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

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


I was quite knocked off my feet. And set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice you see. I don't know how it hits other people. There are many things that can be said about introducing a chemical into your body. They've shown that certain people are 50,000 times more sensitive to the odor of certain compounds than other people. And part of the unique genetic heritage of each of us are our complement of synaptic receptors for psycho-active alkaloids. So that there may be something to the notion that the Celts tend to be poets, that certain peoples tend to be expressive in certain artistic modes, or certain senses seem to be accentuated for certain human sub-groups.

But whatever the explanation for how it hit me, I felt it like a call -- there was no turning back from trying to understand, because there is no place for it in our world, and yet it is overwhelmingly, existentially real. You see? And easily accessed. I'm not telling you that you have to go some place in India with poor sanitation and put yourself at somebody's feet for a dozen years or something like that. The enunciation of the presence of this dimension should inspire some kind of coming to terms with it. It's preposterous that we can entertain in our popular journalism the titillation of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and prop up all reductionist personalities, and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type stars, and this sort of thing. Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see.


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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

As an example, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of history, and there was a whole focusing on the horse archetype. Which in the 20th century, gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high-performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals.


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

The world is communication. Nature is the great teacher. All human gurus are simply distillations of the wave of nature that is coming at you. So you can just short-circuit the whole human boil-down, and go straight to the executive suite by putting yourself under a tree in the wilderness. The Great Ones all have said this but they need to be taken more seriously on the subject of their own expendability. Me too.


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

Question and Response


Question and Response

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

Q: Along the line of this timewave, can you give us a reading of our current time in the not-too-distant future?


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

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

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


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

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


Around 2000 the resonance pattern will have shifted, and we will be occupying a relationship to the late high Middle Ages, and the emergence of the new social forms created by the emergence of the mercantile class and the bourgeois. In other words private wealth, cities, end of cultural insularity, a re-starting of the economic machinery, and a kind of new flowering. But still under the shadow of these fundamentalist forces that will have come into ascendancy in the previous dark age.

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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1988

Interivew w/ Jeffrey Mishlove on 'Thinking Allowed' Show

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[Jeffery Mishlove, Ph.D.]: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Throughout recorded history, human society has been haunted by reports of unidentified flying objects in our skies, many of which have defied all attempts at scientific explanation or understanding. What are these phenomenon, and how can they be explained? With me today is Terence McKenna, a philosopher and thinker of note in the area of altered states of consciousness and alternative realities. Terence is the coauthor, with his brother Dennis of 'The Invisible Landscape', and also 'Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide'. He is a founding member of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving and studying psychoactive plants used by native cultures throughout the world, and he is also the developer of a computer software package called Timewave Zero, designed to augment interpretation of the ancient Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching. Welcome, Terence.

[Terence McKenna]: It's a pleasure to be here with you.


[Terence McKenna]: It's a pleasure to be here with you.

[Mishlove]: It's a pleasure to have you here with me, also. You know, the UFO phenomenon is, uh, striking because it's so bizarre. It seems as if the, the reports that come in about UFOs defy any attempt whatsoever to categorize them. I guess from my point of view, I can only assume that there are probably many different interpretations of, of this event. I think, given your background as a student of shamanism and altered states of consciousness and alternative realities, you have some unique perspectives on the UFO phenomenon. I wonder if we could, uh, get into that material.

[McKenna]: Yes. Well, the ordinary approach to the UFOs has been to view them as visitors or intruders from a nearby star system that have come in metal ships, uh, for reasons of trade or scientific investigation or military conquest --

[Mishlove]: Or missionary activity.


[Mishlove]: Or missionary activity.

[McKenna]: -- or missionary activity, to the vicinity of our planet. This was a myth that sprang up but concomitant with the modern wave of sightings that began shortly after World War II. As time has passed and the number of sightings has gone from hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of instances, as the myth has fleshed itself out with sub-themes -- the theme of abduction, the theme of telepathic contact, uh, it's become much more difficult to fit all the known facts into the simple model of, uh, space-faring visitors from another world. S,o what we are left with, then, are a number of more exotic competing theories in the so-called postmodern phase of thinking about the UFO. Probably the best known of these alternative explanations was the one pioneered by, uh, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who in 1953 wrote a book called 'Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky'. And, Jung was at great pains, without passing judgment on the reality of the saucers, of the things seen, to interpret them psychologically, to interpret them as one would interpret a dream. And, he saw in their circular form, in their scintillating, shining, uh, alchemical brilliance, a symbol of human wholeness, and felt that they were a symbol of our collective yearning for a kind of totality and individuation. Now, in a way this kind of explanation is very satisfying; however, it is not satisfying to the person who has immediately undergone a very strange and a very real seeming experience.

[Mishlove]: Unless such a person were told great messages of hope for the planet.


[Mishlove]: Unless such a person were told great messages of hope for the planet.

[McKenna]: Well, and this is a persistent part of the flying saucer phenomenon [Mishlove: Yea]-- that people who have close contact with the saucers return with messages of universal brotherhood and benevolence, with stories of a beneficent hegemony of organized intelligence, where wiser, older worlds and civilizations help younger and, uh, and, uh, less mature worlds toward a kind of galactic citizenship. However --

[Mishlove]: That's just one thread of the evidence.

