Uh, we could -- and we are tremendously under the spell of this illusion. I mean, we worry about ‘the’ future all the time. Well, notice that you could just move to an island somewhere and get a brown-skinned girl and then you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else’s future because you would have made your own future. We can step out of the assumption of a universal history in which we’re trapped. And, I think realizing this is the beginning of a kind of liberation. Our assumptions, uh, are the edges of our worlds and this is one of our strongest assumptions. The assumptions that there is a past and a future and our destinies are all caught up in that. But, actually you can – a word that rarely passes my lips – you can deconstruct that assumption and, uh, and then you’re given back a-a whole different way of looking at the experience of being, which is empowering. Because, somehow when we are embedded in the future, we feel we have no control whatsoever. We’re like corks in a raging river. But, in fact, that’s a false model, I think. Anybody want to get in on this?

[Audience] - Sometimes when I’m listening to you, um, I have sort of the troubling thought that Terence hasn’t done enough psychedelics. Or, I think that you’re too straight in some way. When you get onto some of your scientific tracks, and as you put it, you’re a rationalist, I start thinking, um, why get lost? I start thinking -- I start referring to experiences I have had of being altered where a lot of this seems, um, in


cidental to the experience to one experience of eternity, which I know you had. And, how do you reckon with yourself sometimes and think when you doubt yourself and think this is just my ego, um, concocting things to make me feel good, etc., etc. whatever would be the worst-case scenario for you?. It’s hard for me to express this sort of well , but there’s something about the way you often refer to what seems to be a scientific model that’s, um, very linear even as you talk, you know….

Well, I would certainly say that I haven’t taken enough psychedelics. [Audience laughs] Um, reading these people, it seems like, uh -- I mean, I doubt these guys are real psychedelic heads and they’re much further out than I am. Um, the real truth -- the real truth is and I’ve said it many times that the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose. And, in a way, that’s either permission to suppose anything you want or to just stop supposing, you know. Um, these things are models. The real -- nowhere is it writ large that bipedal apes should be able to understand how the universe works. Still less likely is it written anywhere that Terence McKenna should be able to understand how the universe works. Were you here the other night when we talked, uh, about the black hole theory of enlightenment? It was two nights ago?

[Audience] – I was here. [Audience laughs]


[Audience] – I was here. [Audience laughs]

Well, that’s the idea - that the real truth can’t be told. I’m very aware, uh, that all of this is just stuff to support me, to make a living, in other words [audience laughs], you know. Um, that, in fact, what’s really going on defies rational apprehension. I hope! [Audience laughs] I mean, I would hate to think -- I would hate to think that we could understand what’s going on. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for this modeling process and I agree. I think I’m getting old. Uh, you can only push yourself so far. I mean, when I read one of these things today and he was off on some tear, and I just realized, you know. It struck fear in my heart. And, I said, "My God! You know and I actually did a, mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the weirdest one of all?".And, it said, "Hans Moravec is the weirdest one of all." I said, "Shit!" I should bring him here and sit at his feet! I don’t know. Am I talking about what you’re talking about? Oh good!


[Audience] – I find a fantastic parallel between psychedelic experience and physics. I mean, I haven’t found anything in the psychedelic experience that would be any problem to relate to the point of view of the physicist. And, actually, I think that all the stuff in physics got out of the bag because of the psychedelic, you know, breakthroughs in the ‘60s. Fritjof Capra and others had psychedelic experiences and then started to ferret it out. I mean, In the 1920s, people were puzzling about these things and having the spiritual crises and throwing away all of their assumptions about reality and having these types of breakthroughs, and then it go lost because we started to bag physics to use for the military. It was all an environment that opened up because of the psychedelics.

But, I don’t think that science -- that the purpose of science is to understand reality. This may go to what your saying. I think the purpose of science is to advance technology, which is a heresy. I don’t think reality can be understood and that it’s absolute hubris for science to, you know, cloak itself in the mantel of philosophy. All it’s for is to make better toys or, if you're nuts, better weapons. And, um, ultimately there’s not going to be any closure in the effort to understand and I think that the real -- the thing that you take away from psychedelics finally is that all models are provisional. That there is no truth.


We talked at one point in here about Wittgenstein’s phrase, "true enough" – true enough to get you to the gas station – true enough to get your taxes paid. But, uh, there'll be no, uh -- there'll be no closure on this stuff. We have to live in the light of the mystery. But, I think we also said in here, you know, it’s the death of conversation, if we glorify the mystery too much cause then I’ll be just like everyone else here and I’ll announce that we’re now going to have a meditation, which I’ve never done to you, I want to point out! [Audience laughs, applauds] Somebody wanted to say something?

[Audience] – With that in mind, I wonder how you can project an end to eternity at a certain time?


Well, I didn’t mean to imply a nothingness beyond. It isn’t like that. I think it’s an everythingness. That when I talk about what I envision it as - as boundary dissolution. If all boundaries dissolve then, you know, I am you, and you are me, and we are all together. [Audience laughs] It's a -- it’s an exfoliation of the human experience. The great boundaries are -- no, the small boundaries are man/woman, self/world. And then the big boundaries are life/death, uh, past/future. All of these will be dissolved into something like William Blake’s Divine Imagination. And, we will become, you know, our, our grandest dreams. And, so, the whole challenge is to dream a dream worthy of that dimension. I mean, it’s a very interesting exercise. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it. God! It comes close to being a visualization, I’m sorry to notice, but have you ever played the game, uh, "What would I do if I could do anything?"


First of all, you have to wrap your mind around the concept "anything." What would I do if I could do anything? And, I used to think about it in terms and for some reason for me it takes the form of an architectural fantasy. You know, first of all, I just locate myself in the house featured in last month's Architectural Digest. Then from there, I begin to work it out. Well, if you could do anything within a few minutes of entering into that exercise, you’re unrecognizable to yourself. I mean, you don’t even have to exist in a forward flowing casuistry of three dimensions. Uh, you can be a number of species and all possible sexes. You can be translocated at many points in time. Uh, you begin to realize that you are tremendously limited by your assumptions. And that, this is sort of what I imagine death is: It’s release into the divine imagination and if you’re, you know, blown up in an airliner, then immediately after dying, you’re just a dead person, but then you begin to unfold and test the boundaries.


And, you know, as James Joyce says in Finnegans Wake, uh, "up n’ent prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings." And that’s just in the first 30 seconds that you woof your wings. And then you’re able to assume to divide your consciousness to assume any form, to be any place, to know anything. Anything recognizable as human, I think, would quickly drop away or would just become a tiny and familiar touchstone that you would occasionally return to, to touch. And, somehow the dying, which occurs to each one of us, that’s the microcosm of the planetary and historical process that we're caught up in. It’s the thing that we hate most of all. We fear it. We really get agitated when death is raised as an issue. James Joyce called it, "The Grim Reaper"—a blessing in disguise. “If you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked.” Meaning: You know, you have to die to fully exfoliate into this dimension.

And, sometimes I think – and I don’t often say it to groups because I fear I’m misunderstood and I don’t want people to go out of here depressed – but, sometimes, I think that what human history pushes for is the extermination of all life on the planet for the simple reason that we’ll never be free till then. That we are in some kind of hell world and we are locked in a world of matter and energy and space and time, and that it is not – you know, my God! this sounds like, you know, Southern Baptists – [audience laughs] but, we are living death at this moment and that we must die in order to be born again. In other words, that somehow what we are has become trapped in a lower dimensional matrix and our greatest delusion is to cling to this most tenaciously.


Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his stories, has this idea that, uh, the species, uh, any species, is somehow not completed in eternity until the last member of that species dies. And, it is interesting that if you think about biology, 95 per cent of all species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct. This is what happens to species: they go extinct. And yet, we’re driven to pursue immortality. It pains us greatly to imagine the death of all life on this planet, and particularly, the death of our individual selves or our species. But, the fact of the matter is, we don’t know what death is. I mean, one of the puzzling things about the DMT trance is, you know, these creatures, made of light, in the mind, that are so different from us, but have such affection and love for us, they seem like relatives. They seem like – dare we whisper the word – they seem like ancestors. And yet,


word – they seem like ancestors. And yet, you know, we would rather believe that they were aliens from Zeta Reticuli or elves in a parallel continuum than apply Ockham’s Razor to the phenomenon, and say – since we are the only intelligent entities that we have ever contacted in this universe – these things which we contact in our minds in the center of the DMT flash, they must be human beings of some sort, but they don’t look like human beings. But, they love us so much and understand us so well!   Well, is it possible that the kind of human being that they are is a dead human being? That we’re actually breaking through into an ecology of souls. I mean, if we say that the psychedelic experience is an experience of boundary dissolution and, if we say that DMT is the strongest of all psychedelics, then may it not be that it is dissolving the most resistant of all barriers, which is the barrier between the


of all barriers, which is the barrier between the living and the dead? And that what you actually come into is the antechambers of eternity for a brief glimpse. If you were to take that rap and properly translate it into Witoto or Munangi, or something like that, and go to the Amazon and query those folks, they’d say, "Of course. I mean, your own Mircea Eliade tells you that shamanism depends on the spirit ancestors." And, for all the credit we give shamanism, we’ve never actually come to grips with the possibility that, uh, shamans really do work with the spirit ancestors, that there really is an ecology of trans- trans-material human beings in a nearby continuum that can be approached by a boundary-dissolving drug.   And, it’s because, you know, we and certainly I – and certainly proven by this rap tonight – are obsessed with technological explanations of it and how it’s going to be the flying saucers,


how it’s going to be the flying saucers, or it's going to be the time machine, or the collapse of the quantum vector or something like that. But, because the forward thrust of our technology is toward immortality. I mean, that’s what gnawing at the back of our minds. And yet, what may actually be coming towards us, orthogonal – meaning at right angles to the historical process – is the dissolving of the barrier between the living and the dead, which is so unsettling and mind boggling to us that we'd take a flying saucer invasion any day over having that happen to us! [Audience laughs] And yet, it’s very, very late in the game. You know, human nature is going to have to undergo a radical, vertical translation of some sort, if we are to avoid, um, the extinction of ourselves and all life on the planet. Well, so then, you know, uh, maybe that’s what it was for. If we believe that we were always embedded


for. If we believe that we were always embedded in the machinery of nature - that we could never act outside the purposes of nature - then this must be what it’s for.


