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Psilocybin and the Sands of Time

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December 1982

SEN Interview, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

8169

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Frank [surname unknown]: Welcome Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna: Thank you very much [laughs]

F: Um, what I, what I'm, kind of, first of all interested in is your, your education, like you know, how come that you developed this very particular kind of interest.


ut it was not until the Amazon that I saw that this was possible in a way that was accessible to me. So then I concentrated on those people, those chemical families and that, uh, that then became the compass for all the work that I've done since then, and, uh, I regard the degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don't really, uh, there is no degree in shamanism. But, my interest was basically one in the phenomenology of religious experience, religious traditions worldwide and, uh, primitive people against a background of tropical nature. And, uh, stumbled onto the mushrooms in the jungles of Colombia in 1971 and was not even particularly interested in mushrooms at the time. We were looking for a, m-less well-understood drug that is still not discussed much in the literature but exists in a very circumscribed area among three Indian tribes. And we went into the jungle to stay at a mission that served these Indians, and the priest at this mission had cleared pasture and brought in white cows and there were many, many of these mushrooms. And as soon as we started experimenting with them, I realized that what I had been told about psilocybin, which was that it was analogous to LSD but simply required a larger amount for the effect to be present, was, uh, a complete simplification of the issue. And actually, then, psilocybin became the focus of my interest and, by extrapolation, the other tryptamine related hallucinogens.

F: You just mentioned that, uh, that the mushroom is really important for our country right now. Do you perceive yourself an advocate to bring into our culture new elements like an easy way to reach altered states of consciousness? What can we learn from these experiences?

F: How do you perceive in this context the future of mankind and the human mind?


F: How do you perceive in this context the future of mankind and the human mind?

F: Were you just talking about the Bell theory?

F: What is the Bell Theorem you were talking about?

F: Some people talk about entities?

F: This is all what Jung called the Collective Unconscious?

F: Are these entities coming from outer space or are they more part of us?

F: It’s not important to know the context? It’s more important to know the content?

Female audience member: Terry, are you--are you a shaman?

F: Are you an exploring shaman?

F: Do you want to everybody to take this drug...goes out and takes the drug, or...

F: You mentioned earlier mankind evolving towards a teleological goal. Would you kindly tell me, what is the goal?

F: Do you have any comments about the fact that DMT is located in the human brain?

F: You stated earlier that psilocybin is coming from outer space. There is a possibly that the mushroom is?

F: Uh, can I ask another question, uh, it'll be the last one?

F: What do you think is evil? And, can these mushrooms be misused?

F: Well, uh, you know during your talk I thought about one experience Rita and I had in in India when we were at the [Ajanta?] caves. We were looking at lingam and you know, we would look out of the caves; we would see across the bay. You could see an atomic plant and these two things just looked really identical.

F: Oh it's perfect.

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Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

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December 1982

Lilly/Goswami Conference, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

7714

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...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 even clandestine 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.

v1.0 - Dec 1982 - Dolphin Tapes - From a talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. This was the first of many lectures that Terence gave at Esalen. A transcription of his talk appears in Terence's 1991 book The Archaic Revival, wherein the incorrect year of 1983 is given for the talk.

v1.1 - Oct 1999 - Hosted by Erowid. Text taken from the Hyperreal Drug Archives, which used The Archaic Revival as its source.


Erowid Note: The audio recording of this talk was republished in 1986 by Lux Natura, and has recently been posted online. In addition to appearing in the 1991 book The Archaic Revival, a longer transcription of the recording that includes some of the audience question-and-answer session was published in 1993 in the Jahrbuch für Ethnomedizin und Bewußtseinsforschung/Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness Nummer/Issue 2, 1992. Versions of this talk also appeared in the 1996 magazine Towards 2012, Part II and in the 2003 Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult.

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New and Old Maps of Hyperspace

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November 1982

Institute for the Study of Consciousness, Berkeley, California

10992

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[Announcer]: The big issue these days, and it has nothing to do with his talk... is this idea of self-reflection and and of, uh, things that, uh, self referential things and the paradoxes that can come out of that, and I find Terence McKenna a kind of self-referential person. Uh, he's spoken to us at least once; [Terence: Twice] twice I think, right, uh, and each time, uh, I have experienced, uh, an almost hallucinogenic experience in listening to him talk, and I'm looking forward very much tonight to hearing him speak on dreams, hallucinogens, and UFOs... New and Old Maps of Hyperspace; take off.

[Announcer: Let's have a break] [Applause]

[BREAK]


[Announcer: Let's have a break] [Applause]

[BREAK]

teonanácatl, the flesh of the gods. Well, the Catholic church has a monopoly on theophagia and was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on. Now, three hundred, four hundred, whatever it is years after that initial contact, I think that the uh, that eros, which retreated from Greece and retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity, retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazeteca essentially, and then was finally pushed into seclusion there. It now reemerges in Western consciousness, and our institutions, our epistemology, all of these things are so shakily founded and so misconstrued, that with the, uh, help of shamanically inspired personalities, we can release this thing once again. I mean the Logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people, and when it does, uh, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien, and this is, uh, this

Question: Uh, well, you indicate that this essentially needs to be done through hallucinogens. I'm not saying they're good or bad; I'm just saying that there appear to be many ways of discovering that, that, um the inner reality, the ultimate reality.

Q: Yea.

Q: Well maybe it's, uh, it's a shortcut for a lot of people.

Q: But information in the form of a flood of data. That isn't gnosis, I mean could you spell out what you mean, you certainly must mean something more important than data.

Q: Yes. That is a very powerful statement

Q: Yes, Yes] you do believe it, you do believe it.


Q: Yes, Yes] you do believe it, you do believe it.

Q: But I was going to say that, that you're speaking of 'seeing', and we say 'Q.E.D.' after the demonstration in geometry but, the Hindus says 'Behold'. Now the seeing involved there, I wouldn't think of as visual, but does get the word 'seeing' or name 'seeing'. You somehow, your whole, uh, whatever it is, I wouldn't say 'mind', your 'being', resonates, I like to use the term 'recognize'. You say "i see that this is the same thing as the other thing." And, I don't know whether it's 'seeing' but it, 'seeing' is a good word, but it isn't, I wouldn't call it visual.

Q: well, yea, that's the recognition], the thought which is heard becomes more and more intense until finally its intensity is such that with there being no jump or glitch, you now are beholding it in a three dimensional visual space and you command it, and this is very typical of psilocybin. Yes.

Q: I have, uh, two questions. One, when you were talking in terms of the dialogue, I was wondering if you could be more descriptive in that regard. And the other thing was as far as the effects of this type of experience, especially over, say, a prolonged period of time, on the body and the body as-as an energy system. And how do you, how do you balance that or how do you counteract possible negative effects or...?


Q: I'd like some clarification on some of the things you said. I can, um, understand, at least in my own way, how this idea about, uh, an overconsciousness--or, you know--casting a shadow, and, um, that our psychedelic experience or dream experience has to do with getting in touch with that. But you said that, um, some--I'm not really positive about this, which is why I need some clarification on it, is that in some sense that, uh, that, uh, those brief experiences, something about that our experience was in order to get back there, and that was the reason for us to be?

Q: Um.

Q: Well, I have a bit of trouble thinking kind of like which came first. Are you saying the chicken or the egg? Are you saying this overmind has something to do with, uh..

Q: Can you comment on the, um, importance of your discussion on the I Ching in your book.

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The Transformations of Language Under the Influence of the Psychedelic Experience

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October 1983

Berkeley, California

10441

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Q: Yeah, that last generalization sounded real broad. Maybe you could expand on tribalism is a social form which can exist at any technological level.

Q: Would this kind of visional or beheld language have any basic structural units to it, like an alphabet, or would it be, uh, something so abstract which you couldn't re- resolve into basic... [??]

Q: It occurred, something that I've been devoting a fair amount of thought to lately -.haven't gotten very far - and that's the conviction under certain experiences, you're getting information from deep within your psyche or so, from deep within some sort of racial or human information - sometimes what you talked about before, foreign but yet human information and yet another experience that you are just willing to absolutely bet that's not human information that is coming into your brain, or whatever. Many people talk about this and I was just wondering if you would share your thoughts on that division or any hypotheses, whether you feel that that's accurate, not accurate...

Q: Can you relate this in any way to the crisis their having currently in the art world [???] the end of art, you know - that kind of thing...

Q: Take your pick. [laughs]

Q: You talked about language as information structures...


