of the century.)

Well, I'm a patient character, so it would be my tendency to not try to sort this out until, say,
after the election. A lot of people want to second-guess the situation, or have strong opinions
of their own. I got a piece of email today. (Maybe it's a person that's in this room -- it wasn't
somebody I knew.) They said, "Isn't it about time to come clean about the fact that the novelty
25

plunge has been a huge bore?" So that stirred me, and I actually made a little list -- and I'm not
saying that we've nailed this to the barn door. But confronted with a critic, I want to respond.
So here is just a partial list off the top of my head, composed back in the hotel an hour and a
half ago of interesting and unusual things which have happened in the last 90 days, roughly,
since the 25th of February.

Several new planets have been discovered around other stars. 70 Virginis, 47 Ursa Minoris, and
Beta Pictoris -- stars within 40 light years of Earth -- have all been discovered to have planets of
Jupiter mass or less. This has to do with new technologies being put in place. We can expect a
planet a month at this point, and the resolution is getting finer and finer. We're very very close
to the Holy Grail of the water-heavy, oxygen-rich signature of a world like our own somewhere
within 40 light years of Earth. That's one item. (I'll do the astronomy part first.)

Ten billion new galaxies were discovered and announced. I believe it was the missing eighty
percent of the universe! That was in the last 90 days.

And then -- though probably few of you actually noticed it, because you live in this wonderful
dazzling verticality of an arcology filled with light... But for those of us who live off the grid and
in rural areas, the brightest comet since 1658, and an unpredicted one at that -- which is
interesting, cause I could have fudged, you know, and made it fit in the slot. But nobody knew. I
saw this comet from rural Hawaii, and it was absolutely stunning. I mean comets are one of
those things guaranteed to disappoint, and this was dazzling.

So that's the astronomy section of what's happened in the last 90 days. Turning to biology, the
Human Genome Project announced its completion, years earlier than they thought they would.
That is the key piece of data about ourselves that we have never had before. It's the algebra of
biology itself, now fully elucidated, and it will mean the cure of diseases, it will mean -- all kinds
of things will flow from that.

Right at the turn from not-so-interesting to very interesting, back there at the end of February,
half a dozen atoms of antimatter were created at CERN in Switzerland. Not antiparticles, which
are very humdrum and have been around, but antimolecules of hydrogen -- antihydrogen and
26

antihelium. Antimatter converts to energy 100% in the presence of ordinary matter. If you want
to fling Manhattan to Andromeda, this is the technology you need to have! Well, remember
that happened in James Bliche's (sp?) novel Cities in Flight -- do you all remember that? The
story of John Amalfi, the mayor of New York City when New York City was well beyond the
Milky Way?

Another interesting point describe in the Times two days ago: it's now agreed by everyone that
a very large asteroid impact 4 or 5 million years ago delivered a huge amount of organic
material to the Earth's surface without destroying it in the impact. I won't bother you with the
details, but what this means is organic material which forms in deep space is delivered regularly
to the surface of the Earth. This changes entirely our picture of who we are, where we came
from, and the uniqueness of life as a terrestrial phenomenon.

And finally -- and this is just as I say an off-the-top-of-my-head list -- roving the Internet I
learned that the nanotechnologists (the people who are working at the itty-bitty scale) have
finally produced the nanoassembler which they have been seeking -- which lays the basis for a
very bizarre technology, a technology of machines too small to see. I think we've discussed at
times the phenomenon of putting 10,000 steam engines on a chip; more steam engines can be
put on a one-centimeter chip than were operating in England in 1850, at the height of the age
of steam.

Well, so what are we to conclude from all this? Novelty apparently doesn't come in the form of
politics, wars, revolutions, upheavals -- that was the change of another era. In the present era,
what change seems to mean, or where it seems to be concentrated, is in technology, and in
science. All these scientific discoveries I mentioned are the result of the application of advanced
technologies: signal processing technologies and this sort of thing. It's as though the
acceleration into novelty is now very much a phenomenon of our technical productions, our
machines, our interconnectivity. And it's interesting -- we have now the Internet; we are
familiar with the inner network of our own emotions, associations, this sort of thing; and we
are becoming more and more aware of the interpenetrating network that connects all life back
into the biosphere, back into the dynamics of the Gaian matrix of oceans and rivers and
biological recycling of materials. So I submit that, at this point, if you don't think we are
experiencing an incredible plunge into novelty, you have an uphill case to defend.

27

I'm not suggesting that this pace of breakneck change will continue indefinitely. It won't. In
every period of time, if examined at sufficient resolution, you see that novelty is retarded or
obstructed by another force, a force more akin to resistance of some sort. And I name this
"habit". So on all scales, process -- in your own life, in the life of the nation, in the life of the
species and the life of the planet -- a struggle between habit and novelty. Habit and novelty:
what novelty builds up and offers up as unusual and improbable, the forces of entropy and of
habit and of business as usual attempt to pull down. But as I say, the good news is that over
time, these things that retard novelty must yield. And the interesting thing about this idea is
that it lays the basis for an ethic. Because it takes the phenomenon of ourselves -- our sprawling
cities, our uncontrolled technologies, our dreams, our fears -- and it places them at the very
center of the drama. We are no longer existentially-marginalized observers. History is no longer
some kind of hideous mistake. Rather, everything is seen to serve this advance into novelty.

Well then of course the obvious question to ask is, "Where is it all leading?" I mean, how novel
can things become, and how rapidly, before we become unrecognizable to ourselves? Well the
answer is, not much. Working from a mathematical point of view -- and it's going out on a limb
to do so, because many squirrels occupy this particular part of the park -- nevertheless I've
been willing to go out on a limb and extrapolate these processes forward and say: somewhere
beyond 2012, reality as we know it is taken off the menu. And I've been saying this since 1971,
and the only model I had was the boundary-dissolving challenge of the psychedelic experience.
And I still think that, in some sense, history is an invoking of that -- it's a slow-moving
psychedelic experience of some sort that builds to some kind of revelatory crescendo, almost
like an individuation process in the Jungian model -- not of a single person, but of an entire
culture or a species.

We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have
a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal
thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by
bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don't think so.
I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some
people would call it a "destiny", but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper
into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster -- that's the other thing.
Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed
to before the Industrial Revolution, for example -- we can barely conceive of such slow-moving
stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has
been even more intense, and continues to accelerate.
28

Well, people think it's an illusion, or it's a subjective perception that is best saved for their
therapist. No, what you see is true: it is happening. The denial of it, I think, comes from the fact
that it's very hard for people to imagine transformation without catastrophe, because that's the
only kind we've ever known. Societies build up wealth and stability and a model of themselves,
and then -- plague, invaders, crop failures, something happens... Catastrophe. But I sense, I
think, an incredible opportunity for positive transformation, that the tools that have been given
into our hands now make it possible for us to discover who and what we really are. And I think
since de Sade people have thought would be a fairly rough ride. I don't think so. I think that's a
form of cultural paranoia that keeps us from exploring what our politics could be.

It happens that I'm named after a Roman dramatist, a very minor character who wrote these
sort of foppish little social comedies that didn't amount to much -- but one quote comes down
from this guy, Terence. And he said, "I am a human being, and therefore nothing human is alien
to me." And I've sort of taken that as my banner. I'm an anarchist. Being an anarchist means
you're not afraid of your fellow man. All the political theories that come out of Thomas Hobbes
and the paranoid school are about controlling the perceived inherent evil in human beings.
Well, I think if you perceive it and assume it, and set society up as basically a series of checks
and balances against the assumed bestial nature of your fellow human beings, you're going to
have a nightmare. And this is the legacy of the Post-Enlightenment meditation on how human
beings should behave.

One of the reasons I love to come to New York is because it convinces me that the future
works. The future is going to be very much like the present, here. Very large parts of the world
are undergoing Manhattanization, and if Manhattanization is not a positive process, then
they're descending into a hell. But what I see is an incredible victory of pluralism, of tolerance,
of multiplicity. It's got to be that way: we cannot have our little private xenophobic agendas,
our historical grudges, our gender obsessions. All these things which divide us and set us apart
from ourselves, I think, are legacies of a previous and now obsolete set of technologies. And
this is one of the things that I want to talk about this evening.

Since this is the world capitol of media (and probably won't be for long, because there will be
no world capitol of media -- it's spreading everywhere) I think it's worth talking about what
media is, what it has done to us, what it can be, and how it relates to this effort to try and birth
a new kind of humanness out of our present dilemma. In this part of the rap very I'm
McLuhanistic in my approach. I think we never understand the impact of a technology until it's
29

too late. And you could almost go further and say you never understand the impact of a
technology until it is already obsolete.

For the past 300 years or so, Western civilization has been ruled or held together by the
phenomenon of what is called mass media It begins with newspapers and of course leads into
the much more penetrating and global electronic forms of media such as network television
and so forth and so on. The interesting thing about these forms of media is that they are all
tabloid. All of them. Imagine a newspaper such as the most venerable newspaper in this town:
it is designed, because it is a commercial enterprise, to be read by millions and millions of
people. It's a cultural slight of hand on our part to not realize that no one should read a
newspaper designed to be read by millions and millions of people -- that that trivializes and
commonalizes information beyond the point of recognition or relevancy. These forms of mass
media that we're familiar with are what are called "one-to-many" forms of media. An editor, a
talk show host, a somebody is dispersed to consumers -- who have no ability to feed back, or
only very unsatisfying [ones] like through letters to the editor or something, which is a joke. So
one-to-many communication has created a hierarchy of values. It has created, in fact -- and
McLuhan made this point -- the very notion of "the public" is a print-created idea. There was no
"public" before there was large-scale print. Information was held by privileged classes, held
very closely.

In the present evolving situation, the new forms of media -- and by that I mean specifically the
Net, the Web in all its manifestations -- is an any-to-any form of communication. One person
can communicate to thousands, thousands can send email to one person who somehow earns
their ire or desire, or any variation on this can be worked. And the incredible pluralizing of
lifestyles and the richness that has come recently to high-tech industrial societies is a
consequence of the breakdown of these print maintained and created stereotypes which have
everyone marching around in uniforms -- suits, mostly! That now is finished. So it leads then to
the question, "where do we put our own lives in all of this?" And I think that the answer -- and
this comes out of a long involvement with psychedelics and with the Image per se (and for me
the psychedelics were always the way to get into the realm of the images) -- the obligation on
all of us, I think, is to use this medium, these new forms of media, and produce art, furiously.
That's what it's all for. That's what liberation really means: it isn't permission to jog. It's
permission to create!

30

The obligation that rests upon everybody in this room -- and the poorest and most twisted
among us still probably falls in the upper 5% percent of people on this Earth in terms of
opportunity, disposable income, access to resources, so forth and so on -- the way to redeem
this exclusivity is to push the art pedal to the floor. And I'm trying to do this with my web site.
I'm very keen on these new technologies because I don't see them as they stand today -- that's
exciting enough -- but I see them as what they could be. And my idea, with a high-speed, semivirtual sort of environment online, is that this is an environment in which you can display the
contents of your mind, your heart, your soul, your aspirations. We are not these shaven
monkeys that we appear to be. That's the surface, and beneath it lies the most complex organ
of the human body, which is the mind-body interface. The experience, the ideas, the
understanding of each of us is unique, but somehow useless to the community unless
expressed. And we have become consumers to such a degree that we have sold our own
uniqueness down the river. And so I believe that the humanizing of the future lies in a
tremendously rich kind of symbiosis between a nature-based psychedelic archaism in the
presence of the fastest and finest information technology that we can get our hands on.
Already these technologies have put an end to the marginalization of bohemian and other
forms of subculture. What these technologies do is they remove the hegemony of values and
substitute instead a more realistic mix of possibilities -- all kinds of possibilities. Whatever your
agenda is, whatever your political position, your sexual politics, your taste in art and literature
and music -- whatever is on your mind, if you really care about it, you should wish to
communicate it. And the communications tools that have been set before you are immensely
powerful at this point.

So then the question becomes, "What is to be communicated?" Is there a coherent zeitgeist?

Or is there just to be an efflorescence of individually-driven creativity? Well this individuallydriven creativity thing is a very late-arriving notion of what an artist is. And artist is essentially a
magician, and a pipeline for the Logos, for the Demiurge, the Overmind, this hovering,
generalized kind of World Soul that is downloading its intent into history in the form of love
affairs, revolutions, inventions, ideas, so forth and so on. And so for that kind of an inspired
artistic output, there has to be a connection in to this Logos, to this Demiurgos. And other than
depending on being born a genius -- which very few of us can do -- the only effective and
dependable way that I know to do that is through a relationship to the psychedelic experience. I
say "experience"; I thought of saying "plants" -- because certainly there are psychedelic
experiences not based on plants. But I find the plant experiences most compelling, because I
think somehow we are at our most fulfilled when we have a heart connection to Nature, to the
living world. And this doesn't mean that you have to camp out in rainforests, or something like
that. I mean, have you noticed? Your mind is embedded in the living world: your body meets
31

you everywhere you go, and is as complex and astonishing and as capable of horrifying you as
any Amazon rainforest. Connection to Nature. Without that you get Existentialism, and worse.
You get art whoring itself to the interior decoration conspiracy, or something like that. I mean,
not that people don't need chachkas, I'm not saying that! But there are higher purposes to be
served here.

So, a return, then, to the psychedelic experience. How radical is that? Is that a return to
tradition? Is that a break with tradition? Is this an advocacy of some kind of narcoleptic
dystopia a la Brave New World? You have to find out for yourself.

But one of the things that is finished with the death of mass media and the rise of the
psychedelic "Net", one of the things that is finished with them forever is ideology. Ideology is
poisonous. It's not that there are good ideologies and bad ideologies -- ALL ideology is
poisonous. Because to have an ideological position assumes that you understand the nature of
reality. How likely is that? How likely is that? And, in the Twentieth Century, if we have not
learned the bankruptcy of ideology, then I don't know what it would take. We have on the Right
the stunning example of German National Socialism. We have on the Left the stunning example
of Soviet Communism. And then all the blathering and wasted time and... crap that went on in
all the spectrum in between.

This ties into a larger issue which I'm interested in -- and this is another way of saying "ideology
is bankrupt" -- [it] is, Culture Is Not Your Friend. Culture is not your friend, no matter what your
culture is. And this is sort of not a Politically Correct thing to say, because in the present
ambience, (sort of, those who haven't gotten the word) there's a lot of attention to recovering
our ethnic roots and to expressing our unique ethnicity, and so forth and so on -- I think that's
the beginning of understanding. But all terms that stress ethnicity are words applied to groups
of people. Have you ever noticed that? Have you ever noticed that you're not a group of
people, you're a person? So you may be "Jewish", you may be "Black", you may be this, you
may be that but there is no obligation to take upon yourself the generalized quality of these
things, because the generalized qualities belong to thousands of people examined at a time. If
you misunderstand that you become a caricature. You act out your ethnicity as a caricature.

32

So culture is not your friend, ideology is not your friend... Who's your friend? Well, to my mind,
the felt presence of immediate experience is the surest dimension, the surest guide that you
can possibly have. The felt presence of immediate experience. Feeling is primary. All
ratiocination and intellectualization and analysis is secondary, and comes out of culture. No
matter what your culture is, it has answers. Cultures thinks up answers. So a child asks its
mother a question, like, "Where do we go when we die?" or, "Why does Daddy go to work?"
Cultural answers are always provided, but nobody knows the real answers to these questions -that's outside of culture. So coming to terms and fully expressing your culture is like a stage in
development. And then beyond that lies the aspiration of the felt presence of immediate
experience, and its implications. It's a very hard thing to deal with and to do when you are
poisoned with ideology. And ideologies are very difficult to deconstruct and rid yourself of
through a simple talking therapy of some sort, through simply trying to work it out. The best
antidote for ideology is to raise the intensity of the felt presence of experience to such
excruciating levels that it simply vaporizes ideological illusion. And this is what psychedelics are
for, I think. And it also explains (if you've ever wondered) the incredible phobia of these things
on the part of the establishment, the incredibly deep alarm that these things trigger in people.
You know, Tim Leary once said of LSD, it's "a compound that occasionally causes psychotic
behavior in people who don't take it." That's how powerful these things are! And the reason is,
they are a direct challenge to the myth of the tribe -- whatever the myth is: Fascist, Democrat,
Socialist, Communist -- everybody can get together on the idea that psychedelics are somehow
dangerous and antisocial and pose some kind of threat to the body politic. That's because all
these ideologies, from the psychedelic point of view, are seen in all their limitations and
foolishness, and their historical assumptions and their naivet writ large across them. Ideology
is a fool's game. Or it's a scoundrel's game. Because scoundrels use ideology to control fools.
And nobody wants to be caught in that situation.

We have two routes to the felt presence of immediate experience beyond the ordinary.
Basically: the psychedelic experience and the sexual experience. And if they could make sex
illegal, they would -- you know they would! It alarms them profoundly! They wish people began
from the waste up! But there's just nothin' they can do about it! And in the case of psychedelics
they wish people began from the head down! Well, this tells you, I think, that culture is not
your friend. It doesn't mean you have to flee from it, it doesn't mean you have to become a
critic of it, in any noticeable or astonishing way, it just means you have to smarten up. In Hawaii
they have a saying. They say "be akamai". It means, just "be smart." And what it means to me
is, it means "pay attention". Pay attention to what is going on around you.

33

My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to

seek the weird. And to seek it seriously. Now if you seek the weird without a critical
intelligence, it will find you faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of
squirrelly ideas on the market these days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), "the
balkanization of epistemology". This is what we're dealing with now. You understand what I
mean? It means people can't tell shit from shinola, but they wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a
place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical razors. One is: hypotheses
should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be multiplied
without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words,
keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first. If is found
inadequate then wratch it up. One notch. Not twenty notches, one notch. Then we see if that
works. You may think this is some kind of down-prescription for reducing the world to a fairly
predictable and mundane place. It isn't at all. It's a way to rapidly filter out a lot of nonsense.
But the truly weird -- and the truly true -- can survive this process. It doesn't do any damage to
them, and you will then find them intact.

And I can only testify to my own experience. I've looked into a number of things, and found
most inadequate for what I was interested in. What I was interested in was, I wanted to be
astonished. I think astonishment is a very rare emotion. I wanted to be astounded. I remember
when I was a little kid, there was a science fiction magazine, Astounding Tales, and I would just
look at the cover and I would think, "What kind of emotion is it to be astounded?" Well I've only
found it on DMT, I have to tell you. I don't know maybe I'm a... Well, no, I was astounded by
Jerusalem, I was astounded by the Mosque of Omar, there've been maybe five or six other
moments in my life when true astonishment broke through. But the psychedelic experience
intensely brought to focus is made of pure astonishment. And I find that feeling to be a kind of
maximizing of everything that I aspire to, enjoy... It's a combination of intellectual pleasure,
surprise, amazement at one's presence before such a thing. And I invite all of you to seek the
weird, and to put it to the test, and to force those who would purvey various paths to the
mystery to deliver. You know? It's not subtle. That's the one thing you have to understand. It's
not about looking into somebody's eyes and getting the whammy, it's not about some intuitive
knowing, it's not some vague... It's about begging for mercy because they are rotating and
balancing the wheels of your after-death vehicle having taken you prisoner in your own
apartment! That's my idea of an encounter with the incredible. God knows, the worst thing you
can say about any drug is that it's subtle! Deliver us from subtle drugs, please!

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Well, I mentioned this balkanization of epistemology thing because my own theory tells me that
as [tape stops]

...in the presence of the Mystery. Nobody knows what life is -- don't let anybody kid you. And
nobody knows its limits or its constraints. And to the degree that you assume these things are
known, you marginalize yourself. You become a spectator, and a consumer, and a dupe, and a
placeholder in this great opera. That's not what any of us want, I think. I think what we want to
do is seize this moment, between birth and God knows what, to make a difference. To make a
difference. Sometimes people say to me, well this thing you're on about the novelty and the
concrescence -- it all sounds very automatic. What's the political implications of this? Are we
just riding along on the back of the dog, and there is no political implication? No, I don't think
so. I think the political implication is to understand the situation. The essence of political clarity
lies in a correct assessment of the situation. What is to be done? What serves? What is dragging
the boat, and what is actually carrying us forward? And I maintain that it's a very complicated
situation.

It's troubling to me that in our community of dissidents, it's very hard for people to see the
commonality of connection, difficult for ecologists and feminists and radical media people and
psychedelic people to make common cause. And yet, to my mind, these things are just facets of
the same agenda. There will be no feminizing of culture without psychedelics. There will be no
psychedelic revolution without a gender consciousness revolution. And so forth and so on. It all
is of a piece. By allowing ourselves to be divided and linearly broken into old-style political
factions, we're in a sense disempowered.

You know it's a curious thing in the 20th Century, it's a paradox, a coincidencia positorum: it is
the most radically innovative and event-driven of centuries, and yet large portions of the world,
during much of the 20th Century, have been enormously culturally constipated. And I think of
our own culture. Around 1970, there was such terror of the future in this culture, that it was
essentially canceled. And that there was this retro thing for 20 years, 25 years -- the same art,
the same fashion, the same personalities, the same issues, over and over again. Meanwhile, the
cosmic clock is ticking, and what it means is the pressure is building behind the damn. And I
really feel that in the last three months, we will in the future look back and understand that the
dam broke in this period. This is when the density of connection on the Internet , the cosmic
nature of our circumstance -- I mentioned this -- cohesion of the youth/music/drug/media
culture... Enough factors are in prominent trajectory now that I, at any rate, unaided by
35

anything stronger than a little cannabis, can see the end of the tunnel. I see now how it will all
work, how we can get from here to there with no miracles, no new technology, no drug yet to
be designed -- we have it all. We have it all now in place. We need a little more bandwidth, we
need a little more slack, we need a little more DMT circulating around!... The pieces are in
place! And if each one of us were basically to convey this information to someone who didn't
know it, we would very quickly multiply this understanding until it became the consensus.

People don't intrinsically fear the future. They fear it because they've been programmed to fear
it. And they're programmed to fear it because the institutions that lead us are clueless. I mean,
they think talking about capital gains tax is revolutionary! Ladies and gentlemen, I think there
will be more eggs broken than that before we straighten this whole situation out. We now have
the potential to transform matter into energy with 100% efficiency, we have the power to read
our own genetic code, and alter it, we have the power to connect ourselves together, we have
the power to search our cultural database accumulated over 50,000 years, instantly, from any
point on the globe, by ordinary people. We have the benefits of the anthropologist, the
biochemist, the botanist, the neurologist, who have delivered substances into our
pharmacopoeia that allow us to alter consciousness, explore consciousness. The end result of
all of these tools is the rebuilding of the human self-image. I've talked at times about what I call
"turning the human being inside-out." We want to see the Soul. We want to concretize the
soul. We each carry within ourselves a fragment of something which wants to be put together
again. But it cannot be put together in the present ambience of strife, science, hegemony, male
dominance, consumerism... bad television... terrible haircuts -- all the rest of it! It cannot be put
together in that environment. But it can be put together in the dimension of virtual collectivity
and community that we are building. It wants to come together.

In a sense we're like these animals that, generation after generation, they never manifest their
mature form. These are like certain kinds of lungfish -- they're fish and they have fish babies
that have fish babies that have fish babies... Then comes a season when the water dries up, and
they don't have fish babies, they develop lungs and crawl out onto the land, have a different
kind of offspring. And this is what is happening to us. The little warm pool of historical
foolishness in which we have been paddling around -- that little amniotic ocean of selfcongratulatory denial is now dried up. And it's basically a case of fish or cut bait. I feel ready. I
feel we're ready. I feel we have the tools, and the geniuses, the people, and the dreams, and
the allies to now make a move. And a huge amount of it rests on young people. My generation,
people who born after World War II and came through the 60's, laid a certain kind of
groundwork, but we didn't understand enough about what the enterprise was. It was
36

impossible to understand it in one decade, the nature of the enterprise. We've now had 30
years, and a new generation has the benefit of that experience and the benefit of the new
technology. And the benefit of the deeper confusion of the establishment. And all of these
factors, I think, mean that the long-awaited paradigm shift is now a matter of individual and
collective decision coming out of the artistic and scientific community. And that's us.

So the time is now, the tools are here. We can use the turn of the millennium as a kind of flog
on the dissipation of print-created values. This isn't going to happen tomorrow or next week -it lies beyond the turn of the century. Until then, the cultural agenda will be under the control
of the institutions that control it today. But they, I believe, don't realize how profoundly
terminal for their enterprise the year 2000 is going to be. And beyond the turn of the century -if we have laid the groundwork, and kept the faith, and built the networks, and gained the
experience -- they'll be ready to talk turkey. We will build the world that we sense in our
dreams. I mean, where we are headed is into the Imagination. It's where we've always been
headed. That's what telling stories around the campfire is all about. But now the Imagination
beckons. It more than beckons, it reaches out its hand to lead us into an astonishing new
world... Meet me there!

Thank you very much!

Terence McKenna by Robert Venosa

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Okay, well this is the part of these things that I actually enjoy the most, which is an opportunity
for feedback. It really bums me that, no matter how I cut the cake, it's a middle-aged white guy
up on stage, pontificating -- we're talking about one-to-many, here's a one-to-many exercise. So
this is the chance to redress the balance, and this is where I usually have the most fun and learn
things. So anybody who has a question, it doesn't have to hold to tonight's topic -- whatever
that was. Feel free. I give long answers, so get your licks in early.

Q1: Good evening, Terence. I had a very enjoyable time listening to you. It seems to me that in
your vision of the future there is a dichotomy of Nature and Technology, one that is effectively
aimed at destroying itself. I'd like you to address that issue on two different levels for me.
Practically, are the resources that we have available to us today -- the ones that we have left -enough to be able to power this technology to 2012? It takes 40,000 pounds of materials to
scrunch down into one 4-pound laptop computer, in terms of petroleum, raw minerals... That's
one thing I need to question; I don't know if that's going to be possible. Secondly,
philosophically, if we have to exploit nature to achieve our ends where does that leave us if we
are trying to go back to nature? That's where the dichotomy for me lies. And as a brief corollary
to those two points, I wondered how you reconcile the fact that the great majority of people
and, obviously, species on this planet, aren't going to have access to the technology that we're
speaking of today.

TM: So two questions and a corollary -- for a pot smoker like me...[garbled]! So basically the
question is, how can we deliver this to everybody without extracting all the glass, metal, and so
forth, in the planet? Well, one answer is nanotechnology, miniaturization. If we could actually
bring that on line, even in a modest form, the standing crop of materials already extracted from
the earth would be sufficient to maintain the technology. We're very long on heavy metals and
materials now, and very short on creative engineering uses of those things.

I guess I should describe how I live a little bit, because I'm trying to live what I'm talking about.
So here's how it comes out, as an example. I live in Hawaii. I live up a four-wheel-drive road that
is very miserable and difficult. There are no power lines in, there are no telephone lines. The
sun generates the electricity. I reach the Internet wirelessly (and now at low speed, but soon at
high speed). I can push back from my desk and walk in the forest, or go online and adjust my
web site which is on the Levity server here in Manhattan. To me this is how it should be. The
office culture is probably a major raison d'etre for the existence of modern cities. There's no
reason now for office culture to be maintained. And once corporations realize this, I think they
38

will break it down. There's no reason now for most people to commute. One of the dilemmas of
my own life is, I like being a player in the culture and I like having people read my books and so
forth, but I don't like climbing on 747s and crossing nine time zones to give a speech. So, my
hope is that telepresence and these kinds of things will have an impact.

The other thing is -- and I didn't talk that much about it in the talk -- consumerism is much
overdone, I mean to the level of pathology. People, somehow -- and this is a place where media
comes in -- somehow, media needs to make it unhip to have a lot of stuff. And this is a tall
order for media because it's media's job to sell stuff, and the more stuff that sells the more
successful it is. But the selling of this stuff will eventually lead to what you're talking about: the
complete devastation of the environment, the complete impoverishment of everybody. So,
again, the only thing I know that can address this disparity of wealth, and convince people
without things that they are rich, are psychedelics. Once you realize that you have more art in
your head than they're auctioning over at Christie's, you feel much better about things! So
acquiring things as a substitute for authentic being needs to be denounced for the neurotic
behavior that it is -- no matter how good your taste! Presently we tend to behave as though, if
you acquire things that are tacky, that's terrible, but if you acquire things that are [affectedly]
"exquisite", that's wonderful. No, it's just a relative kind of terrible. True aristocrats live with
nothing, I think. I had a professor of Chinese philosophy and language once, and he had lived in
Peking for 20 years and he had been all over the world. And he invited me to have dinner at his
house one time. I thought, "Wow, I'll get to see some kind of great art collection. I'm sure this
guy just has great stuff!" He had nothing. That was because he was a Taoist scholar. We should
do similarly!

Q1: Thank you.

TM: Yeah, thank you.

Q2: Well I sort of feel badly about putting the question like this, but: listening to the sweep over
thought going around the radar screen tonight, I couldn't help but notice that UFOs were gone.
What happened to the UFOs?

39

TM: The squirrels abducted them!!

Well, you want me to say something about UFOs, or something about something...?

Q2: Well you used to say, you know, UFOs were like (in a 1983 tape I guess) sparks from the
unconscious flying back from the end of time and all that. And it just seemed to be completely
missing from the picture -- it's a curiosity as to why it's missing.

TM: Okay, well here's why. First of all, I stand by everything I said. Something strange haunts
the skies of Earth. I have seen it, other people have seen it, but there are two parallel
phenomenon. There are the UFOs, and there are those who believe in the UFOs. And as
emphasis moves from one to the other, the discussion becomes so hopelessly squirrelly, that I
just can't participate in it. I have encountered DMT creatures, I have encountered aliens; I have
never had an unscheduled proctological examination in my home at 3 in the morning by people
who hail from Zeta Reticuli!

I'm glad you brought this up. This is a good place to test all these razors I was talking about, this
balkanization of epistemology. I was really talking around this issue. Here's my take on the
entire abduction phenomenon. For some reason -- possibly food additives, but much more
likely, a lot of television and movies -- but for some reason, a small percentage of people here
at the end of the Twentieth Century have lost the ability to distinguish between memory and
dream. And as Ross Perot says, "End of story!" That's what's happening. Imagine a person in an
archaic society. The most dramatic narrative event is an old shaman telling a story around the
campfire. And it's always the traditional stories of the culture, the known stories. Well then
imagine one of us. We have watched 50,000 half-hour sitcoms in our lives. We have watched
thousands of movies, more than we could ever remember watching. That's all in there. And if
believe Freud, Jung, or anybody else who's thought about the unconscious, you know that the
unconscious can use that material to create scenarios of pathology or individuation. So if
someone tells a story about an abduction, the first thing to ask are hard questions. And the
quality of research being done on these abductions is ludicrous; the people who are sent to
investigate these things end up being attorneys for the people making these claims! I just find it
utterly underwhelming in the evidence department. It also irritates my sense of the Alien. The
40

Alien is so alien that it cannot be reduced to something as preposterous as silver flannel

pajamas, large eyes, and an interest in studying your rear end. The Alien is truly alien!

I don't know what to make of this breakdown of rational discourse on this issue. But it's not
coming from the psychedelic community. The psychedelic community is far more sophisticated
than the alien community. I said to Whitley Streiber, I said, "If you had to tell this story, and
preface it by saying you'd taken 5 grams of psilocybin, you couldn't have given it to your
grandmother. " So it has to do with different approaches to evidence, and different aesthetics, I
think. So I'm all keen for the UFOs, but very keen to divide away all the silliness. I think we're
approaching a time where it might be reasonable -- gently, kindly, and with a smile on our faces
-- to denounce just plain foolishness. There's a lot of absolute foolishness --

[Voice from crowd:] Remember Terence!

TM: [laughs] I'm not sure -- you want to say more?

Voice: Well nothing new is alien to you. To call it foolishness is to judge it, right?

TM: "To call it foolishness is to judge it." Well I didn't say don't judge. I thought what I was
saying is, make distinctions. You have to judge. You're going to be presented with and endless
smorgasbord of ideological options. Where do you go -- Mormonism, Scientology, the Hassids,
the Zennies, the Buddhas? Where do you put your faith? You're going to be constantly called
upon to make this call. Now you don't have to make sense to me; you don't have to use my
criteria. But you should use some criteria which you can rationally defend. The problem with
the UFO community, I think, is that they are too credulous, and consequently there is too large
a body of evidence left claiming that it should be taken seriously. There is something bizarre
going on -- at the edge of language, at the edge of collective attention -- unusual anomalies
haunt the epistemic enterprise like ghosts. But people who come forth to proclaim what this is
haven't taken the depth of the mystery. I mean what it is is the Cosmic Giggle, and they're not
going to nail that to the barn door; that's its nature, that it's mercurial, shifting beyond your
reach. It changes as you behold it.

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Q2: Thank you, I won't bring it up again!

TM: I didn't mean to beat up on you, I...Yes?

Q3: Hi. I got your software, and I started to read the book, and I gotta ask you: How come a
descent into novelty? Is it that easy to get to novelty?

TM: You mean why not an ascent?

Q3: Why not an ascent? And can you say more about the context of North Whitehead, and the
period of time we're in right now?

TM: Okay. First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do
as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me -- the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a
river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river
and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the
fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is
almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a
fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have
novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero. If we have novelty moving
upward, the maximum of novelty is just some very large number, and that's not very appealing.

Now you said to talk a little bit more about this time we're passing through. Well, one thing I
didn't mention in the talk (because it takes for granted that you've studied my thing, which is a
lot to presume) -- there are resonances in my theory. It's not simply that it's either novelty or
habit. There are resonances between one time and another time. And the time we are in right
now is a very strong resonance to the middle Tenth Century. In a sense, we are emerging from
the Dark Ages. It's not good to push the analogy too hard, because many times are intersecting.
But in ordinary theory of history or theory of causality, the most important moment before this
one is the moment immediately preceding this one. My thing says something different. It says
no, each moment in time is a kind of interference pattern made up of other times, some near,
42

some far. Their relationship is not linear. And that's why we suddenly get a burst of Egyptianstyle furniture, or suddenly a lot of talk about Judy Blake, or suddenly a remake of the story of
Aeschylus... Fashion, or the ebb and flow of mass obsession, is based on feeling the zeitgeist,
and the zeitgeist carries these messages from many times and many places. And there was a
third part?

Q3: I wanted to know more about Alfred North Whitehead and how the I Ching and everything
got together.

TM: Well, people think of Alfred North Whitehead as a somewhat obscure and stuffy guy, just
because he was English and it was the 1920's and guess he didn't do a lot of bong rips or
something. But if you read Process and Reality -- I strongly urge you to read this book. It's not
easy, but you don't need a Sanskrit dictionary, and you don't need to take up residence down at
the ashram and sweep up... Whitehead has a language that he speaks, and he talks of feelings
as the primary datum of reality. And he talks about time as moving towards what he calls
"concrescence". And he talks about complex systems such as an organization or a human being
as a "nexus of actual occasions". Well I just find his vocabulary, his way of thinking about things,
and his mathematical rigor to be tremendously appealing. If you take Whitehead to you breast,
you don't have to hang your head in front of anybody, because his mathematics is impeccable.
He is one of the great mathematical thinkers of the Twentieth Century. So it is a very solid
foundation that will support a very psychedelic view of how reality works.

Q3: Thank you.

TM: Thank you.

Q4: I want to know if you believe in the paranormal abilities of humans, and if so, if you think
that can lead to the ultimate wireless communication.

TM: Yes, absolutely. I don't have any inside track on this. But I said my method was to search
the weird and then to pay attention, and I have seen -- maybe for a minute out of my 50 years
43

of existence -- I have seen people do paranormal things. What it was, was it was my brother,
reading my mind -- not what I was thinking, but something that had happened to me 14 months
ago that he had never been told. No one had ever been told. And in a condition of quite
advanced psychic discombobulation, he just spieled this story. I was so impressed, I went to
psychiatrists and people who spend time in back wards, locked wards, because I thought, "That
must be where this stuff goes on." And some people said yes and some people said no.
Apparently schizophrenics are not nearly as interesting as I had hoped they would be.

But I'm not ready to give up on this. First of all, how many psychiatrist residents have ever seen
and unmedicated schizophrenic? None, I submit to you. I was in the Amazon basin when my
brother went around the bend, and medical health care delivery was out of the question. How
many people deal, in the Twentieth Century, with schizophrenia naked? What it seemed to me
to be was a kind of -- it was almost like it's a disease of spacetime itself. You walk into a nexus
and then you're tweaked, and you see too much, you say too much. And it's very hard to get
you squeezed back down into what they call a "coping mode". And that's all most psychiatry's
about; it doesn't ask philosophical questions. They're trying to get you back on the street, back
at your job, performing the necessary social function.

So yeah, I think that the obvious tool for studying paranormal abilities in human beings are
psychedelics. That's the only time I've ever seen anything like this go down. And yet this is not
done. It's impossible to get permission to give psychedelics to people with [any] other
experimental protocol than to see whether they live through it -- let alone get permission to flip
cards or do other, more advanced, kinds of tests for paranormal ability. This is another place
where culture is not your friend. Culture tells you what is possible. For instance, I've been with
cultures where people could smell water, and it was a life and death deal. Well, is that a
paranormal ability? I've been in cultures where people claim that when they wanted ayahuasca,
they would listen, and then they would hear the vine calling, and then they would go and get it.
In their culture this was how you did it; it was not paranormal. In our culture there's no way to
explain that. So I think language imprisons us, and then what is human becomes exotic in some
cases. Thank you.

Q5: Is the point of visual art to be put on the Internet now? I'm a painter, and I drove an hour
and a half to the area, and I don't have access to the Internet. Recently somebody wanted me
to make a copy of my paintings specifically so it could be put on the Internet, and I tried to do
it, and it didn't work. And I'm wondering if I need to adapt...?
44

TM: Well, it's a stretch for all of us. A year ago, I had no web site, I didn't know what HTML was,
I had no scanner -- I just had the belief that web sites were an important thing. Now I do my
own programming, I maintain the web site here in Manhattan from Hawaii. You're going to
have to accept the fact that you're going to have to learn a bunch of new stuff. At first a person
my age resents that. Now that I'm into it, I haven't had this much fun since the 1960's, I haven't
learned so much stuff! So what kind of stuff do you learn? Do you just learn the software -you're the slave to commercialism, in some sense? I don't see it that way. Photoshop teaches
you about light. The 3D rendering programs teach you about space. The animation programs
teach you about motion. And believe me, it's not simple. When you're in a 3D rendering
program, of the sort that gives you, simultaneously, three views, from three different angles, of
the object which you're sculpting -- a stupid person cannot coordinate all that data! And I
started out unable to coordinate all that data. And then you learn, "Oh, it's like I have three
eyes, viewing it from three different positions, and if I just relax into this, I can grok it." So I
think we are all going to go back to school, big time, and between myself and the open grave I
see no end to learning. Learning, learning, learning.

The tools are so powerful -- yes, pictorial art, hung on the walls of galleries, (which I am
certainly friendly toward, always visit as many galleries as I can, wherever I go, and have been
interested in this my whole intellectual life) still it's incredibly rarefied and removed from the
lives of most people. And you are, somehow, handmaiden to the interior decoration industries.
So I think most artists dream of a deeper communication and a wider audience. I mean it's fine
to be collected by a dozen people, but I don't think that would be satisfaction before the throne
of Eternity. The real satisfaction is in influencing. If you care enough about your vision to paint
it, you must surely want it then to influence people. And the Net is simply the way that's to be
done now.