It’s very interesting in embryology. I think most people think, you know, of a fetus in the womb, um, as you all know – we begin as very fish like creatures in the womb and then out of what are essentially little paddle mitts, the human hand appears. I think most people think that the tissue retracts tightly and that the human being emerges, but if you’ve seen fetal stages in bottles in medical schools, what’s actually going on is that cells die off. And, massive amount of dying goes on in the womb in order that the human form may emerge out of the fetal form.The webbing between the fingers doesn’t retract. Those cells die and are released into the amniotic fluid. The growth of the fetus involves the death of millions and millions and millions of cells. So, we are born, we are -- you could almost say sculpted into life by the hand of death. I mean, I feel as nervous about all this as you must, uh, but, you know, this is what we’re here for, right? – to stretch the envelope. Yeah.


[Audience] – Terence, I would like to go back to something you said about the beings of light and the shamanic capacity to see and interact with these beings, and they could be the ancestors. Thinking in terms of those individuals who refined their senses to being able to see more than the average ability to see and to hear more than just the normal ability to hear; where there’s a growing awareness of inner-penetrating planes of beings that are actually co-existing with us, but we can’t hear them or see them because we haven’t refined those senses enough. And, the more psychically sensitivity individuals have an increasing ability in a non-drug state to be aware. It's just that they can see more and hear more, and I haven’t heard you say that.   Well yeah, I mean, that’s a very good point. The perfect example of it in terms of a cultural tradition is, uh, uh, Fairyland. Fairyland is, uh -- the pre-Christian Celtic peoples believed that dead souls stayed around in the immediate vicinity and that there were thousands of them all around. The accumulated dead, very much in the way that when you smoke DMT, then there are thousands of these things and it raises the question – were they always there or what’s going on?


Saint Patrick, who, uh, brought Christianity to Ireland, found this belief (and also Anita makes the point about sensitivity). In Irish folklore, there’s the idea that if you have the eye, you can see these things, uh, and no drugs are required. It’s a psychic ability which the country Celtic people have sometimes claimed. So, when Patrick came to Ireland on his mission of conversion, he found this belief in Fairyland so powerfully entrenched in these people that he invented purgatory. Purgatory was invented by St. Patrick to convert the Irish. And then when word was carried back to Rome that Patrick, who was this great bishop of the early Church, that he had made this doctrinal concession to Celtic folk thinking – the Pope thought it was such a fine idea that they just wrote it into dogma.


So, uh, purgatory, which as you all know is neither heaven or hell, but a place where you expiate your sins for some amount of time before you pass on to heaven, is nothing less than a cleaned-up version of Fairyland written in to Christian theology. Now, I don’t know why the Celtic people had, not a monopoly but a firm grip on this. I mean, it may be their innate gloominess, their obsession with death, their, uh, uh – it’s called the "Ayenbite of Inwyt": it’s that, we just chew on ourselves until we dissolve – but, there was something about that character that set it up for perceiving, uh, these entities. Although, in all traditions all over the world, uh, if you dig deep enough, you can usually find a tradition of small people that live in the hills or under the hills – meaning graves, right? – under the hills and they are the ancestors. And, the best that straight folklorists


ancestors. And, the best that straight folklorists can tell is they have some weird law that as a people recedes into time, they shrink, which seems to me preposterous. I mean, I just don’t understand that.  I think the evidence is pretty good that this is going on. The fact that DMT is, uh, a naturally occurring neuro transmitter is very suggestive. Rupert Sheldrake has made the suggestion that dying is a unique chemical experience and he calls DMT a necrotic hallucinogen. That, that you actually -- if you are truly dying, your brain will be flooded with DMT and then you will see the ecology of souls waiting to receive you. I once questioned a very well known Tibetan teacher, uh, about what was going on in DMT, and he said, "Yes, these are the lesser lights." He said, "You can't -- if you go further than that, you will break the thread of connection and be unable to return." And, so,


of connection and be unable to return." And, so, you know, I think this is the most challenging idea to us on the conscious and unconscious level because we may, you know -- I mean, I’m only speaking for myself, but it seems to me true that we really have, at a profound level, accepted the scientific lie that death is non-entity, you know. And it gives us -- it’s a permanently weakening idea because it makes us each such a finite being. I mean, it means that no matter what you do, eventually, you know, it will all end in the cold, cold ground.  You know, "But at my back I always hear / Times wingèd chariot hurrying near;" "This coyness, lady, were no crime." "Had we but world enough and time." "The grave's a (fine) and private place / But none, I think, do there embrace." Well, maybe Andrew Marvell was wrong. Maybe there’s more fun on the, uh, other side than, uh, you might wish


uh, other side than, uh, you might wish to be congealed. Anybody? Save me from myself! [Audience laughs]  [Audience] – What I’m wondering, I have the impression of what comes to mind is a world that you project where everybody is schizophrenic. So that today I can be Napoleon, tomorrow Jesus, and then I can meet somebody else who also believes that he is Napoleon, Jesus, Buddha or whatever, and back and forth in time. I’m just wondering what kind of a place that's going to be.   Well, I would buy into that. I think schizophrenia is the absence of cultural expectation, you know. In the most profound sense. I mean, the casuistry doesn’t even apply. I mean, I consider myself schizophrenic and I have observed schizophrenia in other members of my family at close up and in great detail. And, what it is, is simply the breakdown of casuistry and then ordinary people - imprisoned in the hallucination


then ordinary people - imprisoned in the hallucination of culture, language and linear time - lock you up and put you away because, uh, you’re reporting from outside the cultural envelope and carrying information that terrifies, alarms, disturbs and just... You drive other people crazy is what it is! [Audience laughs]


I’m talking now about process schizophrenia, which is the spectacular kind: where you bring back information that is absolutely incommensurate with the models of your culture. No, I think -- It’s been said that the world is becoming more schizophrenic. Well, that’s just because they didn’t have the word "psychedelic." Psychedelic experience is essentially a kind of schizophrenia and the people who, in the early phase of psychedelic research – they wanted to call it a psychotomimetic, meaning it mimics psychosis. It doesn’t mimic psychosis; it’s a schizomimetic of some sort. Psychosis is a whole different pathology. But, uh, schizophrenia is simply a, uh, uh, category for, uh, behavior and insight that the rest of society is unable to do anything with, I think. Yeah. No, that doesn’t trouble me at all. I like talking about how I’m schizophrenic. Maybe this answers your, uh, criticism that I’m linear and running down and old. I can always go nuts. [Audience laughs] You know, if all else fails, you can go bananas, I suppose. [Audience laughs]


The schizophrenics return with the great aesthetic visions and the scientific breakthroughs and the poetic understandings, I mean, uh, and, it’s almost as though they have been aided by the demon artificers. They have taken into their, uh, retinue, uh, supernatural helpers and a shaman would say, of course, allies. And, I’m sure you all know the way in which schizophrenia and shamanism map together. I mean, our own Julian Silverman is the great pioneer in the one-to-one mapping of shamanism and schizophrenia. And years ago, when I was completely bananas, every time they would approach from three sides with nets, I had Julian’s paper called, "Shamans and Schizophrenia," and I could quote it chapter and verse and back them off [audience laughter] because, uh, what is called the initiatory crisis in shamanism is nothing more than a schizophrenic break with ordinary reality.

The problem is, we freak out completely and rush to drug people and give them electroshock and tie them down and slap them around. Well, so then the, uh, unfolding of the process is interrupted and it’s as though you were to, you know, perform surgery on a fetus or something and then be amazed when it turns out a monstrosity. When, if you would have just left it alone, for crying out loud, it was unfolding along its own cryodes of morphological development. This is why people like R. D. Laing seem to me to be the ones who thought most deeply and correctly about schizophrenia.


