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Interview Hawaii

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October 1998

Hawaii

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Terence McKenna's Final Earthbound Interview

October 1998

Hawaii

Interview by John Hazard

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Esalen In-House Get-Together

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4 August 1998

Esalen, CA

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Techno-Pagans at the End of History

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August 1998

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

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The World Wide Web and the Millenium

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1 August 1998

Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York

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Live at Wetlands Preserve, NYC

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28 July 1998

Wetlands Preserve, New York New York

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Sherai(sp?)

. And, what can I say; it's a pleasure to be here. I always feel when I come to Wetlands that I'm like checking in with my sort of my home base congregation.

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Trialogues at the Edge of the Millenium

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May 6, 1998

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The Future of Art

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August 7, 1998

Esalen Institute

8316

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In the Valley of Novelty

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Summer 1998

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The original prediction was that there would be a deep plunge into novelty in 1996. There would be the deepest plunge in the 1990s. But that was based on my mathematics before John Sheliak corrected it. Once his corrections were factored in, it showed that there was a deep plunge into novelty where I said it was, in 1996, but that it wasn’t the deepest; it was the second deepest. The deepest was, I believe, in 1993, in Fall of 1993, which was right when the Internet was going public and the worldwide web was coming into being, and all that was happening. The plunge that I predicted in 1996 I felt pretty good about, because right near the place where I predicted the maximum amount of novelty we got within 10 days of each other: the announcement of the Martian meterorite with fossils in it, which has since been hassled over royally – I’m aware of that – but still, I think it was a watershed moment that the President of the United States felt the need to address the nation on the subject of extraterrestrial life, was a rare moment! [laughs]


And then within 8 days of that announcement was the announcement of Dolly, the cloning of the sheep in England – which again, if certain scenarios come to pass, that will be a moment – you know, the point the human race passed from which there was no going back, then, because basically if you can clone a sheep you can clone a human being; and these technologies are all rushing upon us. I mean, the body is being dissolved as much by advanced medical technology as it is by cyberspace and the Internet. I read this story, this amazing story, recently, set slightly in the future, and this guy has been in this very bad accident and virtually nothing has survived but his brain; but they have a medical technology that they can take a fragment of flesh and clone him, and then with hormones rapidly age the infant so that in 2 years there will be a brand-new adult body for his brain to be transplanted in. And these people have this fantastic medical policy that the fine print says that the brain can be kept alive, must be kept alive, by a medically approved method, that the insurance company reserves the right to choose the cheapest method, and the cheapest method is implant into the body wall of the cosignatory of the insurance policy. So this woman carries her husband’s brain for 2 years inside her body cavity, while his body is being grown to manhood for the transplant. It’s a dilemma we all may face some day!


Question from audience: I wanted to ask you about novelty and psychedelics, and the language that changes through the use of them. I remember reading Maria Sabina saying that the mushrooms spoke a different language to her after people like Wasson came down and began to use them – they went from Spanish to English, from Catholic mushrooms to – I don’t know, Harvard mushrooms or something… I don’t know; and having spoken with people who have taken DNA – I mean DMT, sorry! – yet the 1960s, very much, the people I talked to that did, they said it was so overwhelming they could not even understand the language. I haven’t read about this, anyway. Maybe you can enlighten me.

Well, one place – there aren’t many places you can read about it – one place you can read about it is, there is a book edited by Michael Harner, called Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press, and there’s an essay in there by Henry Munn called “The Mushrooms of Language,” which is one of the most eloquent and beautiful essays ever written on psilocybin – it’s wonderful. Henry Munn. Then, harder to get but equally interesting, is a doctoral study that a guy named Horace Beach did at CIIS, and it’s called something like “The Perception of Audio Phenomena Under the Influence of Psilocybin”. And he interviewed Bay Area psilocybin-heads about their experiences with language, and it’s very interesting. This is a very interesting area of discussion.


On DMT, and on psilocybin – and they are closely related, psilocybin being 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, the phosphorylated form of DMT, though they do not degrade into one pathway in the body – it’s a parallel pathway: DMT is N,N-dimethyltryptamine. These psychedelics particularly seem to impact the language-forming portion of the brain, and this produces truly bizarre states of mind, because it’s the language-forming part of your brain that is explaining to you moment to moment what is going on. You know: Now I am eating. Now I am having sex. Now I am flashing on DMT… and when that part of the brain gets foobarred, then you really do have a puzzlement on your hands, because the machinery of description itself has been caught up in the process.


On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it’s doing callisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It’s crawling all over you! And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification. So that it comes towards you – they come toward you – they divide, they merge, they’re bounding, they’re screaming, they’re squeaking – and they hold out objects, which they sing into existence, or which they pull out of some other place. And these things are, you know, like jewels and lights, but also like consommé and old farts and yesterday and high speed; in other words, they are made of juxtapositions of qualities that are impossible in three-dimensional space.


What they’re like is – and in fact, this is probably what they are – what they’re like is, they’re like three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is… it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun is really funny it’s an A,B,C,D pun; and it’s simultaneously all these things… well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output – in other words, a printed pun – in the DMT world, objects can do this. Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once. And, something like a pun, the result is always funny. It’s amusing! You cannot help but be delighted by this thing doing this thing.


Well, so these syntactical animals, or these linguistic elves, are pulling this stuff out and gesturing with it; pushing it in your face, saying “Look at this! Look at this!” And you are fascinated, you know – pulled into it. Because each one is [gasps] What? – you know, How can this be happening?We’re not in the world any more. No artist, no matter how gifted, could make one of these objects. Because they have qualities extremely difficult to language, qualities that no object in this world has! And so you’re trying to wrap your mind, and say, My God, you know, what is it? Because in spite of the fact that it’s just a little thing, you can tell by looking at it that its implications are earth-shaking. In other words, that if I could suddenly pull one of these things out of hyperspace, and we would all look at it, we would all realise that that was the ball game, right there. That somehow this proved it, was it, did it, ended it, started it, made it clear. How can this be? Well, I don’t know – you had to be there, sort of.

And then what lies behind this, or as you try to analyse the situation, you realise that these objects that these things are making are made by the utterances; that sound is how this trick is done. And meanwhile these things are saying, or beaming at you – the general vibe is, strangely enough, “Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!”

Question from audience


Question from audience

Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment. But death by astonishment is entirely possible! I’m not kidding! I mean, you are so fucking astonished that you’ve never felt your astonishment circuits get a workout like that before! I mean, what is astonishment in this world? It’s like, “Oh!” [politely surprised laugh, as though appraising something new]. This is a different form of astonishment, this is: [deep gasp of almost horrified amazement]. So. And then the whole notion that’s being pushed here is: “Do this thing. Do this activity. Do as we do”.

And you can sort of feel your intentionality, your inner something-or-other, reorganising; and there’s this, like, heat. It’s quite akin to heartburn – I won’t metaphysicize it – but heat in your stomach; and it just moves up, and then your mouth flies open, and you do – this stuff comes out, which is a very highly articulated, syntactically controlled, non-English, non-European, language behaviour of some sort. Not, strictly speaking, though I call it glossolalia, it strictly speaking is not glossolalia: glossolalia has been carefully studied, and it’s a trance-like state. On the floors of these Pentecostal churches in Guatemala, they measured pools of saliva 16 inches across from people who were in ecstatic glossolalia. This is much more conscious, much more controlled. It’s almost like a kind of spontaneous singing. But your mind steps aside, and this linguistic stuff comes out.


And you can see it – that’s the amazing thing. It is not to be heard, even though it is carried as an acoustical signal; its meaning resides in what happens to it when the acoustical signal is processed by the visual cortex. That’s the important thing. It is a new kind of language. It’s a visible, three-dimensional language. It’s not something I ever heard about, or any mystical tradition I ever heard about, anticipated. But it’s as though the process, or the project, of language – which according to academic linguists began no more than 50,000 years ago – the process of doing language, in us, is not yet finished; and this thing we do with small mouth noises, and each of us consulting our own learned dictionary and quickly decoding each other’s intent, this is a stumblebum, cobbled together, half-assed, way to do language; and what we’re on the brink of, or what these psychedelic states seem to hold out, is a much more seamless kind of fusion of minds by generating topological manifolds that we look at rather than that we – you know, localise into designated meaning.


And I didn’t mention ayahuasca in this rap, but ayahuasca, being – along with the mushrooms – a natural and shamanically used for many millennia doorway into these places, and what you find in ayahuasca groups in up-river tribal situation is people – the whole way the ayahuasca-taking is set up is to facilitate singing. The shamans get loaded; then they sing; then they go outside and take a leak, and smoke, and talk. And in those intervals, you hear people say things like, you know, “I liked the violet and yellow part, but I thought the olive drab with the silver spattering was way over the top”, and you think, you know, what kind of a critique of a song is that?! Well, it’s the critique of a song that is designed to be looked at. Nobody talks about the sound; everybody talks about the visual impression left by the sound, and it was these groups – these ayahuasca-taking groups – that, when the German ethnographers got into the Amazon in the early part of the 20th century, they called this chemical telepathine. They recognised, you know… and the reputation of ayahuasca is group states of mind. Well, if you’re naïve, then you think you’re going to hear everybody thinking. No: you’re going to see everyone thinking. You know, you’re going to see what people mean.