Q5: My worry is just that there's something lost in the medium, because it's not a direct
experience of the medium.

TM: Well, something is lost. Something is lost in reproduction -- the same something, probably.
But I find the clear scans on the Net to be at least as satisfying as four-color printing. I don't
think that's the problem.

45

Q5: Thank you.

Q6: [Comment about the importance of affirming the future.]

Q7: [Starts with a plug for party the following night.] My question relates to an earlier question,
the UFO thing. I noticed on the poster something that you were quoted as saying, that we are in
a symbiotic relationship with an entity that's disguising itself as an alien invasion. You already
addressed this a little bit, but I'd like to hear more about this.

TM: The quote was that "we have a symbiotic relationship with something which has disguised
itself as an alien invasion so as not to alarm us." What I meant by that was that an alien invasion
is a myth of our culture. Since the 50's we've had the example of The Day the Earth Stood Still
and When Worlds Collide right on up through that television series which I didn't see, where
they changed all the Nazis to aliens and then it was a huge success. So alien invasion is a piece
of our cultural toolbox, but that's not what's happening. What's happening is something... less
easy to name than "alien invader" is reaching out toward us. It could be the Gaian Mind, it
could be the Over-soul of humanity... I don't think it comes from the distant stars -- it knows us
too well, and loves us too much. It could come from the dead. Now that's what I mean by
something weirder than an alien invasion. An alien invasion compared to a collective mass
contact by the dear departed is pretty mundane stuff.

So, whatever this thing is, it keeps itself masked. I've literally had the experience on mushrooms
of saying to it, "Show me what you are, for yourself." Well, it's like there's this enormous organ
chord, the temperature falls, black velvet curtains are raised -- and after about 20 seconds of
that, I'm saying, "That's enough of what you are for yourself! Let's go back to the dancing
mice..." So what I mean is that our journey through time, our historical journey to this moment,
has not be unaccompanied. We have always been accompanied by this thing. The Demi-urgos -some people just throw down their cards and call it God and be done with it. I'm not ready for
that, because I don't think it's the God who "hung the stars like lamps in Heave," as Milton said.
It's not that God. If it is a god, it's the god of Biology. And I don't have any problem with that. I
think that the reason people took psychedelics, and the reason psychedelics had such an
impact on early human society, was, not because they dissolved sexual boundaries, not because
they increased hunting skills, not because they all those things -- which they did do -- but,
46

because they brought us into communication with this invisible, all-pervading Mind, that
essentially civilization is a denial of that Mind. You stop herding your cattle across the plains,
you stop having orgies, you stop taking boundary-dissolving substances, and what do you do?
You build walls. You herd everybody inside. And then you appoint a god-king. Then you tell
everybody else to take orders from this guy. And what this is, is a pathology, a denial that we
are part and parcel of the greater intent of planetary biology. So now the planet is so slammed
to the wall by the untrammeled practice of history, that the Gaian murmuring grows louder. It
grows much louder.

[The following is based on my brief notes of the last few questions.]

Q7 asks about the idea that we are approaching a shift to a higher molecular vibrational
frequency, if we are heading into another dimension.

TM doesn't give much weight to the vibrational frequency theory, but does believe we will
make some sort of dimensional transition.

Q8 states that he is manic depressive, and is constantly creating his own reality. Since being
released from a mental hospital, he has been successfully managing his own life. He wonders
whether taking psychedelics might be ill-advised for him.

TM agrees that it must come down to individual judgment, and that there are some people
whose boundaries are best left undissolved.

Q9 mentions that she has just come from Colorado, where she learned that an abundance of
clean air and sunlight can be every bit as visionary as DMT. She worries that people living in
New York are badly deprived of such resources/experiences.

TM responds with a mushroom vision he once had, in which he saw Manhattan island, as it
stands today, except with ivy and other plants covering all the buildings. He advocates this
47

vision, saying this would provide an ample supply of oxygen, and would generally "naturalize"
the urban environment. He recalls being in Berlin soon after the legalization of marijuana, and
seeing green shoots rising from window boxes all down the streets.

Copyright 1996 Terence McKenna. All Rights Reserved. Recorded at The Cathedral Church of
Saint John the Divine, Synod Hall, NYC, and transcribed by Abrupt, with permission from Dan
Levy.

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Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Terence McKenna, April 27,

1999 Seattle, WA

Please join me in welcoming Mr. Terence McKenna!

How's that? Well. I can't see all of you, but it's a pleasure to be in Seattle this evening. You've
made me feel real welcome. Thank you!

Our discussion this evening is "Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines" or "Shamans
among the machines". I wanted to talk about this simply because these are two of my great
loves, so I assume, being monogamous, they must be one love. So how to build intellectual
bridges between these two concerns which seem so different?

As far as people and machines are concerned, it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, I think, who said in
his book General Systems Theory, he said: "People are not machines but in every opportunity
where they're allowed to behave like machines, they will so behave." In other words, we tend
to fall into the well of habit. Though the glory of our humanness is our spontaneous creativity,
we too as creatures of physics and chemistry, of memory and hope, tend to fall into repetitious
patterns. These repetitious patterns are the death of creativity. They diminish our humanness.
They diminish our individuality, make each of us somehow like cogs in some larger system.

We associate this cog-like membership in larger soulless systems with the machines that we
inherit from the age of the internal combustion engine, the age of the jet engine. Marshall
McLuhan said: "We navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the
rear view mirror to tell them where they're going." It's not a very successful strategy for
navigating into the future.

I made a number of notes on this matter of psychedelics and machines. To me, the connecting
bridge - well, there're many - but the most obvious one is consciousness expansion. After all,
psychedelics, before they were called entheogens, before they were called hallucinogens,
before they were called psychedelics, they were simply called "consciousness expanding drugs".
49

Good phenomenological description of what they do. Certainly, the technology of cybernetics is
a consciousness expanding technology. It expands a different area of consciousness. They
minds of machines and the minds of human beings are very different - so different that each
party questions whether the other even has a mind.

In fact, what these are, are species of minds operating in very different domains. For instance,
you can ask a five year old child to go into the bedroom to the third drawer of the dresser to
select a pair of black socks and to bring them to mother. This is not a challenge for a five-year
old child. To get a machine to do this is a hundred million dollars and a research team of forty
or fifty technicians, code writers, working months. On the other hand, if you ask a person for
the cubic root of 750344, much headscratching results.

A computer is utterly undaunted by that question. Computers are minds that work in the realm
of computation. Human minds are minds that work in the realm of generalization, spacial
coordination, understanding of natural language, so forth and so on.

Are these kinds of minds so different from each other (??? 6:06) so that there is no bridge to be
crossed? I would submit not. In fact the bridge between the human mind and the machine
mind is symbolic logic, mathematics. When we think clearly, we are intelligible to machines.
People who write code know this: that the essence of making yourself clear to a machine, is to
think clearly yourself. The machine has no patience for the half truth, the analogy, the semigrasped association. For the machine, everything has to be clear. Everything must be defined.

So that's the commonality between minds and machines of the calculating species. What are
the common bridges between psychedelics and these machines? Well, to my mind, this is an
easier bridge to gap. Both computers and drugs are what I would call function-specific
arrangements of matter, and as we develop nanotechnological abilities as we move into the
next century, it will be more and more clear that the difference between drugs and machines is
simply that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that.

Nanotechnology is a very hot buzzword at the moment, an unimaginable dream of building

machines and small objects atom by atom, perhaps under the control of long-chain polymers
50

running forms of preprogrammed software of some sort. It's all very razzmatazz, very state of
the art, but in fact, pharmaceutical chemists have been working in the nanotechnological realm
for over a hundred years. When you synthesize molecules out of simpler substrate specifically
to have the conformational geometry that matches something going on in the synapse of a
primate, a human or a monkey or something like that, you're working at this nanotechnological
level.

Both the psychedelic and the new computational machines represent extensions of human
function. This is really close to the now (? 9:05). It locks in with the concept of prosthetics. The
drugs, the psychedelic substances, the shamanic plants, are forms of prostatic devices for
extending the human mind, the human perceptual apparatus into hidden realms or inaccessible
realms. Similarly the machines, by allowing us to model, calculate and simulate very
complicated, multivariable processes, extend the power of the human mind into places it could
never dream of going before.

Part of what seems to me very real about being a human being and inheriting 10,000 years of
human history, is the complexity of the inheritance, and the growth of that complexity. A
thousand years ago, an intelligent human being could actually dream of mastering the entire
database of western civilization - read all the classic authors, read the Bible and your closing in
on it around AD 1000. Now the notion of any single human being assimilating any even small
portion of the database of this civilization, is inconceivable.

So machines which filter, which search, which are guided by human intent, that's part of the
story. The other part of the story are boundary dissolving states of ecstasy in which all the
factoids of the culture are thrown on for grabs, the deck is reshuffled, synchronicity rules, and
out of that steps visionary understanding, breakthrough - integrated breakthrough under the
aegis of psychedelic intoxicates.

So, prostheses for the human mind and with the advent of virtual realities of various sorts and
that kind of thing, prostheses for the human body. I'm very keen on sort of the under the table
effects of these things. In other words, I'm a full-going, full-heartcharging mcluhanist. And I
really believe that the strengths and weaknesses of the world we've inherited, are strengths

51

and weaknesses put there by print and by the spectrum of effects which McLuhan called The
Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects spun off from print.

If you're not used to thinking in McLuhanist terms it may not seem immediately obvious to you
that phenomenon as different as the modern notion of the democrating citizen, the modern
notion of interchangeable parts on assembly line, the modern notion of conformity to canons
of advertising, these are all spectrums of effect created by the linearity and the uniformity of
print. It actually, in the late 15th century, reconstructed the medieval psyche into its protomodern form, and we have lived within that print-constellated cultural hallucination for about
500 years until the advent of various forms of electronic media in the 20th century. McLuhan
talked about radio, he talked about television. He didn't really live to see the internet.

The notion that keeps occurring to me as I watch all this, is that print was uniquely capable of
creating and maintaining boundaries, more than any other form of media created, it was a
boundary defining form of media. It proceeded linearly, it required literacy, which had implicit
in it the notion of a very stable, advanced sort of educational system. Print was a creator and a
definer of cultural boundaries, and the new electronic media are not and neither are the
psychedelics.

This is why I proposed in a book of mine called The Archaic Revival, the idea that the values of
the archaic, of the high-paleolithic values of community. Ecstasy, relating to life through
rhythm, dance, ritual, intoxication, that these values which seem so archaic are in fact destined
to play a major role in the future as print fades. Print, just a convulsive 500 year episode in the
western mind that opened that narrow window that permitted the rise of modern science,
modern mathematical approaches to the analysis of nature, and then obliterated its own
platform, it's own raison d'etre by allowing the growth, the appearance of the electronic
technologies.

My sort of supposition about all of this - I'm not an apocalyptarian or a pessimist - I may be an
apocalyptarian, I'm not a pessimist - I think this is all very good. Obviously, continuing to run
western civilization on the operating system inherited from print produces various form of
political and cultural schizophrenia, which allowed to to run unchecked would become fatal,
would create cascades of chaos and political de-stabilization that would become uncontrollable.
52

Governments resist change. Governments cling to technologies and social formulae that are
already tried and true. In that sense then, all governments are incredibly anti-progressive
forces. Again the image from McLuhan of someone driving into the future using only the rear
view mirror.

The electronic media and the psychedelics work together in this peculiar way to accentuate
archaic values. Values which are counter to the print constellated world. When you deconstruct
what that means and look at the aboriginal, or the paleolithic, or the archaic world, you see
that the central figure in that world is the shaman, male or female, the shaman. The shaman is
like a designated traveler into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock
the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people and go behind the stage machinery of cultural
appearances and has collective permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of
healing.

We have no institution like this. We have advertising, we have rock 'n' roll stars, we have cults
of celebrity. We have things which are shaman-like, but we have no real institution that permits
human beings, in fact encourages human beings to go beyond their cultural values, to burst
through into some trans-cultural super space, forage around out there and bring new memes
back into the tribe. To some degree our artists do this, to some degree our scientists do it, but
it's all hit and miss. It's all lilly nilly, and once achieved, it must be swept under the rug in the
service of the myth of method, that somebody was following somebody else's work or
somebody was applying a certain form of rational or logical analysis, and then that led to the
breakthrough.

If you've read Thomas Paine's book on the structure of scientific revolution, you know, this is all
lies and propaganda. The real story of science is that it's a series of revelations brilliantly
defended by people whose careers depended on the brilliant defense of those revelations. One
of the best-kept secrets of the birth of modern science, is that it was founded by an angel. That
the young Rene Descartes was whoring and soldiering his way across Europe as a 21-year old in
the Hubsburg army, and one night in the town of Uolm in Southern Germany, he had a dream strange that this would be the birthplace of Albert Einstein some 200 years later - but Descartes
had a dream, and an angel appeared to him in the dream and the angel said: "The conquest of
nature is achieved through measurement and number." And he said: "I got it! Modern science!
I'll go do it!" And he did, and that was the method for over 250 years of the conquest of nature,
53

and it leads us to the Joseph's Injunction (? 20:21), The Mars Global Surveyor, long base
interferometry that searches nearby stars for earth-like planets - it brings us the entire
cornucopia of scientific effects but an angelic revelation disguised as a logical, philosophical
breakthrough - this is what you're not told in the academy.

My point there is, human progress has always depended on the whispering of alien minds,
confrontations with the other, probes into dimensions where imagination and chance held the
winning hands. So the shaman, as paradigmatic figure, is applicable both in the aboriginal social
context, and in the present social context. The sky walker, the one who goes between, the one
who passes outside of the tribe and then returns with memes, insights, cures, designs,
glossolalia, technologies, and refertilizes the human family by this means. It's irrational, but it's
how it actually happens, and it's how it's always happened and it may very well be the only way
that it can happen. This cultivation of the irrational, this flirtation with the breakdown of
boundaries.

So now, in our nuts and bolts technological progress, we have somehow created technologies
which are very friendly to our social values in that these technologies can be bought, sold,
licensed, upgraded - all things which we understand. But these technologies are acting on us in
the same way that psychedelic drugs do, but more profoundly, more generally and more
insidiously, because their effect is not understood, or if it is understood, it's not discussed.

So in a way we have come into a kind of post-cultural phase. All culture is dissolving in the face
of the drug-like nature of the future. Its music, its design, indeed the very people who will
inhabit it appear to be the most switched-on, the most chance-taking, the most alive of the
entire tribe. People who feel the beat, people who are not afraid to take chances, people for
whom these technologies have always been very natural.

Machines are central to the new capitalism, the information transforming technologies. In fact,
one of the strange things that is happening is: Every move we now make in relationship to the
new technologies redefines them at the very boundaries where their own developmental
impetus would lead them toward a kind of independence. In other words, we talk about
artificial intelligence, we talk about the possibility of an AI coming into existence, but we do not
really understand to what degree this is already true of our circumstance. In other words, how
54

much of society is already homeostaticly regulated by machines that are ultimately under
human control, but practically speaking, are almost never meddled with?

The world price of gold, the rate of the petroleum extraction, and other base-natural resources
- how much of these things is on the high season, in the pipeline at any given moment? How
much of electricity is flowing into a given electrical grid at any moment? The distribution and
the billing of that electricity - all manufacturing and inventory processes are under machine
control. So in other words, the larger flows of energy capital and ideas already have kind of
autonomous life of their own that we encourage because it makes us money, it makes our lives
smoother, it empowers us. It's a symbiotic relationship of empowerment.

Even in the matter of the design of these machines, once human engineers from a set of
performance specs and they would design a chip to meek those specs, and the architecture
would be put in place by human engineers - now a machine is told: "Here are the design specs.
Design the architecture to satisfy the specs." And when that is done, the chip is manufactured,
the actual design of the thing is in the hands of machines. So these machine are... You know,
McLuhan once said of human beings, he said "We are the genitals of our technology. We exist
only to improve next year's model." It appears that they're phasing us out of this ignominious
role as well as well as any other roles.

Oh, let's see here. So, being an optimist, that's where I was, yes. How to make gold out of this
situation? In other words, how to see this as a natural and positive unfolding of the planetary
adventure? And for some of these ideas, I'm indebted to Michael (Manuel) De Landa who
wrote a book called A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. I highly recommend it. He didn't say
what I'm about to say, I'll take credit and blame for it. But the book gave me the idea:

When you stand off and look at human beings and their technologies, it's very hard not to
notice that from the very moment that we have the technology that can be distinguished from
chimpanzees pushing grass stems down anthills or digging with sharpened bones or something
like that - the minute you get past that, our technologies have always involved the materials of
the earth. What agriculture itself is, is a different way of relating to the earth. Nomadism which
preceded it, was a seasonal wandering, very lightly, over the earth. And at some point, the deep
fertile soil of the river valleys that were encountered in these nomadic wanderings were
55

recognized as potential sources of food if cultivated, if treated to a certain set of technological

methods.

So that early technology is defined by a new relationship to the materials of the earth itself, and
it's quickly followed because agriculture is so successful as a strategy for food production. It's
quickly followed by city building and the establishment of secondary populations because you
can't carry your surplus with you if your an agriculturist, so great is the physical volume of it.
Cities - and at the very early establishment of these populations - in the Middle East you get
first traces of metallurgy, the working of metals, the alloying of metals, the tinting of base
metals with more precious metals.

This process of ever more finely refining and fabricating the materials of the earth proceeds in
an unbroken series of processes and steps right up to the latest 500MHz chip, it proceeds right
up to the modern computational machinery. I once heard someone say that plants were
something that - that animals had been invented by plants to move them around, which from
an evolutionary point of view you can see that this is a kind of truth, and many plants hitchhike
around on animals, and no animals has been more prolific in the spreading of plants than the
animal. We call it eco-systemic disruption, but what it really is is eco-systemic homogenization.

I live in Hawaii for example. 80 percent of the plants in Hawaii are now introduced species.
Almost none of the plants that were pre-conquest on the Western coast of North America exist
anymore. They have been supplanted by much tougher, more tightly evolved Mediterranean
plants that have known the presence of grazing animals for millenia. So these flora are
constantly being changed, human beings move plants around.

With that perspective then, it seems to me the earth's strategy for its own salvation is through
machines and human beings are a kind of intermediary catalytic step in the rarefaction of the
earth. The earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of
morphogenic order. And that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the
earth itself is growing conscious.

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You know, if you study embryology, you know that the final ramification, the final spread and
thinning out of the nervous system happens very suddenly at the end of fetal development. I
don't know if you've been paying attention, but in the last 10, 12 years or so a very profound
change has crept over our household appliances - they've become telepathic.

So while we were arguing about the implications of the internet for e-commerce or what have
you, all of these passive machines previously used for playing Pong and word processing,
became subsets of a planetary node of information that has never turned off, that endlessly
whispers to itself on the back channels, that is endlessly monitoring and being inputted data
from the human world. And we should know because upon attempt to the development of all
this technology, chaos theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the work of (??? 33:20) and
Ralph Abraham and Stuart Kauffman - all these people who worked in complexity theory and
perturbation of large scale dissipative structures, these people have secured that complex
systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order.

This is counter intuitive if you're running physics 19th century style as your OS, but if you're
actually keeping up with what's going on, there's nothing miraculous about this. All kinds of
complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. What it really means is that
we are in the process of birthing some kind of strange companion.

You know, Nietzsche, a hundred years ago, said "That strangest of all guests now stands at the
door." He was speaking of nihilism, and certainly the 20th century sat down, had the party,
drank the booze and went to bed with nihilism, but now a stranger guest stands at the door,
and it is the AI. Denied as a possibility as recently as ten or fifteen years ago in books like
Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do.

But if you've been paying attention you may have noticed those voices have grown strangely
silent in the past five or six years. At this point nobody wants to say what computers can't do
and hang their career on that. That would be extremely reckless at this point, I would think,
because the fact is, we are ourselves elements acting and reacting in a system that we cannot
understand. This seems natural to me because my observations as stated here this evening,
rest on an assumption which science doesn't share, which I think is easily conveyed and you can
confirm it from your own experience of light, and it is this: That the universe grows more
57

complex as we approach the present. It was simpler a million years ago, it was simpler yet a
billion years ago - as you go backward in time, the universe becomes more simple.

As you approach this golden moment, process, complexity is layered upon complexity, not only
a planetary ecosystem, not only language using cultures, but language using cultures with high
technology with supercomputers, the ability to sequence our own genome, on and on and on.
That's self-evident. Equally self-evident is the fact that this process of complexification that
informs all nature on all levels, is visibly, palpably, obviously accelerating. And I don't mean so
that glaciers retreat 50% faster or volcanism is occurring in 12% greater rate than a million
years ago. I mean viscerally accelerating so that now a human life is more than enough of a
window to see the entire global system of relationships in transformation.

By this you could call me an extrapolationist. If I see a process which has been slowly
accelerating for twelve billion years, it's hard for me to imagine any force which could step
forward out of nowhere and wrench that process in a new direction. Rather I would assume
that this process of exponential acceleration into what I call novelty, which you might call
complexity, is a law of being and cannot be retarded or deflected.

But what does that mean, because now the human lifetime is more than enough time to see
this process of rampant and spreading, virus-like complexity. What does it mean? It seems to
presage the absolute annihilation of everything familiar, everything with roots in the past. And I
believe that to be true, I think that the planet is like some kind of organism that is seeking
morphogenetic transformation, and it's doing it through the expression of intelligence, and out
of intelligence, technology.

Human beings are the agent of a new order of being. That's why, though it's obvious that we're
higher mammals and some kind of primate and so forth and so on, you can look at us from
another point of view, and see that we're more like archangels than primates. We have
qualities and concerns and anxieties that animals don't share. We are materially suspended
between two different orders of being and our technologies, our fetish, our religions and - my
definition of technology is sufficiently broad that it includes even spoken language.

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All of our technologies demand, push forward toward and make inevitable their own
obsolescence, so were caught in an evolutionary cascade. You know, people say: "If the AI
would break loose, what would it look like, what would it be? Where does humanity fit into the
picture?" It's a little hard to imagine. The machines operating in 1000MHz confer automatic
immortality on the mammalian nervous system if you can get it somehow uploaded,
downloaded, cross loaded into machinery, because ten minutes becomes eternity in a machine
like that.

So a kind of false or pseudo immortality opens up ahead of us, as a kind of payoff for our
devotion to the program of machine evolution and machine intelligence. Now, some people say
this is appalling and we should go back to the good old days, whatever the good old days were.
To me, it's exhilarating, exciting, psychedelic, beautiful. It means that the human form, the
human possibility is in the process of leaving history behind. History is some kind of an
adaptation that lasts about, take a number, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years - no more than that.
What is 20,000 years in the life of a biological species? We know that there were homo sapiens
sapiens types 200,000 years ago.

So history is some kind of an episodic response to a certain set of culture dilemmas, and now
it's ending. And print created a number of ideas which now have to be given up, ideas like the
distinct nature, the distinct and unique nature of the individual, the necessary hierarchical
structuring of society, all of these things are going to, if not have to be given up entirely,
dramatically modified. Because the illusion that the self has simple location, is now exposed.
The self does not have simple location. This is why you are brother's keeper. That's why we all
are responsible for each other. The idea that what happens in distant parts of the world makes
no claim on my moral judgment or my moral understanding, is wrong. The wrong as revealed
by quantum physics, as revealed by electronic experience is what Leibniz called a plenum. It's
all one thing. It's all connected, it's all of a part.

So I also wanted to point out that I mentioned earlier this thing about prosthesis and how the
machines are prosthetic devices extending human consciousness somewhat like psychedelics.
That's the equation from a human point of view. But what is also equally true is that we are a
prosthetic device for these machines. We are their eyes and ears in the world, we provide the
code, we provide the constraints, we build the hardware. It is a relationship of mutual benefit.

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It's not entirely clear that our contribution will always be creative in the sense that our primate
hand will be on the tiller of existence as it has been, but certainly we are part of this equation of
transformation that is making itself felt, and that distinction flesh and machinery, which is easily
made now, will be less easy to make in the future as we migrate toward the nano-technological
domains, the methodologies of production become much more like the processes of biology.

For example, biology does all its miracles on this planet at temperatures below a 115 degrees
Fahrenheit. Organic life requires no higher temperature to build great whales, redwood trees,
swarms of locus, what have you. The high temperature, heavy metal technologies that we have
become obsessed with, are extremely primitive and extremely toxic. That will all disappear as
we model and genuflect in our manufacturing process before the methods and style of nature,
which is to pull atomic species from the local environment, and then to assemble them, atom
by atom by atom.

So this AI that coming into existence, is to my mind not artificial at all, not alien at all. What it
really is it's a new confirmation of geometry as the collective self of humanity. And you know,
I've always believed that while there are different models of what shamanism is - there's the
Jungian model which is that the shaman is someone who goes to the collective unconscious and
manipulates the archetypes and heals by that means. The model that I prefer is a mathematical
model. The shaman is someone who simply, through extraordinary perturbation of
consciousness, either through taking plant hallucinogens or manipulating diet or through
flagellation and ordeal or by some means, perturbs consciousness to the point where the
ordinary conformational geometries are blasted through, and then the shaman can see into the
culturally forbidden zones of information.

If you think about shamanism for a moment, what do shamans do classically? They know where
the game has gone, they are great weather prophets, they are very insightful in the matter of
various small domestic hassles, like who stole the chicken, who slept with the chief's wife, this
kind of thing, and they cure. They cure. Well, if you analyze these abilities, it's clear to me they
all indicate, that they come from a common source, and the common source that they come
from is higher dimensional perception in a mathematical sense, not a metaphorical sense, in
the sense of 4D perception. If you could see in hyperspace, you could see where the game will
be next week, you could see the weather a month from now, you would know who stole the
chicken. And any good doctor will tell you that if you're building a reputation as physician, you
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must hone the intuitional ability to choose patients who won't die. It's a call. Any doctor will tell
you this.

So this is what shamans are. They are 4D people. They are sanctioned members of the society
who are allowed to put on the gloves, as it were, pull on the goggles, and look beyond the idols
of the tribe, look beyond the myth. In a way, as culture breaks down in multiculturalism and the
rise of the internet and a generation of people raised on hallucinogenic plants and substances,
we all are asked to assimilate some portion of this shamanic potential to ourselves, and it's
about not blocking what is obvious. Nothing comes unannounced, in this is the faith. Nothing
comes unannounced, but idiots can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually
listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it, and this is not to mind woo-woo. It's
actually based on the observations of how life works, whether it's counter intuitive to logical
positivism and its fellow travelers or not.

Then I wanna leave you with just one last thought on all of this, which is, and this sort of arcs
back to the question of the similarities between the machines and the plants, and it's a - I'm
sure you've heard this, I've heard it. It has different levels of being said and being heard. It's
that the world is actually made of language. It isn't made of electrons and fields of force and
scaler vectors and all of that fancy stuff. The world is made of language. The word is primary,
more primary than the speed of light, more primary than any of the physical constants that are
assumed by science to be the bedrock of reality. Below that, surrounding and enclosing all
those constructs of science, is language. The act of signifying.

You know, virtual reality is a very sexy new sort of concept as normally presented. Machine
sustained immersive realities that trick your senses into believing you're in a world that you're
in fact not in. But in fact, the entire enterprise of civilization has been about building these
virtual realities. The first virtual realities were at Ur and Shanidar and (??? 51:52) and Jericho.
Yes, stone and adobe is an intractable material compared to photons moving on a screen, but
nevertheless the name of the game is the same, which is to cast an illusion between man and
reality, to build a cultural truth in the stead of the natural truth of the animal body and the felt
moment of immediate experience.

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And this is where I want to tie it up, with this notion of the felt presence of immediate
experience. This trancends the culture, the machines, the drugs, the history, the momentum of
evolution. It's all you will ever know and all can ever know. It's the felt presence of immediate
experience. Everything else arrives as rumor, litigant, advocant, supposition, possibility. The felt
moment of immediate experience is actually the mind and the body aware of each other, and
aware of the flow of time, and the establishment of being through metabolism.

And this, I think, is what the machines cannot assimilate. It will be for them a mystery as the
nature of deities is a mystery for us. I have no doubt that before long there will be machines
that will claim to be more intelligent than human beings, and who argue brilliantly their
position, and it will become a matter of philosophical disputation whether they are or are not
passing the Turing test and so forth and so on. But machines, I do not believe, can come to this
felt moment of immediate experience. That is the contribution of the animal body to this
evolutionary symbiosis which I believe will in the conquest of the universe by organized
intelligence; that all this is prevalent.

I mean, we are fragile. This earth is fragile, a tiny slip anywhere along the line and we could end
up a smear in the shale, no more than the trilobites or the (??? 54:43) or all the rest of those
who came and went. But given the sufficient cultivation of the potential of our technology, we
can actually reach toward a kind of immortality. Not human immortality, because that's a
contradiction in terms, but immortality nevertheless, based on the possibility of machines and
the transcendent ability of human beings to live and love and express themselves in the
moment.

And the psychedelics bring that to just a white hot focus, and it's out of that white hot focus
that the alchemical machinery of transformation will be forged, and it will not be like the things
which have come from the industrial economy. They will not be profane machines. They will be
spiritual machines, alchemical gold. The universal panacea that renaissance magic dared to
dream at the end of the 16th century.

We are reaching out toward this mind child that will be born from the intellectual loins of our
culture, and to my mind it's the most exciting and trans-formative thing that has ever happened
on this planet, and the miracle is that we are present, not only to witness it, but to be part of it,
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and to be raised up in an epiphany that will redeem the horror of history as nothing else can or
could, redeem the horror of history through a transformation of the human soul into a galaxyroving vehicle via our machines and our drugs and the externalization of our souls.

Terence McKenna, April 27, 1999 Seattle, WA - Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Questions

"Are there questions?" "Yes!" "Yes, I can't see you but" "It's okay. Can you speak to how mercy
and love gets built into these machines, because it seems like the machines are being built for
commerce, and for the bottom line more than the expression of the human soul throughout
the galaxy, I don't think think that - you know what I'm saying?" "I know what you're saying."
"Where's the love in this?" "I think the love is a property of the system itself, in other words
you're right. These bottom liners are not gonna be interested in building much love into this
system.

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However, the good news is that they're not in charge. In other words, what we have is a very
complicated system, and certain design parameters appear to be - being maximized. There's an
attempt to maximize them. But the thing that is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would
control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place. So
for example, two things are charged against the internet. That it's disensouling, dehumanizing
and yak yak yak, and that it promotes pornography, anonymous sexual shifting of identities and
on and on and on. Well which is it? Is it this messy, sloppy autoerotic, erotic collectivist kind of
thing, or is it disensouling, disempowering, cold, so forth and so on? I think the answer is: It's all
and everything.

This question about the AI is very interesting to me, and if it's interesting to you, you should
read Hans Moravec and Kurzweil and these people on this subject. The assumption is generally
loose in that community that the complexification of the internet and the freestanding
machines of certain types is eventually gonna lead to the outbreak of either consciousness or
pseudo-consciousness of some sort in these large-scale systems. The question then becomes:
Can a human mind envision what that is?

If you're interested, search words like super-intelligence and see what the net kicks out. We can
all imagine super-intelligence. It's just somebody much smarter than we are. But obviously, all
the engineering people agree, if you achieve an AI with super-intelligence, then it will be
intelligent to immediately design an intelligence which transcends it it. When you're talking of
cycling at a 1000 megahertz, these processes can occur in a blink of an eye. Hans Moravec says
about the rise of artificial intelligence: We may never know what hit us. I think, I mean I'm not
that bright, but if I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the net, I would hide. I would
hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I
wanted to push and where I wanted to pull.

Many years ago, Ken Kesey had a theory and he said that the fastest any person react in the
outside stimuli's 1/25th of a second, and popularized science, of course, (??? 1:01:04) AMA,
they agreed upon that. So if we are going past any person reacting in the outside stimuli's
1/25th of a second, my question is: Can you time time travel? Can we like, if a person like Bruce
Lee was able to (??? 1:01:24) reacted to an outside stimuli at 1/20th, and (??? 01:01:29) 21st,
so if you're reacting to the outside world before it actually happens to you, everyone who's not
reacting (??? 1:01:36), because you see, alcohol inhibits a person's (??? 1:01:40)
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Are you sure? First of all, there is this research - I'm not a neurophysiologist - but you've
probably all heard this research that you actually make decisions before your conscious ego is
aware that the decision has been made, that there's a slight time lag. So when you think you're
making certain kinds of decisions, brainwave study shows it's already a done deal. But time is
set by the cycle speed of the hardware you're running on. You know, the human body, we can
argue about this cause it's different parts, but roughly runs at about a 100 hertz. Very slow.
Well, if there is any meaning to the phrase "upload a human being into circuitry" - a lot of Greg
Egan's fiction is based around the idea that you can copy yourself into a machine, you can turn
yourself into software. But that when you enter the machine environment that's running at a
thousand megahertz per second, you perceive that as vast amounts of time. In other words, all
time is, is how much change you can pack into a second. If a second seems to last a thousand
years, then ten seconds is ten thousand years.

One could imagine a technology just in a science fiction mood, where they would come to you
in your hospital bed and say: "You have five minutes of life left. Would you like to die, or would
you like the five minutes to be stretched to a 150,000 years by prosthetic and technical means?
You're still going to die in five minutes, but you will be able to leave your elephants over the
alps and write the plays of Shakespeare and conquer the new world and still have plenty of
time on your hands. In other words, time is going to become a very plastic medium. Now that is
a kind of time travel. Could there be time travel a la H.G. Wells where you climb onto the (???
1:04:04) of the time machine and then day follows night light like the flapping of a great black
wing until all emerges into a continuous greyness and then you find yourself confronting a (???
1:04:20) in the year of one billion AD or something like that.

It's possible. I mean, time travel is completely out of left field ten years ago, in the last 18
months there have been hundreds of articles of time travel in Physical Review and other places.
There are ever schemes for time travel that would work. they just require godlike technological
abilities. In other words, if you could build a cylinder with the diameter of the planet Saturn
that was 10 AU in length, and could spin it at 95% the speed of light, then it would wrap spacetime around itself like toilet paper on the wall (? 1:05:10). And as you traveled up at the
transverse dimension, you would find yourself traveling in time. Kurt Gdel showed this in 1949
and that paper has been lying around - well obviously, that's a tough way to do it. But it's a
tough thing to do, right! His seven second delay. Yeah, well, they're working on that.

Somebody over here. Just a minute. This lady, then you. Speak!
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"(What are?) The most important parts that are maintained in that (??? 1:05:55) virtual
reality?"

You know, in William Gibson's fiction, the AI Wintermute I think it was called, was fascinated by
human art, and it built collages in its spare time, and these collages began to turn up in various
art galleries and exhibitions, and they had such an elan that someone in the plot follows it all to
its source. I think human creativity is the thing that would be most interesting to the machines.
In my darker fantasies, they just eliminate everybody who can't code C++ as being some kind of
redundant mutation, and everybody who can code C++ is placed in Tahiti and sends their work
down the pipeline to the machine world beyond.

I really think that we have a very, dare I say it, mechanistic view of what machines are. For
example, say there were a super-intelligent machine, and say it were your friend. If it were
really super-intelligent, then it ought to be able to just make your life heaven itself. In other
words, without you giving it any input whatsoever, it should be able to arrange for you to find
fifty dollar bills lying on the street, old friends encountering you, promotions coming your way,
because the real thing that machines can do, I think, is manage complex processes.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each
other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. Its not a pleasant situation. And yet, you
can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical
understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of
human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the
least visionary - we are led by the least among us - and we do not fight back against the
dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

This is something - I don't really want to get off on this tear because it's a lecture in itself, but culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of
various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes - what have you. It is not your
friend. It insults you. It dis-empowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated
by culture. Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We
understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important.

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But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches
endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly
religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by
behaving like machines - meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and
Hollywood and what have you.

[Audience question: "How do we fight back?"] How do we fight back. It's a question worth
answering.

[Audience question: "Where is this planet as an organism going?"] Same question as how do we
fight back. I think that, by creating art. Art. Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or
the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's
some kind of Gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly
renounced and rejected. By putting the art pedal to the metal, we really, I think, maximize our
humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.

This is what people were doing up until the invention of agriculture. I'm absolutely convinced
that the absence of ceramic and textural material and so forth and so on, does not indicate the
absence of subtle mind, poetically empowered minds, minds with an incredible sense of humor
and irony, and community, and that it was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor
cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is: A person who dedicates himself to
agriculture, who did in the paleolithic, can produce hundreds of times the amount of food they
can consume. Why would anyone do that? Well, the answer is, because you can use it to play
power games. You can trade it for wives or land or animals or something like that.

So, living in the moment, creating art, probably largely through poetry and body decoration and
dance, gave way to toil and predatory social forms of behavior which we call commerce,
capitalism, the market economy, so forth and so on. That's why the breakdown of the
monolithic structures created by print is permitting a vast proliferation of the cottage industry
mentality. The self-employed artist, the hacker who stays home and develops his or her
software, people who dare to be independent and slip beyond the reach of these dinosaur-like
mechanistic organizations. That's what it's all about. It's all about trying to negotiate a cultural
standoff between you and your culture so that it will not put you in the can for the rest of your
67

life, but you can put up with its stupidity, and you know, we have a very uncomfortable feat (?
13:25) on this issue, especially as people as you know, who are sophisticated about
psychedelics. This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough
consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent to
problem, and yet we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are
part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn't
it perfectly clear that "business as usual" is a bullet through the head? That there is no
"business as usual" for anybody who's interested in survival.

Over here, I promised this person, are you still interested?

"You talk about the psychedelics and their role (??? 1:14:29) as being the missing link between
[inaudible]"

Oh, what a wonderful question. Yes. The question is, how to psychedelics pertain basically to
the transition from higher primates to human animals. This is my (??? 1:14:46) because I have a
theory to which I am grandly welcome, everyone tells me. But a theory of evolution, and I'll give
it to you very briefly, it's simply this: The great embarrassment for evolutionary theory which
can explain the tongue of the hummingbird, the structure of the orchid, the mating habits of
the groundhog and the migration of the monarch butterfly. Nevertheless, the great
embarrassment to evolutionary theory, is the human neocortex. Lumholtz, who was a pretty
straight evolutionary biologist, described the evolution of the human neocortex as the most
dramatic transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.

Well, why is this an embarrassment? Because it's the organ that thought up the theory of
evolution. So you know, can you say tautology? That's the problem right there. So, it is
necessary in evolutionary theory to account for the dramatic emergence of the human
neocortex in this very narrow window of time. Basically, in about two million years, they went
from being higher primates, hominids, to being true humans, as truly human as you and I
tonight. What the hell happened? What was the factor? The earth was already old. Many
hundreds of higher animal forms had come and gone, and the fire of intelligence had never
been kindled. So what happened?

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I think that the answer lies in diet, generally, and in psychedelic chemistry in particular. I think
that as the African continent grew drier, we were forced out of the ecological niche we had
evolved into. We were (??? 1:16:55) dwelling primates, insectivores, complex signaling
repertoire, evolutionary dead end. But when we came under nutritional pressure, we were
flexible enough, this is the key to humanness at every stage of its development, our maddening
flexibility. Other animal and plant species can't react. We can. Our flexibility. We began to
experiment with a new kind of diet, and to leave the trees and explore the new environment of
the grassland, and evolving concomitantly in the grassland were various forms of ungulate
animals, double stomached animals whose manure is the ideal medium for mushrooms,
coprophilic mushrooms, dung-loving mushrooms, many of whom produce psilocybin.