[McKenna]: It's one thread of the evidence, and it isn't really well supported by the evidence. Jacques Vallee, who is one of the foremost commentators on the phenomenon, has been at great pains to point out that with the flying saucer phenomenon we're dealing with thousands and thousands of incidents per year, throughout the world. It's very hard, with...even at our own primitive level of scientific sophistication, we can learn a great deal about a planet by sending a single probe to that planet. What kind of scientific program of investigation requires thousands and thousands of appearances? And, if we make the assumption that not all appearances are observed, but that in fact only a small number are observed, then the number of appearances that must actually be going on soars toward an astronomical number. It suggests we're dealing with an interpenetration by an alien dimension on an almost industrial scale.

[Mishlove]: Of course, a single probe could cause thousands of appearances.


[Mishlove]: Of course, a single probe could cause thousands of appearances.

[McKenna]: If it were of a sophisticated enough nature, that's right. The approach that I have taken, that has charactermize--, uh, characterized my work with this phenomenon, was first of all to say, we have not carried out a sufficiently in-depth survey of the life already on this planet to be able to say that at some time in the past life did not arrive here and thrive here that is not part of the general heritage of life on this planet, but that has somehow come in from the outside. My candidate for that kind of an intrusive extraterrestrial would be probably a mushroom of some sort, or a spore-bearing life form, because spores are very impervious to, uh, low temperatures and high radiation -- the kind of environment met with in outer space.

[Mishlove]: In other words, a mushroom spore could conceivably, uh, even waft itself up through the atmosphere of our planet and enter into empty space.


[McKenna]: Oh, there's no question but what this is happening -- that through what's called Brownian motion, which is sort of random percolation, spores do reach the outer edge of our atmosphere, and, there, in the presence of cosmic rays and meteors and rare, highly energetic events, occasionally a very small percentage of these biological objects are wafted into space. We even possess, uh, meteorites that are believed to be pieces of the Martian surface, thrown out by impacts on the Martian surface of asteroidal material. In fact I think part of the grappling with the UFO mystery is going to lead to the conclusion that space is not an impermeable and insurmountable barrier to biology -- that, in fact, planets are islands, and life does occasionally wash in from distant places, and if conditions are correct, can, uh, take hold. However, let me say, in the UFO phenomenon we are dealing, or we presuppose that we are dealing, not simply with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial biology, but with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this is a hair, uh, hackle-raising notion.

[Mishlove]: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores in that [indecipherable].


[McKenna]: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores, at least as ordinarily conceived. And, I--I think the thing that has been overlooked in almost all discussions of extraterrestrial contact is how strange the extraterrestrial is likely to be. It isn't going to be a friendly, elfin little feller with a beating heart of gold. It isn't even going to be some of the more extravagantly grotesque creations out of Hollywood. Uh, conditions and time spans in the universe are long enough and varied enough that, I would bet, the real task with extraterrestrial intelligence will be to recognize it, you see. We have no conception of how species-bound our images of life and biology are. This is a place where we have never been asked to confront to what degree the monkey within us has channeled our expectations and perceptions.

[Mishlove]: Well, it is the case that, on this planet, virtually all known life forms are based on the same DNA molecule.


[McKenna]: Well, except that, have all life forms been examined, to see to what degree they deviate, percentage-wise, from, let's say, a standard DNA molecule? The answer is no. The sequencing of DNA is a very expensive process, and is only carried out on laboratory organisms with an extensive history of involvement in medical research, like E. coli or, uh, the ordinary laboratory rat. No, there's a great deal we don't know about life on earth. We don't know when the fungi entered into the evolutionary chain. We don't know what kind of intelligence is really possessed by, uh, the cephalopods, the shell-less molluscs that include the octopi. The intelligence of dolphins has been studied by Lilly and others; the intelligence of, uh, of the large primates other than man. One way of looking at nature is that it is entirely linguistic intent -- that DNA is in fact a-a way of uttering protein syntactical structures into matter.

[Mishlove]: In other words, that all of nature is, is like a poem. [laughs]


[McKenna]: Yes, nature is a communicating system [Mishlove: mmmhmmm] of some sort, and the, the problem that we have is to transcend cultural languages [Mishlove: mmhmmm], historically created languages with very limited applications, and instead fall into phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us. One possible view of the flying saucer is that it is a kind of projection from the consciousness of the planet -- that it is Gaia, that it is in fact a kind of alchemical object haunting human historical time with a symbol of totality, the kind of totality that our religions and our mystical yearnings are so at pains to concretize for us. But, unless we, as egocentric beings, clarify our relationship to the unconscious, then I think the flying saucer is going to remain quintessentially mysterious. And, this was Jung's view.

[Mishlove]: One of the things that Jung pointed out in his book is that we must pay attention to the research that Dr. J.B. Rhine was doing at that time at Duke University in ESP and psychokinesis, and that, even if UFOs had a physical reality, could be photographed or could be weighed and measured, that they still might in some manner be projections of the human mind.