Q: Take your pick. [laughs]

Q: You talked about language as information structures...

Q: ...and, but you could also think of personality structure, that with which the witness consciousness identifies with as an information structure, too. Wh- Where do you draw the line between language that is beheld as something other and language that is, or- that - those information structures which are part of the, the identity experiencing?

Q: Yeah.

Q: In terms of language.

Q: Yeah.

Q: Yes- in Hindu, um, mythology there is reference to a state of being dissolved into the absolute, or being "one without a second", not, uh, defined by, uh, any past historical reference. Does that in any way connect to what you're talking about?

Q: Yeah, Terence - I had a question: in the traditional use of substances that you've described - this ritual around it.

Q: The - There's also intention generally from shaman around healing, uh, and focus around hunting, uh, real earthly kind of pursuits around survival... and that seems to ground the experience in many ways or provide a focus for it. When we do it by ourselves, shans, uh, sans ritual, sans this kind of language, sans this kind of training, we're prey to the whole deceptions of the mind.

Q: And, so my question to you is, uh, what sort of critical inquiry do you personally use, what kind of critical language do you personally use with these forms in front of you? How do, you know w-... guard against self-deception? Uh, you use the words "critical analysis." What does that mean when you translate into practice these things?


Q: Could you comment on how that issue relates to the more general one that seems to contain it: of the turning towards the archaic, the attempt to recapture or reintegrate the unconscious forces after a period of deliberately not being able to do so as a society and what- how that's going to affect both individual and social change over the next visible historical horizon?

Q: Yeah, what about a development of a suh- a language of consciousness, which we don't have - like Sanskrit's theoretically, uh... [??]...Maslow was playing around with words that would scientifically [audience cough] [comment inaudible] ..ase. Could you comment on that?

Q: Could you elaborate more on the effect of the ayahuasca and with the combination with Stropharia cubensis that you mention in Invisible Landscapes [sic] in effect altering, uh, the DNA and when you mentioned the [stone box?]

Q: What if you don't know anything about any of this?

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The Syntax of Psychedelic Time

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July 1983

Berkeley, CA

11245

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The poster says 'The Syntax of Psychedelic Time: Fractals, Endpoints, End-times, Zero points', something like that. What all this indicates is a set of ideas that I want to share with you that are a slightly different tack than my normal lectures. My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and, uh, historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic, uh, substances: my idea. It is idiosyncratic; it is a psychedelic idea, certainly, but it's only one of, uh, an infinite possible set of such ideas. And the reason I spend time on it to communicate it to a group of people like this is because I think it can serve as an example of psychedelic ideas, uh, generally--how they're formed, how they operate, and what's so great about them. And, (perhaps with an element of ego) I think that


(perhaps with an element of ego) I think that this idea intrinsically has an elegance that makes it worth pursuing. But before I talk about that, I want to, uh, talk about fractals for a moment, as they are understood in orthodox mathematics, because the idea 'fractals' will serve as a basis for much of what I'm going to talk about. Fractals are technically defined as, uh, curves with a dimension greater than 1 and less than 2, or surfaces with a dimension greater than 2 and less than 3, none of which need concern us. What's important to know about fractals is that they have the peculiar property of, uh, presenting the same appearance at all scales. Uh, an examples of a fractal in nature or a fractal-like phenomenon would be a mountain range which, when you get up to it and examine small pieces of rock that are sloughing off the face of the cliff, and hold one up against the light, you discover that the edge of the


against the light, you discover that the edge of the small fragment of rock and the edge of the mountain range are in fact the same thing. And at first this doesn't appear startling because you say 'well, the mountain is made of this stuff, this small boulder is made of this stuff, and it simply...fractures the same way.' But actually, a number of issues are being touched on, uh, in this phenomenon. First of all, when you begin analyzing nature, you discover that, uh, many, many forms of phenomena are fractal. Uh, coastlines, islands, uh...the way processes condense, the way solids condense out of liquids in cheese-making, for example, or something like that. There are many kinds of processes where, uh, a single process is reflected and refracted at many levels of magnitude so that, uh, the whole and its parts and many levels within the whole composed of its parts all have the same, uh, structure. Some fractals have been known for quite some


structure. Some fractals have been known for quite some time, since the late 19th century, but they were considered pathological curves because they had the property of, uh, infinite lengths in very short distances because they adumbrate themselves so intricately that their, uh, length can be said to be infinite. In the same way, you can understand that very readily if you can ask yourself "how long is the coast of California?" Well, it depends on h-what we mean by this, if you... because the.. smaller the unit of measurement that you use, the more detail that will arise. And, at some level, the unit of measurement is so small that it's smaller than the molecular interstices of that which composes California. And at that point the length of the coastline becomes infinite.


Ok, so you get the drift of what fractals are and how they've been treated by, uh, mathematicians, particularly one mathematician. You can't discuss fractals without giving all the credit there is to Benoit Mandelbrot because if you don't give him all the credit there is, he'll ask you why not. So, he has invented this branch of mathematics. He has perfected it, and he's given us, uh, marvelous books where you can see these curves, and I thought about making this a slideshow because the fractals are tremendously beautiful objects aesthetically, but I decided against that because I want to, uh.... hold to ideas. This is a think-along lecture, by the way, and you're free to think along at any point that you feel so moved to do so. [audience laughs and a couple of small claps]


Ok, so that's what fractals are for orthodox mathematics. The psychedelic part... and what I did with this was I began to think about time. I've always had this idea that our physics has failed us because it is not true to experience, and every advance in physics has been gained at the expense of moving the terms of physics further and further away from anything that could be called concrete experience, so that what we finally have is an integrated set of complicated equations that we are told correctly map at the microphysical or the cosmological level the objects of nature that we're interested in, but it does not come tangential to our experience. I'm sure you've heard me say this before. So I meditated on time, with the idea of fractals in the background, and I noticed certain things which are obvious except they have implications when the idea of fractals is linked to them. And they're trivial things, really. They're things like, uh, 'every day is rather like every other


like, uh, 'every day is rather like every other day, and every week is rather like every other week, and every year, and to some degree every century, and to some degree every millennium. But, I noticed that as you raise the ante on these temporal scales, change did become apparent, but at the daily level, every day is very much like every other day, but every day also is obviously different. And it's in the differences that we have the feeling of advance into a future, and, uh, and a feeling of, uh, completion. So, I took all these ideas and, uh, in the Amazon when we were investigating, uh, the beta-Carboline drugs, which were used in combination with DMT... I, uh,... under the influence of these drugs, fell into a long, extended meditation about all these themes. In fact, it actually went on for years. In fact, it's still going on in some sense. It was a true boost, and I looked at the I Ching, which


and I looked at the I Ching, which I was familiar with but had never particularly been obsessed with, and I noticed something very interesting about it, which is: the King Wen sequence, which is the oldest sequence of the hexagrams, uh, a sequence which precedes any written commentary. When mathed for its first order of difference (and its first order of difference is nothing more than, as you pass from one hexagram to another, how many hexagrams change--[corrects himself]-- lines change. So for instance as you go from hexagram 1 to 2, all lines change, so 6 is the value of that, 6 lines change. When you go from 2 to 3, there is another value, and I graphed the I Ching this way for its first order of difference. Now, in a random distribution, you would expect a fairly even distribution of breaks of orders 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, but, I found immediately that there were, uh, no 5s whatsoever, no breaks of order 5, and