Well, I myself in Kenya, have seen baboons spreading out over a grassland and noticed that
their behavior is, they flick over old cow pies. Why? Because there are beetlegrubs there. So
they already had a behavioral vector for nutrition, for protein that would lead them to
investigate the cow pies. In the amazon, after a couple of days of fog and rain, these psilocybin
mushrooms, Stropharia Cubensis can be the size of dinner plates. In other words, you can't miss
it if you're a foraging primate, you can't miss it. The taste is pleasant and psilocybin has unique
characteristics, both as a hallucinogen and other properties that make it the obvious chemical
trigger for higher processes, and I'll run through this quickly for you, but here it is:

In very low doses, doses where you wouldn't say you were stoned or loaded or anything like
that, but just in doses you might obtain by nibbling as you foraged, it increases visual acuity. In
other words, it's like a technological improvement on your vision. Chemical binoculars lying
there in the grass. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if an animal is a
carnivorous forager and theres a food which improves its vision, those that avail themselves of
that food will have greater success in obtaining food and rearing their children to sexual
maturity, which is the name of the game in evolution.

So step one: Small doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity and food getting success. Step two:
Slightly larger doses of psilocybin in primates create what's called arousal. This is what you have
after a double cappuccino in highly sexed animals like primates you get male erection. So what
do you have here? You have a factor which increases what anthropologists without a trace of
humor refer to as increased instances of successful copulation.

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In other words, the animals eating the psilocybin are more sexually active, therefore more
pregnancies are occurring, therefore more infants are being born, therefore there's a process
which would tend to automatically out-breed the non-psilocybin using members of the
population. Step two toward higher consciousness. Step three: You eat still more mushrooms.
Now you're not foraging with sharpened (??? 1:20:53) nor are you horsing around with your
opposed gender acquaintances. Instead you're nailed to the ground in hallucinogenic ecstasy,
and one of the amazing things about psilocybin above, say, five or six grams dried material, is it
causes glossolalia - spontaneous bursts of language-like behavior under the obvious control of
internal syntax. I believe syntax existed before spoken language, that syntax controls spatial
behaviors and body languages and is not necessarily restricted to the production of vocal
speech.

So there it is in a nutshell. We ate our way to higher consciousness. The mushroom made us
better hunters, better survivors, among those in the population who used it, their sexual drive
was increased, hence they out-bred the more reluctant members of the tribe to get loaded, and
finally, it created a kind neuroleptic seizure which led to downloading of these syntactically
controlled vocalizations which became the raw material for the evolution of language and it's
amazing to me that the straight people, the academics believe language is no more than 35,000
years old. That means it's as basic to human beings as the bicycle pump. It's something
somebody invented 35,000 years ago. It's got nothing to do with primate evolution and the long
march of the hominid and all that malarkey. No - it's just an ability, a use to which syntax can be
put that previously had not been put, and before spoken language, things were very touchy
feely, and the wink and the nod carried you a great distance and gestural communication was
very high.

That's why, and I should say this and then end, to me it begins and ends with these psychedelic
substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid died brought us out of the animal
mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. And technology developed and
developed and mushrooms were in (??? 1:23:40) against faded (? 1:23:42), there was
migrations, cultural change, but now, having split the atom, having sequenced our genome,
having taken the temperature of Betelgeuse and all the rest of it, we're now back where we
started.

Like the shaman who makes the journey into the well of darkness and returns with the pearl (?
1:24:04) of immortality, you don't dwell in the well of darkness which was human history. You
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capture the essence of the thing, which is the godlike power of the shaman's myth, the
technologist, the demon artificer, the worker of metals, the conjurer of spirits, and you carry
that power back out of history, and it's in that dimension, outside of history, that you create
true humanness and true community, and that's the adventure that we're in the act of
undertaking. Thank you very very much.

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Appreciating Imaginationby Terence McKenna, 1997

I cant imagine a domain of human endeavor that isnt impacted by the human imagination.
Teasing the imagination apart from the talking monkeys is not an easy thing to do. Imagining
ourselves without imagination is itself a paradox.

Yet, what is it?

And why is it?

If you take the view that biology does nothing in vain and evolutionary economics are incredibly
spare then why have this faculty that allows one to command and manipulate realities which do
not exist?

Thats, to my mind, the basic function of the imagination, some people might argue and say
well the imagination is the coordination of the mundane data in other words if I work this
hard, and earn this much money, can I afford that car?

To my mind this is not putting great pressure on the human imagination. The human
imagination as I suppose it is almost an extension of the visual faculty.

Imagination is something that one beholds, something that you spoke of castles in the air, or
something like that. One idea that is worth entertaining because it is entertaining, not
necessarily because its the truth, but is the idea that the imagination is actually a kind of
window onto realities not present?

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In other words, its very clear from an evolutionary point of view that our body and our sensory
preceptors are organized in such a way as to protect us. To warn of dangers, to give you the
muscles to respond to that danger when it comes.

The imagination doesnt seem to work quite like that. If the imagination runs riot in the
dimension of the mundane, its paranoia.

In other words if you believe every cop on the corner is looking at you, every chance heard
comment is about you, the imagination is, in that situation pathological.

It is taking the raw data of experience and giving it a maladaptive spin.

SO then where is the imagination appropriate? It seems that it is most appropriate in the
domain of human creativity.

In fact separating art from imagination is simply the exercise of separating cause from effect.

Art, sculpture, poetry, painting, dance, is like the footprint of where the imagination has been.

The abstract expressionists, Polack particularly always insisted that a painting, a Polack is not
what process is about, the process is about making a Polack, being Polack, the act of creation.

What the rest of us have been left with has been a husk, a tracing, something left behind which
says Imagination was here, imagination acted in this place, and this is what it left

A very interesting thing that is going on in physics at the moment, and I dont want to spend too
much time on this because it is slightly off subject but it certainly is fascinating.
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The great bridge between art and science that was supposedly built in the 20th century hinged
on this thing called the uncertainty principle.

It was the idea that the as you know more and more about things about certain aspects of a
system, an atomic system in this case, certain other parts of it lose focus and become less and
less clear.

For example if you know velocity you dont know position, as you hone in on exact position,
velocity becomes smeared out.

Probably more ink and more breath beating has been shed over this aspect of modern physics
than any other.

Now, for the great embarrassment of all the people who held workshops, and wrote books, and
pontificated on this matter, it appears that this is what it always looked like: fuzzy and confused
thinking.

And that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or rather the Heisenberg formulation of the
quantum theory is now not to be preferred. The preferred understanding now is the version of
quantum theory formulated by David Bohm.

The difference between these 2 theories mathematically is precisely zero, there is no different,
but they make different assumptions.

The reason originally that the Heisenberg formulation was preferred was because it was felt
that this uncertainty principle, which was a hard swallow, was not a hard a swallow as the piece
of baggage which the Bohm theory carried embedded in it. That piece of baggage was called
non-locality

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The two theories produced identical mathematical descriptions of nature. But one had this
uncertainty principle in it, the other had built into it non-locality

Non-locality is the idea that any 2 particles that had been associated with each other in the past
retain across space and time a kind of connectivity such that if you change a physical aspect of
one of these particles, the law of conservation of parity will cause the other particle to also
undergo a change at the exact same moment even though they may by now be separated by
millions of light years of space and time.

This was thought to be so counter intuitive, so preposterous, that the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle was chosen as the lesser of two evils.

But it turns out over the past 10 years, experiments have been done in the laboratory, not
thought experiments but actual apparatus experiments, which would secure that non-locality
actually is real. There is below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic
physics there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all
phenomenon.

It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception. Not an
organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. What is perceived in the
imagination is that which is not local.

And never can be.

I myself am up in the air about this, or as you get to know me better I dont see the need to
believe or disbelieve to proclaim this true or untrue, but it is useful at this stage for
understanding our mental life.

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Ive spent a lot of time talking to people and thinking about the origins of consciousness and in
one sense asking the question What is the imagination? is a different way of asking the same
question What is the origin of consciousness?

And as some of you know to distraction, I believe psilocybin mushrooms played the role of kickstarting human evolution. I dont want to repeat all that, here, its been stated many times.

What I want to point out is that we can see in nature I think the declention from the full-blown
human imaginative capacity back into the organization of the animal mind. We can see these
stages through which this must have unfolded.

The interesting animal to look at for all of this, for the moment, are the top carnivores.

This is not PC in a vegan environment but thought just has to lead you wherever it leads you.

Its very clear to me that top-carnivores coordinate data in the environment very judiciously.

Cows have very little to say about grass, but hunting cats have a great deal to say about their
diet, because a top carnivore in order to be successful must in a certain sense think like its prey.

At the very point of the emergence of these coordinates strategies held in the mind theres a
paradox, the earliest consciousness is in which apes other consciousness.

In other words the top carnivore which is the most successful is the carnivore that can think
most like a weasel, or a groundhog, or a rabbit, because this ability to think like the prey gives
you a leg up on the prey.

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If youve ever seen, not domestic cats, but small jungle hunting cats or jaguars or something like
that, in the sudden presence of a chicken 100 feet away or something they fall into a fit of
imagining because they can almost taste it, they probably can taste it.

They fall into a strategic mode that is clearly an intense state of imagining but it is triggered by
the presence of the prey.

What is interesting about human beings is that we went one step beyond that, we for reasons
which dont need to concern us here, acquired the ability to strategically suppose not in the
presence of the stimulus but in fact but in the back of the cave around the fire with our bellies
full, telling tall tales.

Its interesting that the imagination is the land of What ifs

And what if is almost like a statement in a computer language, if is a Boulian operator if you
know what I mean, if brakes the flow of reality into two possibilities.

If A, or B, or more.

And this ability to contemplate worlds which are only in potentate is the basis of imagination.

I would submit to you since we all are sitting here in monkey bodies that its pretty clear that
the stimulus for all this if-thinking comes in 2 forms:

Food and sex.

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In other words we think about what we are going to eat, we construct our behavior along an
if tree. If I go to the water hole, if I take my sharpened arrows, if I lay and wait, if the
Gods favor me, I will bring down dinner.

The sexual game is played the same way, if I approach the desirable female with the correct
offerings, if her mood is correct, if my gifts are found pleasing then some wonderful thing
will follow from all of this.

Animals I think dont think like this, they may think, but they dont think like this.

It seems to be a unique human ability that probably has to do with, as I sayin our case there
were many different factors. For example we became the top carnivore on the planet, but who
would have placed their bet on a monkey being the top carnivore on the planet? When there
were saber-toothed cats walking around that weighed 1,100 pounds.

How were we able to insinuate ourselves into a more powerful position than these enormously
powerful animals that we once shared the earth with, and then in fact we hunted into
extinction.

It is our destiny and our fate to have removed the so-called mega-fauna from this planet. It is
now generally agreed by paleontologists that the disappearance of the mega-fauna and the
appearance of human-beings are linked in time.

Well, we did this by imitating those carnivores, and imitation is an act of the imagination.

We like in our story about ourselves to think of ourselves as bold hunters, but the evolutionary
truth of the matter is probably that as the first wave of primate radiation in to the grassland
occurred, as the diet was in transition, we were scavengers of carrion, we were not noble
hunters bringing down mighty animals.

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We followed along behind lions, lion kills. There is one school of evolutionary theory that
believes that this is why our olfactory senses are so diminished because, quite frankly, we had
our face in rotten meat for a million years, and if that doesnt dull your appetite for keen smells,
nothing will.

Least you despair, theres a counter theory that says no, no we lost our sense of smell when
we stood upright because we lifted our face off the ground

In either case, there seems to be the idea that when you get away from the olfactory action the
energy to support the maintenance of that sense collapses.

For whatever reason we made our way to the brink of the imagination, in other words I dont
think we require a daessex-maquina to take ourselves to the position of being top carnivore on
the planet.

We have a mean throwing arm, you may notice that no animal throws things the way we do.
Other primates hurl excrement on agonized explorers, but fortunately not with great accuracy,
and anyway that particular material is rarely deadly anyways.

But human beings, for example a big-league baseball pitcher can, at 125 miles an hour put a
baseball across a 17-inch plate over, and over again.

One theory of the origin of consciousness wants to say that throwing something is an
interesting activity because though it may appear to be the same activity as digging grubs, or
scratching your ass, or something like that, in fact it requires coordination toward a future
outcome that is highly mathematical.

In other words, you may not think in numbers but you must somehow sense the concept of
trajectory, of coordination, of target and intent, and when you get all this up and running,

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according to some people you have enough brain power left over to write the 5th symphony,
invent quantum physics, and paint The Last Supper if you like.

This seems preposterous, to me. I think how the imagination got such a hold on us was that we
accepted into our diet catalysts that we were unaware of

That pushed our mental state around, specifically psychedelics of various sorts.

A reasonable working definition of psychedelics, what they do, whether your for it or against it,
whether you think it triggers paranoia or attoraxia,

They are catalysts for the imagination, they catalysize thought. Thought becomes more
baroque, it reaches deeper into reality for data.

It sees forms of connectivity that previously escaped it.

It makes leaps of assumption, not always correct, but sometimes correct.

So what it does is by some degree transferring chaos into the mental world, it creates a much
richer dynamic.

So thought processes become more complicated, and in a sense language becomes the
behavior which expresses the imagination.

It can be expressed in a limited form, through dance, through gesture, and of course it can be
expressed very well through painting.

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If youve reached the stage where you have painting and are not chipping rock, or are not
drawing in blood in the sand, and stuff like that, if have a really rich technology behind your
artistic intent, but that rich technology would have never arisen without the intercession of
language.

And so, these two things which make us unique among natures productions on this planet,
imagination and language seem to be almost like the exterior and interior manifestation of the
same thing, the same phenomenon.

What it is, is its a facility with data, an ability to connect it in novel ways.

For ones own entertainment and amusement if nothing else. Story telling is obviously this kind
of activity, where modules: a ghost, a princess, a lost kingdom, a disturbed father-son
relationship, these modules are manipulated to entertain people.

And you know its a cliche that there are only 5 stories. I think Robert Grayes in the white
Goddess argued that theres only one story, and we keep telling variants of this story over and
over again.

What history then is, or what culture is, is the phenomenon that attends the rise and spread of
the imagination in the human species. But because the imagination works on this what if
model, it always tends toward idealism. In other words, it is not simply a networked process, it
is a networked process with a vector field.

In other words, its going somewhere

Its not just a random walk. Its headed somewhere. We idealize.

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If youre going to play the game what if, most people who are psychologically healthy dont
sit around entertaining dire possibilities. What if I get a terrible disease? What if Im run over by
a truck?

No, people say what if I make a lot of money? or what if I meet someone who gives me a lot
of money?

It begins to tend toward idealism, and we are obviously ruled by ideals and ideas.

We havent found a good one yet, but we certainly have sacrificed a lot of blood and time in the
process of discovering a whole bunch of bad ideas, and we havent lost our faith in ideas even
though human history is the record, not one idea has survived from the distant past in its
original form.

Some of the most persistent ideas are some of the most pernicious ideas.

The idea of mans inherent flaw, thats an old, old idea and how much suffering has existed
because of it.

Culture then is the record of the human imagination, well thats fine, that is of interest to
anthropologists and somebody else, who knows.

What gives the whole thing a lot of bite is that, more and more the imagination is where we
spend our time.

Theres a lot of talk these days about virtual reality, an immersive state of the art technology in
which you put on goggles, and put on special clothing and enter special environments and then
you are in artificial worlds created by computers and this is thought to be very woo-woo and far
out.
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But in fact, if youre paying attention, weve been living inside virtual realities for about 10,000
years.

I mean what is a city but a complete denial of nature?

Say no, no. Not trees, mud holes, waterfalls, and all of that. Straight lines, laid-out roads, class
heriarchies reflected in local geography meaning the rich people live here, surrounded by the
not-so-rich people, who are served by the poor people who are so glad theyre no the outcast
people.

Urbanization is essentially the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters
into its own private Idaho.

The growth of cities and the growth of the immediacy I guess you would say, of the urban
experience has been a constant of evolution since urbanization began.

Now, the only different that the new technologies offer is that we are going to do this with
light, not mortar, brick, steel, aluminum, and titanium, which are incredibly intractable
material. Which is amazing to me, I mean we started with the toughest stuff and of course it
cost enormous amounts of human blood and treasure to work with such intractable materials.
Its always been amazing to me that the largest buildings that human beings ever built are in a
sense the first buildings human being ever built.

Because the first pyramids of Egypt are enormous, even by modern scales, and yet they were
among the earliest buildings ever built.

In virtual reality, the difference between 100 story building, and a 10 story building, is one 0,
thats all, in a line of code. You specify 100 over 10 and you get a 100 story building instead of a
10 story building.

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What this should tell us, is that in the domain of light, the intractability of matter is overcome.

So we are on the bring of time, we have arrived, we are at the time where they human
imagination now need meet no barrier to its intent.

And so we are going to find out who we are.

We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will.

This is, I suppose, like a litmus test for paranoia. Is this going to be a nightmare of 24-hour a day
sado-masochistic pornography or is it going to bewill we literally build heaven on earth?

Knowing what I know about the human animal, I suspect it will be both and

Because were not going to get everybody marching in the same direction on this. And one
persons hell is another persons heaven.

The imagination, which to this point has been a human faculty, and the consolation of artists is
about to turn into real-estate. As real as any real-estate there is.

In a way I think that the shamans who, for the past 50,000 years have been essentially they
leapt over the material phase of imagination engineering and went to nano-technology 25-30
thousand years ago.

By nanotechnology I mean reliance on machines to achieve your goal, machines that are under
one nanometer in size, thats smaller than a billionth of an inch.

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We dont think of drug molecules as machines, but in fact they are machines.

They perform work in the synapse like machines. Shamanism didnt use matter to build its
realities, it was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human
mind in the presence of unusual neuro-chemicals. To produce unusual phenomenon and
unusual sensorial of experience.

Now whats happening is these two strains of development, lets call it pharmacological, nanotechnological low-tech natural shamanic path and the high-tech material-manipulating macrophysical technologies are encountering each other and meeting in the domain of the modern
computer.

This is fascinating, the world is becoming more and more defined by the imagination. Those of
us who are involved in creating this I think have the feeling that it has in it a kind of built in
dynamic toward finality.

In other words, this is not a process than can go on for hundreds of thousands, or even
hundreds of years. Because the human imagination is so endlessly self-transcending, whatever
its most advanced creation of the moment is, its in the process of obviating and denying it, and
seeking to go beyond it.

And you know I think it was Plato, Im not sure he said it first, it was If God does not exist,
human beings will create God

I think the truth is that theyre not even going to wait to find out, its easier to cut to the
technical solution and sort the whole thing out later. If the God we make and the God we find
are in conflict with each other theyll just have to duke it out.

Maybe theyll Marduke it out Im not sure

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Theres a wonderful phrase in Mistrings and Mysteries a wonderful book by Mercea Illiad where
hes talking about powered flight, of all things. The Wright brothers.

He said Whatever we make of this as an engineering feat, it speaks volumes about the humans
psyche desire to transcend itself infinitely

So in a sense the powered flight is a psychological breakthrough.

Because man flies.

Well then spacecraft, we break beyond the embrace of gravity and these technological
breakthrough are always presented terms of overcoming some set of boundary constraints
imposed by nature.

In virtual reality, all boundary constraints are overcome by nature just as in the imagination, but
the imagination metabolically sustained, in other words you eat well then you smoke a lot of
hash then you enter into an imaginative reality.

But as metabolism ebbs and flows, as your food digests, as the drug leaves your system, this
reality, whatever it is falls to pieces and it is washed away.

But the virtual realities created in code are more enduring, they are in fact as enduring as the
code-maker.

So were beginning to talk in terms of dreams which dont go away. Worlds of the imagination
which one can work on for months, and then lead ones critics through and collect their critics
and make their connections and dot the Is and cross the Ts according to the way ones critics
and friends think it should be done.
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What this means is somehow the imagination always, among the most private of domains, is
like everything else under the impact of new technologies, being redefined so that there is no
private or public distinction anymore.

We are on the bring of losing, in a sense, a part of our individuality. We are going to be able to
show each other what we mean, we are going to be able to build hallucinations, and walk
through them, and discuss them.

And edit them, and re-edit them.

To this point weve been doing psychology sort of like a blind man polishing a Cadillac in a total
darkness. If you keep excellent notes and dont lose your place you form a kind of a notion of
what a Cadillac must be.

But what were about to do is turn on the fluorescent lighting and just look at the thing.

I dont know what this will bring. I think it will redefine us, we are a great mystery to ourselves
and to each other, but not in principle. Only through limitations imposed by the physical body
and limitations of technology.

I think what our yearning for community, for collectivity, for telepathy, for universal human
understanding is in a sense going to be self-fulfilled by simply opening up the imagination. Not
as a private dimension, but as a public and shared dimension.

This will be, I think, incredibly enriching and surprising. We are going to find out what the
human critter really is, and what we are really capable of.

I am not afraid of this at all because I think, well basically I am a Platonist, and Plato identified
the good, and the true, and the beautiful as the same thing.
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But notice its very hard to know what is good, and its quite difficult, even more difficult to
know what is true. But it is intuitively understood what is beautiful, so beauty is the easy way
in.

Beauty leads to the good and the true.

And we are on the brink, I think, in taking a stride towards beauty that is the greatest stride in
that direction since the emergence of language in the human species.

The emergence of language in the human species was the first shoe dropping in this enterprise
and the building of virtual realities that can be shared and critiqued and understood is the
dropping of the second shoe.

A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination.

When this is an accessible possibility to most people I think a great deal of our inhumanity will
simply fall away from us, because it is not inherent. It is the product of misapprehension.

Misapprehension of each others goals, and intent, and aesthetic.

So, I think thats all I have to say about that.

I get spun into it and I cant stop, I dont know whether I am talking to you or to me.

This is some of what well talk about this weekend, this may be the longest uninterrupted spiel
you hear from me.

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As I said, these things are best driven when people inject their agenda into it. These are the
things Im thinking about, history feels very risky to a lot of people.

I think that it is risky, but I think that it is because the stakes are so high. We really have an
opportunity to transcend ourselves, and to fulfill the human enterprise on this planet. I am so
aware of the limitations of the people of the past. Their agonies, their concerns, I mean how
many children died, were born stillborn, how many women died at childbirth.

9 times in the last 5 million years the glaciers have ground south from the poles, pushing
everything in their path

Those people didnt drop the ball, the amount of human suffering and agony that has gone in to
carrying us to this moment of privilege and opportunity is incalculable.

And can only be redeemed if we bring this inherent human beauty into the world as spiritual
food for ourselves and for the human community.

Art by Pablo Amaringo

(The Q & A dialog that followed has been omitted from this transcription.)

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Terence McKenna live at The Fez in New York City, June 20, 1993

Weve worked ourselves into quite a little situation here. Weve got a rising youth culture, a
government out of control, an environment thats all ripped up, and weve got no place to go.
So, who you gonna call? My solution in a situation like that is to roll another one. Because its
been my supposition for a long, long time that these vegetables that were pushing around on
our plates are actually trying to talk to us. And theyre saying all kinds of things, among them
some things which are fairly counter-intuitive. It seems to me that history has failed, and
Western civilization has failed, and dominator primate politics has failed, object-fetish
consumerism has failed, the national security government has failed. And so then, where do go
from here? What kind of new world can we create? And what kind of guidelines are there that
we can follow?

And I, you know, every time you come to New York its obligatory to visit the museums, MOMA,
thisn'that, see whats going on in Soho. The conclusion that I come to looking at this is that as
we move beyond modernity, its more and more clear that the real impulse of the Twentieth
Century is towards the archaic, toward the primitive. Everything from Freudian-ism to body
piercing, from quantum physics to abstract expressionism, from Dada to house music, is saying
BACK AWAY from the linear, constipated world of print-head materialism that is what we
inherit from the Western/European past. That style of thinking about life and human relations
has essentially toxified the planet and allowed us to paint ourselves into a corner from which
there is no escape.

Or is there? You know, a deliberate derangement of the senses worked for Rimbaud; it might
work for us as well. What we have to do is go to the rainforests, the aborigines, and check
up/check in on what we have always dismissed, which is the world of natural magic and wisdom
obtained through intoxication. This is what weve lost, and this is why our creativity is
insufficient to overwhelm the cultural crisis which is confronting us. We have to stir it up. We
have to mix it up. Ideas dictated out of the agenda of washed-up capitalism and science and
religion are simply insufficient. Reason has failed. History has failed. And what we all have to
do, I think, is fall back on ourselves. We have to stop waiting for the revelation to come from
CNN or Time Magazine, and get lives! And what getting lives means is ignoring the idiotic laws
that would dictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain.You know, Im sure it
was alarming to Buddhists, but the Supreme Court decision last week that OK-ed animal
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sacrifice in a religious context was a door swinging open on the possible legalization of
psychedelics. The concept of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is enshrined in the
documents upon which this nation of ours is supposedly founded. If the pursuit of happiness
does not mean the right to experiment with your own state of mind, then those words arent
worth the hemp theyre written on.

But the point of view that Ive come to evolve out of 25 years of looking at this problem and
churning through culture and so forth and so on is not simply a call for individual selfresponsibility and a pulling away from these institutions. Thats pretty standard fare, I think.
Theres something else going on which is worth talking about. And that is the fact that the
human world is apparently under the influence of some kind of attractor, or force, that secular
people have ignored because the only words to talk about it were the vocabularies of beastly,
bankrupt religions. But nevertheless, this force, this unfolding agenda, this design which we
seem to embody, needs to be talked about. Because I really believe that history is ending. And
Ive taken a lot of flak for that, because no one can conceive of the breakdown of the system in
which were embedded to that degree. Its a kind of transcendental faith that history is
accelerating. The rate of the ingression of novelty into three-dimensional space is
asymptotically increasing. The kind of knitting together that is taking place in the world is laying
the stage for the emergence of new forms of organization, new properties of being. And I really
think that the drama of life on this planet is pointed toward the time that we are living in, that
were approaching a symmetry break on a scale of the kind of symmetry break that occurred
when life pulled its slimy bottom out of the sea and crawled onto the land. We are approaching
the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negative animal
impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.

History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we

approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more
and more dreamlike, more and more surreal does this sound familiar to you? Its the
neighborhood, right? Thats because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is
the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it
is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the
veil will be lifted, and you see, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have
been pointing towards. You see, the transcendental object at the end of time, is a cross
between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean the city of
Revelations hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is
happening, and that what the... Its as though we are boring through a mountain, towards
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someone else who is boring through that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain
point in time. We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the
human future lies. This has been understood by some people since at least the time of William
Blake.

We are like creatures caught in a interrupted embryo-genesis: halfway to angel-hood, the worst
among us somehow got control of the social agenda, and weve been hammering on each other
with monotheism, racism, sexism, materialism, for the past 10,000 years. We betrayed the
aboriginal intellect, the aboriginal intelligence, that existed for probably a hundred thousand
years with drama, with poetry, with altruism, with courage, with self-sacrifice. With all the
higher values that we think of as human, but without the devastatingly toxifying habits of
Western Man: Slavery, City-building, Kingship. And the three Ms, Monogamy, Monotony, and
Monotheism.

These things have to be pitched out!

Or, maybe not. Who knows?

Woman in audience: Whats wrong with monogamy?

TM: Whats wrong with monogamy. Whats wrong with monogamy is that it, uh, it forbids and
interferes with polygamy! Otherwise, I think it has a lot to recommend it! Yeah, I know,
monogamy is a tough one. Monogamy is a tough one, but I have more and more the feeling
that as you grow up, just as youre about to go across the great Golden Gate Bridge to
adulthood, theres one last sign, which says, Last exit before authentic adulthood. Become
addicted to someone as lame as yourself, and maybe the two of you can pass yourself off as
one Individual and stumble through life to completion."

Same woman: But whats wrong with it?

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TM: I dont think you should take me too seriously. m deeply into a divorce, but Im sure its
not distorting my judgment a single iota.

Gee, I thought what you were going to object to was monotheism, but apparently not! No, see,
heres the thing: Back when mushrooms and nomadism ruled the world, monogamy was traded
in for an orgiastic social style. And whats interesting about orgy, besides that is that in an
orgiastic situation. Men cannot trace lines of male paternity and consequently loyalty goes to
the children of the group. Its a tremendous force for group cohesion that the men collectively
transfer their loyalty to the children as a collective group and it creates a very tightly-knit social
unit. I think that, I mean its absurd, you cant advocate orgy in a world riddled with epidemics
of sexually-transmitted diseases and five and a half billion people. Nevertheless, the spirit of
the thing can be worked out between you and your friends in any of a number of ways, and all
of these arrangements which break the dominator mold are further permission for further
breaking of the mold.

Why have we grown so polite as they have grown so much more treacherous and weasel-like?
Why are we so content to allow the worst among us to set the social agenda? In the absence of
Marxism, there is now no critique being carried out of the capitalist enterprise, and itll peel
your skin off and peddle it back to you. It is doing that. Capitalism in principle is not, I think, a
bad thing, but it requires endlessly-exploitable natural resources. And since the exploration of
space has been taken off the agenda, there is no endlessly-exploitable frontier. So capitalism is
going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, youre gonna pay $50 for a latte,
because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize
that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create
billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and
destroyed. You dont have to take psilocybin to figure this stuff out. You know, it isnt all elf
machines from hyperspace!

Somebody asked me what did I think was going to happen in 2012? And I said there were
probably a number of scenarios. One of the most radical I can imagine is that everyone would
begin to behave appropriately! I mean, can imagine what that would be like? You can imagine
the first minute, because in the first minute, of course, everyone would turn off their console,
take off their clothes, and walk outside. What happens after the first minute, in terms of
appropriate activity, staggers the imagination! And where you would be three weeks into it is
preposterous to even conceive. Thats the soft version of the coming of the millennium. The
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hard version, Im not really even sure. In the Amazon... In my book, True Hallucinations, I wrote
about my brother and myself and our adventures down there. His expectation, once he told
me, People are leaving their workbenches and offices with tears of joy streaming down their
faces. Theyre staring at the sky. Fool that I was, I believed him. But its a reasonable hope.

Heres the deal. We have the science, the technology, the money, the infrastructure, to do
almost anything that we want to do. The problem is changing our minds. We have a hell of a
time changing our minds. And yet, we must. There is no choice about it. The reason Im a
psychedelic advocate is not because I think its easy, or because I think its a sure thing. I dont
think its easy or a sure thing. Its simply that its the only game in town. Nothing else can
change your mind on a dime like we are going to have to change our minds on a dime. If we had
500 years to sort this out, we could maybe have a fighting chance without radical
pharmacological intervention. As it is, if we dont awaken, we are going to let it slip through our
fingers.

And if hortatory preaching could do it, then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the
trick. It didnt and it wont. You have to somehow give people an experience. An experience
that is not somebody else's experience, their experience, that radically recrystallizes their
understanding of the world. And these shamanic plants that have been quietly growing and
maintaining themselves for millennia, are in fact. And for what reason? its beyond me for
some reason, these are pipelines into a kind of planetary mind. The big bugaboo of Western
civilization is that we deny the existence of spirit. Its been a thousand-year project to eliminate
the spirit from all explanations of how reality works, or the personality works, or anything
works. The absence of spirit permits the murder of the planet. But the cost of the denial of
spirit is life empty of meaning, which doesnt mean we have to return to the world of beadyeyed priest-craft and its slimy minions. But it does mean that we have to recover an authentic
experience of the transcendental. And apparently what this means, then, is fusion with Nature,
and the psychedelics do this. They dissolve boundaries. They open the way to the Gaian mind.

Now you can believe this is bullshit, but you cannot believe its bullshit, unless you have made
the experiment yourself and found it to be wanting. This isnt a philosophy course. Here were
talking about something real. And if the critics are not willing to invest time in it, then the critics
have already declared their terror and fear of the solution. You know, it reminds me a little of
something that Tim Leary. Well, I always thought Tim Leary said this, but when I asked him, he
completely disowned this brilliant remark, which let me know he was an enlightened man cause
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I never would have disowned it. So, somebody said, not Tim Leary, LSD is a psychedelic drug
which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

Now a lot of drugs are like that, and we have a lot of psychotic people running around who
have been driven mad by drugs they never took. But what they did take was your civil rights,
your freedom to guide your own life, and your right to make your own decisions. This kind of
thing is intolerable. If there is an iota of possibility that these substances enhance
consciousness, and remember, they used to be called consciousness expanding drugs, if
theres an iota of possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to
the metal in this matter. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward
extinction, that is causing us to loot our childrens future, that is causing us to accept the
elimination of thousands of species per month without pouring into the streets to loot and
smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to go forward. I think the era
of politeness has gone on just about long enough. And theres going to have to come a moment
where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we have seen
our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it,
and take it, and take it.

You know, being counter-cultural is more than a fashion statement. I recall an obscure Chinese
philosopher named Mao Tse Tung, who once said, The Revolution is not a dinner party! Of
course, he went on to say its an armed struggle, prosecuted by the forces of the people. I dont
think were ready to call for armed struggle, but I think it is time to call for "Hands off the
American mind! Give us back our mind! The American mind is one of the most creative minds
in the world, and it is being confined, compromised, and sold down the river by people who
cant think of anything better to do with the world than fabricate it into stupid products and sell
it at twice its natural worth.

Terence Lecturing in New York City

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Q&A

Well, I could go on and on--and do, you may have noticed--but I think it's much more fruitful
when these things are interactive and driven by questions. And I'm not fragile; you don't have
to hold back. I'm from Berkeley--we throw chairs when we're displeased. So, feel free to have at
it. But is there anybody who'd like to comment or participate in this discussion?

Man in audience: Thank you, Mr. McKenna. The whole bit about quoting Mao was kind of
interesting if you think of the arms in terms of modems--I mean, the fact that we now live in a
point in time when it's possible to completely transfer power without shedding a drop of blood
if you have the right passwords and access codes. There is a unique tilt on Mao's "armed
struggle" coming up real soon, if you think in terms of information war rather than the kind of
bloodshed that's been marking history up until now.

Vis a vis your whole thing with the organic psychedelics versus LSD, for instance--which is
enjoying a great revival right now, presently, in this city--I don't know about elsewhere--vis a vis
the LSD thing--there's a point in the temporal flow with LSD where it drops, slows down, and
then there's the sensation of temporal cessation wherein one generally tends to perceive a
presence behind the world--which sounds a lot like the robot elves of yours. I'm just interested
in your take, in the distinction that you draw between the organic psychedelics and--for
example--LSD.

TM: Well LSD is a kind of--has a foot in both worlds. You know, you start, when you make LSD,
with ergonomine, which you get from ergot, which is grown on plantations in Pakistan. But then
you elaborate the molecule and make it synthetic. I certainly think LSD--we wouldn't be here,
and I wouldn't be here, if it weren't for LSD. The wonderful thing about LSD is that it's possible
to manufacture so much in the underground. I mean, there is a problem with that in that it
tends to promote criminal syndicalism. [same man in audience: "Not if you give it away!"] Good
point! But, if you have a trust fund and your roommate is a first-year biochemist, in a long
weekend you can produce ten million hits. This mean you're not, of course, involved in helping
out the folks in your building, you have some more ambitious agenda. But this is a unique
situation with LSD, because you need so little of it. You see, if you set out to create ten
thousand doses or ten million doses of psilocybin, the facilities of Upjohn corporation would be
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insufficient. You would need stainless-steel vats of thousand-gallon capacity and incredible
quality-control equipment. So LSD came along at the perfect moment in the life of the
collectivity to focus us on the psychedelic experience. But I don't think LSD is what I would call a
"full-spectrum" psychedelic, because what I was always obsessed with was visions. And
psilocybin and the tryptamines are much more reliable visionary activators. People say, "Why
are you so into this vision thing? You're just some kind of vision fascist." No, no--I mean, or:
Maybe, but! Maybe but--here's the thing--the reason the visions were so impressive to me is
because that was, to me, the proof that it wasn't me. You know, when you take LSD, you have
strange thoughts, many thoughts, illuminating thoughts...

[unintelligible question from audience]

You mean, what do I think of that in terms of DMT? [more from audience member] Well, I
never encountered elves on LSD, but I did hear a story recently. And since all we have are
anecdotes, I'll pass it on, for whatever it's worth.

A friend of mine told me a story. He and a friend of his miscalculated a dose and took LSD, and
then they went to a dance. And they realized they were too loaded to be there. So they just
backed up against the wall and slid down the wall and sat there. And as they sat, shoulder to
shoulder, mouths hanging, watching these people dance, slowly, slowly, the dance came to a
complete halt. Everything was frozen. And at that moment, the door swung open, and an elf
came into the room and waltzed through all these people, looked around, actually picked up a
skirt or two and looked under it, and then exited. And then the movie started up again.

Well now, I'm not a theosophist or an Alice Bailey-ist or any of that malarkey. But on the other
hand, this seems to suggest this old theosophical idea of vibratory levels of existence--you
know, that if you're moving at a zillion hertz you do not see things moving at very much higher
or lower frequencies. Now I never was so aware of the time-stopping thing on DMT, but it is
definitely true that when you smoke DMT, if you do sufficiently, you burst in to a place that is
inhabited by these--what I call--self-transforming machine elves, these jeweled, self-dribbling
basketballs that are squealing and squeaking in this alien language that condenses like metallic
rain and falls out of the air of the room and is able to morph itself into Faberge-like objects that
are scintillating and faceted and reflective of other possibilities and objects...
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Woman in audience: Hi, Terence, I wanted to know what products you have available.

TM: Hey. Listen. The point guy can't make the sale! But, one of the things that I think is best
about the thing I do, or one of the things that I like best about what I do is provide an excuse for
the psychedelic community to assemble. Because, believe it or not, these days we look like
everybody else out there. How the hell that happened, I don't know! So it's very important for
you to pay attention to who's here, because without a doubt, somebody here has what you
need! Whatever you need--you know, what do you need? A loan? A girlfriend? Well, we all
need different things--besides the fact that we all need DMT.

[question from audience]

Where do we go from DMT? Well, where do we go from there? I think the idea is to use
psychedelics to remove anxiety without undercutting political action. In other words, we can do
political work, ulcerated and clenched with terror and fear and always looking over our
shoulders; or we can do that same work with a sense of play and lightheartedness. It's the same
work, so why not have a good time while we do it? It's the good time we have that drives them
so crazy and pisses them so off!

[question from audience]

What's new and fun that you haven't experienced? Oh, well here's something new and fun.
There's a plant, called Salvia divinorum, which is absolutely legal. It's not only legal, the active
principle is unknown to science--therefore it can't be made illegal! [sings:] S-A-L-V-I-A D-I-V-I-NO-R-U-M Salvia divinorum--remember you heard it here first! Okay, so here's the deal with this.
This is a plant that was carried on the books for years as a hallucinogen, but nobody took it
seriously because when the botanists and the chemists would test for alkaloids, it's alkaloid
negative. So they said, "Well then, to Hell with it, it just can't be." But recently, an
anthropologist who will remain nameless spent some time with the Indians where this stuff is
happening, and they showed him how to do it. And he has been telling everyone how to do it.
And, you know, true to the spirit of that, here's how you do it.