And it’s not that surprising, when you think of it, because obviously the world arrives at the surface of our skin as a seamless body of electromagnetic and acoustical and pheromonal data. It’s just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin, we break up this incoming flow of data. And now we’re close to McLuhan country here: I think what this hints at is that print skewed our perceptual apparatus, our style of parsing perceptual data, toward the acoustic space. So that for us, thought became a voice… you know? And very early in the Western tradition, this is so. Jehovah is a voice in the Old Testament; the Logos is a voice. In Hellenistic philosophy, we are the People of the Voice. But apparently, you know, there is a passage in Philo Judaeus where he talks about the etymology of the word Israel, and he says “Israel means He who sees God” – he who sees God. And then he poses the question to himself: “What is the more perfect Logos?” And then he says, “The more perfect Logos is that Logos which goes from being heard to being seen, without ever passing over a moment of noticeable transition”.


Well, I’ve actually seen this happen in psychedelic states, where you will be lying in silent darkness; you hear distant music; and as the music gets closer, it’s like a band with lights and drums coming over a hill. As the music gets louder, it seems to physically approach and a confusion of light turns into, you know, oom-pah-pah, brass band, dancing elves, cavorting harlequins, and less easily described denizens of the imagination… and then it all goes thumping and marching past, and disappears; but it’s a perfect example of light and sound arriving together in the hallucinogenic space. The fact that we’ve talked here, or mentioned, that we have DMT in our pineal glands, in our brains – what we haven’t said is that we also have compounds in that same organ very much like what’s in ayahuasca. Occurring in the human pineal gland is a compound called adenaroglumerotropine [??], but when you give it its physical chemical nomenclature, it turns out it’s 6-methoxy tetrahydroharmine; it’s a very near relative of harmine and harmaline. So I’m, you know, it doesn’t strain me to believe that perhaps in looking at this phenomenon we have actually put our finger on the place, the cutting edge, of the evolution of consciousness, right now, at the biochemical level: what’s happening is, there is a shifting, or an acceleration of the concentration, of harmine-like alkaloids and DMT in the human pineal, and it’s affecting our ability to process language, and it’s pushing and exacerbating a bias toward visual understanding.


And I see this, then, also reinforced and accelerated by the evolution of media, you know? In the last 150 years, we go from photography to colour photography, to moving coloured photography, with sound, with stereophonic sound, and – you know – pointing toward virtual reality, with more and more money to be made at each step of the way; and clearly, with amounts of money now, we’re outspending defence for entertainment, we will produced simulacrums of imaginary worlds; and engineering bench tests will be to make it as much like Hawaii as possible, or as much like Tibet as possible… but what people will really want to do with these things is make worlds as strange as we can stand, that are in these virtual places. So whether it comes through a natural evolution of the human nervous system, or the evolution of an advanced interface with prostheses that create virtual realities… I think the transformation of how we do language is part of this acceleration into singularity.

I believe you made a reference in one of your books to Julian Haines’s book, The Origin of Consciousness, […] and the way we evolved in the […] was like an auditory hallucination before, I guess, our consciousness really developed; and we were thinking human beings…


Yeah, Julian Haines, it didn’t win him too many friends, but he wrote a big book and had this theory that this thing which we call the ego is so recent in human beings that it actually didn’t exist at the time of Homer. And he goes into Homer, and he shows that the god always breaks through in situations of crisis and danger; and he felt that before Homeric times, people were essentially like ants or something; that their behaviour was largely instinctual, and that the only time they encountered this phenemenon of free will, the interrupting of the instinctual pattern, was in situations of great crisis and impending danger… and then this thing would literally almost come out of the sky and say, “Get your ass out of there! Save your self!” Well, then, over time, this ability to access this higher informational thing was like, again, the metaphor of encysted, closed over with the membrane of the self, and made part of the machinery of the self – and that this is what the ego is. The ego is a Greek god that you have frozen like an ice cube behind your eyes, and that you think you are this thing and … this is just a cultural myth, a necessary weird idea, no more a true statement about the nature of the mind of the hominid than anything else.


One of the conclusions that novelty theory leads to, in terms of its feedback into social here-and-now stuff, is the idea that culture is not your friend. That culture is an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why, to my mind, the word “cult” and the word “culture” have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is a cult! And if you feel revulsion at the thought of somebody, you know, offering to the Great Carrot, or tithing to some squirly notion, just notice that your own culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation and automatic and unquestioned and unthinking behaviour. There is a tendency to want to celebrate culture, springing both from the French deconstructionists and their fascination with culture, and then the effort to build pride through ethnicity, thing… well, that’s all very fine, but I think the cultures we should all revere are our ancestral cultures; the cultures most of us have our roots in, the actual culture we came from, was probably fairly squirly. I mean, the American family is what keeps American psychotherapy alive and well! This is a cauldron for the production of neurosis, and in some cases little else.


So, you know, part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. You know, if there is anything… since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is candy which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. So you can have a Stalinist state, a parliamentary democracy, and a theocratic state, and they all can agree on one thing: that psychedelics are just terrible, because then citizens start asking all kinds of hard questions and the devotion to the values of the Fatherland become mired in pseudointellectual discourse, and the next thing you know somebody has to be shipped off to the camps in order to right the situation.

Audience comment: Well, even our own structures are dissolving in the […]

Oh yeah – no. It definitely works in the personal life. Like, you know, I’ve been building a house in Hawaii, and while I’ve been building it I’ve definitely cut back on my intake of psychedelics, because I don’t want the answer to the question, Is this a good idea? – until it’s too late to do anything about it! [laughs] It’s like St Augustine’s prayer, God grant me chastity and continence, but… not yet!


Question from audience: One of the big ideas that seems to be in the notion of the Archaic Revival is that the whole big thing is really conscious and alive – the universe, the galaxy, the larger entities – and that’s interesting, because it’s a traditional belief that’s held by non-modern, non-scientific, cultures. And if in fact our belief systems are taking us in that direction, such that that makes sense to us, it’s really interesting but it also sort of upsets the current description of evolution within, say, the Darwinian dogma. Because that seems to be, you know, based on the idea that it’s all very random and it’s just all material and life is a big accident, that’s moving forward. So I think that one of the ideas you’re talking about today is teleology, that whether or not we really want to talk about evolution and how evolution as a theory is going to get self-involved and absorb this idea, comes down to whether or not these larger things have


comes down to whether or not these larger things have in fact some kind of direction behind it, which is I think what your work and observations imply. And so I thought one day about how to understand that, and I have a question, which is whether or not you can talk about creativity as having a fractal nature? – since self-similarity shows you at various levels similar principles, and since on our level as human beings anything that we make we first think about – it begins as thought, and then it becomes matter. And so if creativity can be seen as having a fractal dimension, it would be a way to talk about all kinds of creation by simply understanding it at the level at which we see it. And it would suggest that, to modify the Big Bang theory, that before there was a Big Bang there would have to be a Big Thought; and you kind of move along with that idea… so I want to ask you to comment on that, but also in relation to the idea


comment on that, but also in relation to the idea that was also contained in evolution about the origin of language, because some of the things you’re speaking about from your DMT experiences have a funny resonance with Creation stories, like Adam and Eve naming the animals. I mean, I’ve never really been all that comfortable with the idea that language would evolve out of grunts and groans when guys like Chomsky say it’s all [??], it’s a big system in language and all kinds of languages can be very different, but inside they always have these structures. And nature, and ecosystems, and languages, always tend to pop out fully formed and integrated. So is there any possible way that you could think that language, rather than evolving from grunts and groans, evolved in the opposite direction? That the first time language was used, it was used with the power that you ascribe to the machine elves? That is was something that was done carefully and precisely because it could manifest form? Or something


and precisely because it could manifest form? Or something like that? In terms of how new species come into being. The only idea that we ever get to allow into the theory of evolution is that it’s an accident, that there will be a mutation and a new species similar to another species will be born, and it will survive, and that will lead to a new species. But I have a logical problem with that, in that any female creature which gives birth to a new species is going to perceive that species as a birth defect, and this is a baby they’re not going to want to survive. And then there’s only one. And so that Barbara Klar [??] book I read talked about nine dimensions, and said the sixth dimension was the morphogenetic field from which all species and organisms evolve. So I was kind of thinking, maybe along the lines of the metaphor of a computer, there’s a software program through which new species are developed and designed, and the whole way in which


developed and designed, and the whole way in which they integrate themselves into existing ecosystems, etc, somehow or other it all gets worked out, and there’s a mystery then, we don’t see and don’t understand, by which these new forms come into being. Maybe they all come into being at once, with a thousand or a million creatures, instead of just one that’s having to struggle.