To become schizophrenic is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. The trick is to make sure that you’re nowhere where straight people can get at you. [Audience laughs] And, uh, my schizophrenic episode occurred in the Amazon basin and, you know, it was five days march to just a mission. And, I’ve always felt that evading modern mental health care facilities saved my mind. Absolutely! And, in a traditional society, it’s supported, you know. If someone shows signs, uh, because their dreamy or they hallucinate or they’re epileptic or something like that then this is encouraged and they’re put under the care of shamans, and drugs are used to initiate the crisis in some cases. And, it’s a cause for great rejoicing to have these personalities because -- in the culture -- because they’re the antennas of culture that are contacting the, uh, raw stuff of real being and transducing it down into, uh, cultural artifacts and institutions that then are useful. Anything else?

[Audience] – The grandfather paradox.

Oh, yeah What did you want to say?

[Audience] – I don't think, I mean -- your idea of the end point makes perfect sense to me and I don’t think the grandfather paradox is an objection. It’s not really a paradox.

No, I don't think it's a paradox.

[Audience] – It’s a self-consistent universe. You’re here so you didn’t kill your... If you killed your grandfather, you wouldn’t be here to ask us the question.


I think that’s the way to handle that. I think that when we finally really understand time travel, we may find out that it’s common as dirt and has been going on all around us in all kinds of physical processes.   [Audience] – We make up stories. I mean, the human mind likes to make up stories. So, if you came back and killed your grandfather and you’re still here then we’d have to make up a story. Like somebody else got -- even your grandmother.


But, since that isn’t how it works.  [Audience] – Well, it may be working that way. I mean, people disappear mysteriously and all sorts of things happen and we just fit them into a framework that makes sense to us. When we’re in the realm of time travel, then maybe we’ll have to reinterpret all that weird stuff that occurred in history.  That’s an excellent point. That all kinds of stuff goes on around us that may be, in fact, the collapse of paradoxical situations that we don’t understand. Like, you know, all these well-documented cases of spontaneous human combustion and stuff like that. I mean, unless you just flat out deny that this goes on, which is a kind of cop out, I think, because it just means that you don’t believe large bodies of evidence. I mean, not everything weird that’s claimed goes on, but on the other hand, I don’t think God is a republican. I think that there's plenty of weird


I think that there's plenty of weird shit flying around and as I said, nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality. And, every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95 per cent of reality and that the other five per cent would be delivered in the next 18 months.   And, from Egypt forward, they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things. Yet, we look back at every society that has preceded us with great smugness at how naïve they all were. Well, it never occurs to us that then maybe we’re whistling in the dark, too. That the universe is stranger than you can suppose. And that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor, but in service to the living mystery. The fact that you’re not going to understand it. It is not going to yield


to understand it. It is not going to yield to logic or magic or any other technique that’s been developed. It's bigger -- you know, the novelist John Crowley has this wonderful aphorism: The further in you go, the bigger it gets. And, I think this is true of most things.


That’s all, folks! [Audience laughs] We got through another one of these. [Applause]  Okay. Thank you all for coming. I do not understand why you put up with this [audience laughs], but I appreciate it. I do appreciate it!

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We Are at the Cutting Edge

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August 1991

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Unfolding the Stone - Making and Unmaking History and Language

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2 June 1991

Wilshire Ebell Theater, Los Angeles, California

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[Introduction of Timothy Leary]: He's an old friend of all of ours, so, I'd like you all to welcome, uh, Timothy Leary [audience applause and cheers].

[Introduction by Timothy Leary]: Yea.....[laughs] I for one am overjoyed to be here [audience applause]..... [LEARY INTRODUCTION NOT FULLY TRANSCRIBED]

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Finale - Bridge Psychedelic Conference

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1991

Stanford U, Mill Valley, CA

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Address to the Jung Society

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1991

Claremont, CA

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Deus Ex McKenna - Address to the Jung Society - 2:54:43 to 3:35:35 is mislabeled - this segment is from Rites of Spring 0:09:40 to 0:50:45 -- already transcribed at https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/The+Rites+Of+Spring. The Q&A (the second of two question periods during this seminar) for Address to the Jung Society has not yet been transcribed and is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKZTV5bXw9w&t=1h3m20s - questions begin at 1:03:20.

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Hallucinogens in Shamanism & Anthropology

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Exploring the Hermetic Tradition

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When Kat and I were in the amazon in ‘76 taking ayahuasca, we got in with this certain group of people in Peru that took it every week. and, you know cultures have different ways of handling hassle and in some cultures it’s confrontational, in other cultures not. The way these Peruvian country folk operated was if somebody was screwing up nobody would ever say so they would just talk about these people behind their back until the morphogenetic field of gossip was so strong that you'd basically awaken to the problem.

So, there was a complex social situation going on in this ayahuasca circle, which was: there was a master shaman, who we were apprenticed to, who was beloved by his neighborhood, but he had a nephew, a sobrino, who was a jerk. I mean, this guy was, as Don Fidel says, ambitious. He dealt a little weed, he did a little pimping, he was just sort of an edge runner type of guy. And every saturday night we would all get together and take ayahuasca, about 30 of us, older shamans, our guy, people from the neighborhood, and this sobrino, Don Jose.


So uh, I don't know what the real history of it was, ‘cause I had just arrived on the scene, but these old guys would sing these icaros, these magical songs on ayahuasca that appear as colored tapestries in front of your eyes and you know, they were, they had soul, they were into it, they were, and this guy would sing against them. I mean, it's the rudest thing you could possibly imagine, I mean, imagine if, if you know, lou reed were trying to give a performance and the guy in the third just launched into Old Man River, and kept at it! You know, I mean in this town I'm sure large guys would appear and say "sir." In Peru it didn't work like that.They just kept singing, he kept singing, and it was clear that this is how it was gonna be handled. That we had just divided into two separate entities here.

Well, um, my, uh, wife was sitting next to me and he was sitting across the room from us, the sobrino, and I had been watching him for a long time and I was loaded to the gills, and I could see he would get up on his haunches, he. he looked like a monkey. he, he, his face it was uncanny, he looked like a monkey and he also looked kind of like a jackal a dog with long teeth, he kept going through these changes, and.


And Kat leaned over to me and said something like “this guy is an asshole” and I just said, you know, “let it slide, what do we know, think of it as anthropology,” but she, she wasn't having it. So after a while he kept doing this and at one point everybody in the room, every person in the room was bummed out, and they were looking at their laps, all eye contact was broken, it’s actually. When I was a kid I invented a word. The word is Fardow, and it means: The embarrassment you feel when someone else fucks up, you know. and you happen to just be there and somehow the aura of it is so strong so, the entire room is awash in fardow and the old guys are singing and the guy is singing. So then, at the end of a particularly intense clash of these two styles, uh, my wife just looked across the room at this guy and, like, put the whammy on him. And I saw these red arrows leave her eyes and like, like, dotted lines going across there: unh unh unh unh unh, and they moved fairly slowly, you know, more slowly than you can throw a ball or something. Well when this line of red arrows got to this guy he was knocked off his feet. He, he fell backwards with his legs in the air there was a big noise and all the singing stopped and everybody in the room looked up and these three old shaman, who were sitting behind Don Fidel, who I to that point had not heard speak any language but Quetchua, one turned to the other and he says in Spanish "ooooh, the gringa sends the ziboodibooodiblugh!"

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Into the New Millenium

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1991

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA

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Live at the Cyberdome

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1991 (Autumn)

Stuttgart, Germany

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Terence McKenna: [Audio cut off] Hyperspace that's being created. You know, we had this chance five thousand years ago when we started living in cities and we made all the wrong decisions. Hierarchical society, kingship, uh, straight street plans, phonetic alphabets. This time I hope we're a little smarter and we can exalt, uh, magic, eroticism, the feminine, tribal values and an deanem[sp?] emphasis on the natural world and a deemphasis on consumerism, thing worship, sexism and generalized stupidity.


Micky Remann: Und in dem Masse in dem wir uns anschicken das Reich der Imagination im Cyberspace zu erkunden und zu bewohnen, sollen wir uns bemühen die Magie, das Zauberische am Leben zu erhalten. Was für die die die wirklichen Gewürze des menschlichen Geistes sind und, uh, nicht die Fehler zu machen die wir vielleicht in unserer menschlichen Geschichte vor fünf Tausen Jahren gemacht haben auf einem anderen Zivilisationstrip, nämlich gerade Straßen, uh, Immobilienmärkte, hierarchische Ordnung, Bürokratie und Politikerstrukturen zu bilden. Sondern dass, uh, wenn es jetzt um des Phänomen des Cyberspace gelt, dass wir die magischen Elfen, die, uh, Gnome und andere spot spöttische Wesen halten auch in diese technologisch vermittelten Welten Hineinlass gewähren.


TM: So, you know, when you think about the cybernetic community, the psychedelic community, the cyberpunk community. It's in places like this that we gather and we self-select out of the rest of society. So what I think would be important to come out of any evening like this is that everybody take a good look at the people next to them and realize that somebody in this room has what you need. And you have what somebody in this room needs. The, uh, the spreading of the idea of cyberspace has two aspects. It's first of all informing people for whom all of this is new and completely unexpected, but then the other thing is deepening our own commitment to it and that means, uh, more plant psychedelics. It means higher doses in silent darkness. It means a commitment and a courage to live out this way of life so that we can really take back our minds from the dominator culture, the linear paternalistic industrial capitalist culture and live the kind of erotic tribalism that we have our fondest memories of.