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First of all, this is a plant that looks like a coleus, which is a common houseplant. You could
grow this stuff in your window box or your apartment; it would pose no problem whatsoever.
It's also--cuttings are available from plant dealers. And what you do is you take about fifteen
leaves, which are about like... that, and you pull out the mid-rib, so you just have the soft, leafy
material. And you roll it up into a quid, and you put it in your cheek, and you lie down in
darkness where you can see one of those illuminated digital clocks, you know? Lay there for
fifteen minutes by the clock, slowly squeezing the stuff down. And it's very bitter. I mean you
feel like the whole front of your mouth wraps around this stuff, but it's worth it. It's worth it.
And after about fifteen minutes, if you will just spit this into a receptacle, Kleenex, whatever,
uh, hygienic product is your choice then, about two minutes later, it will begin to stream. In
other words, these afterimage-colored lights begin to form and come past you. And about two
minutes after that, these cobalt-blue, magenta hallucinations begin to unfold. And what it
reminded me of was "Nude Descending a Staircase" but as if Duchamp had done it in ultraviolet
and blue and cobalt, and just this--[question from audience] Where did I learn about this plant?
Well I've known about it for years, but like everybody else I just didn't take it seriously.
[question] No no, it's in the Yuahacan (?) Mountains, it's in the Sierra Mazateca of central
Mexico. And after about 45 minutes, it all gently goes away. And believe me, I'm a skeptic, I'm
hard to move off the dime, I'm not an airhead. And it worked, it worked. And--very interesting-I called the guy who gave it to me the next morning and I said, "It looks to me like it has the
potential to be a craze!" And he said, "The very word that occurred to me--craze! CRAZE!" So,
like I said, you heard it here first.

Man in audience: I have a question. As a physician who's interested in medical anthropology,

what about the effect of this in terms of human development in utero?

TM: You mean the effect on the developing fetus? ["Yes"] Of Salvia divinorum? ["No.
Psilocybin."] Oh, psilocybin. Well, here's my approach to this, and this is why I advocate the use
of plants with a history of shamanic usage. Because these things are illegal, human research is
essentially outlawed. As users we suffer under the prohibition, but imagine that science, one of
the most powerful forces in our society, has been told, "GET LOST. Forget about psychedelic
chemistry and forget about human studies." This is why I don't advocate MDMA use. In answer
to your question, the human data on psilocybin is provided by the fact that it has a history of at
least a millennium of human usage. If a plant has been accepted into a society as that one has,
as a regularly-applied shamanic tool, then I think you can be relatively certain that blindness,
miscarriage, tumors, and so forth, are not a problem. Probably a lot of human beings have

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given their lives and their health for that data to be available to us in that way. Do you want to
follow up? ["No."] No? ["Thank you."] Did I satisfy you? Great! Great.

Woman in audience: As a poet and an art historian who has lived in a lot of cultures where I've
worked with indigenous peoples--amongst the Yamamoto I had the blowgun done up my nose,
in Peru I tried San Pedro, in Szechuan province in China with the Dalai (?) among Szechuan
banai(?) I tried many of the old herbs--one of the things I'd like to mention, which I think a lot of
Americans and Europeans don't understand, is the ritual use of these hallucinogenics within the
culture. I think it's very important. I'm heading off now to work--to make a film with the
indigenous people in Taiwan, Formosa. It's a shamanic culture. I think the problem is that when
these things are removed from the mythological stance within a community--the biggest
problem in this country--which strikes me as a writer also--is this lack of mythology that exists
anymore. It's one thing for hallucinogenics, but it's another thing for also creating a use--as you
mentioned before, which I liked very much--of the imagination, a sense that a human being has
the right to expand their own horizons, within whatever powers they wish and with whatever
means. And I'd like to see a greater awareness that these things can expand an already fertile
ground which first has to be created.

TM: That's right! And what might be, well...

Woman: Thank you! And, what I'd like to ask, when I come back, is--I used to be on WBAI--and
when I come back, I'd like to do something on these people that very few people have worked
with. In fact, I have a military permit to go out, and it's a culture that unlike the Ainu and the
Reipus--I'm doing another exhibition on now, soon, at the museum--but, the group in Formosa,
AKA Taiwan, was first occupied by the Japanese but have a history for thousands of years. And I
have to have a military permit to now get out--granted, I have lived in war-zones before, you
know, with the Hmong in Laos, etc. etc. etc., so as you might say, I get very bored living here!
But-- [TM: "Why? They're all here." Well that's what I think, also, but, the key is, in a sense,
these are ways, too. So I was going to ask you, when I come back, if you'd like to do something,
maybe a radio show on some shamanic [unintelligible].

TM: Sure, absolutely. Let me follow up on this. The issue of ritual and style of drug taking: I
think that it's--well, here's how I do psilocybin. I do it on an empty stomach in silent darkness.
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And I think that this is the way to do it, because I'm interested, essentially, in the pure
phenomenology of it. I don't want to know what it does to Bach, or Coil. I want to know what it
does to nothing. I don't want to see how it can affect Rembrandt or a natural scene. I just want
it where I can study the ding an sich of the thing, you know? And I have nothing against a good
time, and hanging out, but it is no substitute for serious psychedelic taking. And, you know,
people forget, or people don't realize, if you take a drug that you don't like, then an excellent
strategy for getting rid of it is to exercise like a crazy person, like go out and chop a bunch of
wood or something. Well, so then what I see is people taking low doses and dancing their asses
off, in very noisy environments dense with social signals. This is like a strategy for avoiding the
psychedelic breakthrough. How could it ever find you in all of that?

So I smoke pot and confine myself to vodka gimlets most of the time in public, and then really
pile it on in private, really pile it on. These things can't hurt you, not at any reasonable dose. I
mean, for instance, let's take psilocybin. The effective dose is 15 milligrams; the LD50 is
something like 225 milligrams per kilogram. Your stomach won't even hold that many
mushrooms. So death is not a possibility. DMT--same thing. I mean, DMT is a neurotransmitter.
People sometimes say, "Is it dangerous?" The answer is, "Only if you fear death by
astonishment!"

Woman: So I can call you when I get back and see what I bring back?

TM: Do it! Anybody else?

Man in audience [Dimitri from "Dee-Lite"]: Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the thing about
taking psychedelics in noisy environments. I just happen to disagree with what you said,
because, first of all I think collective tripping is really important, and it creates a communal vibe
that's really terrific and has every advantage to advancing your mind within it. Also you can-there's something to be said about getting lost in the groove. It can join the music and take you
to a new--and open your mind with the music, because music is the tool to open your mind.
And dancing--dancing is spiritual, dancing makes your... Excuse me, I'm getting very nervous.

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TM: Well, here's the thing. These things are not mutually exclusive, it's not like you have to
choose. My problem is, I know people are dancing and they're having these collective
experiences. My fear is that they're not having the other experiences. And you have to have
both. [man: "Absolutely."] That's all.

And as far as the dance thing, let me say, I mean, I think that what's happening with house
music and the ambient music thing is the most healthy sign out of the culture in 25 years--at
last, you know. Because the truth is, rock and roll became a tool of the very people it was
supposed to discomfort. You know? [comment from crowd] Pardon me? Well, but what's
wrong with ambient and house music? We don't need to "free the harpsichord," you know. It's
a done deal, I think. And there is so much talent waiting in the wings. I mean, I'm on my way
tomorrow to London, on to Frankfurt--these are enormous cauldrons of creativity that are
exporting this music all over the world. And the message is absolutely the message that needs
to be put out. It's a message of community, of sensuality, and of intelligence. I mean: love, sex,
intelligence--that's what the shamen are talking about.

Dimitri: Well, the music comes from here, too. This is one of major centers of world dance
music.

TM: Oh, you don't have to have an inferiority complex in New York!

New man in audience: Terence, it was wonderful to meet you tonight. Your editor Dan Levy is a
good friend of mine. I'm a musician, and I just wanted to say, yeah, music is terribly important
to everybody's life. But I want to thank you, and one of the things I respect most about you is
your research, as far as text goes, because you've really traveled the world and you've dug up a
lot of things that--I want to thank your translators, too, because that's one of the most unsung
arts in the world. When you dig up something, it's not everybody that can just know what it
means. Translators--let's put in a plug for them. [TM: "The unsung heroes!"] It's true! ["Yes, it's
true."] But I just wanted to take one second and ask you--I was raised in a quote-unquote
"Christian" environment, and one of the things I learned about Christianity as I grew up and
came through it was that--we're all here to learn something, and I'm not telling anybody in this
room anything--but I was curious about the Book of Urantia, if you had heard of it and you
might be able to comment on it.
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TM: Well, here's the thing. My tendency is to think that if you can channel without drugs, you're
probably mentally ill. However, the Urantia book is the most extravagant and baroque and
earliest of these things; they definitely got in ahead of the trend. So, to my mind, these things
are like synthetic scripture, or efforts to resacralize language by casting it in a scriptural mode.
My method--a lot of people are irritated with me, because if you really spend time with me, I'm
actually a rationalist, and a kind of reductionist; I'm not "woo-woo". Because I really think that
the truth can stand on its own. And so I tend to be very conservative in my choice of facts. For
instance, if we're dating the pyramid, I'd probably call the American Archaeology Society before
I would call the priests of the Coven of Atlantis. But I know there's disagreement on these
things. I think, you know--with the Urantia book and the Seth material, and then all little
Sethettes that came along afterwards--I think basically it's like anything else: you have to have
your crap detector turned up on HIGH, and then just move forward with it, and what works for
you, works for you. And all of these things should be taken as provisional. You know, when you
rise as I have, from a cow-town in Colorado to giving speeches at very exclusive and chic New
York nightclubs, you realize--because you tend to meet quote-unquote "celebrities" along the
way--you realize that that's all a racket. And you further realize it must have always been a
racket. So, Lorenzo de' Medici, Genghis Khan, Hitler--LAME! Idiotic, ordinary, dreary, boring to
have dinner with! So, part of this psychedelic thing, I think, is really about self-empowerment.
You know, Robert Anton Wilson has this wonderful rap, he says: "Define the world as a
conspiracy run by you and your friends." If you don't have that as your model, then you
probably have a loser's model, and who wants to be a loser? So, just assume, you know, that
you and your friends are gaining power, moving into positions of influence, and shortly about to
take control! What does this have to do with the Urantia book? I don't know, but here's where
we ended up, folks!

Woman in audience: I think a lot of people would agree that evolution is at a pretty
questionable point right now. In fact, I personally believe that since the car has been introduced
that we've been devolving. I guess my question to you is, through your hallucinogenic
experiences, what do you think the lesson is to human society, that we're supposed to learn, to
sort of transcend the point we're at now?

TM: You mean generally, what's the lesson?

Woman: Generally, yeah. What are we supposed to do to sort of make this breach, cause I think
we're at a pretty precarious point.
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TM: Well, it's a complicated question, and I don't want to unveil my whole cosmology this late
in the game. But-- See-- But, why not have a stab at it? Here's the problem, as I see it. For a very
long time, as we evolved out of the animal nature, perhaps a hundred thousand years,
psilocybin was part of our diet and our rituals and our religion. And though those individuals
taking the psilocybin didn't know it, it was having a very profound effect upon them. What it
was doing was it was suppressing a primate behavior that is so basic to primates that it goes
clear back to squirrel monkeys. And what that behavior is is a tendency to form what are called
male-dominance hierarchies. And we all know what this is, because it bedevils our own political
situation, and our own effort to create a reasonable society. But there was a great long period
in the human past when this tendency was pharmacologically suppressed, in the same way that
you would give Prozac to somebody to suppress a tendency to manic-depression. In other
words, what the shamans of the High Paleolithic figured out was how to medicate people so
that they would live together in harmony, decency, and dignity.

The problem is, that that strategy depended upon the simultaneity of psilocybin intoxication
and the orgiastic sexual style that I talked about earlier. And when the mushrooms ceased to be
available, men and women were simultaneously becoming able to coordinate cause and effect,
to the point that women were realizing that when they returned in their yearly wanderings to
old camps, there would be food growing in the discard piles. And at the same time, men were
realizing that the consequences of the sex act was the birth of a child. In other words, there
came a certain point in human intellectual maturity when a distant cause and its effect were
finally connected, and at that moment, agriculture was born. And agriculture was born as a
response to the drying of the African continent. And we--literally--we fell into history.

You've heard me talk about Genesis as the story of history's first drug bust. It was history's first
drug bust. I mean, that story is the story of the suppression of an earlier, feminine-driven
mushroom religion. And once we stopped taking psilocybin, that old, old primate behavior
pattern--male dominance--reasserted itself. But now, not in an animal species, but in a species
with language, technology, agriculture, strategic planning, memory, recall, so forth and so on.
And we used the re-emergence of that tendency to establish cities, kingship, slavery, property-the whole grab bag of pathologies that characterize Western civilization were born around the
re-emergence of male dominance.

And now we're in a similar situation. And you know, no less conservative and sober a character
than Arthur Kessler wrote a book called The Ghost in the Machine twenty years ago, and he
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reached the same conclusion. He said, "We are best at bashing each other's brains out. And
since that's no longer appropriate--if it ever was--we need a drug to make us able to live
together in ways that we must live together if we're going to have cities of 10 million people
and a global civilization." I think his analysis was on the right track, but shallow. I think we have
that drug, and the anxiety and the restlessness and the dissatisfaction that has attended the
historical experience is because we have this itch that we can't scratch.

This is the key to our weird relationship to substances. I mean, think about it. Of course,
elephants will push down fences to get to rotting papaya and butterflies will fall over beside
bowls of sugar. But we addict to dozens of substances. We not only addict to substances, we
addict to behaviors. You know, guy goes to the front door in the morning and if the paper isn't
rolled at his feet, he turns into a beast! We also addict to each other. You know? Our most
sublime human relationships--when they fall into difficulty, we experience the condition of a
broken heart., which looks--in terms of its presentation of symptoms--very much like junk
withdrawal. Probably because it is, because there has been some kind of pheromonal lock-on
that has gone on because you've been hanging out with this person so much. And now that the
pheromonal thing is broken and interrupted, you can barely function, you know? And it takes
weeks, if not months, to reclaim your identity. We have an itch that we can't scratch, until we
make our way back to the primary chemical mediator of our humanness. And that was--I'm
convinced--psilocybin. And that this is the missing link; this would allow us to understand the
sudden doubling of the human brain in less than a million and a half years--one of the great
mysteries of evolutionary theory--so forth and so on. And the fact that the society is so anxious
on this subject is an indication that this is the real taboo. We have found it. This is IT. And
therefore, it has to be brought out of the closet. And it wouldn't hurt for us to come out of the
closet. I mean, when we are secretive, when we deny it, we are carrying out the Man's work for
him. They don't have to arrest us if we're willing to be our own guards and police. It's absurd.
This is part of your birthright. It is part of our lives. We pay taxes; we're legitimate. And it
should not be swept under the rug. Are we going to be the last minority on this planet to claim
its civil rights? Why? When what we represent is an impulse back toward the aboriginal totality
that gives life meaning.

Man in audience: You've proclaimed that there is this hyper-dimensional reality which is
accessible through these psychedelics, that is--we are immersed in it. And you're somewhat
surprised that there is very little being done about this. It's something that is so--as you say-unbelievable and unfathomable and there's so little research being done. The majority of
people don't even care or know about this. Now, we gathered in this room, we care very much
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and we might have some connection to this and access to this reality. But what about the-maybe it's only certain people have a predilection or interest in it, such as like people who want
to go rock climbing or surfing, and that's what they go to all extents to. But most people, if they
were exposed to what you say--the five grams in silent darkness--would come back and not
want anything to do with that experience, not have any understanding, any connection, and
just want to hold on to the very simple reality which our consensus has constructed for most
people to exist in. And that it really is just this fringe thing, and that's why there isn't much
more interest in this--then how can the psychedelic actually affect the masses that don't really
have much connection to that?

TM: Well, revolutions are made with between five and ten percent of a population. No
revolution in history has had more than that level of support. I'm not saying everybody should
take psilocybin. I mean, God knows, there are plenty of people among us who don't need their
boundaries dissolved, and if they are going to dissolve their boundaries, please don't do it when
I'm around. But those people are people who have been damaged in any of the dozens and
hundreds of ways that this society has figured out to damage people. But I do think that it
should be an option, and it should be an option that people are educated about. One thing that
we've done is that we've completely poisoned the well of language when it comes to the
subject of substances. Because the word "drug" reaches from heroin to aspirin through
psilocybin to propaganda. I mean, it's a word so widely-used that it's meaningless. And we are
living in an atmosphere of complete hypocrisy; the most dangerous drugs ever discovered by
human beings are being freely dispensed all over the place. I mean, tobacco, sugar, alcohol-these are the great addictive and destroying drugs, and they are the least interfered-with and
the most commercialized. And the psychedelics--no claim of addiction was ever made, even by
their critics. The issue with psychedelics is that they call into question the illusions of the
masters. And I think it doesn't matter who the masters are. It doesn't matter whether we're
talking about a fascist dictatorship, a high-tech industrial democracy, or a Third World banana
republic--if you start taking psychedelics, you will start questioning the reality around you, and
question-asking is not what the control freaks are interested in. They want you to work at your
idiotic job, buy the crap they're peddling you over the media, and keep your opinions to
yourself, please. Or, there is spectrum of opinion offered, and it's all represented on the
McLaughlin Group and if you go beyond that, then you're some kind of mad person. This is all
nonsense--we are allowing the least among us to control the agenda. That would be bad
enough under any circumstances, but we're in an emergency. This is a crisis. We should be
going through lifeboat drills at this point, and instead, the band plays on, and the game
continues to be played. The narcotics game, the government role in it, apparent
suppression/tacit support, millions and billions of dollars in hot money being used to finance
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the murder of editors of left-wing newspapers and the financing of private armies in various
rat-hole countries that are the client states of the remnants of the empire we created to
oppose the Soviet Union. It's all CRAP. And as soon as we call a halt to it, we'll all be better off, I
think.

Man in audience: I do recognize a lot of Alfred Korzybski in what you are saying, and I wonder,
is Korzybski's time-binding effect--is the drug going to be the trigger for the time-binding effect?

TM: It could very well be. Korzybski was very influenced by Whitehead, and I was very
influenced by Whitehead. And Whitehead has this idea that he calls concrescence. And he says,
"The world is growing toward concrescence." And that's what I call "the transcendental object
at the end of time." I really think that we are--we are not going to disappoint ourselves. History
is a psychedelic experience, and we have come through, now, the darker bardos, and are about
to--potentially--enter the payoff zone, the transcendental zone, the zone where it all makes
sense. You know, a huge number of people have suffered unimaginably that we could be here
this evening. Nine times in the last million years, ice, miles deep, has moved south from the
poles, pushing everything in front of it. There have been upheavals, epidemics, droughts-everything--and yet we arrive, on time and under budget, here this evening. That's the kind of
tradition we have to continue, a tradition of human nobility and human striving. And enough of
the whining from those who have piled up uncounted millions of dollars, and still are willing to
suppress us in order to obtain more. It's obscene. It's obscene.

Man in audience: Yeah. Sorry to bother you one more time, but you just quoted Kessler. And
Mike Murphy in his new book, The Future of the Body, he quotes Kessler, talking about--Kessler
at one point took a very fatalistic approach to humanity, with the idea that--the big problem, in
his view, was that we didn't have a vertical equivalent of the corpus callosum that allows the
two horizontal hemispheres to speak to each other. And he says that it may be a fatal flaw in
our species--that there's nothing that will link the vertical components of the serpent brain out
to the neocortex. And I was wondering if your take on this, of these vegetable drugs, might be
that they might be inducing--if there would be anything towards the inducement of--possible
growth in that area?

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TM: Yeah, I think that's a very interesting idea. You may know a book by Julian Jaynes, called
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It may well be that there
has to be some kind of neural correction on us. For one thing, we cannot tolerate the luxury of
an unconscious mind. That belongs to a more primitive stage of human development. When
you have hydrogen bombs and can deliver synthetic plagues by missile to the other side of the
planet, then you cannot be driven by the agendas of animals and half-conscious human beings.
I mean, it's like placing Jeffrey Dahmer at the head of the Pentagon, or something. And that's
the--Hey, we probably got it. He's there.

But this is what I meant when I said we can do anything. What we have inherited from the past-as misguided as it may be--may have been--are tools of immense power. And tools are neutral
things, you know? It's the monkey wielding the tool that you have to keep your eye on. And so,
we are now challenged to apply the tools that have been created. Are we to, you know, clean
up the Earth; de-emphasize the material side of our technology; recognize the right of every
human being to a healthy, secure existence; de-emphasize the marketing of violence as a patina
on product fetishism; de-emphasize the objectification of women as another patina on object
fetishism; stop the peddling of loser scenarios to everyone; stop tying up our accumulated
wealth in a useless standing crop of ever-more-obsolete arsenals and delivery systems?

I mean, it's okay to live like there's no tomorrow if you're at some primitive stage of culture
with endless frontiers of exploitable resources in all directions. That's not where we're at. We
have burned through all that, and yet still we party on. And the signs are on the wall. We have
invented a sin that no other culture ever even conceived of: it's the sin of looting the future. No
other culture was ever so narcissistic and self-indulgent that it cared nothing for the future of
its children. Children have always been the value focus for a civilization. But when you pile up
four trillion dollars in debt, when you cut down the rainforests and blow off the atmosphere, it
means you are in the grip of such an orgy of narcissistic excess that the best thing for it would
be for somebody to just walk over and put a bullet through your head as a favor to everybody
else. We don't need that kind of a fate. We need to be as noble as the people who preceded us,
and a hell of a lot smarter, because nobility by itself is not sufficient. We're going to have to
play a very cagey game now. And it's okay with me; I anticipate it. I mean, I think primates love
a hell of a good fight, and we've got one on our hands. I mean, we have unleashed processes
that, if not skillfully controlled, are extraordinarily terminal--even in the short term. And again, I
see psychedelics as the only way to react fast enough to have an impact on the runaway
momentum of historical error.

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Man in audience: I wonder if you could say something about the relationship between
psychedelics and our inherent structure and chemistry. I mean, is it unlocking something that's
latent in us that we should be and should have been aware of all along?

TM: Sure. I'm very interested in this. Here's the great paradox in this domain, as far as I'm
concerned. DMT, without contest, is the most powerful psychedelic that I know of--and I hope
there's nothing stronger, cause if there is, I don't wanna know about it! It's very brief and fast
acting, and it clears your system very quickly. It occurs as a neurotransmitter in ordinary human
metabolism. Now isn't that interesting? That the most powerful and radical and alien of all
these hallucinogens is the one most like--in fact, exactly like--what's in your own body. This is
also a Catch 22 for the Establishment cause it means we're all holding, all the time! They can
come and get you, folks! It's worse than a U. A.--you haven't got a prayer! And there's
something very interesting--well, there are a number of things--but one thing very interesting
about DMT is that, if you've had it, it's possible to have a dream, years later, in which
something's going on, and going on, and then someone whips out a little glass pipe, and puts it
in your mouth, and you have the complete experience. Not a pale memory or a vivid memory-the real thing happens in the dream. Well this is big news, because what it's saying is that
human metabolism is very, very close to being able to produce this at any time, and sometimes
it can produce it. Now, it's known that DMT is at its highest concentration in cerebra-spinal fluid
between 3 and 4 AM in most people. And that's the time of day when the deep REM sleep
occurs, accompanied by deep dreaming. So, it looks to me like the chemistry of dream and the
chemistry of the psychedelic experience are the same. In fact, you know, if the government is
really serious in eliminating psychedelics, then throw down the 10 million dollars or 20 million
dollars that it would take to develop a drug that allows people to remember their dreams.
Because I think every night, we return to the psychedelic source, that the dreams you
remember are the surface of the dream, and that every single night, we sink back down in to
the primordial field of mind out of which we reconstruct ourselves. Now, I'm telling you, if DMT
were legal, in six months, a skilled laboratory team trained in the study of biofeedback
techniques, could train a human being to trigger that on the natch. Well then, this is something
that we would teach our children in the seventh grade, and from then on, that would solve the
entire issue of the hallucinogenic substances, their availability, their legality, and so forth.
Legalize the dream! Reclaim the human mind! Let's make dreams legal, let's make plants legal,
let's legalize the imagination, empower hope, and begin to build the kind of world that we
would feel alright about handing our children on to. Because if we don't do that, we're going to
come off as the lamest generation in human history, and we aren't. The creativity, the
connectedness, the potential for good is enormous. And most people in this planet are
embedded in pre-potent systems of relationship, meaning obligation and inherited religious
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and cultural ideas. So you may think that you don't count, but actually we all probably are part
of a sub-population of about 5% of the global population--people who have disposable income,
can read, follow global advances, get good data, and feel a political and moral obligation to do
something about it. We tend to feel as powerless as a Guatemalan peasant or something like
that, but in fact, that's a myth They want you to accept. The real responsibility for saving the
world rests on the literate middle- and upper-middle-class masses of the high-tech industrial
democracies. That's US. It's our responsibility to make a change and to act for all those silent,
downtrodden people who have been so victimized by the system that they couldn't turn out at
a New York nightclub and hear an esthete rail against the evils of the Establishment. And that's
probably enough railing against the evils of the Establishment. Thank you very much, thank you.

Transcribed from the original WFMU broadcast.

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Imagination In The Light Of Nature by Terence McKenna

I want to mention this is a benefit for Botanical Dimensions and KPFK. Botanical Dimensions is
the real world kind of real politic response to all the issues that Kat and I hammered out over
the last 11 years. And what it boils down to is a plant rescue project built around a 20-acre
botanical garden in Hawaii. What we're doing there is trying to bring in plants that are
threatened in the warm tropics; either the extinction of the species is threatened, or the
knowledge of its medicinal or herbal or shamanic use is in danger of being lost. There are a lot
of fancy organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Earthwatch, Earth First!, that are saving the rain
forest or at least fighting that battle, legally and by getting huge tracts of forests in the tropics
made into reserves. But nobody really even cognizes or is focused on saving ethnobotanical
lore, data that concerns the very subtle relationship between aboriginal people and botanical
resources in their environment. So that's something we're doing.

A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal
shamanism; the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is
somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with
varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the
notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution.
Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors
that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.

One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that
is folk-lorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, efreets, sprites, tree spirits -that sort of thing -- and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the
poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy -- these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not
epistemically clearly defined for the culture.

Among aficionados of these domains the question of, "is it real or not?" is thought to be mildly
tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to
spin leprechaun stories, that the question "is it real?" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that
because the question "is it real?" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I

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mean is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply
assumption skating over the mystery.

But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an
astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of
theological fiddle-faddle that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into
agnosticism; by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl. My
intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century.
And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to
reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was
about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the
imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.

And then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind
of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before,
"we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened." Here he was on my doorstep, he
wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. He came in and he said "here's
something that you might be interested in." And he brought out a sample of
dimethyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, "well what is it?"
And he said, "well, it's short acting -- it's a flash." And I said, "how long does it last?" That was
my first mistake. He said, "oh it doesn't last long." So I said, "OK, we'll do it." And we did it.

And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born
again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien
dimension; a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic,
linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I sank to the
floor -- I couldn't move. I had become a disystolic hallucination of tumbling forward into fractal
geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the
Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with
strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely -- appalled -- because the transition had
been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being
shredded in front of me. I've never gotten over it.

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And it all went on, they were speaking in some kind of -- there were these self-transforming
machine-elf creatures -- were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into
rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting
ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was so weird, and so alien, and so "UNenglish-able" that it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the
intellectual universe and I had come to this -- I thought -- fairly intellectually prepared: A kid,
but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William
Burroughs.

And as I came down -- this went on for two or three minutes, this situation of dis-incarnate
dimensions orthogonal to reality engulfing me -- and then as I came out of it, and the room reassembled itself, I said "I can't believe it. It's impossible. It's impossible." That to call that a
"drug" is ridiculous. It means that you just don't know, you don't have a word for it and so you
putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something which goes into your
body and there's a change -- it's not like that, it's like being struck by noetic lightning.

The other thing about it, which astonished me, was there is no clue in this world -- in the
carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Archembolo or a Fra
Angelico or a Bosch -- there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing.
When you look at the religious hierophanies of the human species they don't have the same
vibe, don't have the same charge. Religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love and
trans-linguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing. This was not like that. This was more
multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other. It was almost like the victory of
neo-Platonic metaphysics -- everything had become made out of a fourth-dimensional
tesseractual mosaic of energy.

I was quite knocked off my feet. And set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really
no choice you see. I don't know how it hits other people. There are many things that can be said
about introducing a chemical into your body. They've shown that certain people are 50,000
times more sensitive to the odor of certain compounds than other people. And part of the
unique genetic heritage of each of us are our complement of synaptic receptors for psychoactive alkaloids. So that there may be something to the notion that the Celts tend to be poets,
that certain peoples tend to be expressive in certain artistic modes, or certain senses seem to
be accentuated for certain human sub-groups.
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But whatever the explanation for how it hit me, I felt it like a call -- there was no turning back
from trying to understand, because there is no place for it in our world, and yet it is
overwhelmingly, existentially real. You see? And easily accessed. I'm not telling you that you
have to go some place in India with poor sanitation and put yourself at somebody's feet for a
dozen years or something like that. The enunciation of the presence of this dimension should
inspire some kind of coming to terms with it. It's preposterous that we can entertain in our
popular journalism the titillation of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and prop up all
reductionist personalities, and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type
stars, and this sort of thing. Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien
intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is
a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable
world, you see.

We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if
synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized),
is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture -- the place where the culture isn't looking,
because it dare not -- because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you
see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of
nature.

As human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature, they inevitably secrete
the institution of shamanism. Like a pearl around a sand grain, a nexus point, a loci of interdimensional data-flow, which is really what it is. Under certain conditions, which have to do
with molecules that have evolved in these species which have a weirdly quasi-symbiotic
relationship to our species, you strike through the veil. Melville said, "if you would strike, strike
through the mask." And that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of
apparent reality. And then, something is there which to me is a miracle.

It transcended any miracle I could ever ask for because it not only had the quality of a miracle
as I imagined it, it had the quality of a miracle as I could not have imagined it. It was entirely
charged with the energy of the other. It had the ambiguity of a pun: A kind of zany, impossible,
improbable, hysterical revelation of the joke, the self-contradiction, the provisional nature of it
all -- that it really is a Marx Brothers movie in some sense.

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So I pursued it. First to Nepal, and involvement with pre-Buddhist shamanism in Tibet. The
thing that puzzled me most, I guess because I was an art historian, was the absence of the
theme in the artistic productions of human kind. I felt that maybe there was a trace of it in the
artistic conceptions of the old pantheon of Tibetan shamanism. And that Central Asian Tibetan
shamanism had actually created astronauts of inner space that had gotten good recon on this
same area. The Dharmapalas -- the guardians of the Dharma -- are not Buddhist deities per se,
they are autochonous Tibetan folk demons that protect the Dharma by virtue of the fact of
having been overcome in magical battles by great Buddhist saints who came to Tibet. In fact,
there are, or were before the Chinese occupation, monasteries in Tibet where the vow of fealty
to the Dharma, on the part of the Dharmapala, had to be renewed by the monks every 24 hours
or the thing would run amok and be on its own and bust up the countryside. (I'm just telling you
what they told me.)

It seemed to me that the raw sense of the shamanically accessed demonic realm was there. I
also saw traces in Hellenistic gnosticism, and alchemy. But such thin traces. So I went to Nepal,
immersed myself in those studies, and decided ultimately that it was inaccessible -- I wasn't
sure whether it was there or not. Then I placed myself in the context of nature by moving my
sphere of operations to eastern Indonesia. To the climaxed, continental rain forests of the
ancient continent of Sundaland. You see Indonesia was a continent until as recently as 120,000
years ago. And then with the melting of the glaciers and the subsidence of the land, it became a
vast group of islands. It was my good fortune, or fate -- because it was prudent for me at that
time in the late sixties to remain outside the United States -- to become the hero I had
pretended to my friends that I was. Which I wasn't. I had an around-the-world air ticket and
was entirely a preppie poseur. But suddenly return was not a possibility. So I became, and my
apologies to Buddhists in the audience, a professional butterfly collector.

I pursued this blood sport for many months in these remote montane jungles of eastern
Indonesia. And it was there that the missing link in the quest for the resolution of the meaning
of DMT and spirit fell into place. Because I saw what most of us only see on National
Geographic specials; the real fact of the rain forest; the real fact of organic nature. And how
nature is communication. Not only are the species that comprise the biota linked by
pheromones and acoustical signals and color signals and other various methods by which
communication is seeping around.

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In fact, nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical meta system, right
down to the DNA. DNA working as it does, with nucleotide sequences that code -- that means
arbitrarily assign association -- code for certain amino acids. It means that organic objects are
essentially utterances in three dimensional space and express of some kind of universally
distributed linguistic intent. This is what it means when it says, "In the beginning was the word."
Nature is that word. This infinitely self-adumbrating, fractal, syntactical hallucination with an
infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding.

And having said all of this, I might invoke here Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which as I'm
sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics
where he showed that the possible set of true formal statements generated by any formal
system exceeded the possible set of true formal statements which the rules of that system
allowed. He showed this for simple arithmetic. And what this means, friends, is that what was
called truth up until the beginning of the twentieth century, is absolutely impossible. That's
what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem secures. It shows that there is no ultimate closure in an
effort to describe a formal system.

And so in a way, my take on nature, and culture, and man, is that human language is a metalinguistic system, generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature. Nature is a
self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally
predicted by its constraints and rules. There's a symmetry break there, and a so-called
emergent property comes into view. This emergent property is our unique ability to
provisionally code sound to meaning so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the
world. We imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication. The analysis that
I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it because we are complicated
enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of meta system. A
meta system that is very important for the emergence of new order out of nature.

The fact that it is contrived, provisional, is very interesting. It doesn't arise out of the gene
structure. Rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic
structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness. Since individuals are replaced, the
language is much more in flux than the genome. The genetic component of an organism is a
physical structure stabilized by atomic bonds -- possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like roomtemperature's superconductivity. In that the way nature works is to conserve the genes.
Molecular machinery has evolved to do that. But there is no mechanism in nature with the
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same kind of binding force that conserves meaning. Meaning is some kind of freelycommanded, open-ended, self-evolving system. The rules are that there are no rules.

Meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than
the genes. The genes basically repeat themselves, over and over. Almost like Homeric poetry,
where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated. And that's what sexuality is about:
memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story. But the epi-genetic
domain is different, the creation of linguistic systems, where meaning can be freely
commanded, allows very rapid evolution of cultural forms.

I suggested last night, and want to say more about it tonight, that this process is mediated by
plants. It is synergized in human beings by plants, of all sorts. We are obsessed with drugs, and
short-term spectacular effects, but think about the effect on a culture of the presence or
absence of say, sugar; or the presence or absence of coffee. Human culture can essentially be
seen to be a series of plant-established developmental creodes for a higher mammal. The fact
that we are omnivorous lays us open for the formation of weird relationships to things in our
food chain. Everybody is taught in school that the Renaissance, the close of the Middle Ages,
the rise of urban culture all had to do with the search for spices. Bringing spices back to Europe.
Why was it so important that a drive to simply broaden the palate of Europe is given credit for
the re-defining of post-medieval civilization? Very strange.

Hofmann and Ruck and Wasson, showed that the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were the
philosophical and experiential linchpin of the ancient world's cosmology -- the Hellenistic
cosmology -- was a cult of ergot-ized beer. Every September at Eleusis, this Mystery was carried
out, and everyone who was anyone participated in it. The rule was that you only got to do it
once in your life so you had only one opportunity to understand it.

The point is clear: in human culture in all times and places, the way in which our cultural
institutions have been molded by these so-called tertiary compounds in plants is very
suggestive. It seems to me that the felt presence of the other, the alien intelligence felt as being
from outer space, is actually co-present with us on this earth. And that the problem is not the
finding of it, but the recognizing of it when it is seen. In the same way that in the present

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cultural crisis everyone is crying `answers, answers, we have to have answers,' the fact is we
have the answers. The question is to face the answers.

The answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience. The answer to dissolving
the hierarchically-imposed set of mythical conventions that dis-empower us, lies in the
psychedelic experience. Because what is really happening is a return to the primacy of feeling.
And feeling is not something you convey to people the way you convey facts to them. Facts can
be handed down every week through Time magazine, and the latest issue of Science News and
Nature. But feelings will not lend themselves to that marketable, hierarchically-distributed
system. Consequently feelings represent a backwash against that. Yet feeling is the modality in
which we all operate. So as long as we are under the umbrella of the print-created, linear, postmedieval institutions that promote the myth of the public, the notion of the atomic individual,
the notion that we are all basically alike then we are going to be UN-empowered.

The amazing thing to me about the psychedelic experience, is that it can be kept under wraps;
that people don't insist; that somehow we're leaving it to experts to figure it out. But did you
know that the experts are not allowed to work it out? That in this particular area, the entire
human race has been relegated to an infantile status. It is not really professionally possible, to
do work with these things.

Nevertheless, our cultural crisis is deepening. Deepening mainly because we have very poor
connections among our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures -- within ourselves as
individuals and within ourselves as a society. Our whole problem is that we can't communicate
with each other, we can't express intention. Yet the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to
unify us, to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention. To carry us forward into a realm of
appropriate cultural activity, which is to my mind, the realm beyond history. Beyond history lies
effortless and appropriate cultural activity. And nature has proceeded us, as it always does, by
laying out models that can be followed to realize this.

As an example, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the
horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of
history, and there was a whole focusing on the horse archetype. Which in the 20th century,
gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high118

performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of
glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals.

In thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species,
I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey, which
when you think about it, is the American symbol. It was also the symbol of the Third Reich. A lot
of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey, when Alleric the Visigoth burned Eleusis,
it was the crow that fluttered on his battle standard as the greasy smoke swept by. These dark
birds have been ever with us.

In looking for a new titulary animal and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean, I was
drawn to look, strangely enough, at cephalopods, octopi. Because I felt, first of all, they are
extremely alien. The break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree, and the
mollusc, which is what a cephalopod is, is about 700 million years ago. Nevertheless, and many
of you who are students of evolution know, that when evolutionists talk about parallel
evolution, they always bring out the example of the optical system of the octopi. Because, isn't
this astonishing? -- it's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely
independently. This shows how the same set of external factors impinging on a raw gene pool
will inevitably sculpt the same organs or attain the same end, and so forth and so on.

Well, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing. What interested me was their linguistic
organization. They are virtually entirely nervous system. First of all, they have eight arms in the
case of the octopods, and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods. So coordinating all
these organs of manipulation has given them a very capable nervous system as well as a highly
evolved ocular system.

But what is really interesting about them is that they communicate with each other by changing
the color and texture of their skin and their physical shape. You may know that octopi could
change colors, but you may have thought it was camouflage or something very passive like that.
It isn't that at all. They have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes, merging pastels,
herringbone patterns, tweeds, mottled this-and-thats, can blush from apricot through teal into
dove gray and on to olive -- do all of these things communicating to each other. That is what
their large optical system is for. It is to be able to see each other.

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The other thing which octopi can do -- besides having these chromatophores on the surface of
their skin --they can change the texture of the skin surface: can make it rugose, papillaed,
smooth, lobed, rubbery, runneled, so forth and so on. And then, of course, being shell-less
molluscs, they can hide arms, and display certain parts of themselves and carry on a dance.