5s whatsoever, no breaks of order 5, and that there had been an obvious effort to, uh, optimize breaks of value 2 and 4, so.. that in itself, I mean, obviously it's ordered some way, so this wouldn't be too startling to discover a property like that. And I should pause for a moment and point out for people who have interest in the I Ching, that the I Ching is actually formed of 32 pairs. If you've ever looked at it, it's formed of pairs such that the second term in each pair is the inverse of the first term, except there are 8 cases, naturally, where inverting a hexagram has no effect on it. The obvious case is where you invert the first one. It's all solid lines, so inverting it has no effect. In that...in those 8 cases, the rule is 'all lines change'. And you see following the first hexagram, which is all solid lines, is the second hexagram, which is all broken lines. So, in studying the sequence


is all broken lines. So, in studying the sequence of the I Ching, your problem is not really wh--'how are these 64 hexagrams arranged'? The question is 'how are these 32 pairs of hexagrams arranged.' So, I graphed the first order of difference as I mentioned, and, uh, and then I noticed a peculiar visual symmetry in my graph, which was: it looked basically like a random squiggle except that the beginning and the end of the wave were stereo-isometric reflections of each other. Now, what that means is that if you were to rotate in the plane an image of this wave without lifting it off the paper, you could bring the two graphs together and they would dovetail together perfectly at the beginning and at the end but nowhere in between. And this seemed to me a very powerful argument for, uh, order; that I had in fact discovered a previous kind of order that was implicit in this thing. Now, to some audiences I have to make a complicated apology


some audiences I have to make a complicated apology about Logos and voices in the head and all that. I'll just skip that and say 'and so I continued working with this thing under the instruction of the voices in my head'. And...and, the first thing that I noticed when the wave was fitted together in this particular way, was that the hexagrams paired up so that they always summed to 64. In other words, 63 would pair with 1, 62 would pair with 2, 61 with 3, 60 with 4, and so on. So, it was as though a kind of magic square was being generated, where the I Ching was additive to itself in all directions on a grid. And so I took this forward-and-backward-running 64-term...glyph or graph and I said 'aha, it is the complete I Ching running forward and backward against itself'. Since it is the complete I Ching, all 64 hexagram, all 384 lines, I will follow the principle of constructing modular hierarchies. I will collapse it to


modular hierarchies. I will collapse it to the simplest term in a system...of levels, and I will treat this rather complicated looking thing as though it were a line, one of only 384, and then I, uh, then from there, over a period of years and many pencil sharpenings, we went to computers and produced very complicated versions of this graph and, uh..... then found a way to mathematically quantify it so that it could be, instead of a network of lines running forward and backward against each other, it became, uh, a single line running in one direction into the future.


Ok, so now, what's so great about this?......... In its own terms, it is a self-consistent idea about time that tries to be true to experience. It's saying that, uh..... time is made of elements. It is not simply an event-space, something required for things to have duration. You see, before Einstein, space was thought of as a... the place where you put things. The necessary adumbration of a thing having being was that it be in space. Einstein came along and said, no, time can be thought of as a surface, as a continuum, as something which in and of itself can affect the outcome of the propagation of a beam of light or an electromagnetic field or something like that. What this idea suggests is something similar about time: that time is made of elements, and that what we intuit about time is more true to the facts of the matter than what physicists are telling us about time. What we intuit about time, and what astrology and all forms of prophecy and


and what astrology and all forms of prophecy and intuition and clairvoyance and all these things are are the idea that we can know about time by deploying our feelings into it, and, uh.... what this theory does is take what has generally been a very, uh, feeling-toned, intuitional kind of idea and, uh, mathematecize it and give it rigor, and say that with a very simple computer we can predict novelty. We can understand, first of all, that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world that we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels.. of integration, and no matter on what timescale you view the universe, you see this happening. In other words, the universe, uh, in its early moments, is all chaos. There are...er, er...Temperatures are too high to allow even inter-atomic bonding, so there's only a plasma of


bonding, so there's only a plasma of stripped, uh, er, uh... particles, charged particles, and then as the universe cools, atomic bonds become possible and atomic systems come into being, which, which, uh, indicate a....m-more refined level of organization, and then later, much later, molecular systems and st--and on another level, stellar dust and star systems and organization of large aggregates of matter. Then life, and it represents another one of these quantum leaps in complexity, which is old stuff. But something else besides a leap in complexity is happening with each of these ingressions into novelty. What is happening is a speeding up of the speed at which these ingressions are happening, so that the early, uh, the first half of the history of the universe, you can say virtually nothing happened. Everything happened in the last half of the universe, uh, of the life of the universe. And, about, uh, a billion or two or three billion years


uh, a billion or two or three billion years ago, about 20% of what we assume to be the total life of the universe ago, life appeared, and then the mammalian line, the early mammalian line appeared 60 or 70 million years ago at the close of the dinosaurs, then we get culture, 25, 30, 50 thousand years ago. And very shortly after that, mathematics, and very shortly after that, uh, electronic circuitry, and there is this compression of events which, from the point of view of the historian, is the major thing that he sees when he looks at the history of the universe, but science has never mentioned this peculiar compression of events and densifying of complexity. Science takes the position that if that's happening, it's unimportant, and it probably isn't happening at all, and science goes to great lengths, though it admits evolution, to make sure that it arises out of non-teleological processes, and to make sure that it's always confined within the realm


make sure that it's always confined within the realm of biology so that a real..., uh, an orthodox evolutionist is very uncomfortable if you start speaking of stellar evolution or cultural evolution. I've heard these guys say 'if there are no genes involved, you do not use the word evolution'. See, they don't want to see it as a formative process touching the organic, the inorganic, the social, the psychological.


Uh...So, uh, I took very seriously this deepening ingression into novelty, and I said it is a physical quality of the continuum that we're existing in. It is not a, um, a loose and unconstrained tendency, but it is a predictable tendency like charge, speed, momentum, that kind of thing. And I noticed something very interesting about the number 384, which, if you'll recall, is the number of lines in the complete set of the I Ching. The number 384 is 13 lunar cycles. There are 29.29, I believe, days in the lunar cycle, 13 of which gives you 383.89 days or something like that. So in other words, it's to within a fraction of the day, 384 days, so, I.... it suggested to me a calendar. And, then I noticed that in, uh, hexagram 49, which is revolution, it specifically says, "the magician is a calendar maker." And then I, uh, used resonances of this 384-day solar year, uh, resonances of


this 384-day solar year, uh, resonances of 64. So, for instance, I would take the 384-day year and multiply it times 64. This gives you a period of time which is 67 years, 104.25 days. That is, uh, 6 minor sunspot cycles and 2 major sunspot cycles. Plus it also...in The Invisible Landcape, the other astro..logical... astronomical, pardon me, correlations are made clear. Uh, when you rise to the next level; when you take the 67-year cycle times 64, you get 4,306 years. This is, uh, very close to, uh, uh...let's see, half of the zodiacal age. In other words, the precession of the earth on its nutational axis requires about 25,000 years, and that is what is spoken of when they talked of the Piscean age, the Aquarian age. They're talking about how, through the slow procession of the equinox, it is moving from sign to sign, and it takes about 2000 years for a sign to be transited, so two


years for a sign to be transited, so two signs can be transited in exactly the cycle of time indicated.


Now, I want to talk briefly about, uh, something which happened in the past which happened, possibly, hypothetically, and how it relates to this running into the short epochs where all time and culture and information seem to flow together in a kind psychedelic, uh, eternity, uh, and information stasis, a kind of standing-wave hologram that is, uh, the now. I mean, I believe the poster says, "Plato says, time is the moving image of eternity," because we, we talked about that last time. Julian Jaynes, who was a psychologist at Princeton, talked about, uh, what he called 'the origin of consciousness in the bicameral mind', and he said that [clears throat] in pre-Homeric times...excuse me [takes drink]...what we experience as ego-consciousness was experienced differently by people, uh, in those early societies. What we experience as our selves, something which we completely dominate and somehow enfold in our bodies--this is the cultural metaphor that the


bodies--this is the cultural metaphor that the self is inside the body--they experienced as outside the body and exterior from the ego and, uh, somehow independent of their own will, so that what we experience as the self and the ego, they experienced as a kind of disembodied god, or guiding voice, or inner spirit, or guardian angel. The important concept in all of this being that they experienced it as separate from themselves. Uh, and then Jaynes goes on to suggest that it was traders, who were people who passed from one society to another for the purpose of exchanging goods, who were the first cynics, because they realized that everybody's gods in different places were saying different things, and they realized therefore that there was something funny about these gods: that they were, in fact, somehow rooted in, uh, in human...psychology, rather than in theogony, in some sense. And, they became the world's first egotists, or the world's first individuated people,


egotists, or the world's first individuated people, because they correctly identified a psychic function as arising from themselves and they integrated it. And, then, he goes on--I don't want to spend to much time with this--but then he goes on to say that it was the spread of trade, the rise of money, all these things, which broke down these dialogues between cultural wholes and their gods, and that, when it broke down, that was what shattered that, uh, world of city-civilizations that is the true ancient world, in other words, the world of Babylon, Ur, Sumer, Chaldea, the states which precede the Hellenic world, were shattered by the breakdown of this dialogue between the people and the god...and kingship. He talks a lot about how the kings assimilate, were associate with, this voice in the head, so everyone thought the king was speaking to them when they were told to...go pump water, uh...herd the cows, sheer the


water, uh...herd the cows, sheer the sheep...whatever they were told to do.