MR: Die psychedelischen Gemeinschaften, die technodelischen Gemeinschaften, die psychone- navigatorischen neurologischen Gemeinschaften wie immer man sie in dieser Disko oder sonst wo anfinden mag, haben das gemein, dass sie sich selber gewählt haben ein Raum zu finden der sich vom Rest der Gesellschaft abhebt, in dem sie ihre Neugier erkunden, in dem sie ihre neurologischen Pfahl begehen können und sich da gegenseitig bestärken können. Und, uh, das Beste was man aus einem solchen Abend wie diesem mitbringen können ist vielleicht die, uh, Realisierung dass wenn man sich nacht rechts und links umschaut, da genau die Leute sind, die diese Gemeinschaft bilden und was immer man braucht, sicher ist in diesem Raum irgendjemand der genau das hat und du hast genauso irgendetwas was jemand anders der in diesem Raum ist braucht und in dieser Gewissheit zu leben um sich umzugucken, das könnte die Vertiefung der psychedelisch neuronautisch Cyberspaceerfahrung sein zu der man hier zusammenkommt.


TM: What put me on to the connection between archaic shamanism and the new technology and the new music was when I went to the Amazon and, uh, spent time with the people down there who use a plant psychedelic called Ayahuasca. I discovered that, uh, the people were singing what they called magical songs, that were, uh, revealed to them under the intoxicating influence of this plant. But when they criticized the magical songs to each other, they treated them like painting, or like sculpture, not like music. So then when someone would sing a song and then, uh, everyone would say well I like the part with the blue stripes and the yellow dots but I didn't like the part that was red with gray overlay. In other words, for them sound was something that you see, rather than hear. And my, uh, fantasy for virtual reality is to use it as a technology for objectifying language. Because, you see, if we could see what we meant when we spoke, it would be a kind of telepathy. The method that we use to communicate now, small mouth noises moving through space as acoustical signals and then the consulting of learned dictionaries. This is not, uh, a wide band of communication and yet the whole world is held together by small mouth noises and their electronic transductions as radio, television and so forth. So what the cyberpunk generation holds out to the rest of us is a new kind of communication. A communication that is like telepathy because it's seen with the eyes and so then it dissolves boundaries and unites us back into this tribal, uh, community that we feel such a need for.


MR: Was mich interessiert an der Verbindung von archaischen schamanistischen Methoden und der Bewegung der Cyberspace und Cyberpunk ist die Verbindung zum, uh, zu der Art und Weise wie die Amazonasschamanen ihre magischen Gesänge vollführen. Sie nehmen eine halluzinogene Pflanzentinktur namens Ayahuasca zu sich, die, uh, die Wirkung hat, dass sie, uh, sehr f- in sehr tranceartige schamanische Gesänge verfallen und die Art und Weise wie sie über diese Gesänge reden ist allerdings nicht auf die, uh, Kritik der Töne bezogen, sondern es ist eine Beschreibung der Farben. Es findet ein Übertragung von Töne auf Farben statt. Und wenn am nächsten Morgen nach dieser Ayahuascatrance die Leute sich darüber unterhalten wie diese magischen Gesänge waren, die sie unter dem Einfluss der Pflanze gesungen haben, da sagen sie nicht ja, dieses Lied hat aber


sie nicht ja, dieses Lied hat aber gut geklungen oder es geht [sp?], sondern sie sagen mir hat besonders gut der Teil gefallen wo eben wie diese auf Lilauntergrund diese gelben Sterne erschienen, aber diese Teile mit den roten Streifen auf gelbem Feld, die fand ich weniger interessant. Das ist die Art und Weise wie im Amazonas eine synesthetische Verknüpfung zwischen auditiven und visuellen Kanälen geschaltet wird. Und unsere Hoffnung der Cyberpunkgeneration ist die, dass wir einen Weg finden diese telepathische Ästhetik wiederherzustellen, dass wir auf die, uh, Sprache wie sie jetzt stattfindet in Form von kleinen tonalen Mundstücken die hier ausgesprochen werden und dann über die Luftschallwellen irgendwo in eure Ohren kommen wo sie mit erinnerten Lexika und deren Bedeutungen verglichen wird, um dann wieder in eine Bedeutung rückübersetzt zu


wieder in eine Bedeutung rückübersetzt zu werden, was ein extrem komplizierter Vorgang ist. Da wäre die Hoffnung des Cyberpunk des Cyberspace ein neue Form von visueller synestethischer Kommunikation zu finden, die es ermöglicht, dass wir das sehen was wir meinen.


TM: So it seems to me the way the cyber, uh, punk, cybertech community can keep its compass pointed toward a real human future is to always keep natural models in mind. So, when I became interested in this whole problem of visual language, I went to nature to see if there was some natural system of communication that modeled this thing that I was interested in. And what I discovered was that in the octopus and in the squid you have this form of psychedelic language is already highly evolved. Because the octopus can change the colors and the texture of its surface and because it lives in water and so can dance and fold and unfold parts of its body very quickly. It has essentially become the surface of its own mind. It is, uh, uh, in effect a nervous system turned inside out, so that the thoughts of the octopus ripple across its surface and, uh, you know the engineers who have designed cyberspace and virtual reality environments in California are fond of saying that you can be anything in virtual reality. Well then it seems to me the thing you want to become is naked linguistic intent, pure intent toward communication and so by mapping the linguistic possibility onto a topological continuum and then processing it through, uh, computers we actually create a true mirror for our own mind. And so to look upon this or to share it with other people is to participate in a true form of telepathy and I think this true boundary dissolving telepathy that unites us all into one family should be the goal of the cyberspatial community.


MR: Wenn man diese neuen Dimensionen des Cyberspace erkundet, dann empfiehlt es sich vielleicht zu sehen ob es irgendwo natürliche Modelle gibt, die diese Art von angestrebter synesthetischer Kommunikation schn praktizieren. Das würde der Entwicklung auf jeden Fall sehr helfen, wenn man sich auf solche Modelle, uh, rückbesinnen könnte. Und erstaunlicherweise gibt es bereits ein Lebewesen auf diesem Planeten, das telepathische Synesthesie praktiziert. Das ist der Tintenfisch, dessen, uh, Möglichkeiten auf der eigenen Haut Farbkaskaden, Mosaikgebilde und ganze TV-Screens abzubilden schier unerschöpflich sind. Und, uh, der Tintenfisch könnte dargestellt werden als ein nach außengeklapptes Nervensystem. Alles was innerhalb dieses Tintenfisches an Emotionen oder Mitteilungen vorgeht wird sichtbar in Form von farbigen Displays auf seiner eigenen Außenhaut. Und das Versprechen, das die, uh, Cyberspacetechnologie macht geht ganz in eine ähnliche Richtung, dass, uh, die der Inhalt meiner Imagination sichtbar wird als ein, uh, dreidimensionale farbige Skluptur, die nicht weiter beschrieben oder umschrieben werden muss, wenn an die direkt wahrgenommen werden kann, uh, als die Außenhaut meiner Imagination.


TM: It's always held against the technical community that somehow we've moved beyond the values of the natural and the biological world. But if you think about what the tools of cyberspace are, they are integrated circuits, chips and, uh, electronic components which are made of gold, platinum, arsenic, silver, copper, silicon. These are all the materials of the earth and in a sense what we are doing is organizing the raw material of the earth so that it can reflect the dynamics of electrons, of light, moving through fiber optic cables. So really, the in in the cybernetic revolution what is happening is a kind of completion of the dream of alchemy. That spirit could actually, uh, come mingle with, uh, metals and glass and, uh, that out of this mingling of spirit and matter could come a new possibility, a new evolutionary option, a kind of philosopher's stone, a kind of panacea at the end of time. And this is to me what the computer and the virtual technologies all push toward. A kind of mirroring of our own souls. That what the agenda of cyberspace is is a kind of, uh, turning the body insight out. Bringing the soul into visible manifestation in the world as a kind of eternal transdimensional object and then turning the body into a freely commanded object in the human imagination. I mean this is the idea. To tray[sp?] to make this reality behind the menu and make the reality of cyberspace the reality in front of the screen, to reverse the figure ground relationship and find ourselves free at last in the imagination.


MR: Was der Cyberspacegemeinschaft häufig vorgehalten wird ist ihre Fixierung auf diese technischen Mittel. Aber es ist natürlich, uh, wenn man sie auseinandernimmt, diese technischen Mittel, kommt man auf Silizium, Kohlenstoffverbindung, Polymere, Kupfer, Nickelt, Eisen, verschiedene Substanzen dieser Erde sind. Und was letztlich in der technologischen, uh, Evolution geschieht ist dass diese Erd irdischen Stoffe auf eine Weise zusammengefügt werden, dass sie eine eigene Intelligenz hervorbringen, oder dass sie eine in ihre zu in ihrem Zusammenwirken eine Rückkopplung mit der irdischen Intelligenz bilden, die es vorher noch nicht gegeben hat. Und was die, uh, Cyberpespacetechnologie[sp?] verspricht ist ein alchemistischer Traum. Nämlich eine Verbindung zu schaffen zwischen Geist und Materie in der Weise, dass die Seele oder die die Kraft der Imagination nach außen gekehrt wird und dass der Körper mehr nach innen gekehrt wird und dass die Beziehung zwischen Keyboard und Vorstellungsvermögen durchlässig werden.