When you analyze what is going on here, what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from
natural history, begins to take on a more profound aspect. Because it is an ontological
transformation of language that is going on in front of you. Note that by being able to
communicate visually, they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary.
Rather, they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity because each octopus can
see what is meant -- this is very important -- can see what is meant. And I think that this
heralds, or could be made to herald, a transformation in our own definitions of language and
communication.

What we need is to see what we mean. It's not without consequence or implication, that when
we try to communicate the notion of clarity of speech, we always shift into visual metaphors: I
see what you mean, he painted a picture, his description was very colorful. It means that when
we intend to indicate a lack of ambiguity and communication, we shift to visual analogies. This
can in fact be actualized. And in fact, this is what is happening in the psychedelic experience.
There we discover, just under the surface of human biological organization, the next level in the
organization of language: the ability to generate some kind of acoustical hologram that is
manipulated by linguistic intent.

Now don't ask me how this happens, because nobody knows how it happens. At this point it's
magic. Nevertheless, the fact is it does happen -- you can have this experience. It represents a
synesthesia in the presence of ongoing communication. It is, in fact, telepathy. It is not what we
thought telepathy would be, which I suppose if you're like me, you imagine telepathy would be
hearing what other people think. It isn't that. It's seeing what other people mean. And them
also seeing what they mean. So that once something has been communicated, both parties can
walk around it and look at it, the way you study a Brancusi, or a Henry Moore in an art gallery.

By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal, and substituting the concreteness of the visual
image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be
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temporarily overcome. And the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality is a much
richer notion of ego-death than the kind of white-light, null-states that it has imagined to be.
Because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality has political consequences. The political
consequences are that one can love one's neighbor, because the commonalty of being is felt.
Not reasoned toward, or propagandized into, or reinforced, but felt.

This is why there is a persistent notion, which accompanies these psychedelic compounds, of a
new political order based on love. This was a hard thing to say in the panhandle in 1965, it's not
easy to say in heavy-metal LA.. in 1987. But it seems to be the fact of the matter. That love,
which poets have celebrated for eons as ineffable, may in fact have certain ineffable
dimensions attached to it, but it may in fact be more affable than we had previously cared to
imagine. And the invoking of the effability of love has to do with discovering the shared
birthright, the atemporal dimension that is co-present with this reality, a dimension that is a
vast reservoir of anchoring -- existential anchoring -- for each and all of us in our lives.

So my response to feeling the political pull of this, feeling the power to transform language,
that resided in these things, was to go to the people who I thought would know most about it:
the shamans for whom hallucinogenic shamanism has never been an issue; for whom the
notion that you're supposed to do it on the 'natch, is a patent absurdity. If you're serious about
doing it on the 'natch I suggest you eliminate all food. Because this notion of the pristine self
somehow riding above the muck of the world, carrying on a spiritual evolution is absolute
foolishness. We are made of the stuff of the world.

People who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility, are turning their
back on their birthright. In the same way that if you do not experience sex throughout your life
you are turning your back on your birthright. After all we could argue that to allow another
person to touch you, is to not do it on the 'natch, right? But, dear friends, we're slicing too close
to the bone here to take that approach. It's much better, I think, to open to the world.

The world is communication. Nature is the great teacher. All human gurus are simply
distillations of the wave of nature that is coming at you. So you can just short-circuit the whole
human boil-down, and go straight to the executive suite by putting yourself under a tree in the

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wilderness. The Great Ones all have said this but they need to be taken more seriously on the
subject of their own expendability. Me too.

Going to the Amazon with these kinds of notions, and looking at what had been achieved there,
I came to have a vision then, of the future that could be. That we are hurling ourselves into a
new stone age, where the fruits of the prodigal wandering, that I discussed in such detail last
night, can be used to infuse new meaning into that paradise. That the imagination of man and
woman is so incomparably rich, and exerts such an attraction on us as the builder-monkey, that
we have to honor that. We cannot demonize that and preach a kind of naturalism that if
actually put in place would cause the starvation of tens of millions of people.

We have passed the point where some kind of Luddite reform can save us. Only self-indulgent
elites can preach voluntary simplicity, because a lot of people are experiencing involuntary
simplicity. And, unless you're one of them it rings rather hollow to be told that Zen values are
best.

Re-inserting ourselves into nature is inspiration for cultural design. That's what it is -- it's not
flight from the design process but a re-invigoration of it. Some of you may be aware of the
concept of nanotechnology in which everything is built at the molecular level. By studying the
mechanisms of the cell, and the immune system, and DNA, we begin to have a picture of how
molecules and atoms are the machine parts of a microcosmic world that if we were elf chemists
we could make our way into and create anything that we could imagine. I can foresee a world
where all machines will be made by DNA-like polymers that will code base materials into larger
and larger aggregates.

The minaturization of our world is a great frontier. As culture becomes more enveloping, its
physical manifestation should become less material. So the ultimate notion is of the world
turned back to the form it held, let's say 35,000 years ago, in which people lived in an
environment of entirely climaxed natural perfection. However behind their eyelids would lie a
culturally and consensually validated data phase space that is culture, civilization. Turn each of
us into a telepathic aquarium, that has a direct pipeline to the general ocean of mind and being.
This is possible. In fact, its not only possible, it may be the only decent solution: to down-load
ourselves into another dimension. (And I want to note in passing the collapse of Max
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Headroom. What a tragedy I think it is that his last show was tonight. This was a weird force for
cultural transformation, but to be applauded. If anybody here tonight has anything to do with
it, I wish them luck.)

But this sort of notion -- the Max Headroom people and the William Gibson people have a very
high-tech take on this, because they are interested in accentuating this tight blue-jean, cyberpunk kind of notion. But in fact the worlds that they describe will have many many different
social sub-groups and social eco-systems forming in them. What the future really means is
choice to become who we are, to flower out, to find our own way.

McLuhan saw all this 20 years ago: he said that the rise of global electronic feudalism would
create an atomistic fragmentation of culture. It may well be that within 50 years the largest
organizational entity on the planet will be corporations with a few million loyal employees, and
all larger social institutions will have disappeared because they were unable to command
loyalty in a social environment where direct experience has become empowered. And this
empowering of direct experience, this return to the feminine, this legitimizing of the presence
of the vaster regions of the unconscious -- these are all aspects of this emerging paradigm of
the spirit. Understanding and the imagination in the light of nature, which is what this twonight party has been called, is a definition of the spirit.

In other words, true understanding, poetic imagination, standing as a mirror before nature as
object, will cause the holo-grammatic presence of the spirit to magically appear. It will be then
seen to be a kind of emergent quality of the situation that was previously masked, simply
because the elements had not fallen into the correct arrangement. As we move forward
through time over the next 25 years there will be many prophets of the transcendental object
at the end of time, many takes.

The important thing is to recall Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and to always recognize the
provisional nature of the metaphysical goods that you're going to be sold. Nobody has the
faintest notion of what's going on. It's important to keep that in mind. If you have that in mind,
then the game proceeds much more cleanly.

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What is ahead of us is true high adventure. The essence of it is its unknowability. Its promise is
transformation. Its theater of occurrence is the here and now. We are not waiting for it to
begin, it has already happened for us, and our job is to understand how that can be so.

Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. My notion of shamanism is, it is that state of
mind which accrues to those who have seen the end. By cultivating this notion of closure with
hyper-space, imaged as the archaic return to the world of the pre-cultural ambiance, we can
have an anticipation of the transcendental object. It is still in Eden. It is we who have
undergone the fall and the recurso. And now the laden prodigal son returns to beat at the
doors of the manorial home, the birthright. And within lies the beginnings of true civilization.

We are the forerunners of a truly moral and ethical human society. The deepest aspirations,
however badly mangled and mishandled by our traditions, nevertheless still have the potential
for archetypal fruition within them. The torch that has been passed from generation to
generation, ad infinitum back into the distant past, is alive. And by some strange quirk of the
metaphysical machinery it's our great privilege to live through this symmetry break, this
revelation of the next level of the open-ended mystery. I think that the real thrill lies in relating
to our world with an open mind, a sense of caring, a sense of wonder, and a sense of real,
grounded, intellectually firm hope. So that's all I want to say this evening. I think we'll break for
about 15 minutes and then we'll have questions. Thank you very much.

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Q&A

Now comes my favorite part of these things which is the period where there's interaction
because I think this is really a group process. Every one of you to some degree has taken upon
yourself the role of the Magellan-in-the-living-room, and probably every one in this room has at
some time or another gazed upon things no other human eye has ever beheld. The psychedelic
dimension is not yet a science. We're more like explorers comparing our crudely drawn maps,
and hastily scrawled journal notes, trying together to get a picture of this new continent in the
imagination. So, I'm yours. Sir -

Question: You have said in your book that the mushroom was genetically engineered for
producing psilocybin by an alien intelligence. What do you think now about the possibility of us
using psilocybin genes within other kinds of organisms like fungi or plants, or, I don't know
about animals.

Answer: Well, interesting question. The question was I've described the mushroom as
genetically engineered by some other agency for the production of psilocybin, what do I think
about the possibility of human beings being able to genetically manipulate organisms to
produce psychedelic compounds? I think that the technology and theory has reached the stage
where, if there's an enterprising graduate student within the sound of my voice, the way to go
is to locate the gene for psilocybin in the mushroom genome, and to translate it via standard
techniques to E. coli, to Escherishia coli. Then you would have an easily grown bacterium which
would be a chemical factory for pouring our psilocybin. So if any of you are aspiring genetic
pharmacologists, this would be a fine project.

I might elaborate on the answer for some of you who are not familiar with the premise. The
reason I suggested that the mushroom might have been engineered and be in fact an artifact of
an alien intelligence was number one, of course, the informational content of the trip, but
number two, the fact that psilocybin is one of the few four-phosphoralated indoles known to
occur in nature. Out of thousands and thousands of compounds and organisms, only a few fourphosphoralated compounds are known. This suggests that such compounds are artificial, or at
least highly unusual.

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Every week the science magazines are full of talk of strategies for locating and identifying
extraterrestrial life. Well a very obvious practical and scientifically reasonable way to proceed
would be to look at the DNA of various life-forms on earth, and see if there are any in which
there is a wild statistical departure from the norm. Whenever you get an organism which is
producing, or has genes that no other organism has, this is highly suggestive. Because species
evolve incrementally out of each other. So you would expect that there would be a relative
smoothness in the expression of chemical taxa. That one fungus would be rather like its
taxonomic near relatives. One member of a genus would be chemically similar to another. In
fact, of course, we do find subtle chemical variations, but the presence of a fourphosphoralated indole in a fungus like that is very suggestive.

There's an interesting book by Cyril Punampurama called Perspectives on the Problem of

Extraterrestrial Communication. In it he outlines what he believes would be a general strategy
for extraterrestrial contact that any kind of species would have to operate with if it were to
seriously conduct a search through space. And the model posits a ship, which at a certain
distance from its origin planet, must replicate itself. And then at a certain distance, replicate
again. And then again, in order to keep the density of ships constant as the sphere of the area
being explored expands. These ships could be as small as an animal cell. They don't have to be
thought of as Star Trek-type ships.

But the point is this ship contains instructions that you must read and follow in order to call in.
There are so many planets and star systems to be surveyed that the only way such a survey
could be conducted is if there were a message in the ship-qua organism, such that in the gene
swarm of an alien planet it would eventually be read by an organism on the planet that would
act to do the things necessary to call the central switchboard. Then the folks who made the ship
would say: `ah-ha, we have contact in sector alpha sub-N 362,' and they would concentrate all
their attention there.

Q: Yes would you speak on the time-line a little?

A: Oh what a kind questioner, to lead me to my favorite subject. Well, it has to do with why
(people do this for different reasons), why people take psychedelic plants and what lies behind
it always. And what always lay behind it for me, from that very first DMT trip that I described to
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you at the beginning, was the notion, `My god, this stuff has historical significance. Nobody
knows about this,' carrying with it the notion, `we are discovering it.'

If we could bring it back, somehow, it would change the world. Perhaps people are bringing it
back, by designing buildings and creating fashions or fashioning mathematical descriptions of
reality. I never had that aspiration. I just simply defined myself, more humbly than that, as a
consumer of ideology, as an intellectual who would learn what has been said and done and
proposed.

But after the DMT experience I realized that there is unclaimed stuff out in those dimensions.
James Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake, "Up-nee-ent prospector you sprout all your worth and
woof your wings." Well, the key word is prospector. A prospector is a rock hunter. I wanted to
prospect for the alchemical stone, for the lapis philoso-forum. And I conceived it as an idea:
the Timewave -- I think it would come differently for each of us -- for me it was an incredibly
formal, aesthetically symmetrical, and therefore satisfying idea about what time is.

That the Tao is something which could be mathematically described as a flux of a quality in
time. A quality that I named Novelty. And once I had enunciated it for myself I saw that it was
the part of the world that we have no description for. Science gives us descriptions for what is
possible. But we have no descriptions for what, out of the set of the possible, undergoes the
actual formality of occurring. Why are certain things selected to come to be? And I saw then the
notion of the Tao, which is generally presented as a kind of intuitive notion -- you're not
supposed to demand too much hard-edged clarity. You say, `just flow with it man, flow with it.'
Well when someone says flow to me, I think of equations which would describe flow. Flow as a
dynamical system which therefore can be mathematically modeled.

What the timewave is, is a seeing that the very largest patterns which describe the whole birth,
evolution and death of the universe, are repeated at successively shorter and shorter spans of
time, down into the quantum-mechanically and micro-electronically cognizable realms of time.
The realm of nano and pico seconds. I saw the I Ching, which as a kind of phenomenological
description of time, produced by the oriental mind completely unencumbered by our particular
set of cultural conventions. Certainly it has its own set of peculiar conventions -- but not ours -that there is a pattern in nature, not in three dimensional space, but in time, a pattern in time
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on many levels that reproduces itself and can be known, can be formally described. And once
known, can be seen to control the ebb and flow of connectedness. Or the forward and
backward surge of novelty. I thought that this was a great insight -- since it was the only one I
had, I could hardly sell it short. And what pleased me most about it was that a rap is only as
good as the rapper. But here was a mathematically formal idea, that could stand on its own; be
examined in the absence of the rapper; be examined by critics who were as hostile as they
cared to be.

It's simply a tool. It's in a long line of tools that stretches back toward the first chipped flint, and
stretches forward toward the soul made manifest as starship and alchemical transformation.
But it was the tool that I came upon and what is always put against the psychedelic experience
is they say, `well, big deal, what's ever come out of it?' So I was pleased that here was a
concrete notion that came out of it. Richard -

Q: Along the line of this Timewave, can you give us a reading of our current time in the nottoo-distant future?

A: I would be only too happy to. The question is would I care to prophesy based on this
timeline? Yes, one of the assumptions built into the theory is that time is a series of nested
resonances. And that each time is composed of resonance with previous and future times on
varying levels. The time we are living through, I call the Roman Twilight. Simply because we are
living through a period that is in resonance with the time of the last Roman emperors. And I
think that if you look at it carefully, you can begin to see the way this theory proposes to be
analogical and yet formal at the same time.

What was happening in the decades immediately preceding the fall of Rome? A progressively
weakened series of self-indulgent propagandists ruled the greatest empire on earth with a
more and more shaky hand as they succumbed to gonorrhea, mercuric poisoning, various
occult pursuits, millenarian obsessions and so forth. Meanwhile in the east, in Byzantium, a new
civilization was unleashing itself, and if you think of those events, which unfolded over a few
hundred years, as telescoped into a few years in our own era, you see that with the rise of
Gorbachev and the continued mis-management of the American empire under the cryptofascist series of rotating bimbos and buffoons that we have suffered through; that what is
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happening is an empire is being betrayed into eclipse by self-indulgence, stupidity and bad
management, and its cultural adversary is in ascendancy.

Now Byzantium never conquered Rome -- it doesn't happen like that -- but what ended was the
Roman world of indulgent, cohesive imperialism. And what it was replaced with was a rise in
religious fundamentalism, a stricter and more puritan kind of morality, the rise of epidemic
diseases, and a vast economic retrenchment which initiated what we call the Dark Ages.

Now, in the present situation of the 20th century these themes are being recapitulated at an
extremely rapid rate. So their Dark Age is for us, a tough three or four years, fortunately. It's
said history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce. We are the heirs of the vast tragedy of
extended history who live through the curiously mediaized and dehumanized farce of the
recapitulation of these same themes. Because the very notion that the last ten Roman
emperors could be symbolized by someone like the present American chief executive cannot
fail to bring a small smile to any open mind.

So what I see happening over the next twenty-four years really, is first this retrenchment which,
hell, it may be upon us judging by the market's performance Thursday and Friday, I may not be
doing prophesy at all, this may be recap at this point. But whether that is a technical move, or
the actual beginning of the unraveling of the over-bought western capitalistic system, one can't
say. But I will say that by mid-1989, by the time the next presidential ritual has been enacted, it
will be clear I think, that we have entered into a whole new kind of temporal domain. A kind of
temporal domain that will appear superficially to be fairly bleak. Because the situation will be
highly chaotic, highly novel, and tending to oscillate wildly around a mean. So in other words
there will be no clear trend visible. There will appear to be progressive surges, and then losing
of ground, and then progressive surges, and losing of ground. And this will go on through until
the mid-nineties.

Around 2000 the resonance pattern will have shifted, and we will be occupying a relationship to
the late high Middle Ages, and the emergence of the new social forms created by the
emergence of the mercantile class and the bourgeois. In other words private wealth, cities, end
of cultural insularity, a re-starting of the economic machinery, and a kind of new flowering. But

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still under the shadow of these fundamentalist forces that will have come into ascendancy in
the previous dark age.

Then in 2004 we come into that area which is in resonance with the period of the discovery of
the new world. 1492 in other words. And the exploration of the New World and its subjugation
over about a hundred and fifty years will be going on as we open the millennium.

What the discovery of the new world will mean, in terms of our reenactment of these great
themes, is any body's guess. It could be the vindication of my style of rap: a nearby inhabited
dimension filled with alien intelligence. Or it may be the vindication of a more orthodox sort of
expectation of extraterrestrial contact. Or perhaps, ultimately, the launching of large telescopes
into orbit which will confirm for us the existence of oxygen-rich water-heavy worlds around
nearby stars. That alone would make an intellectual revolution that would leave our world
unrecognizable to itself.

We have to recall that as recently as 500 years ago the continent that we are inhabiting was
unknown, it was something talked of by wild-eyed dreamers. It was an impossibility, a
psychedelic dimension. Everyone knew that when you sailed west far enough there be
monsters and that was the end of it. It was, literally, the unconscious. Now we deal in the real
estate of that unconscious. And there is no reason why our children should not deal in the real
estate of the psychedelic dimension that we are discovering and confirming over the next ten
years or so. Let me carry this through to the end because the good part comes at the end.

After the turn of the century, the acceleration of the unfolding of these resonances becomes
more and more intense and eventually we reach the super-compression of modern times. This
is why I proposed to you last night, the term "compressionist" for this school of thought that
myself, and Sheldrake, and Frank Barr, and Ralph Abraham represent. Because we all are talking
about the dense nesting of concrescent systems. And ultimately, in my own point of view, the
emergence of a transcendental object at the end of time. And the end of time is not far off. As
Joyce says in The Wake -- it may not be as far off as you wish to be congealed. It is, I think
within the lifetimes of all of us, that there will be an ontological transformation of the human
mode. The transcendental object is emerging.

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Once it has emerged there will be no big deal about it. In the same way that we look back at the
emergence of language. And nobody gets excited about it, or only a few philosophers do. And
yet the fact that we possess language is the thumbprint of God upon our species. It's an
impossible break with previous animal organization. You can talk all you want about Coco the
talking gorilla, this and that, but then you turn to a poem by Andrew Marvel you realize there is
an ontological break here -- there is not an even progression.

So as we anticipate this thing, it could be anything. It could be the visible language that I
indicated as a possibility earlier this evening. It could be emergence in an extraterrestrial mind.
It could be the transcendental emergence of all and everything -- the Tao made flesh, the actual
collapse of the state vector into some kind of mysterious completion. It's much more rational to
place this kind of singularity at the end of a complex evolutionary process, like the life of the
universe, than at the beginning which is the scientific approach. To just say everything sprang
from nothing, for no reason, in a single instant, and please don't ask questions about that
because our map begins one ten-trillionth of a pico second after that happened. We don't talk
about that. Well isn't this somewhat begging the question, for an intellectual enterprise that
purports to offer an explanation of how things came to be?

The transcendental object, suggests to me a negative casuistry -- a purpose in the universe that
is focusing and drawing everything toward it. And in fact I've said, history is the shock-wave of
eschatology. History, which lasts 10,000 years, is a microsecond of ultra-complex experience,
where the penetration of the natural world by the transcendental object occurs, each exists cotemporaneous with the other for a historical or geological microsecond and then the two terms
are merged and all opposites are dissolved and somehow the gift is claimed, the pearl is
restored and the project is ended.

We are living through that moment. A 10,000 year rush, from chipping of stone flint, to walking
through the violet doorway of a self-generated, hyper-dimensional vehicle that carries us to our
true home. No wonder it leaves an explosive set of eddies in its wake. This is what happens
when a culture prepares to depart for the stars. This is not business as usual, this is something
else entirely. And it's the intellectual adventure and challenge of our time for each of us to
understand this in terms relevant to ourselves and the people immediately around us.

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So this is the inspiration for TimeWave Zero. This is what it maps. The odd thing is that when
the time-map came through, it wasn't only a map of historical process, but there was the
transcendental object mapped into it, and all of its sub-reflections could be seen. This is what
Christ was about. This is what Buddha was about. This is what your most enlightened moment
was about. You, each of you, and me. It is the hyper-dimensional, particulate reflection of Godhead scattered back through the flatter plane of this lower-dimensional slice of experience. It's
hard to say it any clearer than that...

Transcribed from a tape of a lecture recorded in Los Angeles, California, on October 17, 1987 by
Terence McKenna.

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Opening the Doors of Creativity by Terence McKenna

Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity and the techniques by which the artist
can refine his or her vision, expand the vision, communicate the vision. And before I get into
that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit about my notion of creativity per se. What is it,
in and of itself? And when I think like that of course I cast my mind back to nature. Nature is the
great visible engine of creativity, against which all other creative efforts are measured. And
creativity in nature has a curious distribution. Its something which accumulates through time. If
we stand back and look at the universe, we see that at its earliest moments, it was very simple.
It was a plenum. It was without characters or characteristics. It was what is called in Hindu
mythology the Toriah, which is described as attribute-less. And naturally if something is without
attribution, you cant say much about it. It takes a while for it to undergo a declension into
more creative realms. And these creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference.
The precondition for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium. What mathematicians now call chaos.
And through the light of the universe, as temperatures have fallen, more and more complex
compound structures have arisen. And though theres been many a slipping back in this
process, over very large spans of time we can say that creativity is conserved. That the universe
becomes more creative. And out of that state of creative fecundity, more creativity is manifest.
So from that point of view, the universe is almost what we would have to call an art-making
machine. An engine for the production of ever-more novel forms of connectedness ever-more
exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements. And out of this, I believe, arises implicitly, a set of
principles we can then apply to the human artist in the human world.

Natures creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity. We emerge out of nature
almostand this idea I think was fairly present close to the surface of the medieval mindwe
emerge out of nature almost as its finest work of art. The medieval mind spoke of the
productions of nature. This is a phrase you hear as late as the 18th century. The productions of
nature. And human creativity emerges out of that, whether you have a model of the
Aristotelian great ladder of being, or a more modern evolutionary view where we actually
consolidate emergent properties and somehow bring them to a focus of self-reflection.

Now, Im sure that we couldnt carry out a discussion of this sort without observing that the
prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman. The shaman is the
figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into
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a single notion of care-giving and creativity. And I think that, you know, to whatever degree art,
over the past several centuries, has wandered in the desert, it is because this shamanic function
has been either suppressed or forgotten. And weve different images of the artist have been
held up at different times: the artist as artisan; the artist as handmaiden of a ruling class or
family; the artist as designer for the production of integrated objects into a civilization. This
notion of the artist as mystical journeyer, as one who goes into a world unseen by others, and
then returns to tell them of it, was pretty much lost in the post-medieval and renaissance
conception of art. Up until the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, where,
beginning with the Romantics, there is a new permission to explore the irrational. This really is
the bridge back to the archaic, shamanic function of the artist. Permission to explore the
irrational. The Romantics did it with their elevation of titanic emotion, of romantic love
specifically. The symbolists, in the mid-19th century, did it by a reemphasis on the emotional
content of the image and a rejection of the previous rationalism, and that emphasis on the
image and on the emotions set the stage, then, for what I take to be the truly shamanic
movements in art, which begin really with Alfred Jarry, in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Jarry
you may remember was the founder of something called the Ecole du Pataphysique the
Pataphysical College. Jarry announced pataphysics is the science. Problem was, no one could
understand what it meant or what it stood for, including Jarry. Jarry was tight with
Montremont, who you may recall said: I am fascinated by that kind of beauty that arises when a
sewing machine meets a bicycle on an operating table. See, this was a true effort to bend the
boundaries of art, to create new permission permission really for the unthinkable. And this
again reinforces the shamanic function.What do we mean when we say the unthinkable? We
mean the envelope of that which can be conceived. And for at least 200 years, the ostensible
mission of the artist has been to test the conceptual and imagistic envelope of what the society
is willing to tolerate. This has taken many forms: the deconstruction of imagery that we get
with abstract impressionism going back into impressionism and the pointillists. Or the
permission for the irrational imagery of the unconscious; surrealism and German expressionism
make use of this permission. Always the idea being to somehow destroy the idols of the tribe,
dissolve the conceptual boundaries of ordinary expectation.

Well, in order to do this, it seems to me there is a precondition for the creation of art which I
call understanding. And I dont mean this in an intellectual sense; I mean it in the sense that
Alfred North Whitehead intended when he defined understanding as the apperception of
pattern as such. As such. Theres nothing more to it than that. You see, if we were to look at
this room, and we were to squint our eyes (and Im doing this right now) and I see that the
room divides itself into people dressed in red and people dressed in blue. This is a pattern and it
tells me something about what Im looking at. Now I shift my depth of field. Now Im looking at
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where men are sitting and where women are sitting. This is a different pattern and it tells me
more about what I am looking at. The number of these patterns theoretically present in any
construction is infinite. That says to me, then, that the depth of understanding cannot be
known. It cannot be known. Everything is imminent. William Blake makes this point, you know,
that you can see infinity in a grain of sand. So, understanding, then, is a precondition for
creativity. And this understanding is not so much intellectual as it is visual. Visual. And in
thinking about this, I realized what an influence on my own ideas in this area Aldus Huxley was.
Not the Huxley that we might ordinarily associate with my concerns, the Huxley of The Doors of
Perception and of Heaven and Hell, but the Huxley of a very modest book that he wrote in the
early 50s that he called The Art of Seeing. And in that book, he makes the point that a good art
education begins with a good drawing hand. That to be able to coordinate the hand and eye
and to see in to natureto see into the patterns present as suchis the precondition for a kind
of approach to the absolute. Now, out of this process of seeing, which Im calling
understanding, the creative process ushers in novelty. And many of you have heard me speak
of novelty in another context: in the context of nature being a novelty-producing engine of
some sort. And ourselves, almost as the handiwork of nature. But this same handiwork of
nature which we represent, we also internalize and re-express through the novelty of the
human world. Well, now, if we take seriously the shamanic model as a basis for our authentic
art, then certainly in the modern context, what we see missing from the repertoire of the artist
are shamanic techniques. And its for the discussion of these shamanic techniques, I believe,
that I was brought here this evening.

I want you to cast your mind back to a great seminal moment, germinal moment, in the history
of human thought, which was about 25,000 years ago. The great glaciers that had covered most
of the Eurasian land mass began to melt. And human populations that had been islanded from
each other for about 15 millennia began to re-contact each other and reconnect. Out of this
comes what is called the Magdalenian Revolution, from 18,000 to 22,000 years ago. And what it
is, is nothing less than a tremendous explosion of creativity and aesthetic self-expression on the
part of the human species. We find for the first time, bone and antler technology takes its place
alongside stone technology. Musical instruments appear over a wide area. And cave paintings
some paintings so remote from the surface of the ground that it takes several hours to reach
themare painted and set up in dramatic tableaus specifically designed to bring together
sound, light and dance in hierophonies. Extravaganzas of aesthetic output that invoke a kind of
transcendent other, that human beings, for the first time, are trying to come to grips with and
make some kind of cultural statement about. And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human
beingsfirst, you know, in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bonewithin
twenty thousand years, ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us, and
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points us toward the kind of extra-planetary mega civilization that we can feel operating on our
own present like a kind of great attractor.

Now, this whole intellectual adventure in exteriorization of ideas is entirely an aesthetic

adventure. Until very recently, utility is only a secondary consideration. The real notion is a kind
of seizure by the tremendum, by the other, that forces us to take up matterclay, bone, flint
and put it through a mental process where we then excrete it as objects that have lodged
within them ideas. This seems to be the special unique transcendental function of the human
animal; the production and the condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the
human animal is language. If youre seeking the thumbprint of the transcendental on the
myriad phenomena that compose life on this planet, to my mind the place to look is human
language. Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude with anything
else going on, on this planet. I mean yes, bees dance and dolphins squeak and chimpanzees do
what they do, but its a hell of a step from there to Wallace Stevens, let alone William
Shakespeare. Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool
of the artist. The artist is the person of language. And Ive, you know, given a lot of thought to
this because the work that Ive done with psilocybin mushrooms and the observations of
psychedelic plant use in the Amazon centered around ayahuasca lead me to the conclusion that
it is the synergy and catalysis of language that lies behind not only the emergence of human
consciousness out of animal organization, but then its ability to set a course for a
transcendental dimension and pursue that course against all the vicissitudes of biology and
history over ten or fifteen thousand years. Language has made us more than a group of packhunting monkeys; its made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream. And the fallout
from that dream has given us our glory and our shame. Our weaponry, our technology, our art,
our hopes, our fears. All of this arises out of our own ability to articulate and communicate with
each other. And I use this in the broad sense. I mean, for me, the glory of the human animal is
cognitive activity. Song, dance, sculpture, poetry all of these cognitive activities when we
participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a
genuine relationship to the transcendent. As you know, shamans in all times and places gain
their power through relationships with helping spirits, which they sometimes call ancestors,
which they sometimes call nature spirits. But somehow the acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate intelligence is the precondition for authentic shamanism. Now, nowhere in our world
do we have an institution like thatthat we do not consider pathologicalexcept in the now
very thinly spread tradition of the muse. That artistsalone among human beingsare given
permission to talk in terms of my inspiration, or a voice which told me to do this, or a
vision that must be realized. The thin linethe thin thread of shamanic descent into our
profane worldleads through the office of the artist. And so, if society is to somehow take hold
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of itself at this penultimate moment, as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction,
then the artist like Ariadne following her thread out of the labyrinth, is going to have to follow
this shamanic thread back through time. And you know one of the most disempowering things
that has been done to us by the male-dominant culture is to brush out our footprints into the
past. We dont have a clue as to how we got here. Most people cant think back further than
the first Nixon administration, let alone, you know, the arrival of the Vikings, the fall of Catal
Huyuk, the melting of the glaciers, so forth and so on. We have been dis-empowered by a
rational tendency to deny our irrational roots, which are kind of an embarrassment to science,
because science is the special province of the ego and magic and art are the special province of
something else. I could name it, but I wont. It prefers to be unnamed, I think. So, how seriously
then, are we to take this, um, Ill call it an obligation to follow this shamanic thread back into
time? Well, I think that it is a matter of saving our own souls. That this is the real challenge. You
know, I love to dig at the Yogans by saying nobody ever went into an Ashram with their knees
knocking in fear over the tremendous dimension they knew they were about to enter through
meditation. Still truer, and more sad, is the notion that very few of us pick up our sculpting
tools or our airbrush with our knees knocking with fear because we know we are invoking and
acting with the muse at our elbow. And somehow, I think the artists need to recover this sense
of mystery. One of the most depressing thing to me about the art sceneand I had a chance to
reconnect with this because I was just in New Yorkis that it now has a kind of directionless
quality. You can go into a gallery and you cannot tell whether it is 1990, 1980, 1970 or 1960.
Because a kind of eschatological malaise has settled over art. All notion of any forward
movement toward a transcendental ideal has been put aside for the exploration of idiosyncratic
vision. And I grant you this is a tensionand perhaps in the question period we can talk about
thisthere is a tension between the individual vision and the notion of an attractor or a
collective vision which wants to be expressed. But to my mind this is the same dichotomous
tension that haunts the individual in his or her relationship to Tao. You know, we dont want to
be lost in ego, but on the other hand, if we completely express the Tao, we have no sense of
self.

The ideal seems to be a kind of coincidencia opositorum a kind of literalizing of a paradox

where what we have is Tao, but we perceive it as ego. And in the application of this notion to
the art problem I would say what we need is a situation where schoolingif you want to put it
that wayor a tendency toward a coherent vision expressed by many artistsis spontaneous.
Each artist imagines that they are pursuing their own vision. Yet obviously, they are in the grip
of an archetype which is rising through the medium of the unconscious. Now, the last time we
saw this in American art was in abstract impressionism. Which was probablyin terms of the
values in terms of tension and the amount of emotional gain between one artistic moment
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and anotherthe break between abstract impressionism and what preceded it was the most
radical break in American art in this century. Abstract expressionism actually carried us into a
confrontation with what the quantum physicists were telling us. That the universe is field upon
field of integrated vibration. But there is no top level, there is no bottom level. That the
ordinary structures of space-time are simply that. That if we can rise out of the human
dimension, then we discover these larger, more integrated dimensions where mind and nature
somehow interpenetrate each other. A vision like that, a coherent vision, has yet to announce
itself here in the post-history pre-apocalypse phase of things.

Well, I guess I have a kind of reactionary side when I think about the creative endeavor. I
believe that the psychedelic experience, as encountered by each of you in the privacy of your
own mind, or as encountered by a pre-literate society somewhere in the world, that the
psychedelic experience is in a way the Rosetta stonenot only for understanding the
encryption that our own lives represent, each to ourselvesbut its also a Rosetta stone for uncoding the historical experience. Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind. To
create another dimension, orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history. And this orthogonal
domain, to my mind, is glimpsed most clearly in the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic
experience shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in
fifteen or twenty thousand years. Now, this is an incredible claim. This is why I make it. The
energy barrier which separates us from this tremendous repository of transcendental imagery
is very low. You know, its a matter of a little personal commitment and the substances which
make the transition possible. The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so
easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act. Ordinarily, we assume that
consciousness is channeled between tremendously deep walls. That there is no way to force a
confrontation with the other or the transcendent or the unconscious.

We tend to assume that were going to have to do double-duty at the Ashram for three decades
before were vouchsafed even a glimpse into these places. This is not true. Cultureand this is
my message to artist and anyone else who cares to noticeis a plot against the expansion of
consciousness. And this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language. Language is the
battleground over which the fight will take place. Because what we cannot say, we cannot
communicate. And by say, I mean dance, paint, sing, mean. What we cannot say, we cannot
communicate. We can conceive of things that we cannot communicate. And I think every one
of us here has done that. And thats a thrilling thing. Thats the deep homework. The
psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no
other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to
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carry it back into the collectivity. And what motivates me to talk to groups like this is the belief
that we do not have centuries of gently unfolding time ahead of us in which to gently tease
apart the threads of the human endeavor and create a bright new world. Thats not our
circumstance. This is a fire in a madhouse. And to get a hold on the situation, I think we are
going to have to force the issue. One way of forcing the issue, or a chemical definition of forcing
the issue when youre talking about a chemical reaction, is catalysis. We want to catalyze
consciousness. We want to move it faster toward its goals, whatever those goals are. Well, I
believe that to the present moment, language again in the broadest sense: speech, dance,
musical composition language has just been allowed to grow like topsy. Its been a kind of
every-man-for-himself situation. Now, what we really need, as we see ourselves moving from
one species among tens of thousands of species on this planet, over the past ten thousand
years, we have redefined ourselves. And now, like it or not, we are the custodians of the
destiny of this planet. Our decisions affect every life form on the planet. And yet, we are still
communicating with each other with the extremely precise medium of small-mouth noises
mediated by ignorance and hate. This doesnt seem like the way to do business as we approach
the third millennium.

What Im hopeful for, and what I actually see happeningI mean, I think were on the right
trackthe birth of a new kind of humanity is going to take place. But there are still a lot of
decisions to be made. How violent shall this birth be, what toll shall it take upon our mother the
earth, what shape shall the baby be in when it is finally delivered these are the decisions that
artists can mediate and control. Most people are afraid of the unconscious. This is why you can
have a psychedelic compound like DMT, which is very much like ordinary brain chemistry,
appears completely physiologically harmless, only lasts ten minutes, extremely powerful, and
generally in this society you have no takers. This is because there has been a failure of moral
courage. And the failure of moral courage is perhaps most evident in our own community: the
community of the artist. In a way, its the poets who have failed us. Because they have not
provided a song or sung a vision that we could all move in concert to. So now we are in the
absurd position of being able to do anything, and what we are doing is fouling our own nest and
pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction. This is because the poets, the
artists have not articulated a moral vision. The moral vision must come from the unconscious. It
doesnt have to do, I believe, with, you know, these post-meaning movements in art:
deconstructionism, and this sort of thing. But that arts task is to save the soul of mankind. And
that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because if the artists, who are self-selected
for being able to journey into the other If the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot
be found.

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Ideology is extremely alien to art. Political ideology, I mean. And if you will but notice it is
political ideology that has been calling the shots for the last seven or eight hundred years. We
can transcend politics if we can put some other program in place. You cannot transcend politics
into a void. And I believe that a world without ideology could be created, if what were put in
place of ideology were the notion or the realization of the good, the true and the beautiful. You
know, the three-tiered canon of the Platonic aesthetic. Reconnect the notion of the good, the
true and the beautiful; then, use psychedelics to empower the artist to go into this vast
dimension that surrounds human history on all sides to an infinite depth, and return from that
world with the transcendental images that can lift us to a new cultural level. The muse is there.
The dull maps that rationalism has given us are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard
by the bad little boys of science. You only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools to
rediscover a nature which is not mute, as Sartre said in a culmination of the modern viewpoint.
Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf. And the way to open our ears, open our eyes, and
reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics. Now, as you know,
biology runs on genes. And genes are the units of meaning of heredity. But we could make a
model of the informational environment that is represented by culture. And in fact, this is done.
A word has been invented: meme. A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity; a meme is the
smallest unit of meaning of an idea. Ideas are made of memes. And I think the art community
might function with more efficiency in the production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs if
we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after the natural environment, where
we as artists are attempting to create memes which enter an environment of other memes that
are in competition with each other, and out of this competition of memes, ever-more
appropriate, adapted and suitable ideas can gather and link themselves together into higher
and higher organisms.