Ok...I mention this, because, I thinks that something similar is happening in the present, and that, unwittingly Jaynes may have provided a, uh, metaphor for understanding this. We talked a bit last time about the flying saucer and how it was, uh, a projection of a future state of mankind, a mobile psychic entity, linked to the idea of the exteriorization of the soul and the interiora....interiorization of the body in electronic circuitry. I think that, uh, what we all experience as...our culture...fashion, rock and roll, politics, music, media....all of these things which we experience as the clothing that we must put on in order to be able to talk to each other. This is a kind of god, or a kind of autonomous psychic function that has slipped out of our control, or which has arisen outside of our control as a legacy of this earlier, uh, uh, process of integration in the Hellenistic period, so that...ph-phenomena like the Nuclear


period, so that...ph-phenomena like the Nuclear Freeze Movement, or, uh, the t-the rise of the term 'networking', or, uh, all of these integrative, holistic, feeling-toned, you could almost say 'liberal', or you could almost say that liberalism in its classic 19th century guise is the first faint, uh, uh, uh-uh, sounding of this theme; this rising global humanism is in fact the rising into consciousness of a tribal god, similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in..in these pre-Hellenic societies. And, however, in the present cultural context, cultural evolution is happening so fast that it is not going to take a millennium to pass through, you know, the first faint enunciation of the theme, the full-fledged exploration of the theme of, uh, cultural wholeness as exteriorized, uh, uh....God, or God-like mind to the integration of it. And, the psychedelic, I believe, are the keyyy to moving from wearing culture like


are the keyyy to moving from wearing culture like clothes to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self. And, that's what all the hullaballoo is about, I think. And, I think that, uh, this is happening. And, uh, if, if the date 2012 means anything, it means, uh, simply that, uh, we can take that as...we can make a statistical model of what's happening and say that, uh, on, uh November 15th, 2012, a sufficient number of people will have integrated this state of global electronic self-hood that it will be uh, um....irreversible. That, up until a certain point, when any stochastic process begins to happen or when any...cascade begins to get going, up until it has a certain momentum, there is a possibility of many different bifurcations leading different end-states. But, once a certain amount of energy is in the system, then, you know, you can say


in the system, then, you know, you can say it's going to go all the way, and I prefer to think of....I prefer to probabilitalize all of these predictions of the end of the world and to think of them simply, uh-uh, the way you think of a particle in the quantum mechanical model. When we assign a position to the particle, we understand that the particle isn't at that position, that that point is merely the center of a cloud of probably positions, any one of which could be occupied. Nevertheless, outside of a certain short distance from that point, the probability of finding the particle drops off asymptotically. So, it's a cloud of probability, and this date up after the first of the century is the center of a cloud of probability. Now, what kind of ethics decline from that kind of a position. It seems to me obvious that the first thing that's apparent from that is that you don't sit around waiting for the apocalypse. You understand that as soon as


for the apocalypse. You understand that as soon as you push yourself over the brink, you've done the major piece of work that has to be done in your cosmos. From then you just sit around, uh, watching it happen. So, uh, it's an invitation...we're, we're all very fortunate. It reminds me, and I probably mentioned this last time, I think about it fairly often, of the Irish prayer, 'May you be alive at the end of the world'. Uh....probably we all have a very good shot at it [audience laughter], but I have no idea what the probabilities are for any one of us. Uh...I've spoken of this tonight more in its operation terms, rather than in the 'gee whiz' kind of terms, which I did last time, where I painted a picture of what it will be like to invoke this global electronic, uh, uh, aspect of the self and to integrate it. But, these ideas about collapsing time vectors, about history having an end, about,


time vectors, about history having an end, about, in fact, history being the shockwave of an event at the end of time, these are the ideas that religions handle, uh, fairly well...I mean, not religions so much but theology. Religion tends to concern itself with, uh, with public morality. But, underpinning religion is theology, and it seems to always, at least in the West, meaning in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam, and in all of the spectrum of cults that each one spawned, or, and continues to spawn, there is this wish to put an end to time, to close it off, to redeem us from the cycle of becoming. And, I think that the reason these ideas are so persistent in the human psyche is because, uh, all of history can be seen, in biological time, as so brief that it is simply, uh, a prelude and an anticipation...[end side 1 of tape]


[start side 2 of tape--ambient music in background]...so that they actually look down on their culture. They become extra-environmentals is a way of putting this: they act the role of the extraterrestrial. And, and, uh, we all connect the role of the extraterrestrial when..and do, when we adopt this extra-environmental position. It can be viewed as alienation if what arises out of it is, uh, uh, a feeling of forlornness and being 'cast into being', as Heidegger says. But, that need not necessarily be the feeling. The extra-environmental is also tremendously, uh, freed from the cultural conditioning. And, when you travel, you are always an extra-environmental and, extra-environmental and, you have a, uh, very deep insight into societies that you may only spend a short time in. Uh...I think the emerging archetype of the other or the alien is an effort to integrate alienation and actually make it a positive thing. And, I think I mentioned either here


positive thing. And, I think I mentioned either here as Will [last name?]'s show about ET and how clever this was to make people identify with something which looks like a cross between a can of anchovies and the Pilsbury Dough Boy [audience laughter] and to actually....you know, love is what that movie is about and it's alien love, and, uh, it's a very important form of love to cultivate, because this process of integration of the electronic overself that is one way of looking at the end of history; that is, uh, that is the process that we're all involved in, and psychedelics, uh, which I haven't mentioned too much tonight, but which I hope you realize are the, uh, entire source and motivation and raison d'etre of all of this, because what psychedelics are doing, uh, are they are anticipating this future state, this electronic global information organism is, in fact, already present in the same way that most of the future is present in the past. I


most of the future is present in the past. I mean, think of any point in the past. Think of 1950. Think of how much of today was present in 1950. It means that this idea that science fiction has sold us that the future is a total other world just up around the bend, it isn't actually true. The future is, uh, 95% present


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Dynamics of Hyperspace

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June 1983

Santa Cruz, California

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A Necessary Chaos

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10 June 1983

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Terence McKenna in conversation with Michael Toms

Terence McKenna: The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety. The human imagination has gained such an immense power that the only environment that is friendly to it is actually the vacuum of deep space. It is there that we can erect the architectonic dreams that drive us to produce a Los Angeles or a Tokyo, and do it on a scale and in such a way that it will be fulfilling rather than degrading. So yes, I think we cannot move forward in understanding without accepting as a consequence of that that we have to leave the planet, that we are no longer the bipedal monkeys we once were. We have become almost a new force in nature, a thing of language and cybernetics and an amalgam of computers and human brains and societal structures that has such an enormous forward momentum that the only place where it can express itself without destroying itself is, as James Joyce says, "up n'ent!"

Q: So long long ago in the far away gala


Q: So long long ago in the far away gala

TM: Well, it's in our present I think. Our future is probably almost unimaginable because I think the transformation that leaving the planet will bring will also involve a transformation of our consciousness. We are not going as 1950s style human beings. We are going to have to transform our minds before we are going to be able to leave the planet with any amount of grace. This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds. No cultural shift of this magnitude can be unambiguous, i mean the very idea that as a species we would leave the earth behind us must be as rending an idea as that a child would leave its childhood home. Obviously it's a turning away from something that, once left behind, can never be recaptured. However, this is the nature of going forward into being, a series of self-transforming ascents of level. And we now simply happen to be at that moment of ascent to a new level that is linked to leaving the planetary surface physically and to reconnecting to the contents of the unconscious collectivity of our minds. These two things will be done simultaneously. This is what the last half of the 20th century, it seems to me, is all about.

Q: Well by and large psychedelics have really not been accepted into the mainstream. Do you see a change in that?