[McKenna]: Oh yes, this is an important point to make, which the flying saucer people are forever misunderstanding, and that is, saying that the flying saucer is a psychic object does not mean that it is not a physical object. Uh, Jung in 'Mysterium Coniunctionis' is at great pains to say that the realm of the psychic and the realm of the physical meet in a strange kind of never-never land that we have yet to create the intellectual tools to explore. This is where the mystery of synchronicity is going to come to rest, the mystery of, uh, all kinds of paranormal activity on the part of human beings, and the mystery of the flying saucer. It's interesting, you see, that if you take the broad world of the so-called 'Mysteries' -- para-psychological, shamanic, extraterrestrial, and so forth -- and hypothesize another spatial dimension, one more spatial dimension, then suddenly all these mysteries become trivial. They are easily done. Locked boxes are opened; future events are discerned; lost objects are found. Uh, this sort of thing becomes quite the ordinary run of things if we hypothesize dimensions hidden from ordinary experience.

[Mishlove]: And, of course, there's serious work, at this point, in the field of, uh, unified field theory in physics, to postulate other dimensions of space than we normally think of, so....


[McKenna]: That's right. [Mishlove: mmhmmm] The current physical models of the universe require eleven dimensions, eleven integrated variables to describe. And that's physical models of the universe. If we then turn our attention to mind and realize that we have no definition of what mind is, why then is there any mystery in the fact that we have no definition of what the UFO is? The mind is present at hand in every conscious moment. It has been our constant companion for fifty thousand years, and we haven't a clue as to what it is. So therefore, a manifestation of the other -- the superego, or the extraterrestrial other like the UFO -- it is not surprising that it is a mystery. I always hark back to the words of J.B.S. Haldane, the great British enzymologist, who said "reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose."

[Mishlove]: Well, that, that suggests to me that if we look at some of the most bizarre, most anomalous cases that we have, such as UFOs, and we begin to ask ourselves, not so much what are they, because that's a mystery, but what is their function? How are they affecting us? That's like holding up a mirror to ourselves, and it tells us a great deal about the basic mystery of our mind and our reality.


[McKenna]: Yes, this is the so-called postmodern approach -- to ask the question, not what is the UFO, but what is it doing to us? And, Jacques Vallee pioneered this approach. And, the answer is fascinating. What the UFOs are doing to us, to global society, is they are eroding faith in science by casting directly in the path of science a-a-a kind of gauntlet, a challenge: "Crack this" -- almost as though the cosmic giggle had shown up at, uh, the bachelor party of science to spoil the bash, uh, in the same way that the resurrection of Christ posed a tremendous problem for the intellectuals of late Roman antiquity, because they had no place in their world view for someone rising from the dead. They were Greek materialists, atomists, essentially. In that same way, the UFO challenges the assumptions of science, and, uh, I think in that way--in that sense, Jung was really onto something when he saw it as


was really onto something when he saw it as coming from the unconscious. It is like an object coming from the unconscious with a compensatory function -- to turn us away from the rational and toward the intuitive; to turn us away from the paternalistic, Apollonian, solar, uh, masculine view of things, and toward a kind of watery, lunar, mysterious, intuitively felt, feminine force -- almost as though the UFO is a manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess. Science, as the proudest -- pardon the word -- erection of the rational mind, then, is challenged by something from an entirely other dimension, an entirely other realm, that concretizes for us the culture crisis. And that's why I've gotten into UFOs; I think they are important for a resolution of the culture crisis. They concretize the struggle between the paternalistic-masculine and the lunar-feminine, to--uh, between a dominator society and the kind of partnership society that we require


and the kind of partnership society that we require to survive.


[Mishlove]: And yet, it seems as if that challenge is not a direct confrontation. As Vallee points out, the UFOs are operating almost at the mythological level of our culture. They're not landing in the White House; they're not really challenging the military or NASA.

[McKenna]: No, they're very mercurial, very watery. When you reach out toward them, there is nothing there. What they chiefly have--have become is an intellectual force in human thinking about the future, but when you reach out to grasp the hardware, to read the message, to meet the alien, there is nothing there. I've come to the conclusion, both from talking to contactees and having had a contactee experience that whatever lies behind the UFO mystery, it is a force which can literally do anything. So, it is fruitless to talk about the size of the objects or their composition or color, or the size of the entities, their dress and weapons and accoutrements, because it can appear literally any way it wants to. It can appear as the Virgin Mary; it can appear as galactarian overlords; it can appear as gnomes, elves, sprites, this sort of thing. It is not to be s-caught in the rational net.

[Mishlove]: Your description is strikingly actually parallel, with one exception, to the view of many Fundamentalist Christians, who say this UFO stuff is all the work of the devil.


[McKenna]: Well, I don't know about the work of the devil. Jung's criticism of Christianity was that it had not made a place for what he called the shadow, and he said the production Chr---the productions of Christian culture will always be neurotic because the shadow has not been included, so there's a lack of psychic balance. Perhaps the UFO carries compensatory psychic energy from the realm of the shadow. Some people are very frightened of it. Some people see it as an almost millenarian, salvational hope, the savior of mankind. I think that it's very powerful, that it haunts time like a ghost, that the messianic anticipations of Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are in fact a picking up on the shock wave that the image of the flying saucer casts backward through time -- that this image of the New Jerusalem, the four-gated city descending from the sky to whisk the elect away to a better place, is a kind of prophecy yearning toward a fact in the act of becoming. You know, Christianity and Islam are the most history-obsessed of all the world's major religions.