TM: So when I try to imagine the cybernetic world of the not too distant future, what I imagine is a world where, uh, all tools and toolkits have been tucked away into a virtual cyberspace. So what we see when we look at this world of the future is we see healthy men and women living in a natural environment, uh, naked, happy, at peace and when these people close their eyes in this natural environment, what they see hanging in mental space are menus. And these menus are the way you make your way into an interface which is completely hidden in three dimensional space, but which is nothing more than a hard wiring, a downloading into, uh, hardware, if you will, of the unco- the collectivity of the unconscious that exists anyway. I mean, what we're doing is, uh, the end male men engineering mentality is following along at hardwiring what the animal body has always been into. So, uh, the future is a future of ultratechnology in a dimension that


a future of ultratechnology in a dimension that is split off from what is called the ordinary world. The ordinary world, the natural world is maintained like a botanical garden or a natural preserve and then the human imagination, which is this titanic, Promethean force that is loose in our species, it is free in a virtual reality to create all of the castles of the imagination, to create the mile long buildings in all kinds of architectural styles, to create the arcologies and vision spaces that are the affirmation of the imagination. We are our mental power to project imagery has become so powerful that now really our only option is to break with the planet and head out into a cultural space defined by our dreams and by our machines. And this is in fact what we're doing and you people are many of the people who will do it. What we're doing is we're taking back our minds. I mean that's more than a political slogan. We're taking back our minds from


political slogan. We're taking back our minds from reductionism, from materialism, from scientism, from all of these intellectual philosophies which disempowered the artist and made the artist somehow slave to other forces in society. In the cyberdelic future, artists will rule, because the world will be made of art.


MR: Wenn ich meinen kurzen Ausflug in die weitere Entwicklung dessen machen kann was Cyberspace heute am Anfang versucht, dann, uh, kann man sich vorstellen, dass es ein, uh, freundliches, lächelndes, äußeres Universum gibt, grüne Wiesen, lächelnde Menschen, die nackt in ihren Höhlen hausen und sich, uh, das Leben gut sein lassen, in der herkömmlichen dreidimensionalen Realität. Aber sobald diese Menschen ihre ihre Augen schließen werden also unendliche Menüleisten von Optionen und Werkzeugkästen erscheinen auf ihrem inneren Auge, die sie dies ihnen ermöglicht, uh, psychedelische, imaginative Optionen zu erleben, und mit der gleichen Wirklichkeit und der gleichen Realitätsdichte wie diese dreidimensionale Realität. Und mit ihren, uh, Körpern auf dem gesunden Grass liegend können sie hinter geschlossenen Augen in unendliche Räume vordringen und, uh, sich in alle möglichen Situationen und Gesellschaftsformen hineindenken, die von den jetzigen Gesellschaften so weit entfernt sind wie wir von den, uh, Steinzeithöhlen und, uh, diese Möglichkeiten sind in der Evolution dieser Technik enthalten und wir können uns gegenseitig Mut machen oder uns dagegen, uh, währen, aber wir können uns auf diese Schienen einschwören und in Gesellschaften oder den Gemeinschaften wie diesen die, uh, Wege dorthin erkunden.


TM: Yes, you see. What we're doing is, uh, invoking a co- kind of collective mind. It's a a political project that has been the dream of civilization for as long as there has been civilization. And it actually is within the power of this generation to, uh, create this kind of new definition of humanness, where all the shit and horror of the last five thousand years of human history can somehow be reclaimed or made to have meaning by the application of technology toward the reflection of the human soul.

MR: Und der Versuch der dahinter steht ist eigentlich ein sehr alter Traum der Menschen, nämlich sich ihren eigenen Geist zurückzugewinnen und, uh, das Territorium was von Bürokraten und Politikern und Zi- und Zivilisationen bei denen alles durch, uh, Horror und Shit gegangen ist. Dieses belebte Territorium der eigenen Träume und der eigenen Imagination wieder für sich selbst zu reklamieren. Und, uh, dieses. Da war noch irgendwas. Das hab ich inzwischen vergessen wie's weiterging, aber es ging in dieser Art weiter. Uh, dass die, uh, die Möglichkeiten dieses zu einer bewohnbaren Welt zu machen.


TM: Boring[sp?] the natural psychedelic vision into that loop, then, uh, endless realms of alien and unpredictable beauty lie ahead. And this is really what human beings were made for. I mean, we are the information generating, art making creature. All our higher activities, dance, painting, music, poetry, uh, human relationships, all of these things have the character of art. And so the the future is lies in the realization of beauty, the making it more and more explicit, the sharing of our dreams by at last applying tools, not toward warfare, but toward the dissolving of boundaries between people and, uh, nations so that, uh, the real biological fact of a human community can show through. If we're able to do that we're we will be able to fast forward the cultural crisis and we will be able through psychedelics and mass media and the, uh, distribution and control of the flow of information actually be able to save ourselves and this world from ruin. It rests in the hands of the high tech communities developing and controlling, uh, information technology, because we have the money, we have the power to make any change we want in the world. But we have to change our minds. And that means better art and more psychedelics and so that's the responsibility which rests on you guys, and, uh, I'm sure you're up to it. Thank you very much.

[Audience claps]


[Audience claps]

MR: Ich werd sehen, ob ich aus dieser Rede noch ein paar Fische ins deutsche Land heranziehen kann. Was als Kompass und Maßinstrument[sp?] gelten sollte, wenn man jetzt diesen Cyberspace erforscht und bewhont, sollte die Schönheit der psychedelischen Erfahrung sein. Nimmt man ein, uh, nimmt man diese diesen Reichtum der psychedelischen Vision nicht mit in diesen Cyberspace hinein, läuft man Gefahr auf eine narzissistische Selbstschlaufe hereinzufallen in der eigentlich nur die eigenen, uh, Begrenztheiten widergespiegelt werden. Aber der unendliche Reichtum, der in der psychedelischen Vision die ich[sp?] die andersartige und außerirdische Schönheit dieser Visionen, das könnte das Element und das Ingredient sein, dass aus dem Cyberspace eine wirklich lohnende Alternative zu dieser Realität ist, uh, wo wir auf der Endmoräne von technologischen Problemen sitzen, die, uh, ein dieses genau dieses neue und visionäre Input brauchen, damit wir uns über die Runden kommen. Und, uh, es ist schön in einer Gemeinschaft, in einer Gruppe zu sein, die sich mit diesen Themen beschäftigt, weil das liegt in unserer Hand, diese menschlichen Träume, die Welt als Kunstwerk und Imagination zu verwirklichen. Schönen Dank.

[Audience claps]

TM: Thank you[sp?].

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Terence McKenna vs. Young Republican Radio Debate

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2nd-6th September 1991

KFI radio station with Tom Leykis

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Approaching Life's Edges and Boundaries

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20 November 1992

Unknown

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Imagination in the Light of Nature

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2 October 1992 (Apparently: 17, Oct, 1987?)

Earth Trust Benefit, Los Angeles, California (Apparently: Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles)

6210

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October 2nd 1992

Unknown

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The future of humanity with Abraham and Sheldrake

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August 29 1992

Esalen

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Camden Centre Talk

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15 June 1992

London, England, Camden Centre

19061

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Search For The Original Tree Of Knowledge

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May 29-31 1992

Boulder, Colorado

85354

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here.