Well, all this raises a lot of stuff, most of which I can’t remember because of my devotion to cannabis. But let’s go back to the thing about language, and – yeah, the origins of language, let’s talk about that for a minute. I think that – I’ve been thinking about this, because I’ve been writing about it, and here’s what I’ve come up with. Part of what makes it difficult for us to think about language clearly in English is that this word, language, is used by us to mean spoken language; and it also means the general class of linguistic activity, as in computer language, body language, so forth and so on. And to think clearly about language, we need to have a clear distinction between spoken language and the general syntactical organisation of reality.

Language. Because that is old. Honeybees do it, dolphins do it, termites do it, they all do it different ways… octopi do it. There is much of language in nature; in fact, you could argue that all of nature is a linguistic enterprise, because the DNA essentially is a symbolic system. Those codons which code for protein are arbitrarily assigned – assigned, in other words, by convention. There is no chemical relationship between the codons and the proteins they code for, any more than there is a relationship between an English word and the thing it intends. Those are just conventionalised by probability over time. So language is deep in nature.


What is not deep in nature is speech. Speech is as artificial as the water wheel, the bicycle pump, the Tessler coil and the space shuttle. Somebody figured this out somewhere. Well, so then people say, “But this is hard to understand. It’s hard to picture how it could happen.” Well, here’s how I think it happened. My little example about the songs earlier was a stab at this, but here’s more. It’s that all kinds – all non-genetic behaviours (which are called, reasonably enough, epigenetic behaviours) are nevertheless… they’re not simply expressions of free will; they are under the control of a looser system of rules than the genetic rules, which are chemical and absolute. The epigenetic behaviours are under the control of syntactical constraints. In other words, we need to expand the concept of syntax from the rules which govern the grammar of a spoken language to the rules which govern the behaviour of any complex system.


So, for example, before speech among human beings, I think it was probably very touchy-feely. If you watch monkeys, you see this: they touch each other. They stroke, they grunt, they groom, they goose, they push, they do all of these things. The repertoire of this kind of behaviour, if you’re good at it, may be on the order of having four or five thousand words in your vocabulary. Well, when we watch primates do this kind of behaviour, we don’t think of it as a language. But in fact it is; it’s a gestural language. A couple of years ago, some research was done where these people took preverbal infants, and they taught them standard American sign language, before they could speak. So these little tiny children could sign “Pick me up”, “Please change me”, “Where is Daddy?”, “I’m hungry”, “I want to watch TV”, der-der-da-da, before they could ever utter a word. Well, now what we’re always told about spoken language is, it’s this miracle, and that we’re genetically hard-wired for it. Well, these experiments seem to imply we’re even more genetically hard-wired for standard American sign language, which is something very few of us will ever learn to use.


What does this mean? Well, it means that the gestural capacity is deeper than the ability to verbalise, and hence probably older. So I think there was a gestural language as complex as standard English, probably, in place before anyone ever uttered a word. Now, what the psychedelics seem to suggest is that you can get so hyped up on tryptamines that your body goes into some kind of almost convulsive shock, and the normally acoustically modulated processing of language flows over into the voicebox and you begin to literally articulate syntax. You begin to make a noise which is a tracking noise for this ongoing syntactical stuff that’s organising gestural intent. And it’s like going from carving in stone to colour TV: your listener immediately transfers loyalty to this much more spectacular form of behaviour. And so it’s like literally that the word burst forth full-blown, based on a platform of gestural syntax that had been maybe millions of years in its formation. It was just this ability to redirect the energy of syntactical intent through the body, so that instead of coming out of the end of the fingers, it came out of the end of the tongue, flapping in the airstream, and this thing happened.


It’s amazing to me that the straight linguist, you know, if you go to an academic university and study linguistics, will teach you that language is no more than 35-40,000 years old. I mean, that’s like yesterday! I mean, we – fire is half a million years; chipped flint, a million and a half years; language, 35,000 years old – language is everything we are, everything we do; you can’t think without it, you can’t do anything without it. And yet, if it’s that new, then what it represents is simply a technology, a form of media, that’s squeezed out other forms of media. And it’s not hard to see why: after all, it works in the dark, that’s good; it allows politics, you can make speeches to large groups of people; and it’s – well, it’s just very portable. It’s the cleanest technology ever put in place. When you think about it, it’s one of the weirdest abilities human beings exhibit. And when you go forward to reading, you realise this is an animal in some kind of an informational tizzy. I mean, the idea that you would make marks in clay which signify tongue noises which signify designated objects, so that these pieces of clay can be lugged hundreds of miles so that other people can reconstruct your thought by looking at these pieces of clay, this is bizarre! For animal behaviour, this is absolutely – it’s… how they managed to do that?!


And of course, the picture-writing, we understand; but similar to the breakthrough to speech, is the breakthrough to a phonetic alphabet, where you see: “Ah! We don’t have to portray the thing we intend; all we have to portray is the sound of the word that signifies the thing we intend!” And then, you know, you’re just roaring forward; and from there to the printing press, what is it, a couple of thousand years or something – and then there’s no going back. So that’s the part about language. Now, what was the second part after that?

Just whether you could think about creativity as a principle that could have a fractal dimension, and that would be a way to think about design, or a larger universal order, having some consciousness… [??]

Well, if you think of the universe as an engine which produces and conserves novelty, and you think of it as a fractal thing, a fractal hierarchy, built up and build downward of subsets of itself, then in a sense every creative act is the paradigmatic act of the Big Bang. I mean, it always struck me, you know, that the end of the novelty wave, which is: Up, Down, Oscillate, Zero, it’s like it’s a general map of all process. We could be describing the life of the energy output of a star, or the firing of a single neuron, or the birth and death of an economy; in a sense, you get down to a fractal level where you can say all processes are the same: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end… and if you know where you are in this concatenation of process, you can sort of locate yourself in the cosmic domain.


The thing that I tried to talk about this morning, that we need to map into our maps of reality, is the acceleration. I think it’s a really weird idea to talk about a thousand years in the future; I mean, good grief! A thousand years in the future, what do you imagine will be left standing that you call home? What – cast your mind back a thousand years: King Canute was taking charge of things across Northumbria, and the Anglo Saxons were making forays along the coast of Norway, and, you know, very few of the concerns of the day have survived to this moment; and that was the slow-moving part of the process! We’re going to move, you know, in the next 10 years, further than we’ve moved since the time of King Canute to this morning. So it seems to me the most unlikely future scenario is one which assumes things will stay more or less the same. Because we’ve put in place all these processes designed to make sure that does not happen. You know – rapacious capitalism, technological innovation, bourgeois social aspirations in the hearts of every man, woman and child on the planet, urbanisation, connectivity – all of these processes are designed to erase reality as we know it.

I’m wondering what you think of the kind of Vedic paradigm involving the states of consciousness, the waking state, the dreaming state and the sleeping state, and the transcendental force state, and they used that on an individual basis, but also with regards to [??] genesis. And that criticism of the West, that the West has taken the waking state as standard, and evolved its philosophical views without accounting for these other states of consciousness?


Well, certainly the West has built its house on a narrow foundation, denying these other possibilities. On the other hand, if… well, you get into all kinds of difficulties here. How do you judge whether or not a civilisation has assimilated or explored the domains it’s named its own? One way is by looking at the technological applications that it’s created. And for all this talking about these other states of mind, they seem actually as mysterious to the East as they are to the West. I don’t get the feeling they’re really navigating through what they’re talking about. In the past, there may have been levels of understanding. It may be, see, that psychology – though it’s a mystery to us – it may be that it’s an easier nut to crack than the nut of matter; and so I don’t have any trouble believing that Vedic India of 3500 BC may have known all kinds of things about how the mind works and how to navigate through these imaginal spaces that we’ve lost; but the spirituality of modern India is thoroughly contaminated by a thousand years of commerce with Islam and the West. It isn’t that different, really. I mean, Vedic theology and German idealism are strikingly similar cousins.

…a number of things of conflict, when you talk about the archaic revival and then the current cultural and technological revolution. It seems to me that a lot of the stimulus for novelty that was generated by the psychedelic experience now may be generated without that experience, such as through virtual reality, technological advancements, and perhaps would maybe make the psychedelic experience less necessary in order to […] observe and [??]


Well, definitely, what you’re getting at is that technology itself is a kind of psychedelic drug; that, you know, by chance or design, the proponents of psychedelica have figured out that it’s totally acceptable to this culture if you disguise it as electronic entertainment and put it out that way. So the web is incredibly subversive! Simply the fact that all that information is there and available, in a world where control of access to information has always been the game. So, yeah – the way I see it is that the psychedelic people need to use the new information technologies to build art of a type more powerful and more compelling than the world has ever seen. Call it virtual reality, call it multimedia, call it whatever you want, but it’s basically walk-into, walk-around, art – and then the boundaries will fall for ordinary people, because you see when you build a virtual reality, in a sense what that technology is allowing you to do is it’s allowing you to show people the inside of your own head! We have never had a technology that would do that.