TM: Well, not particularly. They hold a certain fascination for a persistent majority, and in that way they do their catalytic work on society, which is to introduce new ideas and to release a certain kind of creative energy into society. I certainly would not like to see a return to the psychedelic hysterias of the 1960s. I think it's fine that these things are now the subject of interest of a much smaller group of people, but perhaps a group of people with a greater commitment and a better idea of exactly what these things are. And it's really the same people. It's just a smaller group of them, and they have accumulated experience over the past 20 years. However I certainly don't think all psychedelic frontiers are conquered. One of the things that I write about and speak about are the phenomena that many people confirm with the psilocybin family of hallucinogens that no one has included in the standard model of psychedelic drugs, and by that I


model of psychedelic drugs, and by that I refer to the Logos-like phenomenon of an interiorized voice that seems to be almost a superhuman agency, a kind of genus loci. And I have been writing recently about alien intelligence, which is what i call this, where you have contact with an entity so beyond the normal structure of the ego that if it is not an extraterrestrial it might as well be because its bizarreness and its distance from ordinary expectations about what can go on is so great that if flying saucers arrived here tomorrow from the Pleiades, it would make this mystery no less compelling because I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension. And there the problem is not the absence of contact, but the volume of contact that must be sifted through because the fact of the matter is shaman and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and talking to gods and demons since the paleolithic and probably before. That


demons since the paleolithic and probably before. That doesn't mean that we can rule out this approach to communication. It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate interdimensionally and telepathically. That amounts of time available for intelligent species to evolve these kinds of communication are vast. So I think that it's very interesting then that the tryptamines, psilocybin and DMT, at the 15 milligram level, very reliably trigger what could only be described as contact-like phenomena. Not only the interiorized voice in the head, but also the classical flying saucer motifs of the whirling disk, the lens-shaped object, the alien approach. This seems to be something hard-wired into the human psyche, and I would like to find out why. I think it's a very odd fact of human psychology, and I don't buy any of the current theories ranging from that nothing at all is happening to that this is in fact another species with a world around another star that is


another species with a world around another star that is getting in touch with us. I think it's something that's so bizarre so that it actually masquerades as an extraterrestrial so as not to alarm us by the true implications of what it is.


But I suspect it is something like an overmind of the species, that actually the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. It is no government, no religious group, but actually what we call the human unconscious, but it is not unconscious, and it is not simply a cybernetic repository of myth and memory. It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates, and it is so different from the primates. It is like a creature of pure information. It is made of language. It releases ideas into the flowing stream of history to boost the primates towards higher and higher levels of self reflection of it. And we have now reached the point where the masks are beginning to fall away, and we're discovering that there is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis about. And I'm, for no reasons in particular, very optimistic. I see it as a necessary chaos that will lead to a new and more attractive order.

Q: Terence you were talking about extra-ordinary realities. It occurs to me that there's an enormous amount of prejudice against the psychedelics and the use of hallucinogenic substances. It's almost as if there's an inordinate fear to open up the door to the closet that these substances reveal. What about that prejudice? What do you think, how's that going to be resolved?


TM: Well I think it's more complicated that a prejudice. it's a prejudice born of respect because most people sense that these compounds probably actually do what their adherents claim they do. It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line the way you had to when you too 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you , if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics. On the other hand, for some people that's the most horrible thing they could possibly imagine. They navigate reality through various forms of faith, and I think that the psychedelics, the doors of


I think that the psychedelics, the doors of perception are cleansed and you see very very deeply. I spent time in India, and I would always go to the local sadhus * of great reputation, and I met many people who possessed wise old man wisdom. But wise old man wisdom is a kind of Tao of how to live. It has nothing to say about these dimensions that the psychedelics reveal. For that you have to go to places where hallucinogenic shamanism is practiced, specifically the Amazon Basin. And there you discover that beyond simply the wisdom of how to live in ordinary reality, there is a gnosis of how to navigate in extra-ordinary reality. And this reality is so extra-ordinary that we cannot approach what these people are doing with any degree of smugness because the frank fact of the matter is that we have no viable theory of what mind is either. The beliefs of the Wetoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an


the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right


So It's the power of these things, the fact that here is something we have not assimilated. We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean, the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that here is where all the contradictions flow together. And the same prejudice against psychoanalysis that characterized the 20s and 30s when it was thought to be a superfluous or some kind of fad attends the psychedelics now. It's because it touches a very sensitive nerve. It touches the issue of the nature of man, and people are uncomfortable with this, or some people are uncomfortable with this.

Q: What is the value of exploring the extraordinary realities?


Q: What is the value of exploring the extraordinary realities?

TM: Well I guess it's the same value that attends the exploration of ordinary realities. There's an alchemical saying that one should read the oldest books, climb the highest mountains, and visit the broadest deserts. I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to figure out what is going on. And since all primary information about what is going on comes through the senses, any drug or any compound which alters that sensory input has to be looked at very carefully. I have often made the point that chemically speaking, you can have a molecule which is completely inactive as psychedelic, and you move a single atom on one of its rings, and suddenly it's a powerful psychedelic. Well now, it seems to me this is a perfect proof of the inner penetration of matter an mind. The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position chances an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together. This means that in a sense the term extraordinary reality is not correct if it implies a division of category from ordinary reality. It is simply there is more and more and more of reality, and some of it is inside our heads, and some of it is deployed out through three dimensional Newtonian space.

Q: Most of us I think just simply accept the everyday reality as the only one, and you're talking about journeys into the nether regions, far beyond most peoples' conception or even wanting to conceive of such a reality.


TM: Well I think there's a shamanic temperment, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. IN other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experience that are found always to be applicable. You see I don't believe that the world is made out of quarks or electromagnetic waves or stars or any of these things. I think that the world is made out of language, and that this is the primary fact that has been overlooked. The construction of a flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge. And people find it very hard to imagine exactly what I"m talking about. What I'm saying is the leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being. We in the West have had it the wrong way around for over a millenia, but once this is clearly understood, with what we have learned in our little excursion through three dimension space and matter we will create a new vision of humanity that will be a fusion of the East and the West.

Q: Well a world being made of language, and I think of these extraordinary realities which are totally beyond any language that we use in any ordinary sense


TM: Yes well they are beyond ordinary language. I always think of PHylojudeas writing on the logos. He posed to himself the question: What would be a more perfect logos? And then he answered, saying it would be a logos which is not heard, but beheld, and he imagined a form of communication where the ears would not be the primary receptors but the eyes would be. A language where meaning was not constructed through a dictionary of little mouth noises, but actually three dimensional objects were generated with a kind of hyper-language so that there was perfect understanding between people. And this may sound bizarre in ordinary reality, but these forms of synesthesia and synesthesia-glossolalia are commonplace in psychedelic space.

Q: Terence could you identify Phylos for us and tell us who he was?

TM: He was an Alexandrian Jew of the second century who made it his business to travel around the Hellenic world and discussed all the major cults and religious and cosmogonic theories of his day. So he's a major source of Hellenistic data for us.

TM: How would you relate to Socrates' view of the world.


TM: How would you relate to Socrates' view of the world.

Q: Well, I think that it's hard not to be a platonist, but it's something perhaps we should struggle against or at least struggle to modify. I think of myself as sort of a Whiteheadian platonist. Certainly the central Platonic idea which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand ouside of time, is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience. And Plato's formation of time as the moving image of eternity is another one of these aphorisms that the psychedelic state confirms. And certainly Neoplatonism, Plotinus and Poriphry, and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.

TM: What I think most of us don't understand or don't really know is the fact that Greek cultures and Elucinean

TM: Yes well my brother has made the point asking what mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it the mushroom of Fermi and Oppenhimer and Teller, or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman and Humphrey Osmond?

Q: Somehow I think the latter is safer (laughter)

TM: Well it may not only be safer, it may open the way to escape from the former. It's like a pun in physics that the force of liberation and the force of destruction could take the same form. It's what the alchemists call a coincidencia oppositorum.


Q: It is an amazing synchronicity it seems, that. Also I was interested, I was talking with Andy Wile some time ago about the fact that there are a new genus of mushroom appearing that have psilocybin in them that had never been seen before, never been tracked before, and it's almost as if they're appearing now.

TM: Well it's amazing how many have been discovered since people have bent their attention to it. There have been psilocybin mushrooms reported from England, France, localities where so far as we know there is no cultural history of usage at all. However it's interesting that cultural usage seems to disappear very early in human history. Hallucinogens are hardly even welcome in agricultural societies. I think it was Weston LeBar made the point that once you learn how to grow plants, your god shifts from the ecstatic god of the hallucinogens to the corn god or the food god, and it no longer is about divining the hunt and weather through the ecstatic use of hallucinogen. It's about being able to get up every morning and go to work and hoe the crop. So you mentioned earlier the prejudice against hallucinogens, I think it reaches back to the beginning of agriculture. This competition among plant gods which exemplified lifestyles that must have seemed very alien to each other.

Q: Is psilocybin illegal?


Q: Is psilocybin illegal?

TM: Oh yes, it's a schedule 1 drug. Without any public debate it was placed on the list at the same time that LSD was, and yet the issue was always couched in terms of LSD being made illegal, but actually at that point in time a whole bunch of things were made illegal. And there was never any public debate. All psychedelics were viewed as the same drug, and LSD was used as the model. Actually, these drugs, there's a spectrum of psychedelic effects and certain drugs trigger some of them and certain ones others, but yes, psilocybin is illegal.