[0:00:00] [Introduction begin] Sounds True, presents; In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence Mckenna. Researcher, author and philosopher. Terence McKenna has spent 25 years studying the foundation of shamanism and the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation. His books include Food of Gods and The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide and most recently, The Archaic Revival. He is also the founder

[0:00:30] of the Botanical Dimensions, a non profit botanical research project. In this weekend workshop, Terence Mckenna examines time and its mysteries, the nature of language and the techniques of ecstasy that have developed the non western societies to navigate to and from invisible worlds. And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado. In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge. A weekend workshop, with Terence Mckenna. [Introduction ends]


[0:01:00]..ahh..how to slice into this pie, I try to never do it the same way because i don't want to get bored but that lays a sort of obligations on me that i am not always able to meet. 2 things i think are going on inside this wrap, as currently packaged. First of all, i am very interested in talking about the impact of uhmm.. psilocybin.. [0:01:30]..on human evolution an.. and values and institutions, and then so that you don't think we’ve just fallen into French anthropology 101.. [audience laughter] I am interested in taking ..the.. the inside from that discussion, and trying to apply it to the modern or postmodern as the case may be, dilemma. Trying to draw some.. [0:02:00..implications from (uhh..uhhh) looking at human prehistory and the 7 factors that were in place as the moment of human emergence; and since i feel pretty much among friends and fringy here.[audience laughter]..I.. it doesn’t


fringy here.[audience laughter]..I.. it doesn’t trouble me to concept that my book, Food of the Gods.. I really conceived of as a kind of an intellectual.. [0:02:30]..trojan horse. It’s written as though it were a scientific study; footnote, bibliography, citations that’s impossible to attain book and so forth and so on. [audience laughter] but this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists. The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep, rather like an abandoned baby or a trojan horse and they will open their doors.. [0:03:00]..to it and take it inside only to discover that out of this very vague rational discourse for the self- transforming-elf-machine from hyper space [audience laughter] with their own agenda. [audience laughter] (clears throat).. I..I feel like i should say this; it’s more for my ease than yours. That..i’ve reached the conclusion that i’m now..[0:03:30]..espouse..through skepticism,


now..[0:03:30]..espouse..through skepticism, reason, rationalism and the tough argument. So it may sound bitsy, flaky and soft headed. Uhmm. But that’s just because you’re hearing it wrong. [audience laugh] the ..uhh.. The guiding input was .. experience. And in a way [0:04:00]..what we are gathered here to talk about..uh.. tonight is an experience which is not only rare, transformity, challenging.. But, also for reason that will probably get around to illegal. So, its.. uhh.. it's a very peculiar situation, very few experiences are illegal. And our models of the world..[0:04:30]..are built up based on our experience. So if u make an experience illegal, you’re essentially saying it is off limit for model building, You can’t include that in your model because it isn’t really there in some sense. And..and this is the situation in western society, these are the psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic


psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic experience..[0:05:00]..is as much a part of being human as sexuality, in..personal independence, uhhh.. child rearing.. These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation.. These..these phenomenal being. And a society which would deny that..[0:05:30-0:06:00]..is a society whose secret or maybe not so secret agenda is the infantilization of its citizens. I mean if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is? And are the people who make the rules; did they carefully, conscientiously and that depth.. Explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit for human consumption? [audience laugh]


Transcribed By Azlan

[6:00]

….or, uh, was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear? I would submit to you that, uh, it’s the latter. Well, first of all I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics, especially in this case psilocybin, on human-ness. And then if there’s time maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it? I had a philosophy professor once, Paul [inaudible], [6:30] some of you may know his book, and he opened his epistemology 101 course by saying, ‘i’m going to teach you what truth is, and then i’m going to teach you what’s so great about it.’

Well I won’t claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is, that you will have to find out on your own, but I think it is legitimate to discuss what’s so great about it. You know, are we, by any measurable [7:00] index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience? Because if not, then really, the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult, to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there. Speaking as a former member of course. [audience laughter] Well, my uh, my notion [7:30] of the way to legitimi- to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing, and I think one can show, uhm, in fairly short order, that these things are not alien to the human experience, or ancillary, or the province of uneducated, uhh, little brown people down in the rainforest or anything like that.


I submit to you [8:00] that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings, is central to understanding who we are, and how we got this way. And if we can, uh, explore this issue and convince ourselves there’s some merit in this point of view, then it will simply- it will do more than rewrite the annals of a stayed science like anthropology [8:30], it will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we’re in the process of grinding into, uh, pollution. So that’s the raison d'être for the politics behind it. Now here’s the spiel. Uhm, sometime in the last three million years, the, uh, proto- our remote ancestors [9:00], the proto-hominids, uh, were, uhh, disrupted in their evolutionary climax in the canopies in the great rainforests of Africa. You see most animal species evolve into a niche; tighter, and tighter, and tighter. We see this with termites and cockroaches and most lifeforms, this is what happens to them.


Only if the niche [9:30] is somehow disrupted or destroyed does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure. And this is what happened to us. Uh, our remote ancestors would have lived happily in the climaxed rainforests of Africa, in the same way the primates to this day live happily in the climaxed rainforests Indonesia and South America[10:00], but for the fact that the dynamics of the planet, and this ultimately is if we’re looking for a cause, or some people would say it’s the villain, then it’s the climatological dynamics of the planet, which began to, uh, limit these rainforest habitats. And a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa which was grassland. It’s very recent [10:30]. And under nutritional pressure, and under a pressure that was the result of this retreating environment, our remote ancestors descended from the trees and began to, uh, adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland. And they did this, uh, over a period of probably a couple of million years.


Now, I maintain, and if any of you are [11:00] evolutionary biologists or anthropologists this is the nub of my position: here’s what’s new scientifically: What they teach you about evolution is that it’s caused by mutation, which is a random process, which then meets another random process which is natural selection, and out of these two random processes, lo and behold you get Sea Urchins, Birds of Paradise, [11:30] Grey Whales, and Human Beings. Now, uh, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation, you will be told it’s cosmic rays, incident, incoming hard radiation which can disrupt chromosomes, and then- most of these mutations are lethal; some huge percentage of them. But a vanishingly small of them actually confer adaptive advantage. And they are then . . .

Transcribed By Nigel Milligan

[12:00]...and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on. Now, what I want to suggest, and I’ve never seen it thoroughly treated by evolutionary thinkers, is that food, is the unexamined source of evolutionary pressure, it can be. If you know anything about animal species, you know that most animals tend (12:30) to specialize their diet. Insects are famous for this. If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar you must give it the food plants you found it on, because they just don’t eat leaves, it doesn’t work like that, they have species specific adaptations. Now why is this?


It’s because it’s a strategy to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals (13:00) that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue to discourage predation, essentially. Well, so then what happens when an animal population such as our remote ancestors comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat or a limited availability of food? Well what happens, if you have any sense, is you start experimenting. (13:30) You start digging up roots you never thought about before, and chewing on them. You start eating leaves, you start eating insect protein, you experiment with the slaughter of small animals and so forth and so on. And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did. This is the much lamented transition from fruitarian holiness to predatory carnivorous messiness. (14:00) But had we not been able to lower our gourmet standards we would have entered the fossil record at that point.


So. So here we have these proto-hominids foraging into this new grassland environment beginning to beat on prairie dogs, and stuff like that, and, and, simultaneously as we all know, evolving in this African veldt environment (14:30) were great herds of undulet animals; proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes, many many different kinds of animals. And one of the curiosities of nature is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of undulate animals to just going out and making a deal with the raw, natural environment. (15:00) They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material when it passes through the double stomach of the undulate animal. As a headline what this means is mushrooms grow in manure. And so, our remote ancestors, testing for insects and eating small animals would certainly have encountered the so-called coprofitic or coprophilic; the dung loving mushroom. (15:30) And they would have tested them for food.

Years ago when I was in Kenya, I observed baboon troops in this very environment we’re discussing, and their habit was; they were very interested in cowpies. Because they had learned from experience that if you rush over to a relatively old cowpie and flip it over (16:00) there’s a high probability of beetles or beetle grubs under there and so these were vectors for food getting. Well in the end I did not observe mushrooms in Africa but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon and they can attain the size of a dinner plate. I’ve never seen them in cultivation quite that large. But, you know, you come out after a hard rain and these things are landed like little flying saucers or frisbees in the meadows. (16:30) They would certainly have been tested for their nutritional potential.


And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals in nature, including as far I can tell all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature; (17:00) psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics which implicated to my mind very strongly in the catalyzing of the emergent of humanness out of proto-hominid and hominin organization. And it worked like this; (it’s very uh, relatively easy to understand as major scientific breakthroughs go, at least you’re not going to be asked to do any partial differential equations this evening.) Psilocybin in very low doses, (17:30) doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low you could conceivably forget you have done it, and just go out and shop and fiddle around. But at doses so low that they do not register as a psychedelic experience, psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity. Roland Fischer did this work in the late 50’s and early 60s, and they had, they built an experimental device, where a person could not be seen by turning a crank….(18:00).....

Transcribed by Kevin Evans


[0:18:00] be seen, by turning a crank- There were two parallel bars, and by turning a crank this person could rotate one of the parallel bars so that, uhm, it was no longer parallel. And, uhm, lacking talking rats they went to the next prefered experimental animal which is graduate students. And they would sit a graduate student down in front of this device, give them a very low [0:18:30] dose of psilocybin, and then put a buzzer in their hand and say ‘When the two bars are no longer parallel, push the buzzer’. And, uhm, [Fisher?] collected large amounts of data which showed that the people who had taken psilocybin, and the other people were given a placebo of course, could detect this deformation long before the unstoned subjects were able to do so. And [Fisher?] who was a totally [0:19:00] straight European scientist, in fact a vianesser. When I talked to him about this stuff he was very cagey,


to him about this stuff he was very cagey, and he- he was funny in fact, he said “Well you see it’s very interesting. Apparently here we have data which, uhm, argues significantly that we are perceiving reality better with the drug than without the drug!”. [Audience laughs] Yes, yes. For him that was a joke. [0:19:30] I mean, he never did anything with it; It was just a throw away line. But it stuck with me and I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you are a hunting animal in a situation of nutritional pressure, as our remote ancestors were, and there is a food in that environment that will give you better vision then, by God, the animals which accept that into the diet [0:20:00] are going to be more successful hunters than the ones that do not.