We think the inside of our heads are all the same, but you know when I say to you that when I smoke DMT it unleashes a Niagara of alien beauty, if I had spent the last 30 years building that Niagara of alien beauty so that you could just strap on the goggles and go, then we would have a very different kind of dialogue and relationship going. And so I really see art as the great searchlight that illuminates the historical landscape just ahead, and I think that art is about to get teeth for the first time in human history. I mean, it’s all very fine, scratching on cave walls, and film, and video, and all that, but it’s always artifice, you know – you never are convinced, or only for seconds, that you’re in the presence of reality when you’re in the presence of art. But we will build art that will literally stand your hair on end. And the amount of creativity in a single human mind, as I said, more than fills all the museums on this planet. So what we need is to figure out how to get a spigot into that, and get this stuff out! And then, as James Joyce said, man will be dirigible!

Well, we said, I think, that when you take psychedelics you go up a dimension. And so this world of transience and flux becomes an eternal world. So in that sense, it’s the same thing. Whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing, I think depends on your meditation and your psychedelics! Different meditations strive for different things. Much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena. This certainly would not be a description of the psychedelic state!

Question from audience comparing LSD insights with meditational experience


Question from audience comparing LSD insights with meditational experience

Well, in the interest of keeping the number of singularities to a minimum, the most elegant thing to do is to wrap the theory around and say that the starting-point and the ending-point are the same place. Yeah, it’s the place where all is co-tangent. How we could get the universe back into the primal dot in 12 years, I don’t know, but there are some schemes to do that. There’s always schemes to do it. You know, if the universe were some kind of vacuum fluctuation, and it had an anti-matter twin in a higher superspace, then there would be the potential, at least, for them to collide across all points simultaneously, and you would actually get the universe of matter disappearing instantly, and you would then be left with a universe made only of photons, because they don’t have an anti-particle. What a universe purely made of light – what its physics – would be like, is hard to say; but it sounds peculiarly like certain Gnostic theophanies [??] about gathering the light and returning the light. Ultimately, the meditation path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of data, if the claims of both are to be respected, which is that they give deeper knowledge about reality. Yes.

Question from audience about expression of information using new technologies that may replicate the psychedelic state


Question from audience about expression of information using new technologies that may replicate the psychedelic state

I’m all for it; I just haven’t seen anything that convinced me that anybody had achieved it to any degree of significance. Yeah, you know, imagine a drug that did nothing more than allow you to remember your dreams! I mean, that’s not exactly shooting for the moon, pharmacologically, these days. And yet a drug which allowed you full recovery of your dreams might unleash God knows what, because we don’t know what we dream! The chemistry of DMT suggests that in deep REM sleep, it’s possible every single night you have a DMT flash. But it does not transcript into short-term memory. Or imagine a drug which allowed you to enhance long-term memory, so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago and play it back moment by moment by moment… again, this is not shooting for the moon pharmacologically. We’re not talking immortality here, we’re just talking simple neurochemistry. But all of these possibilities would change life beyond recognition. And I think these things should be pursued by any means necessary, you know – it’s a false dichotomy, the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things on the natch, and they’re not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics. This is just a con to keep lineages in business, I think, because they don’t want you going off the ranch and charting your own course. But where shamanism becomes priestcraft, it’s already well on its way to senescence.

Audience question re collective perception on mushrooms (nonverbal sharing of ideas)


A couple of situations, I’ve had telepathic things. I’ve had, in group situations, very quasi-telepathic social interactions. What I mean by that is, I’m recalling an evening many years ago taking ayahuasca with these people and they had a weird scene going. The shaman was a good guy, and a good shaman, but he had a nephew who was a jerk and was sort a pimp, and kind of a hustler. And the shaman was singing with his three friends, these ancient ancient songs, and this guy was drunk on aguardiente, and he would sing against them! He would sing against them… and this was in Peru, and if you know the style of rural Peruvians, people are so polite and so not-upfront, that no social problem is ever dealt with directly: people will tolerate incredible bad behaviour without turning on a person and saying “Listen, you’re completely out of line – knock it off”. So, 30 people – 30


– knock it off”. So, 30 people – 30 Peruvian campesinos – were witnessing this sing-against, and the woman I was with at the time very much didn’t’ like what was going on, and at the end of this, this nephew, this sobrino, at the end of his song of raucous interruption, I looked up just as he ended – the room was almost in complete darkness… I looked up just as he ended. I saw her look up and look at him with a look of utter disgust, and when these red dart things got to him, it knocked him off his feet! And I heard… the old shaman was sitting right to my left, and I heard him turn to his friend, and he said: “Ah! The gringa sends the bazudalacathnda…” [laughter]… and so it was like, “Wow!”. But then, ordinary reality immediately reasserts itself and moves forward, and there’s no time to say “Wait a minute, folks! – something


to say “Wait a minute, folks! – something paranormal just happened here, I want to interview everybody, get your impression” – it’s never, you know, when it’s real, it’s always caught up in the on-moving flow of events.


Question from audience

Well, if you’ve taken – what you don’t want to do is take… here’s – this is reasonable advice, too, I think. Where the problem area lies, people think it lies in taking too much. It lies in taking too little. Because if you take too little, you can resist it. You can struggle with it, and then it can turn into a real mess, because you’re afraid of it and you actually have the power, to some degree, to resist it. What you want to do is take sufficiently enough that there’s no escape, and that the transition from ordinary reality to fully loaded is as quick as possible. Because the going up is somewhat terrifying.

For example, let’s use psilocybin as the model. Here’s how it works for me – this is not tea, this is eating raw mushrooms: it comes on more slowly. So after an hour or so, you know, and the way I do it is I sit… as soon as the mushroom enters my body, I sit and meditate. I noticed in South America they don’t do it like this: they dose the ayahuasca, and then everybody just goes on, talking about their motorcycles and the jobs at the saw mill, and who’s conning who… it’s like, totally – there’s a brief moment, they pour, they toss it down, then they all go back to raving at each other about mundane life; and then 30 minutes later, on the dot, the shaman blows his whistle, or shakes his chakupa [??], his dry leaf bouquet, and everybody settles down – it’s like it comes on within two minutes: as soon as the guy starts singing, he just invokes it.


But the way I do it is, I take the mushroom (or the ayahuasca), and then I sit and I roll bombers, so I’ll have them ready if I need them, and I just sit as I’m going to sit during the trip, and I’ve unplugged the telephone, and I’ve gotten everything squared away, and it begins to come on at about the 40-minute or the 60-minute mark; and there’s sometimes some nausea as it comes on. And then I smoke a bomber, or half a bomber. And then it catapaults it into the full deployment of the thing, where you just hang on – there’s about a 25-minute period where your only job is to hang on. It builds. It’s like watching an atomic explosion on the other side of 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal glass. I mean, you “can’t believe this is happening – in my mind”. You have the feeling that everyone from Seattle to San Diego has just crawled under their desk as this thing tore past; but it’s in your mind.


And then there is the interaction with it, which – moment to moment, you are pretty coherent; but you lose it – a lot of it doesn’t transcribe into short-term memory. And then after about an hour or 40 minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable. The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it, because language fails; because English… there are no words. There are no words even close. I mean, sometimes you’ll bring out an image or a metaphor, but out of five hours of tripping, you bring out half a notebook page of metaphors and yet you were entirely engaged during that time – now, this question about fear, which is a real question, because when everything begins to slide, if you are not – it’s more than most people who haven’t done it expect. They have heard it, they’ve read the books, but they think it’s a metaphor. They don’t understand: it’s really going to happen, and it’s really going to happen to you. And there’s a tendency to clutch, or to try and resist it.


The thing to do in those situations, I think – and it’s counterintuitive to how Western people think – but the thing to do is to sing. To sit up, not to assume the foetal position – see, what you might tend to do is assume the foetal position and tell yourself, “My God, this is the most appalling thing that’s ever happened to me – if I can just live through it, it’ll be all right. I’ve taken this drug: if I can just wait through – how long did they say it would be? – seven hours, I see. It started two minutes ago. If I can just…” – No, the thing to do is to sit up and to sing! Why? Well, being practical people, to oxygenate your brain. To move the entire – this thing that’s happened to you, though it may have one claw in heaven, its roots are in your neurophysiology and in the chemistry of the drug. You want to move your physiology around. So oxygenating your brain can’t fail to do this. So you sing. And this almost always is accompanied by a sense of power, control, equilibrium, and so forth and so on.