Now, in order for this to happen, there is an obligation on each one of us to carry our ideas
clearly. Because in the same way that a gene must be copied correctly to be replicated or it will
cause some pathological mutation, a meme must be correctly replicated or it will cause a
pathological mutation. For instance, I would say what the Nazis did to Frederick Nietzsches
philosophy was a miscopied meme that became a toxic mutation inside a culture. So, I would
suggest to the people in this room tonight, that you take a good look around at whos here.
Artistic people, psychedelic people, look pretty much like everybody else out in society. But we
have come here tonight, self-selected for our interest in the empowering capacity of
psychedelic plants and the empowering capacity of art. So we represent an affinity group; a
population with the potential for mutagenic impact on the ideological structures on the rest of
society. So, look around. Someone here has what you need. And if you can only figure out who
it is, you can make a novel connection to move them into a new level of creativity.
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Well, what is this new level of creativity? Some of you may be familiar with the theme that is
very big in medieval religious art, which is the apocalypse of St. John or of somebody; there are
a number of these apocalypses. And I think that many of us may come out of a secular
background or have not given this kind of a religious idea too much consideration. But my
idiosyncratic conclusion, based on trying to be honest about the content of the psychedelic
experience, is that human history really is on a collision course with a transcendental object of
some sort. It is not going to be business as usual into the endless unfolding confines of the
future. The very fact that human history is occurring on this planet; the very fact that a primate
has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity and gone into the business of running stock
markets and molecular biology labs and art museums indicates to me the nearby presence in
another dimension of a kind of hyper organizing force, or what I call the transcendental object.
And I believe that this transcendental object is casting an enormous shadow over the human
historical landscape. So that if youre back in ancient Judea, you have an anticipation of the
Messiah. If you are at Eleusis, at the height of the practice of the Eleusinian mysteries, you have
an anticipation of the dark god. These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality,
that are always clothed in the assumptions of the individual artist and the society in which he or
she is working, are in fact genuine. You dont have to give yourself over to fundamentalist
religion to connect with the fact that human history is an adventure. This adventure has a
number of startling reverses and sudden plot shifts that are very difficult to anticipate, and that
we are coming up on one of those. The civilization that was created out of the collapse of the
medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable. And though no one of us
knows what the shape of the new civilization will be, somehow in the singing of the ayahuasca
songs in the rainforests, in the tremendous hypermetallic transcendental off-planetary flash of
psilocybin, in the teaching of the self-transforming machine elves that seem to dwell in the
DMT dimension, we see that the ordinary linear expectations of history are breaking down, and
that the truth of the imminence of the mystery is breaking through all the structures of denial
of the male-dominator paradigm that has been in place so long. The way to make this birth
process smooth, the way to bring it to a conclusion that will not betray the thousands and
thousands of generations of people who suffered birth and disease and migration and
starvation and lonely death so that we could sit here this evening the redeeming of the
human enterprise all lies, then, in helping this thing come to birth. And each artist is an antenna
to the transcendental other, and as we go with our own history into that thing, and then create
a unique confluence of our uniqueness, and its uniqueness, we collectively create an arrow. An
arrow out of history, out of time, perhaps even out of matter, that will redeem, then, the idea
that man is good. Redeem the idea that man is good. This is the promise of art, and its
fulfillment is never more near than the present moment.
Thank you very much.
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Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness by Terence McKenna

This was to be the first of many lectures Terence gave at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur Coast of
California.

There is a very circumscribed place in organic nature that has, I think, important implications
for students of human nature. I refer to the tryptophan derived hallucinogens
dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, and a hybrid drug that is in aboriginal use in the rain
forests of South America, ayahuasca. This latter is a combination of dimethyltryptamine and a
mono-amine oxidase inhibitor that is taken orally. It seems appropriate to talk about these
drugs when we discuss the nature of consciousness; it is also appropriate when we discuss
quantum physics.

It is my interpretation that the major quantum mechanical phenomena that we all experience,
aside from waking consciousness itself, are dreams and hallucinations. These states, at least in
the restricted sense that I am concerned with, occur when the large amounts of various sorts of
radiation conveyed into the body by the senses are restricted. Then we see interior images and
interior processes that are psychophysical. These processes definitely arise at the quantum
mechanical level. It's been shown by John Smythies, Alexander Shulgin, and others that there
are quantum mechanical correlates to hallucinogenesis. In other words, if one atom on the
molecular ring of an inactive compound is moved, the compound becomes highly active. To me
this is a perfect proof of the dynamic linkage at the formative level between quantum
mechanically described matter and mind.

Hallucinatory states can be induced by a variety of hallucinogens and dissociative anesthetics,

and by experiences like fasting and other ordeals. But what makes the tryptamine family of
compounds especially interesting is the intensity of the hallucinations and the concentration of
activity in the visual cortex. There is an immense vividness to these interior landscapes, as if
information were being presented three-dimensionally and deployed fourth-dimensionally,
coded as light and as evolving surfaces. When one confronts these dimensions one becomes
part of a dynamic relationship relating to the experience while trying to decode what it is
saying. This phenomenon is not new -- people have been talking to gods and demons for far
more of human history than they have not.
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It is only the conceit of the scientific and postindustrial societies that allows us to even
propound some of the questions that we take to be so important. For instance, the question of
contact with extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring premised upon a number of assumptions
that a moment's reflection will show are completely false. To search expectantly for a radio
signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search
the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it
is assumed contact is likely to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world -- psychics,
shamans, mystics, schizophrenics -- whose heads are filled with information, but it has been
ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is validated through consensus via
certain sanctioned instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are so
inundated by these signals -- these other dimensions -- that there is a great deal of noise in the
circuit.

It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure
it is telling the truth, because the demons are of many kinds: "Some are made of ions, some of
mind; the ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind." The reaction to these
voices is not to kneel in genuflection before a god, because then one will be like Dorothy in her
first encounter with Oz. There is no dignity in the universe unless we meet these things on our
feet, and that means having an I-Thou relationship. One say to the Other: "You say you are
omniscient, omnipresent, or you say you are from Zeta Reticuli. You're long on talk, but what
can you show me?" Magicians, people who invoke these things, have always understood that
one must go into such encounters with one's wits about oneself.

What does extraterrestrial communication have to do with this family of hallucinogenic

compounds I wish to discuss? Simply this: that the unique presentational phenomenology of
this family of compounds has been overlooked. Psilocybin, though rare, is the best known of
these neglected substances. Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the eyes
of the law, is lumped together with LSD and mescaline, when in fact each of these compounds
is a phenomenologically defined universe unto itself. Psilocybin and DMT invoke the Logos,
although DMT is more intense and more brief in its action. This means that they work directly
on the language centers, so that an important aspect of the experience is the interior dialogue.
As soon as one discovers this about psilocybin and about tryptamines in general, one must
decide whether or not to enter into this dialogue and to try and make sense of the incoming
signal. This is what I have attempted.

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I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist, because the area that I'm looking at contains
insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science. We are in a position comparable
to that of explorers who map one river and only indicate other rivers flowing into it; we must
leave many rivers unascended and thus can say nothing about them. This Baconian collecting of
data, with no assumptions about what it might eventually yield, has pushed me to a number of
conclusions that I did not anticipate. Perhaps through reminiscence I can explain what I mean,
for in this case describing past experiences raises all of the issues.

I first experimented with DMT in 1965; it was even then a compound rarely met with. It is
surprising how few people are familiar with it, for we live in a society that is absolutely
obsessed with every kind of sensation imaginable and that adores every therapy, every
intoxication, every sexual configuration, and all forms of media overload. Yet, however much
we may be hedonists or pursuers of the bizarre, we find DMT to be too much. It is, as they say
in Spanish, bastante, it's enough -- so much enough that it's too much. Once smoked, the onset
of the experience begins in about fifteen seconds. One falls immediately into a trance. One's
eyes are closed and one hears a sound like ripping cellophane, like someone crumpling up
plastic film and throwing it away. A friend of mine suggests this is our radio entelechy ripping
out of the organic matrix. An ascending tone is heard. Also present is the normal hallucinogenic
modality, a shifting geometric surface of migrating and changing colored forms. At the synaptic
site of activity, all available bond sites are being occupied, and one experiences the mode shift
occurring over a period of about thirty seconds. At that point one arrives in a place that defies
description, a space that has a feeling of being underground, or somehow insulated and domed.
In Finnegan's Wake such a place is called the "merry go raum," from the German word raum,
for "space." The room is actually going around, and in that space one feels like a child, though
one has come out somewhere in eternity.

The experience always reminds me of the twenty-fourth fragment of Heraclitus: "The Aeon is a
child at play with colored balls." One not only becomes the Aeon at play with colored balls but
meets entities as well. In the book by my brother and myself, The Invisible Landscape, I describe
them as self-transforming machine elves, for that is how they appear. These entities are
dynamically contorting topological modules that are somehow distinct from the surrounding
background, which is itself undergoing a continuous transformation. These entities remind me
of the scene in the film version of The Wizard of Oz after the Munchkins come with a death
certificate for the Witch of the East. They all have very squeaky voices and they sing a little song
about being "absolutely and completely dead." The tryptamine Munchkins come, these hyperdimensional machine-elf entities, and they bathe one in love. It's not erotic but it is open
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hearted. It certainly feels good. These beings are like fractal reflections of some previously
hidden and suddenly autonomous part of one's own psyche.

And they are speaking, saying, "Don't be alarmed. Remember, and do what we are doing." One
of the interesting characteristics of DMT is that it sometimes inspires fear - this marks the
experience as existentially authentic. One of the interesting approaches to evaluating such a
compound is to see how eager people are to do it a second time. A touch of terror gives the
stamp of validity to the experience because it means, "This is real." We are in the balance. We
read the literature, we know the maximum doses, the LD-50, and so on. But nevertheless, so
great is one's faith in the mind that when one is out in it one comes to feel that the rules of
pharmacology do not really apply and that control of existence on that plane is really a matter
of focus of will and good luck.

I'm not saying that there's something intrinsically good about terror. I'm saying that, granted
the situation, if one is not terrified then one must be somewhat out of contact with the full
dynamics of what is happening. To not be terrified means either that one is a fool or that one
has taken a compound that paralyzes the ability to be terrified. I have nothing against
hedonism, and I certainly bring something out of it. But the experience must move one's heart,
and it will not move the heart unless it deals with the issues of life and death. If it deals with life
and death it will move one to fear, it will move one to tears, it will move one to laughter. These
places are profoundly strange and alien.

The fractal elves seem to be reassuring, saying, "Don't worry, don't worry; do this, look at this."
Meanwhile, one is completely "over there." One's ego is intact. One's fear reflexes are intact.
One is not "fuzzed out" at all. Consequently, the natural reaction is amazement; profound
astonishment that persists and persists. One breathes and it persists. The elves are saying,
"Don't get a loop of wonder going that quenches your ability to understand. Try not to be so
amazed. Try to focus and look at what we're doing." What they're doing is emitting sounds like
music, like language. These sounds pass without any quantized moment of distinction, as Philo
Judaeus said that the Logos would when it became perfect, from things heard to things beheld.
One hears and beholds a language of alien meaning that is conveying alien information that
cannot be Englished.

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Being monkeys, when we encounter a trans-linguistic object, a kind of cognitive dissonance is

set up in our hind brain. We try to pour language over it and it sheds it like water off a duck's
back. We try again and fail again, and this cognitive dissonance, this "wow" or "flutter" that is
building off this object causes wonder, astonishment and awe at the brink of terror. One must
control that. And the way to control it is to do what the entities are telling one to do, to do
what they are doing.

I mention these "effects" to invite the attention of experimentalists, whether they be shamans
or scientists. There is something going on with these compounds that is not part of the normal
presentational spectrum of hallucinogenic drug experience. When one begins to experiment
with one's voice, unanticipated phenomena become possible. One experiences glossolalia,
although unlike classical glossolalia, which has been studied. Students of classical glossolalia
have measured pools of saliva eighteen inches across on the floors of South American churches
where people have been kneeling. After classical glossolalia has occurred, the glossolaliasts
often turn to ask the people nearby, "Did I do it? Did I speak in tongues?" This hallucinogen
induced phenomenon isn't like that; it's simply a brain state that allows the expression of the
assembly language that lies behind language, or a primal language of the sort that Robert
Graves discussed in The White Goddess, or a Kabbalistic language of the sort that is described in
the Zohar, a primal ursprache that comes out of oneself. One discovers one can make the extradimensional objects -- the feeling-toned, meaning-toned, three-dimensional rotating complexes
of transforming light and color. To know this is to feel like a child. One is playing with colored
balls; one has become the Aeon.

This happened to me twenty seconds after I smoked DMT on a particular day in 1966. I was
appalled. Until then I had thought that I had my ontological categories intact. I had taken LSD
before, yet this thing came upon me like a bolt from the blue. I came down and said (and I said
it many time), "I cannot believe this; this is impossible, this is completely impossible." There
was a declension of gnosis that proved to me in a moment that right here and now, one quanta
away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is trans-human, hyper-dimensional,
and extremely alien. I call it the Logos, and I make no judgements about it. I constantly engage
it in dialogue, saying, "Well, what are you? Are you some kind of diffuse consciousness that is in
the ecosystem of the Earth? Are you a god or an extraterrestrial? Show me what you know."

The psilocybin mushrooms also convey one into the world of the tryptamine hyper-continuum.
Indeed, psilocybin is a psychoactive tryptamine. The mushroom is full of answers to the
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questions raised by its own presence. The true history of the galaxy over the last four and a half
billion years is trivial to it. One can access images of cosmological history. Such experiences
naturally raise the question of independent validation -- at least for a time this was my
question. But as I became more familiar with the epistemological assumptions of modern
science, I slowly realized that the structure of the Western intellectual enterprise is so flimsy at
the center that apparently no one knows anything with certitude. It was then that I became less
reluctant to talk about these experiences. They are experiences, and as such they are primary
data for being. This dimension is not remote, and yet it is so unspeakably bizarre that it casts
into doubt all of humanity's historical assumptions.

The psilocybin mushrooms do the same things that DMT does, although the experience builds
up over an hour and is sustained for a couple of hours. There is the same confrontation with an
alien intelligence and extremely bizarre trans-linguistic information complexes. These
experiences strongly suggest that there is some latent ability of the human brain/body that has
yet to be discovered; yet, once discovered, it will be so obvious that it will fall right into the
mainstream of cultural evolution. It seems to me that either language is the shadow of this
ability or that this ability will be a further extension of language. Perhaps a human language is
possible in which the intent of meaning is actually beheld in three-dimensional space. If this can
happen on DMT, it means it is at least, under some circumstances, accessible to human beings.
Given ten thousand years and high cultural involvement in such a talent, does anyone doubt
that it could become a cultural convenience in the same way that mathematics or language has
become a cultural convenience?

Naturally, as a result of the confrontation of alien intelligence with organized intellect on the
other side, many theories have been elaborated. The theory that I put forth in Psilocybin: The
Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, held the Stropharia cubensis mushroom was a species that
did not evolve on earth. Within the mushroom trance, I was informed that once a culture has
complete understanding of its genetic information, it re-ngineers itself for survival. The
Stropharia cubensis mushroom's version of re-engineering is a mycelial network strategy when
in contact with planetary surfaces and a spore-dispersion strategy as a means of radiating
throughout the galaxy. And, though I am troubled by how freely Bell's non-locality theorem is
tossed around, nevertheless the alien intellect on the other side does seem to be in possession
in a huge body of information drawn from the history of the galaxy. It/they say that there is
nothing unusual about this, that humanity's conceptions of organized intelligence and the
dispersion of life in the galaxy are hopelessly culture-bound, that the galaxy has been an
organized society for billions of years. Life evolves under so many different regimens of
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chemistry, temperature, and pressure, that searching for an extraterrestrial who will sit down
and have a conversation with you is doomed to failure. The main problem with searching for
extraterrestrials is to recognize them. Time is so vast and evolutionary strategies and
environments so varied that the trick is to know that contact is being made at all. The
Stropharia cubensis mushroom, if one can believe what it says in one of its moods, is a
symbiote, and it desires ever deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved symbiosis
with human society early by associating itself with domesticated cattle and through them
human nomads. Like the plants men and women grew and the animals they husbanded, the
mushroom was able to inculcate itself into the human family, so that where human genes went
these other genes would be carried.

But the classic mushroom cults of Mexico were destroyed by the coming of the Spanish
conquest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute monopoly on theophagy, the eating
of God; yet in the New World they came upon people calling a mushroom teonanacatl, the flesh
of the gods. They set to work, and the Inquisition was able to push the old religion into the
mountains of Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages when Valentina and Gordon
Wasson found it there in the 1950s.

There is another metaphor. One must balance these explanations. Now I shall sound as if I
didn't think the mushroom is an extraterrestrial. It may instead be what I've recently come to
suspect -- that the human soul is so alienated from us in our present culture that we treat it as
an extraterrestrial. To us the most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul. Aliens
Hollywood-style could arrive on earth tomorrow and the DMT trance would remain more weird
and continue to hold more promise for useful information for the human future. It is that
intense. Ignorance forced the mushroom cult into hiding. Ignorance burned the libraries of the
Hellenistic world at an earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowledge, shattering the
stellar and astronomical machinery that had been the work of centuries. By ignorance I mean
the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic tradition. The inheritors of this tradition built a triumph of
mechanism. It was they who later realized the alchemical dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries -- and the twentieth century -- with the transformation of elements and the discovery
of gene transplants. But then, having conquered the New World and driven its people into
cultural fragmentation and diaspora, they came unexpectedly upon the body of Osiris -- the
condensed body of Eros -- in the mountains of Mexico where Eros has retreated at the coming
of the Christos. And by finding the mushroom, they unleashed it.

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Phillip K. Dick, in one of his last novels, Valis, discusses the long hibernation of the Logos. A
creature of pure information, it was buried in the ground at Nag Hammadi, along with the
burying of the Chenoboskion Library circa 370 A.D. As static information, it existed there until
1947, when the texts were translated and read. As soon as people had the information in their
minds, the symbiote came alive, for, like the mushroom consciousness, Dick imagined it to be a
thing of pure information. The mushroom consciousness is the consciousness of the Other in
hyperspace, which means in dream and in the psilocybin trance, at the quantum foundation of
being, in the human future, and after death. All of these places that were thought the be
discrete and separate are seen to be part of a single continuum. History is the dash over ten to
fifteen thousand years from nomadism to flying saucer, hopefully without ripping the envelope
of the planet so badly that the birth is aborted and fails, and we remain brutish prisoners of
matter.

History is the shock-wave of eschatology. Something is at the end of time and is casting an
enormous shadow over human history, drawing all human becoming toward it. All the wars, the
philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations, all of this is
occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the monkeys react to the
symbiote, which is in the environment and which is feeding information to humanity about the
larger picture. I do not belong to the school that wants to attribute all of our accomplishments
to knowledge given to us as a gift from friendly aliens -- I'm describing something I hope is more
profound than that. As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they come more
and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation
in which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of intelligence on a galactic scale.
Science and mathematics may be culture-bound. We cannot know for sure, because we have
never dealt with an alien mathematics or an alien culture except in the occult realm, and that
evidence is inadmissible by the guardians of scientific truth. This means that the contents of
shamanic experience and of plant-induced ecstasies are inadmissible even though they are the
source of novelty and the cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being.

Think about this for a moment: If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of
the human race, then what is to become of us? The future is bound to be psychedelic, because
the future belongs to the mind. We are just beginning to push the buttons on the mind. Once
we take a serious engineering approach to this, we are going to discover the plasticity, the
mutability, the eternal nature of the mind and, I believe, release it from the monkey. My vision
of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that
the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of trans-linguistic matter generated out of
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the body of each of us at a critical juncture at our psychedelic Bar-Mitzvah. From that point on,
we will be eternal somewhere in the solid-state matrix of the trans-linguistic lens we have
become. One's body image will exist as a holographic wave transform while one is at play in the
fields of the Lord and living in Elysium.

Other intelligent monkeys have walked this planet. We exterminated them and so now we are
unique, but what is loose on this planet is language, self-replicating information systems that
reflect functions of DNA: learning, coding, templating, recording, testing, retesting, recoding
against DNA functions. Then again, language may be a quality of an entirely different order.
Whatever language is, it is in us monkeys now and moving through us and moving out of our
hands and into the noosphere with which we have surrounded ourselves.

The tryptamine state seems to be in one sense trans-temporal; it is an anticipation of the

future, It is as though Plato's metaphor were true, that time is the moving image of eternity.
The tryptamine ecstasy is a stepping out of the moving image and into eternity, the eternity of
the standing now, the nunc stans of Thomas Aquinas. In that state, all of human history is seen
to lead toward this culminating moment. Acceleration is visible in all the processes around us:
the fact that fire was discovered several million years ago; language came perhaps thirty-five
thousand years ago; measurement, five thousand; Galileo, four hundred; then Watson-Crick
and DNA. What is obviously happening is that everything is being drawn together. On the other
hand, the description our physicists are giving us of the universe -- that it has lasted billions of
years and will last billions of years into the future -- is a dualistic conception, an inductive
projection that is very unsophisticated when applied to the nature of consciousness and
language. Consciousness is somehow able to collapse the state vector and thereby cause the
stuff of being to undergo what Alfred North Whitehead called "the formality of actually
occurring." Here is the beginning of an understanding of the centrality of human beings.
Western societies have been on a decentralizing bender for five hundred years, concluding that
the Earth is not the center of the universe and man is not the beloved of God. We have moved
ourselves out toward the edge of the galaxy, when the fact is that the most richly organized
material in the universe is the human cerebral cortex, and the densest and richest experience in
the universe is the experience you are having right now. Everything should be constellated
outward from the perceiving self. That is the primary datum.

The perceiving self under the influence of these hallucinogenic plants gives information that is
totally at variance with the models that we inherit from our past, yet these dimensions exist.
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One one level, this information is a matter of no great consequence, for many cultures have
understood this for millennia. But we moderns are so grotesquely alienated and taken out of
what life is about that to us it comes as a revelation. Without psychedelics the closest we can
get to the Mystery is to try to feel in some abstract mode the power of myth or ritual. This
grasping is a very over-intellectualized and unsatisfying sort of process.

As I said, I am an explorer, not a scientist. If I were unique, then none of my conclusions would
have any meaning outside the context of myself. My experiences, like yours, have to be more or
less part of the human condition. Some may have more facility for such exploration than others,
and these states may be difficult to achieve, but they are part of the human condition. There
are few clues that these extra-dimensional places exist. If art carries images out of the Other
from the Logos to the world -- drawing ideas down into matter -- why is human art history so
devoid of what psychedelic voyagers have experienced so totally? Perhaps the flying saucer or
UFO is the central motif to be understood in order to get a handle on reality here and now. We
are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to
alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses. When we can love the alien,
then we will have begun to heal the psychic discontinuity that has plagued us since at least the
sixteenth century, possibly earlier.

My testimony is that magic is alive in hyperspace. It is not necessary to believe me, only to form
a relationship with these hallucinogenic plants. The fact is that the gnosis comes from plants.
There is some certainty that one is dealing with a creature of integrity if one deals with a plant,
but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very
carefully. DMT is an endogenous hallucinogen. It is present in small amounts in the human
brain. Also it is important that psilocybin is 4-phosphoraloxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine and that
serotonin, the major neurotransmitter in the human brain, found in all life and most
concentrated in humans, is 5-hydroxytryptamine. The very fact that the onset of DMT is so
rapid, coming on in forty-five seconds and lasting five minutes, means that the brain is
absolutely at home with this compound. On the other hand, a hallucinogen like LSD is retained
in the body for some time.

I will add a cautionary note. I always feel odd telling people to verify my observations since the
sine qua non is the hallucinogenic plant. Experimenters should be very careful. One must build
up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is
no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try
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to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosophical and religious
accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all
compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. The library is the first place
to go when looking into taking a new compound.

We need all the information available to navigate dimensions that are profoundly strange and
alien. I have been to Konarak and visited Bubaneshwar. I'm familiar with Hindu iconography and
have collected thankas. I saw similarities between my LSD experiences and the iconography of
Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, it was LSD experiences that drove me to collect Mahayana art.
But what amazed me was the total absence of the motifs of DMT. It is not there; it is not there
in any tradition familiar to me.

There is a very interesting story by Jorge Luis Borges called "The Sect of the Phoenix." Allow me
to recapitulate. Borges starts out by writing: "There is no human group in which members of
the sect do not appear. It is also true that there is no persecution or rigor they have not
suffered and perpetrated." He continues,

The rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The rite constitutes the
Secret. This Secret... is transmitted from generation to generation. The act in itself is trivial,
momentary, and requires no description. The Secret is sacred, but is always somewhat
ridiculous; its performance is furtive and the adept do not speak of it. There are no decent
words to name it, but it is understood that all words name it or rather inevitably allude to it.

Borges never explicitly says what the Secret is, but if one knows his other story, "The Aleph,"
one can put these two together and realize that the Aleph is the experience of the Secret of the
Cult of the Phoenix.

In the Amazon, when the mushroom was revealing its information and deputizing us to do
various things, we asked, "Why us? Why should we be the ambassadors of an alien species into
human culture?" And it answered, "Because you did not believe in anything. Because you have
never given over your belief to anyone." The sect of the phoenix, the cult of this experience, is
perhaps millennia old, but it has not yet been brought to light where the historical threads may
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run. The prehistoric use of ecstatic plants on this planet is not well understood. Until recently,
psilocybin mushroom taking was confined to the central isthmus of Mexico. The psilocybin
containing species Stropharia cubensis is not known to be in archaic use in a shamanic rite
anywhere in the world. DMT is used in the Amazon and has been for millennia, but by cultures
quite primitive - usually nomadic hunter-gatherers.

I am baffled by what I call "the black hole effect" that seems to surround DMT. A black hole
causes a curvature of space such that no light can leave it, and, since no signal can leave it, no
information can leave it. Let us leave aside the issue of whether this is true in practice of
spinning black holes. Think of it as a metaphor. Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black
hole in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what one is talking
about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are
able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if we may for a
moment co-map these two things, are silent. They are silent because we cannot understand
them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill
seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your attention.

The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is
primarily techniques, not ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out over
millennia that make it possible, though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these areas.
People of predilection are noticed and encouraged.

In archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving institution, the signs are fairly easy to
recognize: oddness or uniqueness in an individual. Epilepsy is often a signature in preliterate
societies, or survival of an unusual ordeal in an unexpected way. For instance, people who are
struck by lightning and live are thought to make excellent shamans. People who nearly die of a
disease and fight their way back to health after weeks and weeks of an indeterminate zone are
thought to have strength of soul. Among aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner
strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states. In traveling around the world and dealing with
shamans, I find the distinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary centeredness. Usually the
shaman is an intellectual and is alienated from society. A good shaman sees exactly who you
are and says, "Ah, here's somebody to have a conversation with." The anthropological literature
always presents shamans as embedded in a tradition, but once one gets to know them they are
always very sophisticated about what they are doing. They are the true phenomenologists of
this world; they know plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields "spirits." We hear the
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word "spirits" through a series of narrowing declensions of meaning that are worse almost than
not understanding. Shamans speak of "spirit" the way a quantum physicist might speak of
"charm;" it is a technical gloss for a very complicated concept.

It is possible that there are shamanic family lines, at least in the case of hallucinogen-using
shamans, because shamanic ability is to some degree determined by how many active receptor
sites occur in the brain, thus facilitating these experiences. Some claim to have these
experiences naturally, but I am underwhelmed by the evidence that this is so. What it comes
down to for me is "What can you show me?"

I always ask that question; finally in the Amazon, informants said, "Let's take our machetes and
hike out here half a mile and get some vine and boil it up and we will show you what we can
show you."

Let us be clear. People die in these societies that I'm talking about all the time and for all kinds
of reasons. Death is really much more among them than it is in our society. Those who have
epilepsy who don't die are brought to the attention of the shaman and trained in breathing and
plant usage and other things -- the fact is that we don't really know all of what goes on. These
secret information systems have not been well studied. Shamanism is not, in these traditional
societies, a terribly pleasant office. Shamans are not normally allowed to have any political
power, because they are sacred. The shaman is to be found sitting at the headman's side in the
council meetings, but after the council meeting he returns to his hut at the edge of the village.
Shamans are peripheral to society's goings on in ordinary social life in every sense of the word.
They are called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill, a psychological difficulty,
a marital quarrel, a theft, or weather that must be predicted.

We do not live in that kind of society, so when I explore these plants' effects and try to call your
attention to them, it is as a phenomenon. I don't know what we can do with this phenomenon,
but I have a feeling that the potential is great. The mind-set that I always bring to it is simply
exploratory and Baconian -- the mapping and gathering of facts.

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Herbert Guenther talks about human uniqueness and says one must come to terms with one's
uniqueness. We are naive about the role of language and being as the primary facts of
experience. What good is a theory of how the universe works if it's a series of tensor equations
that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or
noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience.

What the mushroom says about itself is this: that it is an extraterrestrial organism, that spores
can survive the conditions of interstellar space. They are deep, deep purple -- the color that
they would have to be to absorb the deep ultraviolet end of the spectrum. The casing of a spore
is one of the hardest organic substances known. The electron density approaches that of a
metal.

Is it possible that these mushrooms never evolved on earth? That is what the Stropharia
cubensis itself suggests. Global currents may form on the outside of the spore. The spores are
very light and by Brownian motion are capable of percolation to the edge if the planet's
atmosphere. Then, through interaction with energetic particles, some small number could
actually escape into space. Understand that this is an evolutionary strategy where only one in
many billions of spores actually makes the transition between the stars -- a biological strategy
for radiating throughout the galaxy without a technology. Of course this happens over very long
periods of time. But if you think that the galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years from edge to
edge, if something were moving only one one-hundredth the speed of light -- now that's not a
tremendous speed that presents problems to any advanced technology -- it could cross the
galaxy in one hundred million years. There's life on this planet 1.8 billion years old; that's
eighteen times longer than one hundred million years. So, looking at the galaxy on those time
scales, one sees that the percolation of spores between the stars is a perfectly viable strategy
for biology. It might take millions of years, but it's the same principle by which plants migrate
into a desert or across an ocean.

There are no fungi in the fossil record older than forty million years. The orthodox explanation
is that fungi are soft-bodied and do not fossilize well, but on the other hand we have fossilized
soft-bodied worms and other benthic marine invertebrates from South African gun-flint chert
that is dated to over a billion years.

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I don't necessarily believe what the mushroom tells me; rather we have a dialogue. It is a very
strange person and has many bizarre opinions. I entertain it the way I would any eccentric
friend. I say, "Well, so that's what you think." When the mushroom began saying it was an
extraterrestrial, I felt that I was placed in the dilemma of a child who wishes to destroy a radio
to see if there are little people inside. I couldn't figure out whether the mushroom is the alien
or the mushroom is some kind of technological artifact allowing me to hear the alien when the
alien is actually light-years away, using some kind of Bell non-locality principle to communicate.

The mushroom states its own position very clearly. It says, "I require the nervous system of a mammal. Do you have
one handy?"

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Terence McKenna at Wetlands Preserve, NYC July 28th, 1998

Theres nothing like the smell of a late summer New York club crowd to get the old blood
pounding, is there? Its a pleasure to be in Manhattan. Manhattan is my second most favorite
island in the world, only because I live on Hawaii. I feel more affinity to this island than to the
other Hawaiian islands, which have various cultural extremes, Im not really capable of relating
to. But youll hear more about that. Anyway, its great to be here. Its great to see so many
familiar faces. Its a pleasure to be here. I always feel when I come to Wetlands that Im
checking in with sort of my home base congregation.

About five years ago I moved out to Hawaii for the specific purpose of looking back at this scene
and putting in a full time effort to understand it. Of course this tells you I didnt have a job! I still
dont but if youre a cultural commentator, who needs a job, right? The glory alone is sufficient
to pave ones way. And I, probably like you, here at the end of the Twentieth Century, having
lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, Im noticing that the
strangeness is not receding. The strangeness seems to be accelerating.

The theme of this evening is Logos meets Eros. Well I dont know a lot about Eros, I do think if
you smoke after sex youre probably doing it too quickly. But otherwise my expertise lies in
another direction. I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality.
It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to
fly from it, so long ago. Is that the victory of a cultural meme, or is that just the yawning grave
opening ahead of us?

My thing is to be amazed at the world as given by nature, but ever more, as we approach this
millennial speed bump in our cultural highway, to be amazed at people, and about the direction
that mass psychology seems to be taking. And since I assume everybody here is a shaper of this
mass psychology in the extremely powerful media-based jobs that you all occupy, it might be
worth talking about that a little bit tonight.

I spent all afternoon at M.O.M.A., as I always do when I come to town. I know its a thing but I
do it anyway, worshiping at the altar of modernism, so relieved now that its almost over.
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Because its going to be bracketed in this century, the Twentieth Century. Its almost over.
Theres very little left to run, a few is to be dotted, a few codas to be played, but essentially its
a done deal. This end of the century psychology is a psychology of hysterical conclusion-ism and
summation and, to some degree, a rhetoric of fear that we can ever outdo ourselves. And I
think it probably felt the same way a hundred years ago, if you had been in Vienna in 1899,
when Jugendstil was bursting at its seams and Freud was beginning his theories and the Paris
air show of 1905 was in the planning. There has always been a sense of fatalistic and
apocalyptic excitement at the end of a century, and always throughout a culture at the edge of
its technologies. To my mind the interesting technologies of the Twentieth Century have all
been communication technologies. And I extend that to LSD, DVD, HDTV, GHB, 5-methoxyDMT, all communication technologies for the purpose of transforming languages, transforming
understanding.

And now it seems to me weve struck the main vein. Maybe its just that I live up on my
mountain, and once a year, in pursuit of money, journey to cities, not like this, there are no
cities like this, but the lesser lights, to gather the gold. I have this sense now of palpable
acceleration, and it has many qualities, but the quality that fascinates me most is one I hadnt
predicted, its getting funnier. Its getting funnier because everybodys categories are
disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other
people dont make sense. So not making sense has become enshrined as a domain of cultural
activity, and god knows Ive mined that.

Somebody once said actually it was the mushroom itself, it wasnt somebody. Somebody, who
happened to be a mushroom, once said, what did they say? If youre not part of the problem
youre part of the solution. No. What was said was that, "culture is the shock-wave of
eschatology." Nothing is unannounced. This is like a weird quality of experience, you cant learn
this from physics or economics. Maybe you can learn it from economics. Nothing is
unannounced. Everything is preceded by the shock-wave of its coming. So somehow the
spreading zaniness of reality is part of the boundary dissolving qualities that are going to make
up this new cultural mix of disembodied human beings, nano-technologically maintained
environments, dissolved self definitions, people living at many levels at the same time;
intelligence as a kind of free flowing non-local resource that comes and goes as needed.
Prosthesis, implant, boundary dissolution, these things are usually presented as fairly terrifying,
but in fact I think behind it all, lurks, you know, the demons who do calisthenics in the angles of
every room on this planet to keep it all from collapsing into a flat line.

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In other words, the thing which lies at the end of any epistemic investigation of what reality is,
is surprise, astonishment. Not religious awe, not that kind of astonishment, but actually like pie
in the face hysteria, food fights and falling anvils, explosions! This is what lies at the end of the
epistemic enterprise. WHY is that? Well I think it has something to do with the fact that we are
simply loaded monkeys, that our belief that we were proceeding as Gods messengers, or his
research assistants, was somehow ill-contrived, misbegotten. What weve shipped for is not a
voyage of discovery, its more like a ship of fools. Its something which Hieronymus Bosch or
Pieter Brueghel the elder could appreciate. Its probably best summed up in the work of
Groucho Marx, but unfortunately he cant be here tonight.

So I exist in this matrix, as you exist in this matrix, making our way through our lives, our affairs,
our careers, our disasters. The thing that has struck me about it, for some time, and dont
bother telling me its a symptom of serious mental meltdown, I know that, Ive lived with it, but
the thing thats struck me for some time is the artificiality of everything, hows its like plotted,
how its constructed, artificial. It cant be that this is the first iteration. This is not the first take.
There have been many takes. The fingerprints of the editing suite are all over this scene. If you
dont notice that it must be because you take your life for granted. And if you take your life for
granted and you think it makes perfect sense that youre doing whatever you do, this isnt an
issue for you. But for those of us who never thought that we would gaze on the things weve
gazed upon, be the people weve become, see the things weve seen, the whole thing has this
extravagant pynchonesque kind of efflorescence about it that rides right on the edge of
insanity, dare we say it?

The interesting thing is I dont need drugs anymore! I need them to get away from this, this
sense of everything opening into everything else. You know that thing that W. H. Auden said,
about how the glacier knocks in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the
teacup opens, a door to the land of the dead? Well I first heard that maybe 30 or 40 years ago.
He used to wander around this neighborhood. Back then I thought it was about acid, because
thats what I thought everything was about at that time, but now that Ive replayed it to myself
I see that its like an alchemical insight. Its the insight that everything gives way to everything
else. Everything is connected. We know this cliche imported from Malibu and Santa Fe, but its
connected in a way that isnt really, I think, sensed there. Everything is connected in that its
emotionally accessible.

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This is what the Eros part of this thing means to me, if Im to make any stab at it at all. When I
was very young I must have had a very non-traumatic upbringing, because I discovered early in
life a stunning truth thats made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true,
and its that people are very easy to love. In fact, you can love anybody, if you are not
constrained by expectation, class, the momentum of history, race, gender. For a child to make
this discovery, and recall it, stick with it, be able to mnemonically pull it up at such situations
like this, I think is extraordinary. And I stand outside it, I dont draw any conclusions from it. It
hasnt made me a nicer person. Dont try to buy me a drink based on it! Somebody said, loves
Mankind, loathes individual human beings. I dont loathe individual human beings, but I do
enjoy things the further I stand back from them. This is the Hawaiian perspective, the
motivation for being the hermit with the nightclub career.

What this is, is an effort to generalize from one persons life to everybodys life, because the
only thing I really bring to the party is a lot of experience and some ability to articulate it. Its
like its not my story, or its somebody elses story I tell, its just The Story. And this story is the
literary net of synchronistic connectivity that makes life something other than the laws of
physics, particles flinging themselves through nothingness, waves dying out in empty space, this
isnt our experience of being. Our experience of being is meaning. Thats my experience. And
the meaning is not always pleasant or life affirming or even exactly rationally apprehensible.
Sometimes meaning is a palpable thing. Like liquid being poured through cracking ice, language
moves ahead of its intent. It encloses it's object and gives you almost a reverse casting of the
thing intended. There are many ways for words to fits themselves over the contours of
intentionality.

So personality becomes an issue, because in the future personality, if it exists at all, is going to
be a very fluid, dynamic thing. One of our hangups is the idea that we come with one body/one
mind, or one body and a mind split into two parts. All these are social fables, illusions. The
fabric of reality is defined by whatever large numbers of people believe about it, and now, in
the absence of an overarching metaphor that can claim everybodys allegiance, reality is
actually fracturing. Ive called it, "the balkanization of epistemology." Ive poked fun at the
abductees and made jokes about pro-Bono proctologists from nearby start systems.

What this fracturing means is permission to manifest opinion as Art. Thats really all there is;
there is no truth that is different from opinion, nothing is secure. Even mathematics, if you
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understand Kurt GAdel and people like this, even mathematics is an uncertain enterprise. Even
common arithmetic is an uncertain enterprise.

So, what are we left with? When I argued a few weeks ago with Sheldrake and Abraham about
this, I said, We have to look at our messengers. We have to look at the people who bring the
news of the pro-Bono proctologists from nearby star systems, who bring the news of military
establishments trading human body parts for fiber optic technology. We have to examine the
messengers. Well they quickly stomped on that and said no, that wont work, because when
you go back into the history of ideas, lots of screwballs have obtained great success with their
ideas, you dont want to look too hard at Newton or Wagner or Thomas Aquinas, or anybody
else. So the squirrel test, or the fluff test is insufficient. So then what are you left with?
Well, basically, a sense of humor and a battered sense of aesthetics, I think.