And, consequently, they will outbreed those members of the population that have some aversion to this exotic food. Either they don’t like the look of it, or they don’t like that it grows in manure, or they don’t like the taste of it. But those who accept it, as a dietary item, will be more successful at getting food and consequently more successful and raising their offspring to sexual maturity. [0:20:30] And that’s the name of the game in darwinian evolution. You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity. Then the genes flow forward. If you fail in that you get an F in the evolution game. Well, ok so visual acuity, that’s a very fine. Uhm, but psilocybin has other properties which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity. [0:21:00] Uhm, if you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin, uhm, and this is typical with many indoles, you get- many of which are hallucinogens, you get what is called CNS arousal. Central nervous system arousal. You all know this feeling it’s the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order. It’s that you do not sleep. You are very restless. [0:21:30] You are very alert. Your attention is scanning, scanning, scanning. And in highly sexed animals, like primates, arousal means exactly what it sounds like. It means erection in the male animal. And, uhm, now isn’t that interesting? Uhm, that is a second factor feeding back into this, uhm, increased success with offspring [0:22:00] business. Not only are you a better hunter, but you’re a more highly sexed creature.


And you’re having more of what straight anthropologists refer to as ‘Successful copulations’. An amazing phrase actually. [Audience laughs] Meaning, of course, that impregnation is a consequence of these- of this sexual activity. Now the other thing that psilcoybin does, [0:22:30] uhm, at or slightly above this arousal level, and this is very important for the argument, is it creates- it causes what I call boundary dissolution. And boundary dissolution in human beings, like you and me, means ego loss. And I believe that this would have promoted, uhm, a social and sexual style based, not on monogamous [0:23:00] pairing but, on orgy. The scenario is fairly easy to imagine. It’s that these remote ancestors of ours would take these mushrooms and they, probably at the new and full moon, the thinking is that ritual was originally lunar time. And then they would, we’re talking about nomadic groups of people. Probably no more than 80 to 100 people. [0:23:30] And then there would be, uhm, group sexual activity. Now, an interesting social consequence of orgiastic social styles, besides a whole lot of fun, [Audience laughs] is it’s impossible to trace lines of male paternity in that kind of a situation. You see, women know whose children are whose because they see the child come out of [0:24:00]

Transcribed by Paul Mullins


0:24:00...Out of their body and they nurse the child but man do not in that situation have their children. My children. What they have are our children. The tribal group, and at this boundary dissolving thing, let’s dwell on this for a moment because this is central to my argument and it has political consequences for our own lives. (..urmm..) all primates.. Clear backed.. 0:24:30...down into squirrel monkeys and howler, all primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies. Now what this means is the most.. The males with the longest claws.. The hardest muscles and the meanest disposition.. Take control of everybody else. Women.. Children.. Weaker males.. (..urmm..) everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha male of the pack. 0:25:00...This is true as i said a squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys.. So forth and so on.. It is also true of us.. Sitting here in this room. This is a male dominant society. I mean


This is a male dominant society. I mean there’s a lot of complaining and hair pulling about nit and there’s a political alternative in the form of the women’s movement and feminist sensitivities. But for most people male dominance is the rule..Well, I...Would like to.. 0:25:30...suggest that our peculiarly discomforted relationship to reality is a consequence of the fact that for a long period of time perhaps as short as twenty-thousand (20,000) years.. Perhaps as long as a million (1,000,000) years.. As a species, and not consciously.. 0:26:00...We accepted into our diet a drug that has the consequences of suppressing male dominance. But this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet.. The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumour or a growth if you do not.. 0:26:30...have regular recourse to the cure. And the cure is, psilocybin and the boundary dissolving, sexual and social style which


and the boundary dissolving, sexual and social style which you carried in its way. So the reason that we as a people are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise, a perfect world sometime in the misty past. Is not.. 0:27:00...(..uhmm..).. You know the (..inaudible..) art called the..the nostalgia for paradise and thought that it was a time of.. Of a longing that has no bases. But i think that it is entirely a memory of the period when male dominance was chemically suppressed, ego was chemically suppressed and by male dominance and ego i don’t mean to lay this entirely on men. I mean i would wager.. 0:27:30..Probably everyone in this room has more ego than they need, certainly starting from me.. And that part of the paradox that you’re supposed to enjoy in this… (..audience laughter..) you know the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego...(..audience laughter..) so essentially, you know.. What happened was


so essentially, you know.. What happened was chemical.. A chemically driven leak in evolution had the consequence of the suppression of these 0:28:00.. behaviors that favoured male dominance. Ahh.. as a species.. Ahh.. we would’ve continued with male dominance forever. Had it not been for psilocybin in the diet.. And it established a situation in which in less than two-million (2,000,000) years the human brain size doubled. This is without contest. The greatest mystery 0:28:30..in the whole of evolutionary theory..(..Uhm..ahh..)..Lampston.. Who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist called the doubling of the human brain size in two-million (2,000,000) years, (..ah..) the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. Well, now it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter, or.. (..audience laughter..) or the pancreas of an elephant.. but , notice that..


pancreas of an elephant.. but , notice that.. 0:29:00-0:30:00...it is the organ which created the very of evolution itself (..audience laughter..) and all other theories..so, th..we’re getting a little topological here folks, there’s something (..audience laughter..)..fishy going on.. (..ahh..) what was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size? Well, i maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego and their reinforcement in this situation of nomadic pastoralism and that there was a period, let’s call it from the melting of the last glaciers until Çatalhöyük six-thousand five hundred (6500) BC, there was a period where men and women were in balance with each other, children and .. children and adults were at peace with each other and human beings and the planet were at peace with each other.


Transcribed by Azlan


….and then it was lost, and we fell into history, you know the long slug toward armageddon is what was initiated in its place. Well know,if it was so wonderful, why would anybody ever let go of it; why was it lost?. Well, we have to go back to the very forces which created this situation. Remember I said it was the climatological dynamics of the planet [that] created the grasslands in place of the rainforest. Continuation of those processes turned those grasslands into desert. And where there once were waterfalls, running rivers, grasslands and vast herds of animals and their human symbios; suddenly they were was encroaching desert, fewer waterfalls. The mushrooms began to be seasonal , began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains, the great mushrooms festivals which had been at new and full moon, became solsticio and then equinoctial and then, you know, biannual, and something, anyway, you get the picture. It was fading,


anyway, you get the picture. It was fading, and I don't think people took this lying down [laughs], no pun intended.[audience laughs]. I think that, there was great anxiety about the fading of the mushroom and the loss of the sacrament, and so, these people searched for a strategy for preservation. Well, in a world without refrigeration, there’s only one, well no, there are two strategies for preservation of a delicate food like that. One is air drying, which is not terribly satisfying because as soon as the rain cloud comes along your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air and turns yuck. And so the real, the only real option is preservation in honey, and this was done, I am sure; it’s s still done in Mexico to this day in remote mushroom using villages, people preserve them in honey. Now the problem here, and this is a lot on my book, into this kind of thing a lot because, Food of the gods.


of thing a lot because, Food of the gods. Because what Food of the gods is really about are the hidden, ahh, actors, that drugs lay upon us; that we are not even aware of - and if you are tempting to preserve an hallucinogenic mushroom in honey what you have to be aware of is that honey itself is potentially a psychoactive drug. Honey will turn into mead, .it will ferment into a crude kind of honeyd alcohol. Well, if the mushroom brings suppression of ego, group sexual activity and the formation of group values, what this alcohol brings.. Alcohol has two effects primarily, it lowers sensitivity to social queuing; at the same time that it it consents and exaggerated sense of verbal facility [audience laughs]. In other words people turn into jerks behind it. I mean you only have to go to a busy singles bar somewhere here in Boulder and you will see the alcohol ambiance being acted out right in front of you.So and


being acted out right in front of you.So and you know, it's not so true of our generation but I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in the western civilization unless they were juiced! Because christianity was laying such a heavy trip on everybody, people barely took their clothes off. In other words, you have to become blindly intoxicated to do what comes naturally..And I think up to very recently, how many women have their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse- I mean, some huge percentage, I imagine. So that is the story basically of the fall into history. The loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time we were inventing agriculture, and agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relationship to each other- on two unrelated levels. First of all- you suppress orgy because once you have agriculture - it's no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt; It's all about getting up before dawn


great hunt; It's all about getting up before dawn and hoewing the wheat out of the crops- so it doesn't promote a party mentality[audience laughs]. The other thing is, that as human mental capacity was evolving -remember that exploding brain size- as human mental capacity was evolving, women in this nomadic groups began to notice a curious fact. Which was, every year they would return roughly to the same places they've been the year before, and in the discards from last year’s camps they would discover food plants growing and some brilliant woman or group of women put it together and said AHA!. “we buried food here last year and now there's food here . There must be something about putting food down into the ground that gets you food”………..


Transcribed by Javier Alonso

[0:36:00] gets you food, in other words they were able to cognise a cause and effect relationship that were separated over many months of time. At the same time that women were putting this together men were noticing that the act of sex had certain consequences nine months later.