Not always. I mean, let’s face it: you’re a product of a nutty society and there are unexamined crevices and uncleaned-out drain traps in all of us, and you’re going to encounter that stuff. The good news is, the earlier psychedelic trips tend to deal with that. You will quickly discover, taking psychedelics, that either you can work through your personal issues and become a psychedelic explorer, or this is just stronger medicine than you are up for, and you would be far better to go back to psychoanalysis or whatever works for you. Some people just can’t take it. Why is that? Well, because what it does is it dissolves boundaries, and most of us are over-boundary-defined. But some of us are having an uphill battle getting some boundaries in place, and realising we are not the telephone or the tree or the person we live with; and so for those people, who are having trouble establishing and moving boundaries, this is the last thing on Earth they should get involved with.

Question from audience about the “bombers”

Cannabis. Cannabis. Cannabis! [laughs]

Question from audience about experience the loss of ego – is it possible that your physical self could cease?


Question from audience about experience the loss of ego – is it possible that your physical self could cease?

Well, people often – yes, wondered. Often people wonder. You get into a place where it’s so unfamiliar that the question comes up: Have I done it this time? You know, Am I dying? or Am I in danger? The answer is, the odds are incredible against you being seriously in danger. People don’t die from psychedelics unless they have heart conditions or some incredibly rare medical condition. The problem is that the ego feels threatened by the boundary dissolution, and its ace is your self-identification with it. And it can actually say to you, You are dying, and here’s the evidence; and you have to say,. It’s unlikely. – and sing your way through it. But this is really tough. I mean, the Buddhists talk about slaying the ego – this is slaying the ego for real. You must slay it, otherwise it will spread panic into your whole psychological system, will give way to panic and hysteria. So unless there is some real reason to think you’re dying – and you should have done your homework: you should know what to expect… for example, if you take LSD and begin intense bouts of vomiting, this is not a proper reaction to LSD. Something is wrong, either with the LSD or with your relationship to it. You should know what a typical… a typical trip will put you through changes, but is not dangerous. But if you suddenly begin exhibiting some symptoms – heart fibrillation, or something like that – then you want to have…


This is why, then, there is always the issue of the buddy system: should there be somebody else there, and what about all that? My position is, if you are anxious, then you should have a sitter. If you’re going to do it alone, you should certainly tell someone so that they will check on you after a while. I don’t like doing it in groups or with sitters because inevitably I get spun into them. What I want to do is go as deep as possible, and even if I’m alone with one other person, culture is the third guest at the table, you know? I mean, if you start – I’ve often found myself in the middle of psychedelic trips thinking, “I’m sure glad there’s nobody else here to see this, because I’m sure it would alarm an observer!” – because I have my leg thrown back over my neck, and I’m screaming in Urdu, or something. But it’s OK, after a few minutes it’s OK; but if there were an observer, they would feel the need to do something, you know… and often, like I’ve seen people smoking DMT; and people moan, and they say “No! No! NO!!!!” and they moan. So then, you know, you get them back together, and constituted, and you say, “How was it?”, and they say, “It was fantastic!” So you realise that how they present is not reliable.


Well, setting has a great deal to do with it; and setting is a very complicated issue. Setting means everything, from the astrological situation at the time that you do it to the physical surrounding that you’re in; and it’s also a roll of the dice – you never know exactly what you’re going to get. As far as the question about Buddhism and all that, my own, you know when I started taking LSD I thought I saw, in Tibetan Tonka painting and mandalas, the echoes of this same world, and pursued it: went to Nepal, studied Tibetan, collected the art… and it is similar. I don’t know – I don’t know to what degree the Buddhists, the Mahayanists, realise those states without psychedelics. I do know that with psychedelics, those meditations, those techniques, those insights, are supercharged. And I would suspect that Tibetan Buddhism, as it has its roots in Vedic Hinduism, there may be psychoactive plants in its past; but it’s far in the past. Buddhism was brought to Tibet in 741 by Padnasambhava. There was an autophanous shamanism already present throughout the Himalayas, the Punpo. And it was largely based on cannabis intoxication at that point in history, not so much in the present.


But I think that this is a fruitful area – I just can’t believe that Mahayana Buddhism could have gotten as far as it did without some reliance on psychedelics; and of course, cannabis – we in the West, our style is to smoke it; and that’s a very mild way of dealing with it. I mean, if you eat – if you have unlimited amounts of high-grade cannabis, and you eat grams and grams of it, you will have experiences as extreme as anything that psilocybin or ayahuasca can deliver to you. You only have to read the descriptions of nineteenth-century writers on cannabis – Fitz Hugh Ludlow, S. Weir Mitchell, these people – their descriptions of their trips are as psychedelic and as out of control as any acid reportage or psilocybin reportage.


So the relationship of Indian and Buddhist spirituality to cannabis and other psychedelics is not understood. We do know that the whole Rg Veda is a hymn to a drug, soma, but we don’t know what soma is. Well, the fact that it could have invited such attention to this Vedic civilisation – the 95th mandala of the Rg Veda says, “Soma is greater than Brahman, greater than Indra”. Well, what is being talked about? How could such a great thing be forgotten and lost? What was it? And then, you know, almost as puzzling as What was it? is, How could you lost such a thing?! I mean, it’s like us forgetting how to make automobiles or something! It was something so basic to the culture that how could you possible forget something so central? Yet apparently they did, and today there are scholarly fights. Was it Amanita muscaria? Was it psilocybin? Was it Peganum harmala? Or was it something else? Why is this so hard to figure out? The only thing I can imagine is that it must have been eventually restricted to a priestly class of initiates, and then there must have been a social revolt from the bottom, and all those people were put to death; and then, nobody knew what it was.

Yes, I think you have to push the psychedelics to reach these unitary states. What always fascinated me was hallucination. Because it was, to me, the proof that I was dealing with something outside myself.

Question from audience

Well, and here was stuff that amazed me, that I couldn’t make up on my own, that would – you know, a single image would have taken me hours to draw and figure out, and here I was getting 28 frames a second of this unpredictable stuff!

Question from audience


Question from audience

Well, one of the nice things about the tryptamines, I think, is they leave the sense of self pretty much intact. In other words, it doesn’t distort who you are; it does something to your sensory input. DMT is very, very surprisingly, like that. You smoke DMT: you are immediately plunged into an alien universe. But if you can keep your wits about you, and actually notice how you feel, you don’t feel any different! You’re not smarter, stupider; you’re not more excited, or – once you get the initial panic under control, you realise – My God, it didn’t lay a finger on me! I’m me, I’m entirely intact! What has happened is that the world has been completely replaced by something completely unrecognisable and alien that I have no words for, that’s blowing my mind, that’s ripping apart my philosophical machinery as I gaze upon it; but when I bring my attention back into my body, I discover – I’m fine! I’m OK! It didn’t change my mind, you could almost say, it changes 100% the reality around you.


That’s powerful, because it appears objective. I mean, the impression you have when you smoke DMT is, This isn’t a drug, that’s ridiculous.Drugs, you know, make you smarter, make you stupider, make you fall down, make you stay awake… we know what drugs are; this is no drug, this is something else hiding under the label “drug”. This is a doorway into another modality that exists all the time, independent of my thoughts or feelings about it. Is that true? Well, I don’t know! But it certainly doesn’t seem to be a place constructed to fit human expectations. Like, one of the things that always troubled me about DMT being somewhat of a Jungian event was the question, How come there’s no hint of this in any mythology or religious tradition or alchemical text or fairytale or dream, or anything else?... I mean, if this is so important a part of what it is to be a human being, how can it be so deeply buried, so secret, so unknown, and yet just one toke away?!


It still, that, confounds me. Because you can read all the Hindu scripture or Sufi mysticism, or all the stuff you want – occasionally, sure, you’ll find a phrase or two that could be mapped onto a DMT state, but nobody has trumpeted it. Nobody has said, “This is what it is”. And yet, as I say, it’s spread throughout Nature; it’s been known since aboriginal times. We used to, years and years ago, call it the Secret. And in a way, it really is the secret. Jorge Luis Borges has a story called The Cult of the Phoenix, and he talks about a secret that seems profound and yet preposterous to the initiates. One child may initiate another, and ruins are good places to do this… it just goes on like this for a page and a half, and you realise he’s – he must be talking about DMT.

Question from audience re the ego as a fairly recent phenomenon


Question from audience re the ego as a fairly recent phenomenon

Yeah, the great cultural accomplishment of Western civilisation is this thing called the free individual. But now that we’re on the brink of, you know, the electronic dispensation, exactly what we’re going to do with the free individual, and how that’s going to look, in an era where consciousness flows through a thousand portals, it’s not at all clear. It’s not clear whether we can somehow now carry the idea of the free individual to an even higher level, where each of us will become a kind of god – lord over our own creation, as vast in time and space, but virtual, as the cosmos in which we find ourselves embedded; or whether the free individual is going to turn out to be the problem all along, and we’re going to abandon it and become some kind of socialist gas, or some collectivist swarm, a hive mind, a world where intelligence flows where needed and identity is provisional and fleeting, and unanchored to place or body; I mean, much of this goes on on the Internet, you know. You can be an 11-year-old girl, you can be whatever you want. You can build your avatar and present yourself in many guises. It’s much more like a shifting fantasy-land than it is like the good old world of positivist rock’n’roll.