Q: Are the mushrooms illegal?

TM: The mushrooms also are illegal as they contain psilocybin.

Q: I got a call from Andy Wild saying he walked down a downtown Seattle residential street picking up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of residential homes.

TM: (laughing) Well English law took the view that it was preposterous to try and outlaw a naturally occurring plant, and they took the position that only the chemical was illegal which I think is a very wise position. But I noticed that Canada recently chose the American interpretation over the British one.

Q: Interesting. Turns out, going back to the Andy Wild story, that the reason that these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locales in the northwest was that their spores were contained in a mail order company's mushroom growing product that they sent out mail order. And so...


TM: Yes, this is an interesting phenomenon. You see, the spores of the mushroom are not illegal because they do not contain psilocybin. They only contain the message and the DNA of the mushroom for the production of psilocybin, so it's a kind of bizarre catch-22. The mushroom spores can move anywhere legally, can be bought and sold, but they are the sine-qua-non for the production of mushrooms of course.

Q: Terence the kind of knowledge and the kind of information you're putting forth is not generally available. It's not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the typical academic anthropology curriculum. And yet it seems to be a knowledge that is ever expanding, but somehow it's outside of the cultural institutional entities in some way. Number one, why do you think that's the case- of course there's a logical answer to that one. What do you see as the future of this kind of information, this kind of knowledge.


TM: Well I think in a sense it signals the rebirth of the institution of shamanism in the context of modern society, and anthropologists have always made the point about shaman, that they were very important social catalysts in their group, but they were always peripheral to it, peripheral to the political power and actually usually physically peripheral, living at some distance from the village. And I think the electronic shaman, the people who pursue the exploration of these spaces, exist to return to tell the rest of us about it, that we are now coming into a period of racial maturity as a species where we can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness because as man gains power he is becoming the


because as man gains power he is becoming the defining fact on the planet in the near space area. So the question that looms is, is man good? And then, if he is, what is it he's good for. And the shaman will point the way, because what they are are visionaries, poets, cultural architects, forecasters, all these roles which we understand in more conventional terms rolled into one and raised to the nth power. They are cultural models for the rest of us. This has always been true, that the shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the trans...the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will. And I see the attention that's been given to these things signaling a sense on the part of the society that we need a return to these models. This is why, for instance, in the Star Wars phenomenon Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Skywalker is a direct translation


Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Skywalker is a direct translation of the word 'shaman' out of the Temgusik which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together. This is true as a matter of fact, and as we explore how true it is, the limitations of our previous world view will be exposed for all to see. I think it was J. B. S. Haldane who said 'the world may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose'.


I think that the character Yoda describes a sort of shamanic character.

Very much so

As we talk about shamans and shamanism, again that brings up cross-cultural currents. Do you see the shaman taking on a new...certainly you don't see Indian shamans walking into the metropolitan areas...but do you see the shaman taking on a new form?

Well I believe, along with Gordon Wasson and others, but in distinction to Merciliad who is a major writer on shamanism, that it is hallucinogenic shamanism that is primary, and that where shamanic techniques are used to the exclusion of hallucinogenic drug ingestion, the shamanism tends to be visciated

Q:So as we continue to move towards the further exploration of the spaces. We can expect that social change is a result?


TM: Tremendous social change. I see in fact what is happening is a tendency to what I call turn the body inside out. We are through our media and our cybernetics, we are actually approaching the point where consciousness can be experienced in a state of disconnection from the body. We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components. We have become a force which takes unorganized raw material and excretes technical objects. We have transcended the normal definitions of man. We are like an enormous collective organism with our data banks and our forecasting agencies and our computer networks and the many levels at which we are connected into the universe. Our self image is changing. The monkey is all but being left behind, and all but will be left behind. The flying saucer, again, I take to be an image of the future state of humanity. It is a kind of millenarian transformation of man where the soul is exteriorized as the apotheosis of technology, and it is that eschatological event which is casting enormous shadows backward through time over the historical landscape. That is the siren at the end of time, calling all mankind across the last ten millenia toward it. Calling us out of the trees and into history and through the series of multilevel cultural transitions to the point were the thing within the monkeys, the creature of pure language and pure imagination whose aspirations are entirely titanic in terms of self transformation, that thing is emerging, and it will emerge as man leaves the planet. And i's not something quantized and clearly defined. It is in fact what the next fifty or so years will be about. But at the end of it, the species will be off-planet and transformed, and fully wired from the depths to the heights.


Q: Are we just talking about another version of the Christian death, resurrection, ascention, and heaven?

TM: Except that it is coming into history. What is happening is that the paradise promised the soul is actually going to enter into history because technological man took the apocalyptic aspirations of Christianity so seriously that we are going to make it happen. It has become the guiding image of what we want to be. And I'm reminded of the poem by Yates. It's 'Sailing to Byzantium', where he speaks of how after death, he would like to be an enameled golden object singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. And it's the image of man transformed into eternal circuitry and released into a hyperspace of information where you are a thing of circuitry but you appear to be walking along an unspoiled beach in paradise. It is that we are going to find the power to realize our deepest cultural aspirations. This is why we must find out what our deepest cultural aspirations are. Again, another way of phrasing the question 'is man good.'

Q: What about the idea that the spaces that we've been talking about that you've been illuminating are spaces that can be achieved without the use of psychedelics.


TM: Well, again I scoured India and my humble personal opinion is that it is highly unlikely. I have always approached people of spiritual accomplishment with the question 'what can you show me' because as I said earlier this 'wise old man' wisdom is one thing, but only the hallucinogen-using shaman of the Amazon seem to be able to go beyond that. There may be techniques for doing this, but the efficacy and the dependability of the hallucinogens seems to me to make them the obvious choice. It would only be a series of cultural conventions that would cause one to want to engineer around that. It is the obvious path to transendence. People must face the fact that at one level we are chemical machines. That doesn't mean we are that at every level, but it does mean that that is a level where we can intervene to change the pictures that are coming in and going out at higher levels.

Q: You're not suggesting that people should do this by themselves?

TM: Take hallucinogens? Well I don't know about take it by themselves, probably not, though I always do and I seem to prefer it. What I am suggesting is that they take it in a situation of minimum sensory input, lying down in darkness with eyes closed cannot be surpassed, and people want music, they want to walk around in nature, they want all these things. But nature and music are beautiful in their own right. They are the adumbrations of the psychedelic experience that we deal with in ordinary reality. In confrontation with the psychedelic experience, these things are hardly more than impediments. There are very interesting things happening in the utter blackness behind your eyelids, lying still in darkness. And that is where the mystery comes from and goes to.

My question had to do with with or without a guide.


My question had to do with with or without a guide.

Oh, I don't think people should do it without a guide unless they feel very confident from experience that they don't need a guide. Because I like to have these ideas get out. I think it's important that we discuss all this in a way that is only now becoming possible because of how it was in the 1960s. Now we need to shed all that and look back, and look forward and try to make a mature judgement for our culture based on the facts of the matter.


0:42:08.9 Well someone asked when we first went around to try and talk about the furture. I don't know if I made the point strongly enough. I wasn't sure I felt it click, and I think it's a strong one and it's somewhat new with me. It's this idea that our...that we represent some kind of singularity, or that we announce the nearby presence of a singularity, that the evolution of life and cultural form and all that is clearly funneling toward something fairly unimaginable. I mean I really don't think we can imagine our future because when we try to project some little science fiction scenario of our future, we inevitably select a very small number of trends and then we propagate them forward without integrating the forward propagation of everything else that is going to be happening simultaneously. You know there are options such as nanotechnology, the building of super tiny machines. Space migration was once an option- this seems to be fading,it seems to have been written


to be fading,it seems to have been written off the menu by the powers that be as the Soviet Union cracks to pieces, the human race's ability to leave this planet becomes a memory of ancient times. I mean, we could not return to the moon in less than fifteen years if we committed ourselves to it tomorrow, so the space thing seems to have been taken off the agenda. There's nanotechnology, there's virtual reality. The present solution seems to be this enforced larval neoteny on the consuming blue-collar masses, in the high-tech societies, and triage through epidemic disease and mismanagement in the third world. It's a huge mix, this problem of saving the world or halting the forward thrust into catastrophy. People say, well why do you worry about saving the world, you just said it's going to end in 2012. I don't see that rap as any sort of permission for political irresponsibility or a lack of attention to world problems. If it's true, great,


attention to world problems. If it's true, great, we're golden. If it's not true, and what a long shot it is, then we should still keep our eye on the ball with all of this stuff. It is overpopulation is what's driving us crazy. All other problems, toxic waste disposal, epidemic disease, resource extraction, degradation of the environment, collapse of the atmosphere. Inability to satisfy third-world aspirations. All of these problems are population problems. And capitalism doesn't want to talk about it because capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants. And the more ants there are, the more offerings there can be to Moloch, but this is not a good situation for us ants. Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization. If you read the theoreticians of capitalism, Adam Smith and so forth, capitalism assumes an unlimited exploitable frontier. There is no


assumes an unlimited exploitable frontier. There is no such creature, so it has turned pathological. The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space, but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt. But this frontier, the end is in sight, and when we hit that wall we will join the Eastern Bloc in a fundamental reappraisal of our situation. Democracy I believe in. I think democracy is the psychedelic form of government because I don't see it as a product of rational thought. I see it as institutionalized anarchy. Democracy is biology managed for human purposes. It honors the biological unit, it takes the biological unit and gives it a vote, and that's a way for mother nature to then enter into human history. I mean I'm fairly mystical about democracy, sort of like William Blake.