The same perception had different impact on both sexes, but it was an ability to [00:36:30] coordinate a temporally separate cause and effect.

Well once men got onto the notion of male paternity they realised that these aren't our children, some are mine and some are somebody else's and from that notion you go to "my child" to "my woman" to "my hunting area", to "my weapon" , to my sib group [00:37:02] you get it all you see, the ego is born, and it is born in an atmosphere of complete paranoia.

The first consequence of agriculture , well it has a number of consequences, but one consequence is Ah, it's a tremendously efficient way of producing food, that's obviously why people got into it. What does efficiency mean? Surplus! What does surplus mean? Haves and have nots. [00:37:30] The ole......the most spectacular architectural edifice of 10,000 BC on this planet was the grain tower of Jericho. It was had thick walls to hold the grain and it had high walls so you could climb up on top of it and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it. Surplus makes nomadism impossible cause you can't drag this huge amount of grain with you so you get sedentary populations and then [00:38:00] some of the people who want the grain are killing your people in fury when they can't get the grain , you decide to put a wall around the whole encampment.


Now you have a small town , now you have urbanism, now you have the division between nature and secular society, you have classes, you've got it all. And I maintain that this is the long march into hell and our particular uh obsession with drugs [00:38:30] as a species, I maintain can be traced back to this transition that you know, yes elephants love fermented papayas and so do butterflys and so forth and so on, but this kind of intoxication is not what we're about. We addict severely to several dozen substances, less severely to probably a hundred more and we addict [ 00:39:00] to everything! [inaudible] You know. What we call romantic love uhh shows a lot of similarities to hard drug addiction when you separate the lovers. No... sleeplessness, suicidal tendencies, bursting into tears, hysteria, eh .. loss of weight. Can't tell whether this person is getting off heroin or eh has separated from uh their partner.


Uh, well if you take an [00:39:30] individual who is alcoholic or or has some kind of serious drug problem, current thinking is this can be traced to traumatic abuse in childhood. This is what happened to us! Traumatic abuse in childhood, we were literally torn out of a symbiotic relation to the earth by the forces of male dominance, agriculture, sedentary living so forth and so on [00:40:00] and we've been trying to uh scratch an itch that we can't find ever since. And it has, you know, money doesn't do it, uh..power doesn't do it, nothing seems to do it. We cannot... we seem to be the unhappy monkey and we take this unhappiness out on each other .... with a vengeance. And uh you see what happened was that when the mushroom faded, the million years of [00:40:30] pharmacologically , interrupted patterns of male dominance reasserted themselves, but it was no more a foraging monkey with this style, it was a creature with language, tools, music , social organisation and suddenly it got very ugly, and people weren't, and people began fighting over the women. So we don't want to have orgies anymore, this woman is my woman, touch her you die, and [00:41:00] so forth and so on, and we are living out the legacy of this.

Well before I talk about the [takes drink] the social consequences of it for us. I want to go back to the question....What was so great about it? I mean we've talked about orgy, but you can have orgy without psilocybin. What was so wonderful about that proto-historical mode? Well this is


where it becomes slightly more woo woo [00:41:30] .. uh [laughs] Because what we have to talk about is .... What is the Psychedelic experience anyway? And I maintain that if we're talking about psilocybin, and were talking about taking it in nature as these people did, that you know, yes first come the dancing mice , the little candies, the coloured grids and so forth and so on, but what eventually happens quickly, like ten minutes later is uh…[0:42:00]

Transcribed by Rodney Aries

uhh there is an entity in the trance, in the vision. There is a mind there waiting that speaks good english, that invites you up into its room ... and once there uhh you realise that this is what all the hooflah about the Gaian mind and the rebirth of the goddess and all that is about. It's not a metaphor [42:30] folks, it's a headline in biology. We are not the only intelligent minded species occupying this planet. We may be the only bipedal hairless mammal with intelligence on this planet but there is something out there spread through the grasses, the forests, the rivers and the oceans. Uhh our own own emergence into intelligence took less than [43:00] two million years.


Life has been on this planet for a billion and a half years and we don't know how many strange pathways beckon but at some point a kind of mind came into existence and it is real. It's what lies behind the religious impulse in our species. Uhh there really is somebody else sharing the local mind space and I [43:30] don't believe we're talking theology here. In other words this is not eh y-you know in Milton's wonderful phrase, "...the God who hung the stars like lamps in Heaven". It's not about that. For me that's a big questionmark. But it is the god\goddess of this earth. It is the biological mind. It is that all boundaries are illusions and that life is a thinking [44:00] feeling entelechy of some sort and we are just like a little droplet that has somehow escaped from the river of cognition and now imagine that we are the only water in the cosmos. Not so it turns out.


What, the reason the reason the psychedelic experience is so baffling and transformative, even as we sit here with your heads full of Heidegger and Husserl and uh I don't know [44:30] Wilson Phillips and all the stuff is because uh in the face, in contact with that we have no more sophistication than our orthiastic mushroom munching ancestors. Civilization doesn't give you a leg up on this step. In fact it makes it harder to figure out what's going on eh because we have defined nature as dead. You know? Scr- Atoms screaming through empty space [45:00] ruled by tensor equations of the third degree. That's our picture of what nature is. That isn't what it is. It's uh a-a mind of some sort. Okay. W-what is the implication of all this? Is this just some kind of fringe oh uh anthropological revisionism? No, it isn't because the-the fall into history and its consequences is at this point a loaded [45:30] gun held to the head of the entire plant. We are about to uh pull over the soup cauldron and if we do this then two and a half billion years of evolutionary advance will be shot. Nobody else ever dropped the ball so you know we appear to be vying for uhh this peculiar honour. If we do not awaken to [46:00] the consequences of ego then we are going to run this system right over the edge.


The whole thing which characterises our dilemma as a global society is our inability to feel - feel the consequences of what we are doing. You know? We've got the data, the ozone hole is disappearing, the planktonic life in the sea will die if it does, that will disrupt the food chain. The world [46:30] food supply will drop by sixty percent. Everybody who isn't white as a sheep will have to starve in that case and uh so forth and so on. I mean we actually toy not only with our own extinction but with the extinction of all life on the planet and with the extinction with the idea of dignity and decency itself. Well, I'm not in this psychedelic game because I think it's easy, or because uh I think it's going to be a cinch. I'm in it because [47:00] I think it's the only game in town.

You know if hortatory preaching could have done the trick then "the sermon on the mount" would have turned the corner. Uh if if uh uhh cautionary data flowing back to its ruling institutions could do the trick then sometime uh after Thomas Malthus people would have begun to hit the brakes. Nothing seems to work. We're sick. We need pharmacological [47:30] intervention. The ego is uh out permitting us to slowly, not so slowly commit suicide and you know the fact that we cannot act collectively. That we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism. That we uh really are eh-"all for one, and one for all" is not our style. Instead what we have going is a catfight [48:00]

Transcribed by Marc Van Niekerk


…(0:48:00)...and, you know, no less a straight person than Arthur Koestler, in a book called The Ghost In The Machine said humans are so wired for beating the brains out of woolly mastodons, that’s what evolution has equipped us to do; not negotiate weapons treaties and destroy bacteriological factories. We have to force our evolution. (0:48:30) We have to chemically restructure the primate brain so that we do not commit suicide. And the only way to do it in the time left is for the psychedelic community to stand up on it’s hind legs and roar. And you know, maybe they’ll build camps for us. But the point being I think there’s a moral imperative to try what works! I mean, you know in the 60’s psychedelics were called “consciousness expanding drugs”, (0:49:00) a good old phenomenological description. Well, if consciousness does not loom large in the future history of our species then what the hell kind of future is


our species then what the hell kind of future is it going to be? No future at all I maintain. So, if there is even the slightest iota of possibility that these things do what I’m saying they do, then we need to get Johnny-Quick on it and check it out. (0:49:30) Because we may be beyond the point of no return right now. Nobody knows how bad this ozone hole thing is, or what’s locked up at Rocky Flats or behind the Iron Curtain or dumped in the Arctic Ocean. We may be past the failsafe point right now folks. There is no time to lose. It is time to engage the powers-that-be in a little more serious dialog than the “just say no” horseshit that’s been pedaled recently. (0:50:00) Because we’re talking about the survival of life on the only planet that we are at certain has life on it. This may be the site of a cosmic experiment with universal implications and it rests in


cosmic experiment with universal implications and it rests in our hands.


Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people didn’t drop the ball. (0:50:30) And you know, you think you got problems? Nine times in the last million years the ice has moved south from the poles miles thick. No antibiotics, no electronic communication, nothing, and I’m sure these people were miserable, and they dragged through it and they lived. And they passed it on, now we’re it. And we will be judged the lamest of the lame (0:51:00) if we cannot come to terms with this and begin to talk about what is going on. This is not obscure. As I said I view the psychedelic experience as central to humanness as our sexuality. We cannot allow dominator institutions to infantilize us and to tell you where your mind can and cannot go. ‘Even have a piece of paper locked up in a vault in Washington DC (0:51:30) that guarantees life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Well now what can the pursuit of happiness possibly mean if it doesn’t mean the freedom to practice your own relationship to nature and it’s gifts?