Question from the audience re shamanic singing as the catalyst for visual experience


Question from the audience re shamanic singing as the catalyst for visual experience

Well, yeah, I think that, you know, we see shamanism from the outside with the values of Western civilisation unconsciously applied. In cultures that are taking psychedelics, this thing which we call singing is a very complicated activity indeed; and if you’ve ever sung on psychedelics, you know that – you know, it’s an ecstatic and complicated and synaesthesic experience. I mean, to make of your body a vibrator for sound, to – you know, move out into the Pythagorean octaves with the human voice, and – it’s extraordinary, actually, how capable of sound human beings are. No other animal has the range and control of voice. They say that this is because we’re adapted for spoken language, but I think we had a lot of this range and control before. So things – words that we use very knowledgeably, like song, ancestor spirit, power place – we’re not getting 90% of the nuance of these meanings, because they go so gracelessly into English. When a shaman talks about spirit, he’s using a term as technically complicated in his mind as when a physicist uses the term beauty to describe a quark. You know, it’s very technically defined. And we tend to simplify, and then suppose that we understand.


Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans in various places and times is that once you get past the language barrier, what shamans are are simply curious people. Intellectuals of a certain type. In Australian aboriginal slang, a shaman is called a “clever fellow”. If someone says “I’m a clever fellow”, they mean, you know, I’m a shaman. Well, that’s all it is – it’s somebody who pays attention to how things actually work, and sort of transcends the culture by that means. It’s a weird paradox. It’s that the shamans, who are the keepers of the cultural values, are also necessarily the keepers of the secrets of the theatrics of the cultural values, and so they live their lives in the light of the knowledge that it all rests on showbiz. You know, everybody else is a true believer, but these are the image-makers, the people who actually pull the strings and control the evolution of the mythologies. And in a way, it’s a situation of alienation.


Mircea Eliade talks a lot about this in Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and in History: The Eternal Return. He talks about how the shaman is socially marginal, politically marginal, lives at the edge of the village, and so forth and so on, and is feared by the people, because dealings with the shaman are always dealings about life and death. But then the shaman comes forward in this critical role, as go-between, as mediator, between the cultural mind and the real world, which is this potent set of forces and planetary cycles and meteorological events and diseases and, you know, fate; and the shaman mediates. In many languages, the word for shaman means “go-between”. So the cost of this, or the price of this, for the shaman himself, or herself, is a kind of alienation from the cultural values, and a kind of understanding that it’s a game that’s kept in play.


And this is true in our culture as well: you don’t think the people who market all this crap and produce all this bad art, and so forth and so on, love it?! or watch it, or consume it?! – they market it. Its basic purpose is to delude and distract the masses. So psychedelics, what they bring into that shamanic situation, is sort of rocket fuel for the project of cultural detoxification, or Gnostic rocket fuel into a realm of cultural alienation. And then, from that point of view, then these other dimensions of reality come into being and deeper understanding comes into being. I mean, one of the things I think, after spending a while with all this, is, it really helps to be educated. It really helps to cram a lot of information and experience into your head, because the Logos – the alien AI, the high ?? hidden god that is trying to reach down to you and deliver the message, is a collagist. It can’t really compose the message except out of bits and pieces of what you already possess.


And so, you know, this came home to me very forcefully when I developed the timewave out of the I Ching and its sequence; because at the times when I was most inflated in my thinking, or most grandiose in my thinking, one of the issues for me personally was, “Why me?” You know, “Why are you downloading this millenarian visionary revelation on me?“ And the answer from the mushroom was fairly humbling. It was, You are the first person who has ever walked through this pasture who had these 64 hexagrams in your head. And that’s all we needed: we were just waiting for somebody who could bring that much to the party, and then we could arrange the details and the mapping, and the arrange – but they had to arrive with that much, and you’re the first person. So it was like, nothing about, you know, my fine genes or cosmic destiny, but just, I was the first termite to happen by carrying the right scrap of information in their head, that this thing could then manipulate.

Question from audience

Well, most DMT in the underground has been synthesised from indole. It’s a fairly simple process, like third-year organic chemistry. DMT does occur in Nature, in many plants. But usually there is little of it, so you have to process a lot; or it occurs complexed with other tryptamines that have various psycho and physiological activities that you don’t want, and that’s very difficult to separate them. So most DMT in the underground is made by underground chemists… and if any of them are listening, you might consider making a bit more! – because it’s hideously hard to come by.

Question from audience

Ah, if you had an IND – if you had a licence to give it to human subjects. But so people have such paper that the practical answer is No. So it’s like that.


Question about True Hallucinations – at what level have you experienced the shamanic ability to manifest miracles?

Well, aside from the story mentioned – no, no, a truthful answer is always complicated, although the truth itself is always simple. If you’re asking me to tell a story of a miracle that I still cherish as authentic, I don’t think it’s told in True Hallucinations the book, because – well, you’ll soon see why – but here’s an incident that happened at La Chorrera that didn’t make it into The Invisible Landscape, I don’t believe. Dennis had this notion of what he called “the good shit”. This developed in the days after the ideas about hypercarbolation. And he claimed – it was like a fantasy, it was like a joke, it wasn’t clear exactly what it was, but – it was this idea that there was this hash somewhere that had been rolled into cow dung, with cow dung, and then infected with psilocybin mycelium, so that the mycelium had completely replaced the cow shit in this bowl of hash, or this hypothesised kilos of hash, somewhere in the world. And so there was this psilocybinated, the good shit. And at one point, he envisioned us actually forming a rock’n’roll band which would play instruments that would condense this stuff out of the air over large audiences, and you know, we would go on tour, and at the end of the tour history would be – the whole thing would be in a shambles, because Uncle John’s band really did come out of the woodwork!


So at one point he predicted – one night, after he had been moved to the river and the sort of semi-incarceration – he predicted that the good shit would come that night. And by this time, he was very suspect – I was highly suspect – everybody in the expedition was polarised against everybody else, and it was a pretty uptight scene. And so I left with my girlfriend of the time, and it may have even been the same night as the silver key incident – and it was pouring rain, and we made our way like a quarter mile, half a mile, back into the jungle to this other place where we were staying, where the original experiment had been done. And so then we get to the hut, and it’s pouring rain, and I had scored this kilo of Santa Marta gold for the expedition, and we had smoked nothing of this – for Colombia, relatively rare – weed, for weeks. So I got it out to roll the evening’s joint, and I was fumbling with it, and I got this thing lit, and this little crumb, this little burning thing, fell on the floor, and I lifted it up, and smelled it, and [laughs] the transubstantiation had occurred! It was, you know, like Mazari Sharif triple-A, red lion, hashish, of some sort; and I know hashish!


And here we were, in the centre of the Amazon, in this hut, in the pouring rain, and I could tell that it was the good, it was the good shit, actually manifest. And I showed the woman who was with me – who was easily led one way or another – but anyway, she didn’t say it wasn’t, and I stayed up late that night smoking this incredible hash and waiting for the rain to stop so that at the first grey light of dawn I could go down to the river and confound my critics with, you know, the stone itself! The alchemical quintessence, the concrescence, the excretum bono, the good shit! Here it was! And so as dawn broke and the fog lifted, I made my way across this rainy pasture, and sat down by the hammock of the sleeping form of my most vociferous critic, and sort of elbowed her awake, and you know, there were other instances where this was the principle at work... It didn’t work: everything had returned to normal. It was the Cinderella screw-up, you know. It was just that I was a char-girl who washed pots, and there was no prince, and there was no coach, and there was no… and, plus, I was once again humiliated in the presence of my critics, who had further reason to think that – you know, a check-in to the local mental healthcare delivery system might not be a bad idea. These things happen.

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Lectures on Alchemy

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1998

Wetlands Preserve, New York New York

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Terence McKenna Performs with Lost at Last 1998 Maui

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1998

Maui, Hawaii

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Man and Woman at the End of History

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1998

The Ojai Foundation, Ojai, California

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Terence McKenna Vs. The Black Hole

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Late October-Early November 1999

Terence's House, Big Island, Hawaii

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Erik Davis: I'm Erik Davis, and I had the great good fortune of spending a few days with Terence McKenna, and his girlfriend Christie Silness, in their jungle home on the island of Hawai'i in November 1999. Sadly the occasion was not so fortunate, McKenna had been diagnosed with a brain tumor the previous summer, and he was home recovering from a recent craniotomy. I was there to profile him for Wired magazine, and it turned out to be the final interview he gave before his death, at the age of 53, in April 2000. McKenna's home lay along a rutted road that round its way up the slopes of Mauna Loa from the south corner coast. It was a white modernist origami structure topped with a massive satellite dish and a small astronomy dome designed to house a telescope that McKenna could not yet afford. The house and gardens were surrounded by a riot of vegetation, but among the native flora lay thick ropes


but among the native flora lay thick ropes of banisteriposis caapi, and a sprinkling of flowering salvia divinorum. Every morning I ascended a spiral staircase decorated with blue L.E.D.'s to get to the study where McKenna spent the bulk of his time, either working on his Macintosh or sitting cross legged on the floor before a small oriental carpet, surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia, and twigs of sage he occasionally lit up, and wafted through the air. His library was magnificent, thousands of books on alchemy, Tibetan art, Hindu meta-physics, systems theory, archaeology, astronomy, and of course, psychoactive lore. During the day I asked the usual reporters questions, but in the evening we would relax, and follow less quotidian pathways through the cosmos of conversation. McKenna rose to the occasion of his own mortal condition, and though he tired quickly and occasionally spaced out, he was as brilliant and funny as ever. What


was as brilliant and funny as ever. What follows are edited portions of these dialogues.