[Mishlove]: Along with Judaism.

[McKenna]: Along with Judaism. And, all three of them have this notion of the transcendental object at the end of time. And, alchemy in the sixteenth century was an outbreak of an expectation of a transcendental object in the nearby here and now, that would cure --

[Mishlove]: The omega point of history, so to speak.


[Mishlove]: The omega point of history, so to speak.

[McKenna]: Yes, it would cure all ills, confer longevity, fertility, virility, immortality. And I think that the flying saucer is an airborne philosopher's stone -- the sophic hydrolith of Paracelsus haunting the skies of modern America, with a promise of mandalic cohesion for the future that science has not given us. Science has been a very sadly disappointing religion in the realm of the heart. The flying saucer comes from the heart, but it bears the very strange energy of the other in its manifestation as planetary goddess.

[Mishlove]: I'm often struck by the, uh, psychic powers that seem to be associated with people who've had intensive encounters with UFOs. I've researched many of these cases myself.


[McKenna]: That's right. [Mishlove: I've researched many of these cases myself] The thing is both material and psychological. It anticipates the future. It seems that the memories of the contactees are transparent to this force. It can reach deep into their lives and confront them with information taken from forgotten incidents in their lives. It is an awesome kind of force that transcends space and time for the individual. Now, it may be that we will never have a general theory of flying saucers. It may be that this is something that addresses the individual, in the same way that I don't think we will ever have a general theory of falling in love. That, too, is something which addresses the individual. We have been mistaken to expect Time magazine or the New York Times to explain the flying saucers to us. They will not explain the flying saucers to us, any more than they will explain ourselves to us. This is something that haunts the membrane of experience very close in to the experiencing ego, and therefore it, it, uh, is threatening. This is one of the reasons that I think it relates to the psychedelic experience, because the psychedelic experience is like a UFO encounter on demand. [Mishlove: Yea] It's where the will of the person having the experience enters in. They decide to have this curious symmetry-breaking kind of experience. What I have tried to, uh, say to the UFO community is that we will not really have a deep understanding of what the contact experience is until we include data from the psychedelic experience as legitimate data to be included when looking at the problem.


[Mishlove]: Well, you have talked earlier about our need to make an extensive survey of all of the biological manifestations on our planet. It almost seems that, eh, in order to really get a handle on the UFO phenomenon, we'd need to make a comparable survey of all of the psychological manifestations of which we are aware, and it seems to me that at some level you would agree with me that the UFO phenomenon is one of our psychological manifestations.

[McKenna]: Yes, I agree.

[Mishlove]: We've got about two minutes left, so I wonder if we can sort of summarize your view in that regard.

[McKenna]: Yes, I think that the UFO phenomenon is a modern manifestation of a phenomenon which has been with us for thousands of years -- that is, the partial penetration of our own cultural space by others -- pixies, elves, fairies, sprites, demons, whatever you wish to call them.

[Mishlove]: Angels.

[McKenna]: Angels. [Mishlove: mmhmm] In the past we had a professional class for dealing with these go-betweens. We called the professional class 'shamans', and they mitigated these comings and goings and had a lore and a mythology about them. As we have lost contact with our shamanic roots, the things which go on at a low frequency, out in the wilderness and deserts of this planet, have become to seem to us either like invasions from another world, or like virtual impossibilities. I think that the flying saucer is knocking on our door to remind us of the depth and strangeness and animate intelligence that is resident with us in nature on this planet.

[Mishlove]: Terence McKenna, it's been a very eloquent presentation and extremely thought provoking. Thank you very much for being with me.


[McKenna]: It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

[Mishlove]: And, thank you very much for being with us.

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Jeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome, I’m Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to examine the nature of time and the relationship between time and the human mind. With me in the studio is Terence McKenna, a specialist in shamanistic traditions and also hallucinogens. Terence is the co-author, with his brother Dennis, of Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, and also The Invisible Landscape: Time, Hallucinogens, and The I Ching. In addition, he is the developer of a computer software program called Timewave Zero and is the founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit organization devoted to preserving hallucinogenic plants as used by native peoples throughout the world. Welcome, Terence.

JM: It’s a pleasure to be with you again. You know, shamanistic peoples and, uh, early peoples throughout the entire world have all been involved in systems of what we call divination. It could be throwing bones, or using the I Ching, or looking at the end trails of animals, or clouds of smoke, but each system seemed to involve some sort of a unique way of linking the human mind with-with the very nature of time itself in order to understand cycles of time and understand, perhaps even to predict, the future.

JM: We don’t even have to mention the enormous sales of the I Ching and tarot decks and astrology products here in the United States.


JM: And, I know in the literature today, especially in trans-personal psychology, there are many psychotherapists who use the I Ching as a regular part of their practice. And, parapsychologists have, have found striking evidence that the [stutters] coincidences of tossing the coins in the I Ching do have, uh, psychological validity.

JM: You mean, the order of hexagrams from 1 to 64.