Q: So how are you preparing for 2012 yourself?

TM: Well, by going way out on a limb, I guess. People ask me 'what will you do if nothing happens in 2012'. Well, by god-sent coincidence, my 65th birthday occurs a month before the date, so then I think I'll just steal away in disgrace and find myself a girl on an island who runs fish traps and disappear forever.

As to what I do in the meantime, I don't...I should make it clear. I don't believe this stuff. I find believing in these high-flown complicated synthetic systems to come off sort of like pathology, so I entertain ideas but I don't give the leaf over. I'm very amazed by the timewave. It continuously surprises and delights me. Very few people are obviously as into it as I am, but it's proof enough as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's all I ever would have asked for. It's the gem from the other, it's aladdin's lamp, it's what I wanted and I got it. At one point in La Chorrera naturally this question arose in our group. Why us? Why are the aliens revealing the unified field theory to us, and the mushroom just replied without hesitation 'because you don't believe in anything.' And that apparently is what's required.


Do you all know that Van Morrisson song about 'no guru, no method no teacher, just you and me and nature, in the garden, in the garden.' I think that's actually where it's at. So what I do between now and 2012 is I'm a meme spreader, a mean replicator, and the purpose of these teaching things is to turn you into fellow replicators of the meme, I mean I see it all in the metaphors of molecular biology. I have a new sequence of codons here, and I want to insert it into each one of you without error in copying and you should go forth and tell other people and copy it into their head, and this meme will spread because we cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning, we have to extend it because if we appear to be confronted by insoluble problems it's because we have the wrong language for dealing with this


because we have the wrong language for dealing with this problem. You learn that with computers. Certain languages are good for certain kinds of problems. We have to constantly evolve language and push it forward, and the way I think of the psychedelics is they are catalysts to the imagination. That's what they were back a hundred thousand years ago. The imagination, which was just this glimmering, this iridescence on the surface of ape cognition, was under the influence of the reciprocal feedback of self reflection, you know, that is created by watching your own mind because it has suddenly become interesting, because it has suddenly been flooded by a psychoactive aiming. That iridescence has been coaxed into language, art, architecture, music, poetry, the whole ball of wax. But now we know these things. It's no longer a sort of haphazard process. We can, by analyzing different kinds of cultures existing in the world today and cultures that existed in the past, we can


and cultures that existed in the past, we can uncover, reveal, unravel the lost secret of our origins. I haven't talked too much this weekend, but I'm very keen for the notion of what I call the archaic revival, and the archaic revival is this overarching metaphor that is the way for us to go to save our necks at this point. When a culture gets into trouble, instinctively what it does is it goes back through its own past until it finds a moment when things seem to make sense, and then it brings that moment forward into the present. The perfect example is when medieval Christianity no longer made sense to a major proportion or percentage of the people of Western Europe because of the rise of new kinds of classes, new forms of wealth, new information about the world outside Europe, when the medieval vision lost its power, the intellectuals of that time instinctively reached backwards into the past looking for a stable model, and finally they reached the golden


a stable model, and finally they reached the golden age of Periclean Athens. And there they found Plato, Aristotle, the dramatists, so forth, and they created Classicism. Notice that we're talking here about the 1400's. Classicism was brought to birth in the 1400's, two thousand years after the death of Plato, and we are still to a tremendous degree, we are the children of this classical revival which we call the renaissance. Our theories of law, our theories of government, our notion of justice, our notions of city planning, of architecture, military planning and so forth, are all drawn from classical Greek and Roman models that were brought back from the dead five hundred years ago by a bunch of Italian investment bankers who thought that this was a good model to build on, to hang their civilization on. And now this has run out. The contradictions are too extreme. This classicism, I don't want to say it's failed, but it has just taken us


say it's failed, but it has just taken us as far as it can go. So now we again, we confront great existential confusion, we confront cultural values completely different from our own such as rainforest aborigines and so forth. We confront the toxic legacy of modern science, the retreating species counts of the earth, the decaying atmosphere, all these things. So we must now reach far back into time for a new cultural model. Our crisis is so great that we have to reach back to the high paleolithic, to the moment immediately before the invention of agriculture and the creation of the dominator ego. People talk about the new age and the new paradigm and this and that, well it's larger than that. It's been going on throughout the 20th century. The discovery of the purification of mescaline in Berlin in 1987, Freud begins to publish at the turn of the century, Jung....they are discovering the primitive unconscious. They are revealing to Edwardian and


primitive unconscious. They are revealing to Edwardian and Viennese ladies and gentlemen of great culture and breeding that they have inside them brawling, incestuous, violent, lust-driven animal natures. In other words, they are reintroducing an awareness of the primitive into this tremendously constipated male dominated late 19th century post-Victorian cultural milieu. And then, following hard upon them, the impressionists in the 1880s giving way to analytical cubism and all that. Cubism arose as the result of the fascination of a few artists with primitive African masks. Picasso and his circle, and when they brought this stuff back to Paris in 1905 through 15, nobody had ever seen this kind of thing, and these guys began to try to reconstruct the pictorial space of people like Degas and those people into the pictorial space of the primitive mentality. Meanwhile anthropologists were bringing in..and Frazer published The Golden Bow, which laid before the European intellectual community this vast repository of integrated


the European intellectual community this vast repository of integrated mythology. National socialism, surrealism, all of these things- some negative, some positive- are all aspects of the 20th century fascination and re-vivification of the primitive. Rock and roll, the rise of sexual permissiveness, the rise of styles of dancing which were not the minuet and so forth. All of this signals this fascination with the primitive, but at the center of it stand two phenomena, or two integrated phenomena: the personality of the shaman, and the fact of the psychedelic of experience, and we've come late to that. The 1960's is when this theme was first announced for any large number of people and I think that we have to consciously deconstruct the constipated, classical, industrial, linear, dominator civilization that we're trapped inside because it's a vehicle we can't steer. It's glued to the tracks which run right over the cliff. If we cannot alter the assumptions of this society, if the George


the assumptions of this society, if the George Bush's and Helmut Coles of this world are going to continue to run things, then head for the bunkers folks and pray, because the bunkers aren't going to be any consolation.


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New Dimensions Radio Interview (aka Towards the Unknown)

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10 June 1983

San Francisco, California

5759

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Michael Toms: So, long, long ago in a far away galaxy, uh, Star Wars style may be in our future?

MT: As opposed to our past?

MT: Well by and large, uh, psychedelics have, uh, really not been accepted into the mainstream - do you see a change in that?

MT: Terence, you were talking about, uh, extra-ordinary realities and it occurs to me that there's, um, an enormous amount of prejudice against um, the... psychedelics and the, uh, use of hallucinogenic, uh, substances and, um, it's almost as if there's an inordinate fear to open up the, um, door to the closet that these substances, uh, reveal. Um, what about that prejudice? What do you think is- how's that gonna be resolved? What is the resolution of that?

MT: What is the value of exploring, uh, extraordinary realities?

MT: Most of us, I think, just simply accept, uh, the everyday reality as the only one. Uh, and, and you're talking about uh, uh, journeys into the nether regions of, uh, uh, which- far beyond most peoples, uh, conception or even wanting to conceive of, uh, such a reality. Uh.

MT: Well, the world being made of language and I think of these extraordinary realities which are totally beyond any language that we [laughs], we use in any ordinary sense.