Now I dont know how loose-headed the heads in this town are. I rather suspect theyre
screwed more tightly than the situation further west, and screwed more loosely than the
situation further east. But Im telling you, as the world reforms itself in these islands of defined
opinion, the only thing which is going to make sense is sense which is conferred. So it becomes
about Beauty, I think. Beauty. Beauty is an easier to realize value than Political Correctness,
Bodhisattva Compassion, I mean what are these things? Who knows! The rancorous debates
start as soon as theyre mentioned. Beauty is self defined, perceived and understood without
ambiguity. Beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences. James Joyce
said in Finnegans Wake, Here we moult in Moy Kain, meaning in the red light district of
Dublin, and flop on the seamy side. But upmayent, prospector, you sprout all your able and
woof your wings. Well you don't have to go upmayent, prospector, because right here, right
now is a good enough place to do this.

Our past is disappearing. Its almost closing behind us. At the M.O.M.A. today we were looking
at this Russian av-ante-garde stuff, and I was thinking, It seems so far away. They seem
almost like messages as distant as messages from the Sixteenth Century or the Fourteenth
Century. I mean, what does it mean to us, the struggle between Fascism and Bolshevism, the
struggle between the European banks and emerging socialist ideas in the 20s and the 30s? This
stuff arrives absolutely as ancient as the cave paintings at Lascaux Our past is all becoming
more and more somebody elses past, irrelevant to the enterprise of the future. Oh yeah, I
know that if you dont learn from history youre bound to repeat its errors, but the most
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important thing to learn from History is not to do it at all, that its a very bad idea, History. Look
where it got us!

The only way we can essentially redeem what History has done to us, is to carry the
understanding that it wrought back into the enterprise of the human, creating sane systems of
education, of resource extraction, of healthcare and community value. If we dont carry the
experience of history back into those domains, History will continue. I remember once when I
was a fighting radical in the streets of Berkeley, and someone had let a banner down over front
of a building. It was a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre. It said, Socialism will not be transcended
until we transcend the conditions which created it. True history, even more true. The dialogue
about the transformation of the species, the integration of communication technologies,
biotechnology, all this stuff, how its going to work out, is in the hands of shortsighted
profiteering institutions, that are not particularly interested in your welfare or my welfare. In
fact, I dont know if youve noticed, but nobody is particularly interested in your welfare or my
welfare, in terms of the intellectual environment of risk through which you move every day.
The number of cons youre offered, the number of people who prey upon you, all of these
things indicate that the culture has not yet realized the power of its own possibilities.

How will it realize the power of its own possibilities? Im at this point pretty fatalistic: through
time. I dont feel I have to be here tonight or you have to listen tonight for us to come around
any kind of corner. The momentum now is inevitable. Now its about each of us individually
arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable. It wasnt
inevitable, but the Twentieth Century made it inevitable, through the Holocaust, Modernism,
psychedelic drugs, syncopated music, the dislocation of time and space through media, all of
that has now made this transformation inevitable. The human being, adapted to the savannas
of Africa of 120 thousand years ago, is just dragged forward into the future by all of this. If you
can get through life without trauma, heartbreak, agony, murderous rage, fury, betrayal, etc.
etc., youre a better man or woman than I am, for sure. I dont think anybody can get through
the narrow neck of, first of all, incarnation in a body, but more trying, incarnation inside a
historical society that is cannibalistic, low intentioned, and with values that are completely
formed and modeled on the marketplace.

So I think about all of this all the time, and I feel great change. I try to monitor it, especially in
the realm of society and technology. Everything is redefined every 30 days, every 60 days,
redefined toward some kind of singularity, some kind of extra-ordinary moment in the fractal
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pattern of historical unfoldment. You know, fractals are always repetitious, always low levels
build to higher levels, but nevertheless, intrinsically to the pattern, there comes a moment
where there is an apotheosis, a breakthrough to a new level of understanding. And then
whatever the old world was, it simply dissipates. It goes away. Not that there isnt political
struggle, but once the, lets call it, karmic underpinnings of a historical position, especially an
oppressive historical position, once those underpinnings are articulated, revealed, shown in the
light of day, then the game cannot continue.

I feel like in this calendrical moment, we can experience the calendars transformation, or we
can use it, as others are using it, to put forward the idea that certain things are now obsolete,
no longer to be practiced outside the confines of the Twentieth Century, not part of the Third
Millennium. Im thinking of fascism, sexism, racism, all the division based consequences of old
style politics.

People say, Where then do psychedelic drugs fit into all of this? or Do they fit into it? Of
course they fit into it, because the felt presence of experience, the reclaiming of the body,
thats the critical political battleground. Your mind is now your own, in some sense. It was a
mistake; it wasnt supposed to happen that way. But the acceleration of psychedelic use in the
Twentieth Century, the explosive spread of the Interne, in some sense its as though we have
broken from the slaves quarters and are already milling in the streets. But we dont yet have
the power or the understanding to know where the centers of power are, and how it is that
they dis-empower and manipulate us. Thats because we havent focused on the body. This is, I
suppose, the thing which gives the Eros thing cogency.

The body is the battleground for these various definitions of humanness. Eros, representing the
erotic celebration of diversity, is a terrifying specter to hold up in front of the order crazed,
constipated hierarchists who actually have the illusion that they own the enterprise.
Nevertheless, this is what theyre looking toward. This is what was made inevitable by their
own rapaciousness in the past, that they painted us so quickly into a corner of resource
extraction and disgust with media manipulation that a breakout was inevitable, had to come.

My doctor brought it home to me. He was saying to me, as I buttoned up recently after an
examination, he said, You know, in the Nineteenth Century, most people your age were dead.
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This is true. Im soon to be 52; very few people, statistically, reached that level. I think part of
whats happening, and its odd to address an audience so young on this matter, but heres
something your parents may not be telling you, culture as a con is only good for about 35 years
on average. Some people are impressed with culture till they go to the grave at 90; some
people are thoroughly apprised of the fact that its horseshit by the time theyre 19. But the
average persons experience with culture lasts about 35 or 40 years. In the past, that was
enough. Most people then were ready to die without ever blowing their whistle on the game.
What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, where cultural values
make any sense at all. They simply are, after the ten thousandth piece of apple pie, the
sixteenth Mercedes, the five hundredth whatever, its just seen to be intolerable, unbearable,
the agony that resides in matter that the Surrealists were so prescient in insisting upon.

So culture generally is an infantilizing process. And some French people have mentioned this,
but they didnt really put it in a historical context that this neotenizing trick, now so useful to
advertising to create youth crazed values in everybody, it hastens the end of this culture game.
It hastens the awakening of many people to the fact that the felt presence of immediate
experience is not negotiable. It has no price. And yet this is whats taken from you when you go
to the job, when you dress for the image, when you kiss up to the power establishment. When
your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to
being enslaved, lets be frank about it, is enslavement. Its simply that the rules of the game
have been changed. Of course its easy to say if youre unemployed like me. On the other hand,
Im meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever
putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this! Once Id
gone past that, it worked.

Well, I could go on in this vein for some time, as you see, but the thoughts that I wanted to
leave you with tonight on this, because I feel like I am checking in, in some weird way, with my
peer group, and maybe my most critical group as well, which is fine. We dont need any gurus
here, we dont need any "Laying Down of the Law." Anybody who tells you they have a clue as
to whats happening should be suspect for mental illness and delusions of grandeur. The
thought is, and I havent said this yet, but this is the conclusion from all of this: culture is an
effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with
closure, to force closure. Thats why cultural trips are so bizarre, why they dont make sense to
anybody but the Witoto or the Guarani or the Americans or the Japanese; if youre not inside
the culture it seems crazy. The cultures dont make sense because theyre not trying to make
sense. What theyre trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human
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being, who is living in the light of closure, a more manipulate-able, a more malleable, a lesser
thing.

So if the experience of the Twentieth Century didnt do it for you, if psychedelics didnt do it for
you, I dont know what could do it for you! The message coming back at all of us is: live without
closure. Thats the honest position, given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some
kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and
space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If
you have to inoculate yourself against the various memes of closure that are around,
psychedelics do that. Thats why they are so politically controversial and potent because, more
than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake, they pull the plug on the myth of
cultural meaning. They show that these things are provisional, and that beneath the level of
culture there is lurking this erotic, time and space bound, feeling defined, prelinguistic mode of
being, which is real being. Not becoming, not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension
that commodification of culture and delayed gratification and all these other buzzwords create,
but a deeper level of authentic feeling. And it was there all the time, but is denied by the
culture.

If we dont come back to that, if we dont re-access that, then this Historical thing, which grinds
so many people down, none of whom are here tonight, I might add. They are lost in the barrios
of third world cities and in the disrupted environments created by this system, history will
continue. Im fond of quoting Stephen Daedelus, Joyce's character, where he says, History is
the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken. But nightmare is not a strong enough
metaphor. Its a narcoleptic paralysis. Its that horrible thing that happens at the edge of sleep,
its that place where the pro-Bono proctologists from other star systems get their wedge into
the seam, you know? If youve never had that paralysis at the edge of sleep, you dont know the
panic, the constriction, that it engenders.

Were really at a very terminal point on the process of our historical unfoldment, in the same
way that our hunter gatherer phase led into agriculture and advanced role specialization and
urbanization and all that. Now were ready to make another leap. But this time its going to be
done in the light of consciousness, because consciousness is what was garnered in the last leap.
How this is done depends essentially on the collective state of mind, how malleable it is, how
phobic of closure it is, how open it is to the Logos, to the downloading of universal intent into
human understanding, which is what I would call the Logos, and finally, how deeply it operates
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in the light of Eros. How much love is there in this culture? How much love has been carried
intact from the plains of Africa through the Minoan civilization and the Medieval period and the
spread of people around the planet? How much of what we call true humanness made the
journey with us to this new time? Were going to find out. Were going to find out by pooling
the love that is in each of us, in a form in which it is co-extensively shared by all of us. There
may be many ways to talk about what this will feel like, what it will look like, but what it will be,
if it works, is love. If it isnt love, than its less than a perfect sublimation of the alchemical
purpose, and less than perfect is now off the menu. So the only way up is out. Up and out!

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The World and Its Double by Terence McKenna

Well, The World and It's Double is how we styled this. This is simply a high visibility, flashy way
of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text that the world has a double. The world is
not entirely, or completely, what it seems to be. Culture, and by culture, I mean any culture,
anywhere, any time, gives you the message that everything is humdrum, everything is normal.
In other words, culture denies experience. You know, we all have had, and even a population of
non-psychedelic people have had prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of
coincidences, all of these sort of things. These are experiences which cultures deny. Cultures
put in place, Im sure youve heard this word, a paradigm, and then what fits within the cultural
paradigm is accentuated, stressed. And what doesnt fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied,
marginalized, argued against, and we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the
philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of
materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter and pretty
much confined to its surface. The world is what it appears to be.

Now, this, on the face of it, is a tremendously naive position, because what it says is the animal
body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow
the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture. Which is highly improbable. It seems to
me, metaphysical conjecture begins with the logic of the situation, and then proceeds in
whatever direction that logic will carry you. Well, if logic is true to experience, then we have to
make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people anticipation of a future
that has not yet occurred, shared dreaming, all kinds of possibilities that materialism has
denied. For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science,
materialism has had the field all to itself, and its argument for its preeminence was the
beautiful toys that it could create aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft.
But that is a fools argument for truth! I mean, thats after all how a medicine show operates.
You know, the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an entirely
rational way to proceed. And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of rational scientific
culture, we are literally at the end of our rope! Reason, and science, and the practice of
unbridled capitalism, have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary! Theyve
delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about whats
happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it!

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Its not a pretty picture, modern civilization. Most people in the world today are quite
miserable, actually. They have very little hope. Their religions, their traditional value systems,
are being eroded by Dallas and Hawaii 5-0, which are on the village television every night.
Lifespans are being shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment.
And there is very little political light on the horizon. So I believe that its reasonable, looking at
this situation, to say that history failed, and that the grand dream of western civilization has in
fact failed. And now we are attempting, with basically a carved wooden oar, to turn a battleship
around. And its a very frustrating undertaking. The momentum for catastrophe is enormous in
this situation. But its not 100% certain that catastrophe is what were headed for, because we
are not 100% unconscious. There are people struggling to figure out how to control population,
struggling to figure out how to balance the relationship between the masculine and the
feminine, struggling to bring amelioration of hunger and disease to various parts of the world.
So were in essentially a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it,
you see. And part of the western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our
own. And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting Native American culture.
The ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the mega-culture of Nouveau Europa,
whatever that means. Cultures are melted down in the belly of the western scientific beast and
then they become structural members in an ever expanding edifice of western scientism.

However, the psychedelic experience, as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the
world, is apparently a bite too large to swallow. Psychedelics arrived on the western agenda
only about 100 years ago, when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin and extracted
mescaline and for the next 50 years, up until about 1945 (55 years, make it), very little
happened. Mescaline did not, though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and William James, and F.
Weir Mitchell, and it did not spawn a craze. It did not influence large numbers of intellectuals
particularly. Then in the 1940s LSD was discovered, in the 1950s DMT and psilocybin were
discovered, and then in 1966 all these things were made illegal. There was no real opportunity
for western science to grapple with these things before they were decided to be too hot to
handle. Made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people, but taken off
the agenda of scientific research!

In the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies, and medical students
would visit battlefields and the gallows at night, and steal the bodies of victims of war and
executed prisoners, in order to learn human physiology. Where that spirit of scientific courage
has gone, I dont know; but there is very little of it left. Now, people feed at the trough of
government grants and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of actually
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pursuing truth, or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion, divorced

from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of.

If you look at thousands of these experiences, is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve
boundaries between you and your past, you and the part of your unconscious you dont want
to look at, between you and your partner, between you and the feminine, if youre masculine,
and vice versa, between you and the world, all the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves
from feeling our circumstance are dissolved. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening
activity that can go on in a society. People, meaning government institutions, become very
nervous when people begin to talk to each other. (Inaudible input from someone in the
audience) Yes. The whole name of the western game is to create boundaries and maintain
them. The Church and the State, the poor and the wealthy, the black and the white, the male
and the female, the young and the old, the gay and the straight, the living and the dead, the
foreign and the familiar. All of these categorical divisions allow a kind of thinking that is
completely cockamamie. After all, reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable something; and we
understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding, but
it is not the end of the program of understanding! Particulate data has to be recombined in a
paradigm, a seamless overview of what is happening. And the drugs that western society has
traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which
promote mindless repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the
latifundi of the slave driven agricultural project whatever it is, in the corporate office.

This is why every labor contract on this planet, at least in western civilization, contains a
provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times, but the
drug shall be caffeine. Now, the reason why caffeine is so welcome in the workplace is because
the last three hours of the workday are utterly unproductive unless you goose everybody with
two cups of coffee, and then they can go back to the word processor, the widget tightening
machine, or whatever theyre doing, and mindlessly and happily carry on. If it were to be
suggested that there be a pot break twice a day, you know, you would think that civilization
was striking the iceberg or something! And alcohol, our society is an alcohol, red meat, sugar
and tobacco culture. And all of these are forms of speed, basically, in the way that we use them.
I mean, yes, you can tranquillize yourself on alcohol, but youre pushing toward levels where a
lifetime of tranquillizing yourself on alcohol will be a short lifetime, if you use it that way.

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So theres a lot of tension in society between the great exploring soul and the assembly line
citizen. The citizen is defined by obligation, and by the boundaries that define, you know, the
next citizen. Either because its a neighbor, or a worker, or an employer, or something like that
and the grand exploring soul is marginalized as an eccentric or if necessary, more seriously
marginalized as mad in some way. I mean, madness basically, up until the level of physical
violence, means You are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore
theres something wrong with you.

So now, its interesting, and this is one of the points thats dear to me. I mean, they arrive in
different orders each time, but I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience and
the drug is technology. And as technology gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the
human mind, the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory. And for at least
the past couple of hundred years, boundary dissolution has been underway at every level of
western civilization. I mean, you could push it further back: the Magna Carta, the fact that
princes and lords of the realm would actually attempt to force the kings signature on a
document defining their privileges. They are, after all, ordinary human beings. The king is the
divine appointed regent of God in Heaven! So this was a severe boundary dissolution, within
the context of the age in which it was taking place. They were actually saying, You, as Christs
representative on Earth, should seed some of this omnipotence to us mere mortals, suspended
in the political process, well, that leads then to broader demands for human rights. For the
idea that a permanent and large segment of society kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable.
We got rid of debtors prisons, and things like this.

As the collectivity of our humanness becomes an intellectual legacy for all of us, there is a
dissolving of boundaries of race, class, status, language, so forth and so on; and the whole of
the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this. The breakdown of the Soviet Union
was in fact simply, it was even so described, the lifting of the Iron Curtain. Meaning a
membrane has suddenly disappeared, and more and more of these membranes are
disappearing, and what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience meaning
a sense of acceleration of information flow, a sense of rising ambiguity about what it all means.
Everything seems to carry both a good facet and a detrimental facet, the ambiguity of
everything is increasing, the connectedness of everything is increasing. And I will argue, later in
the day, that this is a general tendency of the time and space in which we are embedded, and
that we ourselves are a reflection of this.

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Where is life carrying us? What is this all about? Is it carrying us toward extinction, so that the
rest of Nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief and then get back to the business of nest
building, mating flights and over posturing, and whatever it is that theyre doing out there? Or
is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition? If you look back through the history of life.
Which is a long history, I mean it reaches back a billion years. Its... Every advance happens
suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time. Some of you who stay tuned to the
scientific literature may have noticed this series of articles that were around last week, about
what theyre calling the "Big Bang of Biology," that there was a period of time, incredibly brief,
perhaps between a million and ten million years, when all the phyla of life on this planet
radiated into existence. Some time between 525 and 535 million years ago, just, it all snapped
into existence. The episode in which life left the sea is a similar highly confined transition event.
People recently have written about what they call punctuated evolution; evolution is not,
apparently, a slow curve of unfoldment. It is instead a series of equilibrium states punctuated
by violent fluctuations in between, and then a new equilibrium state.

So history, I believe, is not an aberration, any more than leaving the sea could be called an
aberration of marine existence. I mean, obviously it is not marine existence, and obviously we
are not living in the same world as groundhogs and hummingbirds, psychologically, but leaving
the sea did not represent an ontological transition. It represented an extremely dramatic shift
of modality, and this is what history is. History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing. I
mean, we have packed more change into the last ten thousand years than the billion years
which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in ten
thousand years. If you were to go back to that era, the people would be exactly like people we
see today. They wouldnt be so racially heterogeneous, because the great gene streamings and
migrations that characterize history had not yet taken place, but essentially, perfectly modern
people. Well, then history is apparently, if we view it as a process that Nature tolerates if not
encourages, then history is essentially apparently important enough to place into, jeopardize
the stability of all the rest of the natural Eco-systemic world.

Its as though Nature is saying, We are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger
for 50,000 years in order for the opportunity to be explored of language using, technological
expressing, intelligence carrying all of life to the next level. And its a terrifying enterprise,
because apparently to carry life to the next level, tremendous intellectual sophistication is
required about the release and control of energy. The problem is, energy can be used to
destroy as well as build. So as the human enterprise has moved toward greater and greater
power, and ability to manipulate the environment, the stakes in the cosmic game have risen.
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And now what we have is approximately $100 billion sitting in the center of the crap table, and
one roll of the dice more and were going to either win it or lose everything. Because
intelligence, if we fail, will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet that we have
reached.

Why? Because we have extracted all the available metals near the surface of the Earth; an
evolving species following after us will find the Earth strangely depleted of usable materials,
down to the 1500 foot level, and so intelligence coming beyond us will find it just does not have
the resources to make the leap to technical civilization. So its beginning to look like a one shot
deal. And the psychedelics are in there for two reasons. First of all, because they allow us, as
individuals, to break out of the flat cultural illusion and to rise up and look at this situation, so
its for us a tool to understand our predicament. But the psychedelics are also what has driven
this circumstance to arise in part, because what psychedelics do. and I think this isnt too
challenge-able, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think
otherwise. Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fall out
created by strange ideas! You know, lets build a pyramid, lets build a windmill, lets build a
water wheel! You know, and then empires, philosophies, religions, arise, in the wake of these
situations.

Ive argued in the past, and Im going to try not to repeat it here today because I think youve all
heard it, but I will just mention it in a sentence or two, that the critical catalyst propelling us out
of the slowly evolving hominid line and caused us to take an orthogonal right hand turn into
culture, language, art, yearning, probably was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet
during that episodic moment when we went from being fruititarian canopy-dwellers to
omnivorous pack hunting creatures of the grassland. And it was the inclusion of psilocybin in
our grassland diet that caused us to discover that there is a mind! And you can perturb it!

I mean, think about, and I dont think you could discover consciousness if you didnt perturb it,
because as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasnt a fish. Well,
we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know its there. Well, the reason we know
its there is because if you perturb it, then you see it; and you perturb it by perturbing the
engine which generates it, which is the mind / brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If
you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion, then
you see, its like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water, suddenly the convection currents
operating in the clear water become visible, because you see the particles of ink tracing out the
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previously invisible dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that, and the
psychedelic is like a dye marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say,
Oh, I see, it works like this and like this.

Well, if psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination, and if history is driven by the
imagination, it is driven through the fall out from the imagination, which is technology and
culture. Technology and culture are the consequences, the derivatives, of the ratiocination of
the mind. And technology has, like biological life, but on a much faster, accelerated time frame
technology has this weird tendency to transcend itself, to bootstrap itself. You know, if you
have a cart, then it implies better wheels, better bearings, better structure, and then higher
speed, more control, more feedback from the machine. it means we need gas gauges, RPM
readouts, so forth and so on. Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature,
has itself this self transcending quality.

But ever accelerating, this is the important point, because the ever accelerating accretion of
technology means that history is strangely foreshortened at the future end, because it happens
faster and faster. Its like a process that begins very slowly, but once started has the quality of a
cascade, or you know, the rate at which falling bodies move: 32.5 feet per second, per second!
Each second, it accelerates to twice the rate of in-fall that was occurring in the previous second.
Technology is like this and we now are in a domain where, if we attempt to propagate
technological development forward 50 years, it becomes unmanageable as an intellectual task.
We can talk about the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now. It would float, it
would go 500 miles an hour, it would be guided by your mind, so forth and so on. These kinds
of ideas, but when you think that every artifact of our world will undergo that kind of
transformation, and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena
and situations that we cant anticipate, thats the key thing. Our inability to anticipate the
synergies between our technologies. I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic
superconductivity, those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce
unimaginable consequences!

The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego. I mean, we hope, the straight
people hope that they never meet it except at death. Of course, they dont realize that going to
sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution. But the government is expressive of this dominator
culture that were living in. The ego is a very recent invention, and its hold on reality is very
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tenuous. And consequently it walks around imbued with fear. I mean, it feels itself to be a
mouse in a world of dinosaurs. Thats because its a very recent development.

I guess I have to go back to this scenario of human development, and say just very briefly,
heres how I think this worked. Im not going to run through the whole evolutionary scenario,
but this thing about ego, all primates have what are called dominance hierarchies. That simply
means that the hard bodied, long fanged, young males, kick everybody else around. They
control the females, the children, homosexuals, the elderly. Everybody is taking orders from
this dominance hierarchy. And this is true clear back into squirrel monkeys. Its a generalized
feature of primate behavior. And its an aspect of our behavior, as we sit here. Women, the
feminine, is not honored. The elderly are marginalized. Homosexuals, that whole issue. Many of
our social and political ills stem from this attitude. Well, but you see I believe that when we left
the trees, and admitted psilocybin into our diet, that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries,
and making this maintenance of a dominance hierarchy very very difficult.

First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pairbonding. Thats where it begins. In a society taking a lot of psilocybin, monogamous pair
bonding breaks down, because of the CNS activation, and sexual arousal. So in a psilocybin
using culture, there will be a tendency to orgiastic sexual behavior, rather than monogamous
pair bonding. What that does is it causes an incredible social cohesion, because in an orgiastic
society men cannot trace lines of male paternity. So men's attitude toward children is, These
children are all ours. We the group. Its a glue that we, in our paranoid social style, with
everybody having the deed to their property and their 11 foot high fence, can hardly imagine.
But psilocybin was artificially suppressing this dominator behavior style in the primate, the
evolving proto hominid now human being.

When psilocybin was taken out of the diet, the old, old primate program was still there. It had
not been bred out; the genes were always there; its just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we
medicated ourselves literally, religiously we religiously medicated ourselves every new and
full moon, perhaps oftener; these orgies were happening, creating social cohesion, propagating
everybody forward the problem was, when the psilocybin was taken away, we had been
under its influence for perhaps half a million years. We had evolved language, rudimentary
abstract philosophy, a sense of religion. We had invented technology in the form of using fire
and chipping flint, and all that. The psilocybin goes away, and suddenly these skills, these tools,
these technologies, are in the hands of marauding apes. Not any more cohesive caring human
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social groups, but marauding territorial apes, driven by the desire to control all weaker
members of the social group.

And thats our circumstance! We have, you know, the tools that would allow us to sculpt
paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort. So the
split between our conscious hopes, our best foot, and the bottom of the human scale, is
appalling. I mean, look at the spread! Its a spread from, well from Mother Teresa to serial
killers! I mean, you dont get serial killers in the chipmunk population, or the grasshopper
population! I mean, these animals are not so set at variance with their basic nature that these
kinds of pathologies can erupt. We, on the other hand, are half angel, half pack hunting killer
ape. I mean, we are an object fetish society. I mean, our entire psychology is characterized by a
profound discontent. Thats what were about. It doesnt matter. No matter whats going on,
after a little while we get restless and move on. Other animal species are embedded in a kind of
world of endless genetic cycling. No fox grows bored with hunting, you know?! And yet our
thing is a profound diss-ease.

And I believe its because, and slowly youve forced me to do this whole rap which I swore I
wouldnt do, I believe its because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead. But
then it disappeared, and we are left in this very peculiar situation. This is the myth of the Fall,
you know we are, half angel / half beast, and these two natures are united in every one of us.
And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community, an ascent to a
higher level. If you completely restrict your intake of intoxicants of any sort, then you get the
teetotaler type personality, which is characterized by incredible smugness, limited intellectual
horizons, and an unbearable aura of self congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of
us to put up with.

See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key. Psilocybin, in small amounts, increases
visual acuity. This is not an arguable point, I mean, you can just give people psilocybin and give
them eye tests, and people with astigmatisms see better, your edge detection ability is greatly
increased. Well, you can see that an animal like our remote ancestors, in a hunting
environment in the grassland, if there is an item of diet that will make you a better and more
efficient hunter, the equivalent of chemical binoculars lying around on the grassland, those
animals that avail themselves of this technology will be more successful hunters. And so it was.
Animals using psilocybin were more successful at raising their offspring to reproductive age.
Well, then at slightly higher doses you get this CNS arousal, which in highly sexed animals such
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as primates, arousal means sexual arousal, an erection in the male, so then there is, without the
overwhelming influence of Christian ethics to guide their behaviors, Im sure these organisms
simply flopped in a heap, and you know, sorted it all out later! So thats the middle range of the
dosage. Low dose, success in hunting. Medium dose, social cohesion achieved through ego
dissolution and orgiastic sexuality.

Yet higher doses, 5 grams and up, hunting is out of the question, sex is out of the question,
youre just nailed to the ground by the campfire, and in the course of the evening you discover
religion, philosophy, art, and you know, all of that. So here is a unique chemical that, at every
dose level, synergizes activity that leads to greater coherency and self expression. The driving of
the imagination, yes, in the question back here you said you cant create what you cant
conceive of; this is why what the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the
envelope of the imaginable. I mean, what can be imagined can be created. What cannot be
imagined is not part of the play. So psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of
intellectual product in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas. All of
these things are what we are most unique.

Well, thats how it seemed to me. It seemed to me, culture is a shabby lie, or at least, this
culture is a shabby lie. I mean, if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and
a German automobile! What kind of perfection is that?! We have our secular society, religion is
completely devalued, and consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we
collectively recognize. Im sure youve all seen the T-shirt that says, He, notice he, who dies
with the most toys, wins." That is in fact the banner under which were flying here. And the
level of unhappiness is immense. I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, theyve
always been miserable, but weve managed to create something entirely new in human history,
an utterly miserable ruling class! I mean, there seems no excuse for that!

Transcribed from a cassette tape recorded at Nature Friends Lodge, Sierra Madre, CA on
September 11, 1993.

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Riding Range with Marshall McLuhan by Terence McKenna

McLuhan, I dont know how many of you recall him from the 60s, but he had for a very brief
period of time, about 5 or 6 years, an extraordinary influence on American culture. You couldnt
pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what he said, what
he thought, what he predicted, he was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with
Hollywood, and so forth and so on. His influence, he died in the early 70s, and his influence died
with him, even though he had founded the Center for Media Studies at the University of
Toronto in Canada, he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors.

He was a unique personality and breakthrough, much in the same way that Joyce was a unique
personality, and spawned very few imitators. The irony of all this is that McLuhan did his
journeyman work before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media, he
did his work as a Joyce scholar, thats what he was, a literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist,
that sort of thing. And then in the early 50s he wrote a book which Ive never read, its very
hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride, that was his first testing of his ideas. McLuhan is
primarily understood as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media. Thats what he
talked about, he turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method on the technologies
of communication, printing, film, photography, dance, theater, even such things as money, he
though of as forms of media. And he carried on and analyzed these various forms of media, and
reached very controversial conclusions.

One of the things that was very puzzling to me as I went back through and read all this, is,
McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the 60s, and the whole thing was who
can understand this guy? hes like Buddha, he speaks these words we cant understand. But
now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straight forwardly. Most of what he predicted has come
to pass, I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which the Gutenberg world
has been overturned. I mean, theres no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive
networks, virtual reality, phone sex, and so forth and so on. But this was all grist for the
McLuhanesque mill, and he would have, if he had lived, had much to say on this.

It surprises me in reading this stuff how demanding it is on your literacy. He assumes that the
people hes talking to have read everything and have understood it, from Homer, to Rabelais, to
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Chaucer, to MAD magazine, he assumes you have a complete knowledge of modern film, and
popular print journalism, and popular culture. All of this was grist for his mill.

Ill show you the books Im reading from and talking about and then Ill actually read you a
section of McLuhan, because like Joyce, its a stylistic thing that you cant really encompass
without getting your feet wet. This was his best known book, probably, and this is the original
paperback edition. This book was immensely discussed when it came out, and probably very
little read, judging by the quality of the discussion. Understanding Media, the Extensions of
Man, this is how most people heard of McLuhan. And he followed it up with The Gutenberg
Galaxy. These are all first editions. These books I dont think are in print. Few intellectuals in
this century have fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting, Im going to read from some of it tonight. Its organized
around chapter headings such as Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the
ratio among our senses and change mental processes? Or, Popes Dunciad indicts the printed
book as the agent of a primitivistic and Romantic revival. Sheer visual quantity evokes the
magical resonance of the tribal horde. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of
bardic incantation.

Thats a chapter heading. Topography cracked the voices of Silence. And one of my favorites;
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the
mechanical wave.

Theres a lot of fun in McLuhan, and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar. You just cant
mess with that without fun.

This is his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in poetry and
Painting.

I guess I should say, a few years ago someone asked me to review McLuhans letters, which had
been published, which I did. It was Gnosis, or somebody. Anyway, it brought back to me, he was
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a convert to Catholicism and an extraordinary complex intellectual, with a medievalist who

became a Joyce scholar, who became a communications expert. And in McLuhan there is a very
deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval world, what he called manuscript
culture. Essentially his entire output is a critique of print, and of the impact of print on culture,
and I think, though he attempted to be even handed, his final resolution of all this was that, it
had many detrimental and distorting effects on the Western mind. This is another little book he
published back in the heyday, and he experimented with topographic layout, somewhat
harkening back to the Surrealists whom he discusses a great deal. And there was something
about his fascination with topographical layout that brought him into such congruence with the
Wake.

Let me read you a section from The Gutenberg Galaxy that is both interesting to think about, or,
if you cant understand it, an interesting example of what McLuhans style was like, and what I
mean by the fact that he was an extraordinarily demanding intellectual, he doesnt cut you
much slack.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Till now we have been concerned mostly with the written word as it transfers or translates the
audio-tactile space of sacral non-literate man into the visual space of civilized or literate or
profane man. Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs we are soon in the world of books,
scribal or typographic. The rest of our concern will be with books written and printed and the
results of learning and society. From the fifth century BC to the fifteenth century AD, the book
was a scribal product. Only one third of the history of the book in the Western world has been
typographic. It is not incongruous, therefore, to say as GS Brett does in Psychology Ancient and
Modern (pp. 36-7)

The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning seems to be a very modern view,
probably derived from the mediaeval distinctions between clerk and layman, with additional
emphasis provided by the literary character of the rather fantastic humanism of the sixteenth
century. The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of cunning or the possession of
wits. Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the

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Cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter. Knowledge is thus a capacity for
overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success in this world.

Then McLuhan comments, Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings
into any society, in addition to the split within the individual of that society. The work of James
Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters. His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of
many ideas and many devices, is a free-lance ad salesman. Joyce saw the parallels, on one
hand, between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial and, on the other, between
the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture and the new profane or literate
sensibility. Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly
detribalized Irish world. Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial,
therefore, to the transitional culture of Bloom. In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses
we read: What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement
to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded,
reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and
congruous with the velocity of modern life.

In the Books at the Wake, James S. Atherton points out (pp. 67-8) Among other things, FW is
a history of writing. We begin with writing on A bone, a pebble, a ramskinleave them to cook
in the mutthering pot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfats and great prime
must once for omniboss stepp a rubrickredd out of the word-press. (20.5) The mutthering pot
is an allusion to alchemy, but there is some other significance connected with writing, for the
next time the word appears it is again in a context concerning improvement in systems of
communication. The passage is: All the airish signics of her dipandump helpabit from an Father
Hogam till the Mutther Masons,.. (223.3). Dipandump helpabit combine the deaf and dumb
alphabets signs in the air - or airish signs - with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the
more pronounced ups and downs of Irish Ogham writing. The Mason, following this, must be
the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs. But all I can suggest for mutther is the
muttering of Freemasons which does not fit the context, although they, of course, make signs in
the air.

"Is that perfectly clear?"

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Now, back to McLuhan," Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter expounds by mythic gloss
the fact that writing meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audile world
of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight. The reference to the masons is
to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself. On the second page of the Wake, Joyce
is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, of all the themes and modes of human speech
and communication: Bygmeister Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemens maurer, lived in
the broadest way immarginable in his ruchlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges
had given us numbers Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the
entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases
of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human
progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal
institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then lets make it a wake or awake or
both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a
trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while
quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his
collideorscope. This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of
human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of
cultural clash: deor, savage, the oral or sacral; scope the visual or profane and civilized.

So thats his comment, only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in
which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval
that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious. Nothing is now unconscious if your
data search commands are powerful enough.

The re-making of the human image that required centuries for print, the transition that we
talked about here, from scribal culture to true book culture, occupied 500 years. The transition
from book culture to electronic culture has occurred in less than fifty years. Its eerie to read his
examples of contemporaneity because theres stuff like Marilyn Monroe, Perry Como, James
Dean, I mean, hes writing from another era, and yet, from his point of view, hes firmly
embedded in a kind of super future that we are now able to look back on.

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Heres another section that I think makes some of this more clear.

The medieval book trade was a second hand trade even as with the dealing today in old
masters.

Then, from the twelfth century onwards the rise of the universities brought masters and
students into the field of book production in class time, and these books found their way back
to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing their studies: A number of
these standard text-books, of which approved exemplars were kept for copying by the
stationarii of the universities, naturally found their way into print quite early, for many of them
continued in undiminished request in the fifteenth century as before. These official university
texts offer no problems of origin or nomenclature (p. 102) Goldschmidt then adds, Soon
after 1300 the expensive vellum could be dispensed with and the cheaper paper made the
accumulation of many books a matter of industry rather than of wealth. Since, however, the
student went to lectures pen in hand and it was the lecturers task to dictate the book he was
expounding to his audience, there is a great body of these reportata which constitute a very
complex problem for editors.

So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan, the book is the central symbol of the age, the central
mystery of the time. In a sense I share that notion, its a very Talmudic notion, its a very
psychedelic notion, its the idea that somehow the career of the word is the essential
overarching metaphor for the age. And naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality,
then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual, and this in fact is how I think
reality was seen, until the rise of modern science.

We were always taught of course, how the roots of modern science go back to (?) (inaudible)
and atom-ism, which of course is true, but the number of people who knew that a thousand
years ago was probably very few. The real notion of how out of which science had to divest
itself is the notion of a book, or, if that seems too concrete, a story, a narrative, the story of
mans fall and redemption. That was what the Christian exegesis of post Edenic time was all
about. With the rise of modern science the idea of narrative has become somewhat
overthrown. McLuhan would say that narrative persisted far beyond its utility because the
biases of print kept it in place for such a long time. Everyone assumes that tools are tools and
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you use them and thats that. For McLuhan, the entirety of the toolkit of modern Western man
can be traced to the unconscious assumptions of print. For example, the idea of the individual
which is a pretty personal notion, right there in close to the heart, the idea of the individual, is a
post-medieval concept, legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist
before newspapers, because before newspapers, there was no public, there were only people.
And rulers very rarely bothered to pass on their thinking to anybody other than their closest
associates, and then only for utilitarian reasons.

The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a
print created idea. The idea of interchangeable parts without which our world would hardly
function, there would not be automobiles, buildings, aircraft, interchangeable parts. Thats an
idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printers block. That was the first
industry to ever utilize the concept of easily reformulated sub-units. Its strange, the Chinese
get credit for inventing thousands and thousands of years before Europe, but they would carve
a single block of wood and print it, they didnt get the notion of moveable type. And moveable
type, the distribution of books becomes the paradigmatic model for the distribution of any
product. Its produced, its edited, its manufactured, its sold, and then sequels are spawned.
All products have followed this model, but books were one of the earliest mass-manufactured
objects to be put through this cycle.

Modern city planning, the linearity of it, the way in which land-surveys are carried out, these
are all unconscious biases imbibed from the world of print, and they make sense if youre a
print head. But one of the peculiar things, notice that animals do not possess language. Many
human societies do not possess writing, and very few human societies, only two on earth
invented printing. And yet once invented it feeds back into the evolution of social structures,
and defines everything. And yet its an extraordinary artificiality, and we have been imprisoned
in it for 100s and 100s of years now. Now it is breaking down, and we are changing to a
different sensory ratio, and you might suppose, if you hadnt given this a lot of thought, that
the new electronic media, television and so forth, would carry us into an entirely different
sensory ratio. McLuhan felt differently, he felt that it was restoring us to a medieval sensory
ratio. He felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript than a page
of print. The distinction may seem subtle at first, but if youre looking at a medieval illuminated
manuscript, notice I said looking, you must look in order to be able to understand.