JM: Now, you’re beginning to lose me a little bit.

JM: It sort of reminds me of the, uh-uh, builders of the great Greek temples who used the, uh, mystical rectangle.

JM: Mmmhm] seems to be the central concern here. You see, we have in-in-inherited from our fascination with Eastern philosophy the idea of Tao. And Tao, in the East, is a concept which antedates the introduction of Buddhism into China by many, many centuries. Tao is the notion of a flux, which comes and goes, a transient medium which builds structures up and pulls them apart according to

JM: They--and, you seem to be suggesting, then, that the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, in their mathematical relationship one to the other as you go through the sequence, describes a waveform.

JM: That’s right, different atoms.

JM: And, as we have then, if I can extrapolate from what you are saying, the periodic table of-of elements in Western chemistry which defined not just 100 elements but a relationship between them, cycles and patterns …

JM: Families of chemicals [TM: That's right

], so we have in other words families of ways of looking at time.


], so we have in other words families of ways of looking at time.

JM: Now, you’re describing this in mathematical terms, and I’d like to come back and ask you to define the term fractal in a moment, but I-I'm also curious about how you seem to be going back and forth between something purely quantitative and something qualitative.

JM: Well, let me step back for a moment, uh, because we’ve been talking very intensively about the I Ching, which is one system, a very popular and profound and highly respected system of this type, but there are other comparable systems; for example, there is astrology.

JM: But, then we're dealing again with the nature of [stutters] nested cycles.

JM: Mmhm] of free will [

JM: Yes], and this is why I think quantum physics, with its probabilistic notion of, uh, of determinacy, has been so attractive to the modern mind. My conclusions looking at the I Ching have been that it is not possible to know the future, for if it were possible to know it life would be a determinism and thinking would be divorced from meaning, and we would be out of business. Uh, but what is possible to know about the future is levels of novelty which future states will fulfill by the happenstance of unpredictable events. Now, this is a formal way of saying, uh, ‘we know where the road goes, but we don’t know what the scenery looks like’. I think, where the future is concerned, we can know where the road goes [


JM: Mmhm], but we cannot know what the f-what the scenery will look like. People who have looked at my theory have said ‘Well, these time maps that your computer draws, you’re trying to get rid of the future’. And, as a matter of fact, a map of time no more eliminates the future than a map of South America eliminates the need to go there. It simply gives one a better handle on one’s destination.

JM: Now, you mentioned quantum physics a moment ago [TM: Yes

], and, in-in quantum physics there are a number of different notions related to the future. One is a notion of multiple universes, another [the Wheeler notion

]--yes--and, another is a notion of-of pro-everything is probabilistic and while we can’t know with any certainty what will happen, we can state with various probabilities what-what the possibilities are. Uh, how does this relate to-to your view of time and the future?

JM: And, you see this described in the I Ching?

JM: Mmhm]. We have failed in our effort to assimilate time into our physics, because of our obsession with matter and the release of energy.

JM: Now, there are some scholars who suggest that the African, uh, Yoruba people which their system of divination called Ifa, which-which has a cycle, I think, of 244 or 264 various myths and stories is even more sophisticated than the I Ching which has only 64. Do you- have you looked into that?


JM: Ahh]. There are 64 codons which code for amino acids in DNA, uh, there are 64 hexagrams, there are 8 primary hexagrams, there are 8 indispensable amino acids. I felt that, uh, really, the I Ching is like mankind’s best shot at this, because it has this reflection in the biological matrix out of which consciousness emerged.

JM: In-In other words, the various ancient divination systems may all reflect a-a striving of human beings towards this, this intuitive understanding of the cyclical nature of time and the relationship between mind and-and the flow of time, and yet the I Ching may have hit the nail on the head better than the others.

JM: In other words, the laboratory for studying time would not so much be our observatories or our systems of quartz clocks but rather looking inside of ourselves, observing our own organism.

JM: Swann's Way?

JM: Mm, yes, well, I haven’t read that, so you’ve got me, a-buh, a bit in the dark here, we have about five minutes left, so could you summarize that point or amplify it a bit.

JM: So, whereas Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist who wrote, incidentally, the preface to Richard Wilhelm’s Book of the I Ching and postulated this theory of synchronicity, well, well, Jung didn’t really provide any mechanism for synchronicity. He-he simply said it works this way, that the mind seems to be related to these events, and he found enormous therapeutic benefit from that understanding. What you’re suggesting is that the potential mechanism behind the Jungian notion of synchronicity has to do with the structure of time itself, and [TM: That's right


], and, and, you must be suggesting therefore that the human mind, at this very deep level that the sages discovered from stilling their organism, that the mind has a parallel structure, an isomorphic structure.

JM: Terence McKenna, you’re taking the provocative position that the I Ching, which some people view as religion and other people dismiss as superstition, is actually a science. And, I gather that your computer software package Timewave Zero proposes to be the demonstration of that.

JM: Terence it’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for being with me.

JM: And thank you, very much, for being with us.