ED: So what was your, uh, what was your, uh, your first like encounter, like with psychedelics, either in a strong way, or just?

ED: Lenny Bruce.

ED: Oh...

ED: So anyways, so you got to, he turned, he turned...

ED: Were you kind of fascinated from the get go?

ED: But were you always, this sort of, partly, as much, influenced by, uh, the kind of alchemical mystical book, historical books you read in some way as, as well the more primal evolving...

ED: When you were still...

ED: Right. But so you were still thinking in a Catholic mode.

ED: Right.

ED: Did you, so, did you have a, uh, a break with Catholicism? Or did it mutate into all of your...

ED: Right. So when you decided to start speaking, and doing these conferences, and speaking on the radio, did you have a sense of your, of a kind of mission?

ED: Yeah, well talk about that a little bit, how do you...

ED: Do, are you uh, when think back of what you felt like you were involved with, you know in the mid-seventies, in terms of propagating the psychedelic experience, and you sort of felt like this is, you know, in a way were being one of a number of Johnny Appleseeds', uh, uhm... when you look now at what happened, emerged from that, are you disappointed in some ways? Or...


ED: And do you think that, do you think that you have the feeling that in some sense it will remain at least for the foreseeable a somewhat marginal, uh, road? Like a path that a certain, certain temperaments, or, uh, characters inside of the social matrix have, of reality have recourse to, but that don't really dominate...

ED: So, the shamanism enters, because that's an inevitable...

ED: Well, what do you think constitutes, uh, uh, a post modern shaman, someone who's legitimately doing shamanic work, and not sort of acting out a fantasy, or playing some game of, of, like a, identification with the other?

ED: That must have been interesting in the sense, that you were propagating the, the philosopher's stone to the, to brethren.

ED: Yeah.

ED: No, that's what I meant, through the whole sort of network of... freak... culture...

ED: So it's interesting to see the way that other plants, now... I mean if that, if the mushroom, the mushroom parasited on print pamphlet technology, now the, uh, more emerging plants that are re-encountered have a different...

ED: ...obligation device, of information fasted forward.

ED: What happens to people that lets them tune into a deeper level and intent? That wakes them up from the spell of, of mere consumerism, and the kind of subjectivity that is, you know manipulation of images and desires that constitutes consumerism, and which dominates many peoples lives?

ED: So in essence that, that, that turn towards deeper values, even though sometimes they take a conservative form is ultimately a healthy balance to just the sheer...

ED: Hm..

ED: But do you see psychedelics playing a role in, in opening up that kind of....


ED: Well, and, so what would that look like then, if you, if you were...

ED: Do you think in that process, the, the actual handling of the plants, growing them, getting to know their cycles is, uh, necessary?

ED: So in that sense, part of the problem with synthetic psychedelics, is that they fit too easily into a kind of consumerism model...

ED: That...

ED: What are the, uhm, uh, emotional, psychological, ethical, expressions of really, kind of genuinely long-term, good psychedelic people?

ED: Yeah.

ED: Try to explain a little more.

ED: And that, and that manifests in the, in the call even in normal life to present it yourself, articulate yourself, oneself differently.

ED: Do you feel that that characterizes the overall, or in some significant way, the kind of people you've met for the last...

ED: Before your sickness, did, how often did you do large, large journeys?

ED: So do you have the sense that what, that tripping you on some level are getting, uh, getting something done?

ED: Yes, that there's something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?


ED: Yes, that there's something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?

ED: You know it's funny, in your raps you, you stay away from, uh, what, what to a lot of people would be spirituality. In, in a way, like uh... the way that somebody would present their... you know, Jewish spirituality, or kind of Buddhist practice or whatever... you don't talk... in fact often you sort of, like slag the, the Guru model. Can you kind of separate yourself from that, and you really have a kind of... I mean you've maintained this sort of... I don't know how to, I don't want to characterize it or anything, but uhm, and yet at points obviously you are limited by something in your own language you might, you would call spiritual.

ED: What is, what comes up around that word?

ED: What do you think about? Do you think that like post-modern spirituality is a sort of legitimate term or project?

ED: Believe, it's not really about belief, I, I, I mean that whatever the kind, I mean there's a lot of people now who are developing relationships with all kinds of spiritual practices, and they're not really doing it, even in the way that people did in the seventies, when there was so much, so much more true believings, it's a different kind of relationship.

ED: Yes it is. So were you ever very interested in the mediation or Yoga?

ED: How is that you relate to Mysticism...to mystical Experience?

ED: Not even that far, I mean, I mean that's one way of saying... of,of judging it in one way or another, is... it doesn't necessarily be valid data, it's just... I mean, you've been interested... this library, obviously mysticism is completely surrounding us.


ED: So it Plato inflated?

ED: You could just start out, you could start off by talking about the relationship between technology and, and shamanism.

ED: So uh.. I mean... can you... do you see that even though the west turns away from the worldview of, of pre-modern enchanted, the enchanted universe, is that there's still something in that process of technological development which has... which is linked to those older technologies?

ED: And that seems to you connected to you with an old, the, the, the operation of doing that goes farther back than just modern science?

ED: In one of my alchemical readings of modernity, is that electricity is a kind of element in the old sense of element, and that it has certain properties that evolve as you develop almost a shamanic relationship with it, in the sense of using it, and developing a relationship with electrical potentials, [Terence: uhuh], and that that sets up a kind of, that interjects a kind of life into the human organism that fundamentally changes it. Because it's introducing this element of electricity which has certain properties of communication, you know electricity is very strange, it's pretty far out stuff, you just laid out like electricity to somebody and kind of said, these are how these fields work, and they're not actually dadadadada, it's like total science fiction, we're just use to that story.

ED: It's an amazing thing and back... those potentials are being then introduced into human communication. So that fundamentally changes them, and I think spiritualism is like a reflection in the archetypal imagination of modernity, about the kind of communication that is introduced by electricity.

ED: Right, and that picks up a line of thought that's been carried through since the, since it first starts...


ED: I mean, the idea of electricity is born in, in an alchemical imagination, it's born at a, at a pre-, uh, point to the sort of... royal society break, or whatever you wanna call it, the genuine scientific, uh... transformation that split alchemy into the shadow realm of culture, but uh...

ED: This comes up in that alchemical matrix.

ED: That's hilarious.

ED: It's funny to say but you look at twentieth century science, and even though it's, it's story has nothing to do with alchemy, that it really is this kind of fulfilling of visionary notions about the way that matter, and energy, and mind can be stitched together.

ED: So what is it about the alchemy that really... kind of, got you?

ED: They, what do you think, what do you think's behind it?

ED: Well I mean that, I mean that gets that whole thing about the, this sort of destiny of technology, or the way that... I mean it's...

ED: How do you, uh, in your own head have come to, let's say reconcile those two sides? The, the side that's, uh, mystical or fascinated by these questions by the soul, or the, the things that are beyond reason... and the intuition, and, and, the, the way that you would relate to reason, sort of expressed expressed through a kind of skepticism, and a certain kind of, uh, uh, love of science?

ED: So you're not, uh, as overwhelmed with the kind of dystopian scenario, since it's obviously an easy thing to do when contemplating the future?

ED: Yeah.

ED: Do you see the internet as being both... is that more of a hopeful direction or can you also exacerbate in that problem?


ED: So how do you see that changing the kind of... the cultural matrix, or the emerging global culture?

ED: But do you see that happening, I mean are, are you... I mean if that's sort of your vision, you must be a little concerned about the, uh, evident power of money and pure greed to drive, largely drive development rather than design principles with an eye toward the future, and social equity, and eco... you know, ecological improvement?

ED: But how do you feel about that conjunction of media manipulation, money, and celebrity that's so dominant now?

ED: That what doesn't happen?

ED: Do you see it going in that direction?