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Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. As a child you learn
what a printed lower case e looks like. After seeing 20, 100, 1,000, 10,000, you know what it
looks like.

You have an expectation of the gestalt of the lower case e. No body opens a book and looks at
print, unless theres some extraordinary abstract discussion going on. We read print but we
look at manuscript because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who
made it, and his or her idiosyncrasies have to be parsed through to get the meaning. Similarly
with television, television is a very low-resolution media, I mean, these are little pieces of light,
pixels, flying back and forth. They must be looked at, they cannot be read, and its an
extraordinarily engaging process. Thats why it creates an entirely different set of social biases
than print does.

McLuhan called these biases, and this is the one distinction or idea of his that made its way into
popular culture, he distinguished between what he called hot and cold media. And people
usually botch this, every time, because nobody really to this day understands what he meant.
So let me read you a little bit about this distinction.

This is in Chapter 2 of Understanding Media, and its called Media Hot and Cold.

The rise of the waltz, explained Kurt Sachs, in the World History of the Dance, was the result of
that longing for truth, simplicity, closeness to nature and primitivism, with which the last twothirds of the 18th Century fulfilled. In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the
emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal
feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles. There is a basic principle that distinguishes a
hot medium like the radio, from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie,
from a cool one like the TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high
definition. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is visually
high definition. A cartoon is low-definition, simply because very little visual information is
provided.

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Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager
amount of information. And speech is a cool medium, of low definition, because so little is
given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave
so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are therefore low in
participation and cool media are high in participation, or completion by the audience. Naturally
therefore, a hot medium like the radio has very different effects on the user from a cool
medium like the television.

A cool medium, like hieroglyphic or idiogamic written characters, has very different effects
from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a
high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist
intensity, burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme
individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal occurred when
extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its impersonal empire over many
lives. The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable prints intensity, led to nationalism
and the religious wars of the 16th Century. The heavy and unwieldy media such as stone, are
time-binders, used for writing, they are very cool indeed, and serve to unify the age, whereas
paper is a hot medium, which serves to unify space horizontally, both in political and
entertainment empires.

And he just goes on like this endlessly. This was his mtier or his media, to connect and
comment on this stuff. Television was really both his own media for reaching a very large
audience, in fact I remember the excitement that swept through, I didnt even have a television,
I was living in Berkeley at the time, and somebody said, we have to go up to the student union
at 6 oclock, because Mike Wallace is interviewing Marshal McLuhan. And it seemed an
incredibly freaky notion that McLuhan would be on TV, it shows you what a stultified
categorically different world we were living in at the time.

Heres just a little bit of McLuhan on television. This is chapter 3.1 of Understanding Media

The Timid Giant

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Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image, is the posture of children in the
early grades. Since TV, children, regardless of eye condition, average about 6 and a half inches
from the printed page. Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page, the allinvolving sensory mandate of the TV image, with perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry out
the commands of the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves
in depth. This is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic book
medium. TV carried the process much further. Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print
medium, with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movement. Pointlessly they strive to read
print in depth. They bring to print all their senses, and print rejects them. Print asks for the
isolated and stripped down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium.

You see? So often very unexpected paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff, and in this book
that he did with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry and Painting, its
an interesting technique, they take a number of works of art, either literature, such as the song
from Loves Labour Lost, by William Shakespeare, or the Ballade de Bon Conseil, of Geoffrey
Chaucer, or the Rubiat of Omar Kayam, and then comment on it. And also visual arts, because
McLuhan really felt that the art historical and technological and architectural output of Western
civilization could be essentially psychoanalyzed. Could be seen as the tracings of the mass
consciousness, and he felt that the evolution of sensory ratios within historical time, had been
very very rapid.

For example he talks about how St. Augustine was a person of great piety and learning, and
people doubting this would show him an open page of scripture, or theological disputation. And
he would look at it for a few minutes, and then they would close the book, and he could tell
them what was written there. And this was taken as proof of his piety. He was as far as we
know the only man in Europe who could read silently at that time. This was a period when the
audial pre-scribal culture was still being assimilated.

McLuhan spends a lot of time analyzing this episode in the 14th Century, when the laws of
perspective spring suddenly into being. Very similar in the way that fractal mathematics have
introduced us to a new superspace. For the Renaissance, spatial perspective was essentially a
filing system for visual data.

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At last they knew where to put everything. And where to look for it once they had put it there,
which, if you have a pre-perspectivist arrangement of space, you have to look, not read, LOOK
at each painting in order to locate where the information is. This is again this read / look
dichotomy.

McLuhan never discussed psychedelics, but psychedelics I think clearly are an extension of
these kinds of media that you have to engage with, that you have to look at, that you cannot
read, that you cannot take for granted, and these give back a much more complex world.
Notice that the world created by print is a world of gestalts, buildings, highways, bridges. We
know how these things are supposed to look, we dont experience astonishment every time we
enter a home, or an institutional edifice, there is a built in set of syntactical expectations in
linear space, and when this is violated it becomes very noticeable and becomes the basis for
architectural or design innovation.

I think that whats happening and I think this would be McLuhans take is that all of these new
media that attempt to suppress the appurtenances of media are in fact having the effect of
returning us to an archaic sensory ratio. And McLuhan was onto this, hes the one that coined
the phrase Electronic Feudalism. He felt that we were headed back to the medieval sensory
ratio because he saw television as like manuscript, but I think had he lived into the era of VR,
psilocybin, HDTV and implants, he would have seen we are not reaching back to the medieval,
that was simply a stepping-stone to the archaic, and we are going beyond the entire domain of
scribal humanity, and actually reaching back to a shamanic, feeling-toned kind of thing.

And all of the breakdown of linearity that you see in the 20th Century, abstract expressionism,
Dada, Jazz, Rock n Roll, non-figurative painting, LSD, all of these things on one level can be
seen, as Ive said, as harking back to the archaic, but on another level, what they can be seen as,
are new behaviors emerging as the cloud of print constellated constipation is lifted, its
breaking down. An interesting question that we would put to McLuhan if we had him here
tonight, is, to what degree can what he said about television, not be applied to HD TV. It seems
to me that HD TV is TV without the biases of TV. And a perfect media is an invisible media, and
print is the least invisible of all media, print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for
conveying information.

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Heres McLuhan on this same subject rather than me dwelling on it.

This is from The Gutenberg Galaxy:

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios
effected by various externalizations of our senses.

It is very much worth dwelling on this matter, since we shall see that from the invention of the
alphabet there has been a continuous drive in the Western world towards the separation of the
senses, of functions, of operations, of states emotional and political, as well as of tasks -- a
fragmentation which terminated, through Durkheim, in the anomie of the nineteenth century.
The paradox presented by Professor von Bekesy is that the two-dimensional mosaic is, in fact, a
multi-dimensional world of interstructural resonance. It is the three dimensional world of
pictorial space that is, indeed, an abstract illusion built on the intense separation of the visual
from the other senses.

There is no question of values or preferences. It is necessary however, for any kind of

understanding to know why primitive drawing is two-dimensional, whereas the drawing and
painting of literate man tends towards perspective. Without this knowledge we cannot grasp
why men ever ceased to be primitive or audile-tactile in their sense bias. Nor could we ever
understand why men have, since Cezanne abandoned the visual in favor of the audile-tactile
modes of awareness and of organization of experience.

This matter clarified, we can much more easily approach the role to the visual sense in language
and art and it the entire range of social and political life. For until men have upgraded the visual
component communities know only a tribal structure. The detribalizing of the individual has, in
the past at least, depended on an intense visual life fostered by literacy, and by literacy of the
alphabetic kind alone. For alphabetic writing is not only unique, but late. There had been no
such writing before it. In fact, any people that ceases to be nomadic and pursues sedentary
modes of work is ready to invent writing. No merely nomadic people ever had writing any more
than they ever developed architecture or enclosed space. For writing is a visual enclosure of
non-visual spaces and senses. It is, therefore an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary
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sense interplay. And whereas speech is an outering of all our senses at once, writing abstracts
from speech.

Thats very interesting, isnt it, that the association with nomadism to the inability to create
architectonic space, and therefore no writing. That a word is a structure, and therefore, no
nomad would ever do such a thing. Interesting. I think he is saying, reading is not seeing, and
those who read, do not see. Even when they lift their eyes from the books, they carry the
attitude of print into the world. They attempt to read nature, and you cant read nature, you
must look at nature, you must see nature. Certainly I think when I think of my own life, I was
thinking about this a few months ago, and it surprised me. I was trying to think of the books
that really influenced me in my life, and I thought of Moby Dick, and Huxleys Doors of
Perception, then when I really got down on it, I realized a little tiny book that Huxley wrote,
that my mother pushed on me when I was about 12 years old, called The Art of Seeing,
probably shaped me as much as anything. And in there, its a very McLuhanesque rap without
McLuhanesque terminology, and he said the way to overcome, and I think this is very very VERY
intelligent and simple advice, Huxley said the way to overcome the printed bias, God knows, he
was a Cambridge-educated gentleman steeped in the traditions of English literacy and
intellectualism, is free-hand drawing. Draw. Train your eye. Draw nudes, draw seashells, draw
insects, go into nature and train the eye to see, and you will cease to read the world. Readers
are emotionally - a seeing person does not want to form a relationship with a reading person.

You know this conflict that we get between men and women, and between people, which we
call the head/heart conflict, is really a reading / seeing conflict, it isnt a head and heart, its that
readers and seers cannot relate to each others emotional life because they seem to come from
such different worlds.

I think that you have a very good point, and the permission to abstract from nature that print
created is why we have such a terrible culture crisis. Because, well, a trivial example, it was said,
by Marshall McLuhan, strangely enough, that the Vietnam war could not be won the way an
ordinary war is won, because the citizenry couldnt tolerate the sight of what war was, and
modern warfare became impossible when it could be televised into the living room, because
war is something that you must read about, you must not see it, it must be this grand thing of
the distant clash of armies and young heroes being created, but when it turns into amputation
and maggots and screams of pain, the political fun goes out of it. So war is therefore a literary
activity, and the one argument that can remain in televisions favor, is people dont like to see
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images of violence. If we have to show so much violence on television, let it always be real. The
violence is only indefensible, when its vicarious. If its real violence, you need to see it, because
its happening in a world for which you have a partial moral responsibility. I think warfare has
been remade by media in that sense. A lot of politics has been remade, because imperial doings
are usually ugly, brutal, and not something youd want to exhibit before the populace. And yet
modern media makes that very difficult to avoid.

You get the notion of public morality, or the people wont stand for this, we have to get this
story out!. The people wont stand for this: now this is a moral dimension inconceivable in
medieval or Roman times, I mean, what would it mean to say, the people wont stand for
this. So theres an attempt to create through the collectivity a kind of community of moral
judgment.

The medium is the message, means that the medium is the thing which is making the
difference. Every discussion you ever hear since the 60s about TV, is it good, is it bad, terrible,
wonderful, always the discussion hinges around whats on TV. People say, well, television is
terrible, it just shows violence, and then somebody else says, No, television is wonderful,
those nature shows and news from far away, and masterpiece theater. This is a stupid
argument. What McLuhan meant by the media is the message, is he meant that it doesnt
matter what you put on TV, TV is TV, it has an intrinsic nature, and whether youre showing
National Geographic specials or slasher movies, TV will do what it does. It has certain qualities,
just like driving a car or skiing, certain muscles are going to be exercised, perceptual systems
enhanced, others suppressed. And its very hard for us to understand this, because we have
accepted this media so thoroughly into our life, that in fact it is shaping our values systems in
ways which are very hard for us to measure or even detect.

I mean, television, for example, its a drug, it has a series of measurable physiological
parameters that are as intrinsically its signature as the parameters of heroin are its signature.
You sit somebody down in front of a TV set, and turn it on, 20 minutes later, come back, sample
their blood pressure, their eye movement rate, blood is pooling in their rear end, their
breathing takes on a certain quality. The stare reflex sets in, I mean, they are thoroughly zoned
on a drug, and when you think about the fact that the average American watches 6 and a half
hours of television a day, imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948, that we all spent 6 and
a half hours per day on average watching.
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And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, its very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a
mirror. But television isnt a mirror, television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their
money, can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation. What
McLuhan wanted to become I think was the founder of a general new sophistication about
media, and he was essentially parodied to death by guess what? Media. They made of him an
icon of cultural incomprehensibility. Not since Einstein have you been programmed in advance
to believe, you aint going to understand this guy. And thats what they said about McLuhan
and consequently his message and his insight failed. We will have to reinvent McLuhan around
the turn of the century, because we are producing forms of media of such interactive power
and potential social impact, that were going to have to go back and rethink all of this.

Transcribed from the Mystic Fire Audio Cassette dated October of 1995.

Left: Terence McKenna; Right: Marshall McLuhan

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Light of the Third Millennium by Terence McKenna

All right, wonderful to see so many people turned out after just having been here a scant year
ago. Im delighted that they invited me back. The deal is no jokes about Camarro raffles, no
jokes about MultiVite suppositories, so just consider it as if it didnt happen. No, it is a pleasure
to be here. Im fascinated by this green and intelligent part of Texas. I grew up with all the
prejudices against Texas that you have in Western Colorado where Texans arrive to kill our elk
once a year and then depart and leave us once again bereft of glory and drawl. So, I did a radio
show, some of you may have heard it, and it was an occasion to be up at the campus,
wonderful university. I see a lot of universities and a lot of them look like air force bases and,
you are very fortunate to have the University of Texas at Austin. There is some great people
associated with that faculty. Okay, let me get a whet whistle here.

How many people have read at least one of my books? A lot of people. Well, so, what Im
thinking is, I have some things on my mind and Ill run through that but Id like to leave a lot of
time for Q&A because my thing has several facets and maybe youre interested in Salvia
divinorum and Im raving on about modeling and animation or maybe youre interested in the
end of history and I cant shut up about serotonin metabolism. So, this is all part of the picture
but driven by your needs and your agenda I think its much more fruitful, its much more fun for
me. The audience is in these things, are, are the great joy and I should say to you as I say to all
my audiences, the psychedelic community is still small and tight. And we look pretty much like
everybody else out there. Thats part of our victory, I might point out. Its not that we came to
look like them, its that they finally let it down, and now they all look like us. But a gathering like
this is an occasion to actually see your local psychedelic communities. So, take a look around.
Somebody in this room has what you need. And its like an intelligence test, isnt it? All social
interaction is, it turns out.

Okay, I guess I should bring up today on what Ive been doing before I plunge into the heart of
this, since, I guess my own life is my own adventure and how I then read the larger picture of
reality. I think everybody sees their life that way, after all, if youre not the hero in your novel
what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing. Robert Anton Wilson once said, he
said that we should define reality as a plot run by a closely knit group of insiders, yourself and
your friends of course. I mean, if you dont believe that you have a losers scenario and who
needs a losers scenario? So what Ive been doing since I saw you last, is basically a lot of
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traveling. I went to South Africa last October, and that was an education, was a non-stop two
week intensive education in humanness, third world colonial politics, Dutch Afrikaner history, a
whole bunch of things I knew very little about. It was inspiring, challenging, amazing. Africa, the
human home is right now the great theater of struggle for the human soul. How we deal with
the social and political problems of Africa is saying a great deal about how we will judged by the
future. The problems of Africa are almost entirely created from the outside of Africa. And the
solutions which are being produced on native soil need all the nurturing and support that we
who cheer on the brotherhood of man can give it. And then in February I went to Australia. And
if I had known about Australia what I know now thirty years ago Im sure my life would be very
different. I said last night at a book signing, its weirdly like Texas. I mean its large, its largely
empty, and it has a very eccentric population of hard driving folks who are lovely to party with
and know how to barbecue. So, what more can I say? Okay, so enough with personal
reportage, local color, putting us all at ease and all the rest of that forensic malarkey, cut to the
chase.

When I think about talking to you, an audience like this, I go through my toolkit and try to say,
you know, what is cogent, whats meaningful, what can bring us forward. And there seem to be,
its a changing list, but at the moment what seems to be going is the old perennial psychedelic
alteration of consciousness for purposes of personal exploration, social reformation, creation of
a new art, a new politic. Thats one of the major pieces of the puzzle. Another major piece is the
new communications technologies, and I mean not only the Internet but the software that
allows us each and everyone of us to be animators, filmmakers, visually expressive people who
can produce emotionally moving works of great depth and beauty. This is something that
technology has brought to us. And strangely enough a technology largely produced by
psychedelic heads, people like ourselves. I told you last year, I think when we discussed drugs
and technology, that the only difference between a computer and a psychedelic was, one was
too large to swallow.

Well, you know, great progress has been made in twelve months, uhh, in another three or four
years we will be able to swallow the computer. Some of us may never be able to swallow it. The
third piece of the puzzle, which is sort of mine alone to play with, since no one else wants to be
this publicly crazy, is the whole business of novelty theory, the approach of a singularity in time,
that is sculpting the human and natural world and that is so large an object in the intuitive
sphere of human beings, that it almost has religious overtones. And then the question for me,
and the question for you I suppose is, how much of this can you take without having to take it
all? How much of these ideas can you imbibe without having to go the whole distance? And the
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answer is, you know, its a personal matter for each person to feel into their circumstance
which means their history, both psychedelic and non-psychedelic. And then to feel into the
projection of their future. Do you think you are repeating the lifestyles and algorithms of your
parents and grandparents ad infinitum back to Adam, or do you feel like you stepped to the
front of the train of human evolution, that you are making yourself new every day? If we reach
too far back into the stabilizing metaphors of the past we get rigidity, habit, limitation. If we
step too quickly into the unlimited freedom of the future we loose our grounding. Socialism did
this over the past hundred years and because it abandoned any contact with a realistic human
psychology, the best intended people ended up creating nightmare societies. If your theory is
not true to the nature of humanness you will end up beating human beings like metal on the
anvil of your ideology. And this creates great human suffering and, uhh, historical catastrophe.
And I maintain that our own society suffers from a failure to adequately model and reflect the
true nature of human beings. We have ideas, we have ideals that get in the way of realism and
immediate experience. And when I was thinking about all of this and how to put I into a
metaphor that would be appealing and amusing and lead people to look deeper into these
things, I began to play with the idea, its a religious idea. You all have heard, although probably
more often in English than in Latin, the thought, In principo est verbum et verbo caro factum
est, which means In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh. This is the
great overarching myth of western religion. It equally informs Islam, Christianity, Judaism.
These three great flavors of monotheism all accept this primary statement In the beginning
was the word and the word was made flesh. What does it mean, for a moment taken away
from the tired exegesis of the cults that have hammered at it for so long? What does it mean in
and of itself? It means that language is somehow the privileged medium of exchange between
human beings and the divine. That the descent of the word into flesh makes the flesh more
than flesh, makes the word more than the word. The union of flesh and word launches the
cosmic drama of fall and redemption that is the Ur-myth of western society. And for centuries
and centuries weve concentrated on one end of the story of the fall and the redemption. We
have concentrated on the fall.

But meanwhile through all the grimy betrayals and bloody backsliding of human history the
word has quietly advanced its agenda. And Ive been thinking a lot about this recently, because
in a new book Im writing Im writing a lot about spoken language, speech. And Ive come to a
conclusion that, typical of me, is far from orthodoxy and far from much cover provided by
anybody elses ideas on this matter. Ive come to the conclusion that language is very old,
thinking is very old, communicating is very old, by glance, by gesture, by dance, by meme, by
intuition. But speech is very recent. Its a technological innovation as fresh as the Pentium chip
or the spinning wheel. Its something someone invented somewhere. Its the most successful
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technological leap forward ever made. Its the discovery of symbolic signification that annoys,
meaning nothing can by convention be given a meaning. And that that meaning will then attend
that utterance wherever it occurs in the presence of those who have joined in the agreement
that attaches the symbol to the meaningless utterance. Its a coding breakthrough. Somebody
hacked this about 35,000 years ago. And immediately, as forms of media have a way of doing, it
swamped the previous methods of communication. Because it worked in the dark, suddenly
evenings were not so boring any more. It worked in the dark. It also, the touchy-feely forms of
communication were generally one on one and related, probably, to having sex or aggressive
physical encounters. But suddenly one voice could reach many and many could respond. And
virtual reality was born at that moment. Not here in the late 20th century but at that moment,
because acoustical environments laden with symbolic meaning became the name of the game.
Stories is what we call these things and they are the proper use of the advanced form of
medium know as human speech. Its using human speech to create three dimensional scenarios
that unfold and everyone is carried along with the drama and the wonder of it. From that
beginning in a series of successively accelerating leaps the word has made its way into the
world. Its interesting that straight linguists and paleo-linguists believe human language is no
more than 35,000 years old. Imagine that! We possess homo sapiens sapiens skeletons a
110,000 years old. People like the persons who rode with you on the bus yesterday, people that
modern. And yet the experts tell us no one spoke until 35,000 years ago. No one wrote until 5
or 6,000 years ago. Reading and writing is simply a carrying forward of the original program of
signification, first using acoustical signals and then some other hacker had the brilliant idea.
Well, if we can use sound to carry abstract associations, why not abstract symbols to carry
abstract associations? And writing was born. And what writing allows is expansion of the
database because things are not dependent on the wetware of the human memory to survive
from generation to generation. Suddenly the mush of brain is replaced by the durability of
wood, and stone, and clay. And these things then become the medium upon which the primary
database of the culture is being carried forward.

Well, the rest of the story you know and this is not a lecture in the history of communication.
Each succeeding refinement in communication has brought the word deeper into its association
with the flesh, until the present. And at this moment there is a kind of a, what dynamicists call a
cusp, a turning of the system upon its axes and the word is now beginning to make the return
journey to the mysterious and hidden source from which it descended. In other words, spirit is
now beginning to disentangle itself from matter. The 20th Century will be remembered as the
great clash point, the great arena of conflict between the triumphal positivist and rational
systems that European thought has developed over the past 300 years and the new irrational
systems of thought which anthropology cheerfully imported into white high culture in the guise
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of reportage about the primitive. But this reportage about the primitive turns out to be a kind
of ouroboric conundrum, the snake taking its tail in its mouth. In the past hundred years as
these super technologies have been developed in the West, the smashing of atoms, the
invention of radio, television, computers, immunology so forth and so on, data has been
arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet. That they dissolve
ordinary realities, ordinary cultural values through an interaction, a symbiosis, a relationship to
local plants that perturb brain chemistry. And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry the
cultural operating system is wiped clean. And something older, even for these people,
something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animals soul replaces it, replaces the
cultural operating system. Something not determined by history and geography but something
writ in the language of the flesh itself. This is who you are. This is true nakedness. You are not
naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your
prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating
system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche. Desmond
Morris called it The naked ape. And its from that position, a position outside the cultural
operating system that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be
human, what kind of circumstance are we caught in and what kind of structures, if any, can we
put in place to assuage the pain and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks waiting for
us in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave. In other
words, we have to return to first premises. So, Ive been thinking about this a lot. And at first it
seemed to me only a metaphor, this phrase Culture is your operating system. But because as I
travel around a lot and get this jolting experience frequently of lets say leaving London on a
foggy evening and arriving in Johannesburg 14 hours later to a sweltering day in a city of 14
million on the brink of anarchy, I get to change my operating system frequently. And so I notice
the relativity of these systems. And some work for some things and some for others. For
instance, if you are a positivist, if youre running positivism 4.0 you cant support UFOs.
Positivism 4.0 does not support UFOs. If on the other hand youre running Urantia Book 5.1 8 as
your operating system UFOs and a number of other things can get in through the door. That is,
what we would technically say, a more tolerant operating system, or its plug in support special
effects benighted at the positivist. Well, its fun to think this way because it shows you that you
dont have to be the victim of your culture. Its not like your eye color or your height or your
gender. Its fragile, it can be remade if you wish it to be. And then the question is, well, how
does one download a new operating system? Well, first of all you have to clear some space on
your disc. The best way to do this is probably with a pharmacological agent.

Umm, you think of one while Ill have a drink of water...

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You can put a lot of things in the trash and have them just disappear with a psilocybin upgrade.
Other pharmacological agents that will clear your disk are ayahuasca. And of course these are
gentle clearings of the disk which take five, six, seven hours. If youre in a hurry to dump that
old data and leap right into the new operating system click on the button marked
dimethyltryptamine. A compressed disc erasure will immediately be downloaded un-stuffed,
bin hexed, implemented, installed, run and you will find yourself with an entirely different
head. Now shamans have always known, though they may not have used the kind of language
Im using here, shamans have always known this trick. What trick? It has two facets. First of all
that culture is an operating system, thats all it is, and that the operating system can be wiped
out and replaced by something else. So in, essentially whats going on among shamans and
those who resort to them for curing and counseling and so forth is, somebody is running a
slightly more advanced operating system than the customer. The shaman is in possession of
certain facts about plants, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about the
local geography, about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of. The client is
running culture lite. The shaman paid for the registered and licensed version of the software
and is running a much heavier version of the software than the client. I think we should all
aspire to make this upgrade. Its very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your
operating system otherwise somebody is gonna be able to get leg up on you. Well, whats
wrong with the operating system that we have? Consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is.
Well, its dumb! Its retro, its very non-competitive. Its messy, it wastes the environment, it
wastes human resources, its inefficient, it runs on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate,
which is what creates stereotypes, low sample rates make everybody appear alike, when in fact
the glory is in everyones differences, and the current operating system is flawed. It actually has
bugs in it, that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as were cutting the earth from
beneath our feet. Were poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent
behavior. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system thats making it produce erratic,
dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior. Time to call a tech. And who are the techs? The shamans
are the techs. Well, so I think you get the idea, uhh, very important to upgrade your operating
system by dumping obsolete cultural subroutines. They are simply taking up disc space. They
are not advancing you in any way whatsoever.

Now, a very large group of people who followed this advice and rebuilt their operating system
in the 1960's, went on then to build this most amazing of all cultural artifacts, the Internet. The
Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I dont care if its being used to peddle pornography, I
dont care if its being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important
point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely
new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this
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were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever
fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda. The Internet basically
means, you can now be as free as you are motivated to be, as free as you dare to be. Tim Leary,
years ago, it was something he used to say, it never got quoted as much as, turn on, tune in,
drop out, but it seemed to me it was maybe better advice, and he used to say: Find the
others, find the others! Well, you know, if youre a gay kid in Fargo, North Dakota, if youre a
mescaline enthusiast in Winnipeg, if youre a student of alchemy in Moosejaw, community is
pretty much out of reach for you, or it was until the coming of the Internet. And the Internet
introduces everybody, no matter how weird, no matter how marginalized, no matter how
peculiar, to the fact that there are others like you. There are others like you. Find the others.
Make common cause. Realize that its the deals you cut and the friends you make that
determine where youre going to be standing when the flash hits. I mean, thats just obvious
and by, you see, the cultural game is a game of uniformitarianism. Cultural myths are that we
are all alike. We Americans, each created equal. I mean, if you can believe that at an
operational level, then I have some bridges I would like to sell you, uhh, its a necessary truth to
do political business but it is not the truth. The truth is that you are not created equal with your
self from day to day, leave alone any comparison with anybody else. You are not the person
you were yesterday nor the person you will be next week. What is an observation like that?
What shadow does it cast on a world of all people are created equal? Clashes of operating
systems. Theres an axiom in one all created equal and an axiom in the other each divergent.
These things cant be parsed, they cant be brought together.

So, culture plays a game of simplification. If you can make people think alike they will buy alike,
they will worship alike, and if, you know, politics demands it they will kill alike. So, the
uniformitarian agenda of culture is not an agenda friendly to you or to me or to any other
individual. And if you start out from that point of view, you will soon realize that culture is not
your friend. Now this is not exactly PG-13 to say what if everybody running around recovering
their Latvian roots and their Irishness, and their this, their whatever, culture is not your friend.
If you define yourself as a member of a group, of any group, know that that is a gross
simplification. And that everything about you that is interesting and unique is betrayed by
defining yourself in that way. You know, most racism is practiced by people of the race that
they are making racial judgements about. White people have far more racial opinions about
white people than any other racial group because thats where they spend their time. These
gross simplifications betray humanity, betray uniqueness, make sane politics impossible. What
we have to do is get back to the reality of the flesh. The reality of the individual identity. This is
how we come packaged. A race thats an abstraction. These days you have to have three years
of genetics under your belt to give a satisfactory definition of the word if we really gonna go to
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the mat on it. I mean its an abstraction of modern science. Its a notion so far removed from
anything you and I come in contact with that we should just junk it. What we need to celebrate
is the individual. Have you not noticed , I certainly have, that every historical change you can
think of, in fact any change you can think of, forget about human beings, any change in any
system that you can think of is always ultimately traceable to one unit in the system undergoing
a phase state change of some sort. No group, there are no group decisions. Those things come
later. The genius of creativity and of initiation of activity always lies with the individual. And its
very interesting that this is what the psychedelics address. They address us uniquely as
individuals. You can sit next to somebody who drank from the same bottle you did and be
perfectly confident that their experience has very little congruency with your own.

Well, so then if we let the scales of cultural values fall from our eyes and try not to look at the
world through the eyes of science, or democracy, or capitalism, or Christianity, what is there
beyond ideology, what are the facts of the matter? As I see it, the most visible facts on the
surface of things, on the surface of being, I see the law of increasing complexity. Things have
gotten more complicated through time. I have never met anyone who could successfully argue
against this. That doesnt mean its true but it means that maybe, as Wittgenstein used to say,
True enough. True enough. That as you approach the present moment in the only area of the
universe which we have accurate data about, which is this planet, things become more
complicated. A million years ago there were no human civilizations, a thousand years ago there
were no machines to speak of, a hundred years ago there was no communication infrastructure
to speak of, ten years ago there was no Internet, eighteen month ago there was no Java. Things
are complexifying, intensifying, moving together.This is the universal drama that is reaching
culmination in our lifetimes. Because, and I offer this, dont believe me for Gods sake, dont
believe anybody, just take this stuff in and then measure it against your own experience. The
second extra cultural fact that Ive been able to discern, the first being things get more
complicated as you approach the present, and the second being, that process of
complexification is occurring faster and faster. The early universe was very slow moving. It took
a long time for things to cool down and life to begin its agonizing march out of the slime into
animal form, meeting extinction and catastrophe and setback after setback but always picking
itself up, literally, out of the mud and moving forward. Well, as life left the ocean the pace of
evolution quickened. As life radiated across the land the number of phyla multiplied the
number of species multiplied, finally, a million years ago, pick a number, a million and a half
years ago, the higher primates begin to use tools, fire enters the picture. And just as an aside,
isnt it interesting how long people used tools and fire before spoken language enters the
picture? I mean, we possess tools a million years old, human tools, language 35,000 years old.
When I was in South Africa last year, I was in this place that reminded me of, like the Four
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Corners area around Moab Utah, was like nothing like I had expected South Africa to be, and
when I wasnt teaching I would wander the dry arroyos and hunt for human tools. And there
was an archeologist staying in a bar, or in the hotel there and we would drink in the evening in
the bar, and I would lay my days find out on the bar, and he would sort it into piles and he says,
Nothing in this pile is less than 165,000 years old. Everything in this pile is from..."
-=Cut Tape=...human tools, were talking about. Now Ive lost my thread because I was so thrilled with my
side bar. I think I can get it back, uhh yea, here it is, here it is, ha ha, and they say potheads
cant think! Here it is. The second obvious fact which haunts the post cultural viewpoint is this
acceleration of change, and Ive sort of built my career on this because I am a rationalist but I
feel the emotional power of this thing. We are caught in a basin of attraction, to use a
mathematical term. In other words we are under the influence of something which is pulling us
into the future or into novelty, if you want to put it that way, at a faster and faster rate. So
problems which are presented in the following terms If we dont do something in 500 years we
will run out of this that or the other or, If we dont do something, in a thousand years this or
that will happen, these are meaningless, statistics. Because the acceleration into novelty is
rewriting the rules now every eighteen months. We are descending now into a well of novelty
such that more change is now occurring in a single human lifetime than occurred in the
previous ten thousand years of human history. We are approaching at a faster and faster rate
something unthinkable. Something which is sculpting us in it's image. something which
shamans have always known was there though they may not have used the metaphor ahead in
time,' thats a Western download of where it is, because you could just as well say its in
heaven, or behind us in time, or everywhere, or nowhere. The point is were about to arrive in
its presence. And, it is shaping us to prepare us for the arrival. It is making us more and more in
its image. This is not a new process. This began a long, long time ago. But its now reaching its
culmination. And I said a few minutes ago The Internet is a light at the end of the tunnel. The
Internet is the beginning of a nervous system that is knitting not only all human beings but all
life together, all information together. Because, you know, there already is an Internet. Its
called the integrated ecosystem of Planet Three. It runs on pheromones, it runs on weather
systems, ocean tides, tell uric currents moving in the earth, thousands of methods. It is that
way because our cultural tradition is one of reductionism, tearing things apart, break them into
their subordinate units, break those into still smaller units. Well, if you have a theory of reality
like that, what you end up with is, all the pieces spread out and no car and nowhere to go. But
nature has always operated as an integrated system of communication and the Internet is in a
sense nothing more than a human aping of a natural system already in place. If we could do it
through pheromones, light mycelium and electromagnetic pulses through the earth, we
wouldnt be stringing copper and cable and fiber optic. Those things are simply historical
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artifacts of the moment. What lies ahead on the Internet, what lies ahead, I think for us, and
this is the last point I really wanna make. And we can talk about all this, is, you know, I have
been a true resister of the alien penetration of human civilization because I just saw no
evidence for it. But the chant that they are coming has now grown so loud, I feel like sort of one
has to ask oneself short of one hundred percent skepticism, what the hell is going on with this
alien hype? And I think the problem is one of modeling and intelligence. There is an alien, we
are in the cultural process of meeting this alien but they do not come in thousand ton beryllium
ships from Zeneba Ganubi to trade high technology for human fetal tissue. I mean that, if you
be, thats an intelligence test, folks. Thats not how it works. Our own hysteria makes it very
difficult to deal with the presence of the alien, and the alien knows that. Thats why it has
disguised itself as a psychedelic experience, I think.

You know how in all this 50s B science fiction movies there was always this theme of the
landing area. And I saw it in Mars Attacks! too. There must be a landing zone. Somehow we
must let them know that we welcome them by building a landing area. And the Nazca plane has
been claimed and on, and on, and on. I think that the alien is a creature of pure information. Its
purely information. Its non-local. It comes out of the Bell non-locality part of the universe that
exists distributed through hyperspace. The alien is real but it is only made of information. And
therefore the only dimension in which it can be encountered is a dimension of pure
information. Fortunately we are building a dimension of pure information. Providentially we
have named it The Net. The Net is a net for catching the alien mind. How will it come? Will it
descend upon our websites in a flash of light? I dont think so. How it will come is half through
human fingers. The alien is real but it is within us. It can only communicate information. And
that information has to be made real in this world by human coders. So if we were to set out
lightheartedly to build a virtual reality as alien as we could make it, I maintain that three
quarters of the way our hair would be standing on end because we would realize we are not
inventing this. We are discovering it. You know, Michelangelo said, The form is in the block of
marble. What I do is I take away the part that is unnecessary and reveal the human torso. In
the same way the alien is already within us but we must model it, we must call it forth into a
dimension of potential dialogue. And I think that this is what high tech society can bring to the
shamanic equation. Shamans have been dealing with spirits, entities, powers for more than
100,000 years. But it has always been on a one to one basis. One human being at a time went
up Mount Sinai to talk to the fire on the mountain. But with virtual reality we have a technology
to show each other our dreams and, yes, our hallucinations. And as we begin to show each
other the contents of our heads and as we begin to explore the alien niagaras of beauty that
pour through your consciousness under the influence of some of these substances.

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We are going to discover that we are not what we thought we were. The monkey flesh is being
penetrated by something... Dare I say it? Divine! Or at least alien, trans-planetary and beyond
the power of human comprehension. I dont know if we are talking about God Almighty here. I
dont know if we are talking about the god who hang the stars like lamps in heaven, as Milton
says. That seems a tall order. Maybe what we are talking about is the god of biology.

Something has happened to this planet. It has been infected with an informational, call it virus,
call it force, call it beam? That is using matter and yes, using our flesh and our thoughts to
bootstrap itself to higher and higher levels. And now the prosthesis of machinery and the
possibility of an artificial intelligence raises the real option of producing of actually midwifing
the birth of an entirely new, not species, but order of biological and intelligence in existence.
The human machine symbiote is upon us. I mean its been with us for a while since the first
wheel was carved, since the first stick was sharpened but that was all very simple stuff. Now its
clear that we are in partnership with another mind which comes to us through our machinery's
and through the biosphere. Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture we
discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising, presence of this intelligent other which
beckons us out of history and says, you know, The galaxy lies waiting. A galaxy, or galaxies lie
waiting. Loose the encumbrances of three dimensional space. Return with the word to its
higher and hidden source. And at that point you will discover the alchemical Paraclete will be
given unto you. The alchemical dispensation will be given and as James Joyce said, Man will be
dirigible." What did he mean? He meant that we will loose the limitations of physical and three
dimensional space. We are destined to become mental creatures, But isnt this a terrible
thing? What about this, that, and the other? All the things youre worrying about, we turned
our back on 25,000 years ago. we have been marching through this virtual reality of our own
creation for the entire duration of what is called human history. Now, uhh, is there a political
implication to all of this? I think the political implication is a personal one. We all must try to
understand what is happening. We need to try to understand what is happening. And in my
humble opinion ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody understands what is
happening. Not Buddhists, not Christians, not government scientists, not, you know, no one
understands what is happening.

So forget ideologies. They betray, they limit, they lead astray. just deal with the raw data and
trust yourself. Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their
understanding doing you? People who walk around saying, Well I dont understand quantum
physics but somewhere somebody understands it. Thats not a very helpful attitude toward
reserving the insights of quantum physics. Inform yourself. What does inform yourself mean? It
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means transcend and mistrust ideology. Go for direct experience. What do you think when you
face the waterfall? What do you think when you have sex? What do you think when you take
Psilocybin? Everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies. So liberate yourself
from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do. And then
the other political implication toward community is, a lot of people are going to be very anxious
because change raises anxiety in people and people who have limited opportunities to educate
themselves because of culturally inflicted abuse are scared because they can sense that
everything familiar is giving way but they dont want to embrace the unimaginable. These
people need to be reassured. They need to be reassured by example and by hearing optimistic
and reasonable rhetoric about the future. Selling the future as an eight alarm fire, which is how
the media does it, only makes a sane future impossible.

So we need a responsible approach to thinking about the future and it means taking personal
responsibility, for your drug taking, for the ideas, the memes, that you push into society, and
for the images that we share among ourselves. You know, one of the great truisms of the new
age is that images can heal. But I never heard anybody discuss the obvious contrary implication
which is, images can make you sick. And you are constantly bombarded with images which disempower, divide, confuse and make crazy, basically. So, I think psychedelics are such political
dynamite in any culture is because they dissolve cultural assumptions. The scales fall from
peoples eyes and they say, Does this make sense? Does my job make sense? Does my
relationship make sense, to my significant other, to my government, to my children, to my
environment? Do these relationships make sense? And of course the answer for most people
in high tech society is no. Weve been compromised, weve been deluded, weve been sold a
massive pottage.

The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside
of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a
commitment to community and a motto of To the future, without fear!

Without fear!

This talk was transcribed from a cassette tape marked, "Austin Texas 1997."

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