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Hallucinogens & Culture

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1988

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Jeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is hallucinogens and culture. We're going to examine the way that various cultures throughout the planet have been influenced in their social and cultural and intellectual development by hallucinogenic substances in the food chain. With me in the studio is Terence McKenna, author, lecturer, explorer, and philosopher. Terence is the co-author with his brother, Dennis McKenna, of a book called "The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching." He's also the co-author of "Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide." He is the author of a computer program called "Time Wave Zero," and he's the co-founder, and president, of an organization called Botanical Dimensions, which devotes itself to saving botanical plants used in shamanistic traditions throughout the world. Welcome Terence.

JM: It's a pleasure to have you here. I think a good starting point for our discussion would be the ancient Vedic culture of India; one of the world's great and and one of the world's earliest religions. The Rigveda is, is considered by all scholars to be one of the most, uh, beautiful composite of religious hymns and deep philosophical discussions, and and yet when one reads the Rigveda carefully one discovers an enormous emphasis on a mysterious, apparently hallucinogenic, substance called Soma.

JM: It seems quite clear that the references to Soma in the Rigveda were not really symbolic; they referred to some actual plant substance.


JM: While I think most notable in South America is the drug ayahuasca.

JM: Isn't it the case, that, I believe it was the German, uh, chemist who isolated this, uh, chem [stumbles] the chemical active ingredient in ayahuasca originally named it telepathine.

JM: I would imagine that many of our viewers have seen the movie "The Emerald Forest" which seems to deal with the use of substances of this sort in the Amazon culture.

JM: And there's also the suggestion there then, I guess, that DMT would trigger telepathic-like experiences, or clairvoyant types of experiences.

JM: Well, well DMT I believe is dimethlytryptophan-

JM: -Tryptamine?

JM: Tryptamine. It's related to the protein tryptophan, is it not?

JM: No, other cultures around the world have also used other types of substances. I think it might be interesting to talk, at least briefly, about alcohol which is referred to so often, in the Bible for example.

JM: I think coffee is a very interesting example because when it was first introduced into our culture, as I understand, it was considered virtually a hallucinogenic drug.

JM: And, and wasn't tobacco also viewed that way initially?

JM: I.., It wouldn't be fair really to talk about drugs without mentioning, socially, what's happened in western culture, particularly during the 60s and early 70s when there was quite a wave of psychedelic drug use.

JM: It's as if our culture, if I understand you right, acts as a filter, uh, between our minds and and direct experience of of reality and the drugs, somehow, blow away that crust of culture and allow more of a direct, a gnostic experience.

JM: For authentic-


JM: For authentic-

JM: Sort of still under the sway of a Victorian sense of, uh, morality.

JM: You have the same controversy, don't you now, within the Hindu tradition where many gurus say 'no drugs', and are denying I suppose the, uh, um, the tradition of the Rigveda which we spoke of earlier.

JM: Do you find the use of drugs of this type, hallucinogenic drugs, in the Tantric traditions, the traditions that deliberately use taboos in order to inculcate higher states of awareness?

JM: You know, I think it's interesting how you referred earlier to the, uh, shamanistic religions as being the ones that really have sanctified the use of these drugs for religious purposes, and yet we find in our Western tradition, Christianity has come and in an effect labeled these sorts of things as diabolic. Uh for example, uh, drugs, I believe, uh, were used, uh, amongst various witchcraft groups that were persecuted by the church.

JM: I have heard, for example, in you know the old story of, of witches using toad skins in in their brews that that there's a drug called bufotenine in- which is a hallucinogenic that comes from the skin of toads.

JM: Now, other than the, uh, obvious spiritual and religious implications which we see again and again in different cultures, even, and I suppose we should mention the Native American Church and their use of

JM: peyote uh, uh, what are the other kinds of cultural developments that we can trace to the use of these drugs?

JM: We've got only about 2 minutes left but I, I wonder what the connection; I don't, I don't quite see it between the mushroom and the cattle and the Goddess.


JM: Well, Terence McKenna, this is a very interesting discussion. You seem to be suggesting that our evolution, I suppose, from the animal kingdom into the human kingdom itself was catalyzed or, or triggered by our encounter with these hallucinogenics um.

JM: Yeah. And one can only wonder how these hallucinogens might affect our future evolution as well.

JM: Terence McKenna, thank you very much for being with me.

JM: For me too. And thank you very much for being with us.

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5-6 November 1988

California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California

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Note: The talk available on the Psychedelic Salon and in the TMK audio archive torrents was mislabeled and out of order – I have restored the transcript of the talk to its order as presented in November of 1988.

Because this is a small group and probably self-selected for high interest in these subjects, as much as possible you should direct me toward whatever your special concerns are so that for each person, whatever their slant, there is a reasonable payback in information. There may be areas where I am disappointing or unhelpful but usually then I can point you toward somebody else or some source.

The first thing this afternoon is that I’ll bring in some books to show you, ten or fifteen source books that would help you in researching any aspect of this, whether you are interested in it academically, or for personal spiritual growth, or whatever. It’s very important to be informed. This is an area where it’s very hard to bluff it, because on one level it’s a branch of medical science. What we’re talking about is folk pharmacology, and you really should understand certain things about pharmacology, certain things about physiology, because your life may come to depend on it in some situations. It’s not casual; you want to be able to assess risk and make intelligent choices.