ED: Well it's interesting about that, because that ties in with the genetics. If you, if you buy in to some evolutionary psychology certainly at this stage of the game, one of the forms that that would take is not merely like the logic that guides you, that how you choose a mate, and the fact that your status and money might, you know, if you're a male bring you a foxier, younger babe than the, the schmo whose, you know, shoveling shit, uhm, that one form that that would take would of course be to maintain your genetic line, and you know, you know, create a situation that's possible.

ED: But, but do you see that there's also madness to that? To that...

ED: You know the way that technology, that the internet would allow you, to build a different kind of career, cause you don't like traveling, and... what were you... what are you working towards?


ED: The, the idea you had about... and I've heard you mention before about somehow taking advantage of, uh, the net, to allow you to continue your career, without having to move around so much. I mean that seems to be one of the real weird paradoxes of the scene we're in, is that at the same time that we're creating all these great communicating devices... that people are flying around, to conferences, to talks, even more than they ever have before.

ED: Well you've this, you've done the circuit for a long time.

ED: I'm interested in a little bit of how you use the net? Like you have, you say you spend maybe four hours a day doing e-mail, but then also surfing.

ED: Term for what, that, that style of...

ED: Searching.

ED: Do you, do you ever have the sense of, uh, as you develop, uhm, that kind of relationship to it, that it becomes more alive?

ED: Do you look at, you know, what we're building with V.R., what's just around the corner with these three-dimensional interactive spaces and avatars, you imagine a culture that's more and more based on, on that kind of interaction... and, you know, obviously there's a kind of superficial shamanic or imaginative dimension to that, but at the same time, it, it's clear that at least initially, and certainly in many of its guises, it would be driven by the same kind of chintzyness, the same sort of crass, tinkely, uh junk, that really drives it... How do, do you think it's just going naturally evolve such that a kind of deeper, uh, shamanic world or at least shamanic analogue will emerge in, in virtual reality, or does it actually require some, some real creative work to seed it?


ED: And that's the, that's the dangers, it just becomes kind of a...

ED: What would the, the, the, kind of ideal 'Terence Mckenna' virtual environment be?

ED: Like the language, a visual language.

ED: And, and, do you... so do you see that, uh, that some language from the past, the imagery of Alchemy or Egyptian art or, or things like that are kind of... can be seen as predecessors for a possible new visual language?

ED: Well that's part of the, the... I think, you know, uh... a more of a skeptic would really would say, the idea of building a, you know, a universal language is a, is an old and crusty dream, and [Terence laughs], and when you get into the realm of actually having images involved in it, in the kind of hieroglyphics of virtual space that are linked with meaning that, uhm, it becomes even more challenging to imagine, how you can make that kind of thing universal? Unless it's the universe of, you know, the Nike swoosh, you know, it's the universe of logos and advertising which actually is, somewhat like this, except that it's information content is...

ED: Exactly.

ED: You ever seen that Scott McCloud book 'Understanding Comics'?

ED: Oh, that's worthwhile.


ED: Oh, that's worthwhile.

ED: Yes, it's really worthwhile, very good, uhm... I mean it's just sort of getting at a grammar... you know a lot of cartoons disagree, I mean they're very irascible [sp?], laud, and a lot of comic people are like non-prescription, but it's a very interesting attempt to use the form itself to talk about the specifics of the form, and it's really about comic art, but it applies to some of these issues of, of animation and cartooning.

ED: I mean animation is a great place to see the reflection of things that are happening in culture at large.

ED: Fleischer, Fleischer is great. I mean I think, I think that, I think Fleischer is the true origin of, of underground comics. I think that you find the most pregnant, uhm, uh, images of a certain kind of seedy, like, like the way that Robert Crumb presents a certain kind of seediness and sort of failure of the bodies, and spaces and yet that's infused with a kind of like, you know... magical eye. So you really have that both in Fleischer, and you really have that, the mania of the Betty Boop, but also a certain real, kind of, quotidian, almost proletarian, uh, uhm, graininess to these characters...

ED: It's very inundate [sp?].

ED: I mean that's one of the, one of the, things again that I just find totally fascinating, is like the magic of modernity.

ED: Yeah, just the relationship of modernity to esoteric religious undercurrents, and things which are not accounted for in, in uh, enlightenment discourse.

ED: You mean in terms of building our own sort of constructed world...


ED: You mean in terms of building our own sort of constructed world...

ED: respectives and communicating them to some degree but not in a way that dominates ideologically, or...

ED: Right. But just how far back to go? Like what's witnessing this bizarre moment in, in history? You know, what point are you, is the perspective kind of sitting in? That's the part I find really hard to figure out, does that make sense?

ED: Yeah, what... so how would you describe that... what's the character of our dissolution?

ED: That, uh, Nicholl's book that I told you about 'Living Time'... what was most impressive about that book was, he lays out this idea of like, time, and he basically kind of presents, a way of thinking about eternal return. Which is that, we are locked into these repetitive cycles, that are eternally re-iterating themselves. The only way of changing their quality is to increase consciousness in the midst of them. And so you affirm this life, this world, not some transcendent world, and just the...

ED: Like under the sign of this is always this way, and how does that mean to relate to the real as it presents itself, as if there's no other thing it can be but that, and that... but as you do this process, you change your relationship to this stream, and then all this other heavy, heavy stuff happens. But it was very interesting. It was like, cause other... up to that point I've always thought of eternal return on a kind of philosophical level, and I never thought what does it mean to actually live in the world of the eternal return, and that's pretty heavy.

ED: What are some of you wilder ideas about kind of technological situations

ED: Should you need any, or, or lying ahead?

ED: Yeah, that's...


ED: Yeah, that's...

ED: But I see the... I see strong movements in some levels for an imagination of Mars as a place to inhabit.

ED: I mean, it's in the scientific imagination, it's in the high science fiction imagination, the... why not? I mean, it's...

ED: a pretty cool idea. I mean, it's insane... it's like, I wouldn't go first [Terence & Erik laughs]

ED: Probably.

ED: What do you mean like, edgy shit?

ED: Hot water in there for something [?]...

ED: Woah! That's trippy a little bit

ED: ...bounce off my head...

ED: Now that would just be a fascinating encounter.

ED: But that one seems more likely, we encounter some kind of weird life-form underneath, but it's not, you know [Erik Davis speaks in alien voice] "I am here from Orion".

ED: It's much easier for me to imagine that on a certain level, that at least the galaxy, or our local part of the galaxy has some kind of other minds. I mean it may be, it may be not true. But it's almost the same way of the way that we model... you know... hopefully model a future. It's almost like you kind of imagine that... and so all that... Star Trek is even kind of this weird dress rehearsal for a certain phase of, of this kind of, uh... realization. That's just a story, just a science fiction story.

ED: And you know, psychedelics kind of seemed like to me imaginative rehearsal to some other event. And whether that event is merely my own individual death, or some kind of cosmic...


ED: event. I, I completely suspend judgement on it, and I don't know if I will be able to, I don't think I'll move from my present...

ED: position, of like, well...

ED: who knows? uh,...

ED: So what do you thinks the... up with the, uh... extra-terrestrial imagery, that features so heavily in some strands of psychedelic experience?

ED: That, and just the sense of, uh, I think it seems like a lot of people just even describe the sense of extraterrestrial intelligence, or...

ED: No longer rooted in, in...

ED: Source being biology and evolution, and the physical form of this particular planet.

ED: And so that, once it reaches a certain kind of...

ED: Yeah, I've had, I've had some pretty profound moments of... of feeling like contact with... something like extra-terrestrial intelligence, without often believing it in the interior of the trip that it was...

ED: Yeah, even at the time going... Okay, this is...

ED: Yeah this is, this is the phenomena occurring, uhm... rather than... Oh, I'm only seeing it, and uh, or maybe you just sort of gear forward science fiction, or..


ED: Well I mean it's... maybe it's just a language that I use for 'other'. That if you, you know, if you present this some kind of intelligence or communicating force that seems to be 'other', that's very 'high', you know very 'evolved', that maybe I'm just gonna tend to see it more as, as alien. But even in terms of those buzzes, like the kind of weird way that sounds can like form these vibrating matrices... is they've often, they often take on a more metallic quality, and become more synthetic. And with that rising begin to enter into an imagery realm that's very...

ED: And it's peculiarly Alien, and that's technological often, as opposed to natural.

ED: And uh... and that's you know this... that's like a lens or something of... cause I mean you imagine you're on, you know.... history is, if you imagine it pouring forward or moving rapidly forward, there's a kind of front edge, that's very weird, because it started bursting all sets of new...

ED: Yeah like, exactly [Erik laughs].

ED: What is the nature of the entities? What constitutes their apparent agency, or communicative agency?

ED: Do you feel like you've gotten any closer to that?

ED: What about the communications that come in from either the extra-terrestrial, quote un-quote, or seeming, or the technological world?

ED: Right, now that time in that phrase, you said the one time DMT, but I've also heard you say Ketamine there. The one time, Ketamine.

ED: Yeah, yeah.

ED: What is your, uh, what is your opinion on Ketamine?