MT: Terence, could you identify Philos for us and tell him-tell us who he was?

MT: How would you relate to, uh, Socrates view of the world?

MT: What I think most of us don't understand, or don't-don't really know is the fact that Greek culture and the Eleusinian min-mysteries, um, incorporated the use of something that- very akin to psychedelics.

MT: And, and, essentially Western civilization [Laughing] is based on the culture that, uh, had at its core root, um, an experience and a ritual that-that used, as I say, something akin to psychedelics

Huautla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult. It was as if Eros who had been martyred in the Old World was then found sleeping in the mountains of Mexico and resurrected. And, uh, the experience of the mushroom is very much the experience of a

bacchanalian nature power that uh, is-is very alien and yet resonates with our expectations of what that experience would be like.

MT: Interesting that the mushroom also is a symbol in our culture of death and destruction, being the symbol of the nuclear explosion.

MT: Mushroom cloud.

MT: Somehow, I think the latter is safer!

MT: Hm, it is an amazing synchronicity it seems uh, that uh... Also, I was interested in--interested in talking with Andy Weil some, uh, time ago about the fact there are new genus of mushrooms appearing that, um, have psilocybin in them that have never been seen before, never been, um, tracked before, and it's almost as if they're appearing now.

MT: Is psilocybin illegal?

MT: Are the mushrooms illegal?


MT: Is psilocybin illegal?

MT: Are the mushrooms illegal?

MT: I recall Andy Weil saying that he walked along a downtown Seattle residential street picking up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of...

MT: ...residential homes. [chuckles]

MT: Hm, interesting. It turns out, uh, going back to the Andy Weil story, that, uh, the reason that these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locals in the northwest was that, uh, that their spores were contained in a mail order company's, uh, um, mushroom growing, uh, product that they send out, mail order, and so...

TM: Yea. So, this is an interesting phenomenon; you see the spores of the mushroom are not illegal because they do not contain psilocybin. They only contain the message in the DNA of the mushroom for the production of psilocybin, so it's a kind of bizarre catch-22. The mushroom spores can move anywhere legally, can be bought and sold but they are the sine qua non for the production of mushrooms, of course.

MT: Terence, the-the kind of knowledge and kind of information you're putting forward is... is not generally available. It's not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the typical academic anthropology, uh, curriculum, um, and yet it seems to be, um, a knowledge that, uh, is ever-expanding, but somehow it's outside of the cultural institutional, uh, entities in some way. Um, number one, why do you think that's the case? Of course, there's a logical answer to that one, but, um, what do you see as the future of this kind of information, this kind of knowledge?

MT: I think of, uh, the chara-[clears throat] excuse me, the character Yoda...


MT: ...certainly as a shamanic type character.

MT: Yea..... As we talk about shamans and shamanism, again that brings up, uh, cross-cultural currents, and, um, do you see the-the shaman taking on a new uh, -certainly you don't see Indian shamans walking, uh, into metropolitan areas, uh, but do you see the shaman taking on a new form?

MT: So, as we, uh, continue to, uh, move towards the further exploration of these spaces, um, we, uh, can expect that, um, social change is a result? Personal change?

MT: Are we just talking about another version of the Christian death-ressurection-ascension into heaven?

MT: What about the idea that these spaces that we've been talking about, that you've been illuminating, are spaces that can be achieved without the use of psychedelics?

MT: You're not suggesting that people should do this by themselves?

MT: My question had to do with 'with or without a guide'.

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Hallucinogens Before and After Psychology (aka Beyond Psychology)

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14 May 1983

University of California Santa Barbara, Psychedelics & Spirituality Conference

3533

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The Definitive UFO Tape

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April 1983

Mill Valley, CA

8014

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The Voynich Manuscript

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April 1983

Mill Valley, CA

4376

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Faustin Bray: Greetings, this is Faustin Bray for Sound Photosynthesis, Brian Wallace is recording, and today we have the good fortune to talk with Terence McKenna. He has chosen a subject that has been interesting to him for quite a while, and, um, the title of this tape is "The Voynich Manuscript."

when he encountered it in Paris. He was involved with a series of Angel contacts where he elaborated a language called Enochian, which like Voynich, is not written in, uh, characters of the English alphabet but has a peculiar set of characters unique to itself. Over 3000 words have been defined in Enochian, first through Dee's, uh, uh, spirit contacts and later the Golden Dawn took it up and further expanded it. But in Dee's diaries which are deposited in the British Museum there are 93 pages of encrypted material which are columns of numbers, and uh, I believe that, uh, uh, to eliminate the possibility that Dee was the author of the Voynich Manuscript the encoding methods of this material in his diary need to be computer analyzed and then compared to the Voynich material.

FB: What would you like to do with it?

FB: [unintelligible] and it's um...?

BW: What does it look like?

FB: What are the ingredients of the inks and the...?

FB: Boy, Bacon gets in there everywhere-

BW: [Unintelligible]


FB: Boy, Bacon gets in there everywhere-

BW: [Unintelligible]

FB: Collapse of the Winter King and Queen?

FB: Are you pursuing it?

FB: And so concludes the interview with Terence McKenna in 1983. Since that time, a book composed of interviews by Terence and various other people, including this one, called "The Archaic Revival" has been put out by Harper Collins, and in that book he continues on with the, um, research that's been done about the Voynich Manuscript, and he writes, on page 182, of that book, The Archaic Revival:

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Alien Love

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1983

Shared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, CA

8213

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The Gnostic Astronaut

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June 1984

Shared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, CA

10987

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[audience member says something--"...tell a story] What?!


[audience member: "you didn't tell a story, the UFO story"] Oh, which UFO story [audience commotion]......Well.....I don't know. It has to do with this whole thing. You see, the alien is an archetype, as well as whatever else it may be. I mean, if aliens didn't exist or don't exist, we would still invent them, because it's, it's the other. You know, I've, I've made the metaphor that we have arrived at some kind of, uh, collective puberty, where we now are fascinated by, uh, the notion of a non-human partner. We're obsessed, as an adolescent is obsessed with sex, we're obsessed with the notion of alien love. We want this, and yet we have all the feelings about it that an adolescent brings to the early sexual experiences; it seems like an abyss, a devouring, a kind of a giving up, impossible, and yet, our, our historical development, has led us to the place where we


development, has led us to the place where we now realized this was possible, it's like finding out the facts of life. The facts of life are that there could be a girl next door......and now [audience member: "who's an alien"]...Who's an alien. Of course! What other kind of girl next door could it be [audience laughter]. So, then, hmmm, there's a girl next door....a-a-and, so, it's not--all the talk about the wonderful technical benefits that we would reap, and all this, and obviously it isn't that. It's an erotic fascination with the notion of the other that drives us and that perhaps this is why, in the psychedelic experience, the alien emerges so fully and completely, because it is a repressed notion. Although, I've noticed that in the...in the history of the, the phenomenology of the UFO contacts, the theme....it was first a light in the sky, then we had all these exotic abductions, and then the last four or


exotic abductions, and then the last four or five years there are more and more persistent stories of, uh, sexual relations, pregnancies, this kind of thing. Well, this obviously means that, you know, we're growing up, we're getting older [audience laughter], the pressure is on to come to terms with how this thing is going to present itself....Yes. [Terence laughs]


[audience member: that's the story man!]

Question: Uh...sort of, psilocybin glossolalia....that's, that's not any words that are in any cultures right, but that has meaning for you [Terence: "Yes"]...Have you ever heard of, or have you ever, communicated with any other person in this language.

Q: Yea.

Q: And both of you have this experience of shared meaning?

Q: No, I just, I mean, I'll take your word, if you both experienced shared meaning and confirmed it, that's about as far you can go...

Q: So, it's like you, you do some and they do some back and forth...and it's totally unintelligible to the English ear.

Q: What, w-you know, what you're talking about, really could be the language before we were trying to build the tower of Babel. We all shared the same language [can't decipher] because we...

Q: I mean, it happens without drugs all the time.

Q: So is it anything like what babies who are about to learn to speak to use to carry on these things, and sounds like a language that you just don't understand...there's all this inflection, and, it sounds very intelligent if you could just kinda catch it [Terence: "It's, it's like that..."--several people talking at once]...well, a lot of it was to actual language.

Q: Is it easier if there's somebody else there to hear it?

Q: Is it easier, in other words....And, uh, I got the impression that there was something about the attention, the listening to somebody else, that facilitated it, a channeling through...

Q: Do you think you're a better speaker in English since having these experiences?