I’ll say just a little bit about my own interest in all this, or how I got into it. I don’t know, I mean one creates a false history when you look back into time to try to explain how you got to where you are, or at least I do. Trying now to understand how I came to be involved in the psychedelic experience, it seems to me that what it really requires is a love of the peculiar, of the weird, the bizarre, the outré, the freaky and unimaginable. I don’t give great credence to astrology, but I am a double Scorpio, so I’m told that this kind of thing predisposes one for 12th house activity.

Several times in my life I’ve gone through these kinds of revelations where everything seemed to change so profoundly that I could hardly recognize who I had been before. I noticed this happening the first time around the time I was 7 or 8. Nature and the imagination seemed to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience, so I was a rock hound, a butterfly collector, a rocket builder, a connoisseur of explosives and all of this sort of thing. While my peers were off playing little league baseball I was back in the hills digging out trilobites and tracking down moths and stuff like that. Then science fiction was a tremendous stimulus to my imagination, because it seemed to say that anything you can imagine is fair game, anything that you can conceive of can be treated as a reality. I was also raised in a Catholic household, so my whole thing was to build cynical resistance to the spirit. I was an atheist, a Marxist, an existentialist, a rational materialist — a pain in the neck, basically.


In all of that, somehow I began reading Aldous Huxley, the social novels: Antic Hay, Chrome Yellow, these comedies of manners of British academic society. I was 12 or something, but I always drove myself to read beyond my level. This lead me to The Doors of Perception. I had read Brave New World, which is an anti-drug dystopia, a nightmarish world of plastic never-grow-old people who take tranquilizers every time there’s a hint of any deep emotion or any kind of anxiety. The motto was, “A gram is better than a damn!” and you could just for a quarter, anywhere, get one of these pills that just put you right back into being happy and cooperative. And so Huxley, who was a very concerned person, very interested in the fate of 20th century society, went from this dystopic vision of drugs to The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell in which he describes experiments with mescaline that totally turned him around and convinced him that these medieval mystics that he was so fond of, Meister Eckhart, William Blake and San Juan de la Cruz and so forth, were actually describing the same reality that he was getting into.


So I wanted to pursue this, and this was 1962 or something, I was about 14 years old. Then a few months later there were stories in the newspaper that morning glories were being abused for their psychedelic effect. There was a bindweed that grew locally, so I went tearing out and gathered half a peanut butter jar of this wild morning glory and took it home and ground it up and took it. Of course, nothing happened, but in the hour before it failed to come on I sat quietly and fearfully and examined my mind from that point of view for the first time in my life. In other words, from the point of view of watching it to see if it was changing in some unpredictable way. Actually, though the morning glories were totally inactive, in that hour of watching I did observe some interesting false positives that would come and go for a few minutes.


Then a few months later I got my data a little more together and learned that it was a certain species of morning glory and that you had to buy the seeds from a seed company. Then I discovered what it was, though not the full-blown psychedelic experience. By this time I was in southern California going to school, and a friend of mine and I would go out into the Mojave desert and grind up low doses of these morning glory seeds, because we didn’t know what a dose was, really, or what actually was supposed to happen, because if you read Huxley it’s pretty high-flown language, it’s all about radiance and significance and existential validity flooding into the rose. Well, once you’re looking at a rose and posing the question, “Is existential validity flooding into it?” you don’t have anything to measure it about. We would go out into the Mojave and take these morning glory seeds and observe shifts in the apparent significance of things. Everything would appear somehow more pregnant with potential meaning. Then, in fact, if you would close your eyes in that situation there would be the beginnings of hypnagogia: drifting lights and undulating colored patterns, grids and laceworks, all these things which are the preconditions for the psychedelic experience.


It wasn’t long after that that I went to Berkeley in the fall of 1965, and LSD was available a few months later, DMT was available. I was just stunned and have never lost that sense of profound astonishment that such things could exist. I mean, DMT seems to argue — convincingly, I might add — that the world is made entirely of something that for want of a better word we would have to call “magic.” Things are not what they appear, not at all what they appear. What we call reality is some kind of utterly provisional construct that if leaned upon too hard can just fly to pieces before your startled eyes. Then the question is, “What are the implications of this? What lies behind it?” So I, as most people do, looked to tradition for some kind of guidance about what this was, and read Jung and read Mircea Eliade and saw parallels, but not a clear congruency.


What I saw in the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism seemed to me to bear certain kinds of parallels to the hallucinations that I had by that time glimpsed in LSD states. So I studied the Tibetan language, went to Asia, and learned that the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism is a rip from the pre-Buddhist shamanism of Tibet, which has been there since the Stone Age. Buddhism only entered Tibet in the 7th century with Padmasambhava, and all the iconography was taken from the autochthonous indigenous shamanism that was there. I didn’t find in these yogis and lamas what I was looking for, which was direct experience of these realities. Tibetan Mayahana seemed tremendously sophisticated in its analysis of states of mind, but operationally it was not coming anywhere close to what these psychedelics were able to deliver. Because I was fortunate enough to have wise and well read friends, I knew that this tradition was alive in the Amazon. I went from Nepal to India throughout Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, ostensibly making my living as a professional butterfly collector but also using that as an excuse to go to these extremely rural and tribal situations and observe what was going on. I concluded that it was far in the past, or far removed, that it was something that had retreated to the status of a myth in most cultures.


Then in late 1970 I went to the Amazon and very quickly, through using mushrooms and through using ayahuasca, learned that there it is accessed, the traditions are alive and the attitudes were simpatico with my own. There were not lineages, you didn’t have to pledge eternal fealty to some character. They were exploratory in their approach, they were open-minded, everybody admitted that nobody knew what was going on with it. Yes, they could cure, yes, they could balance their societies and act as paradigms of behavior to other members of their tribe, but what these shamans really liked to do was get together and puzzle over what the hell it is, and how can it be? They were like scientists, they were like explorers, they didn’t have a myth that encompassed it. They were technicians of myth which they presented back to their societies, and this is something that is very important to realize about shamanism as it is being packaged and sold in this society.

A shaman is primarily a theatrical entertainer. They are not putting on the show for themselves, but in this society people actually become actors on their own stage. I maintain from spending time with them that the shamans do not believe in the powers of magic words, crystals, healing darts, and so forth and so on. They manipulate these things the way a stage magician manipulates rabbits, hats, saws and boxes with women inside them. They understand what it’s for and how it works, and these things are manipulated to create an effect on other people, but the shamans understand that the real magic is the magic of sign, symbol, and language, and that by manipulating cueing, by manipulating expectation you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves but with the Other.


It is no easier for an Amazonian Indian to come to terms with these things than it is for a native of Manhattan. Ultimately, this coming to confront the Other is coming to confront the mystery of being. Not as a phrase, “mystery of being,” I mean we all give lip service to that — the mystery of being is everywhere, it’s in the trees, the stones, the elevators, the life of the city, the life of the country, everything is radiant with the mystery of being — this is some kind of gloss. What I’m talking about is the mystery of being as existential fact: that there is something that haunts this world, that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that’s the primary thing to bear in mind, it is an experience.


As we went around this morning a surprising number of people spoke to it as an experience. This is what makes the great distinction between the shamanic, pragmatic approach and what I called last night the political ideologue approach: that we are not working here from theory, our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we are working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of. Now, most of these Other-oriented experiences, which are hard to keep track of or make sense of, cannot be commanded freely. They are more in the realm of: you are traveling in a foreign country and you contract a terrific fever and you fall into a vision and you have deep awareness and realization about the nature of life. This is not an experience that can ever be repeated; or you’re alone in a wilderness and you confront a flying object in the sky which seems to trigger strange bursts of thought in yourself; this cannot be repeated and triggered on command. So only in the context of the psychedelic experience and the willed decision to act can you enter this arena of repeatedly going to meet the experience of the Other. It is a very, very bizarre enterprise. It is not that if we do it enough times, we will understand it, or become comfortable with it. It is not in its nature to be understood, and it is not in its nature to accommodate itself to us. Rather it’s that we have discovered another dimension, almost in the same way that Europeans discovered another world only 500 years ago.


In 1992 we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. Now, notice that when Columbus set out from Spain there was a large body of intelligent opinion which believed that he was sailing over the edge of the world. Literally, that he was sailing out of mind. Instead, what lay at the end of that voyage was real estate, immense amounts of real estate, and we have come to terms with that and in fact now inhabit what 500 years ago was not even on the maps. It was in the unconscious; now it is the center of the global economy. In the same way that these European navigators began to have this intimation that the world was a wrap-around — that’s what it means to say that the world is round, it means that you can get back to where you started from by going away continuously — in the same way, I think we are on the brink of discovering that you can start in three-dimensional space and time, move off in a linguistic vehicle, and find your way back to the place you left from. This means that what we call three-dimensional space and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, and this is big news. This is entirely goes against our Cartesian expectation of thoughts inside, world outside, objects outside, perceptions inside. This is actually nothing more, this inside-outside thing, than an artifact of European languages, and yet we take it to be how God made the world, basically, because we are so embedded in our language that we literally cannot cognize reality without it.


We cannot cognize reality without our language, but in the psychedelic state somehow this happens. Somehow syntax is replaced by hypersyntax, linguistically-moderated and modulated perception is replaced by perception in the raw; not coded and sculpted and sifted for culturally validated meaning, but rather just the full hit. This is tremendously disorienting, but it is also tremendously liberating, because that’s the full deck. That’s when you have full command of the options available within the matrix. If you play the cultural game it’s like playing only with clubs, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this prelinguistic surround in which we are embedded.

Why is it so emotionally charged for us? In other words, why can the shamans go into this dimension and heal or divine, see into the future, or, in a sense, see into the past by discovering who stole whose cow, or who is sleeping with who, all these things that shamans are concerned with? What is this ground of being that we discover by dissolving the cultural machinery of cognition? I think it is simply reality unpackaged for a historical epoch. In other words, reality uncompromised by the need to be culturally efficacious and useful. This is precisely what we need to throw light on our culture crisis, because the models that we have used to sanction information that is culturally useful have given us information which is toxic. We have actually created a toxic relationship between ourselves and nature. We have pursued avenues of questioning, the feedback from which has given us an overpopulated, polluted, ideology-obsessed, unresponsive planet.