Audience: [laughs]

Audience: I know you have a distante for [9:09:00], quantum physics, but there was a conference apparently last spring in Spain. Actually, it was a conference of astrophysics, I believe. Because I heard some reports on it, their serious topic of discussion was, was trying to attempt to answer the question does time exist. I mean, this was being serious, on the agenda, at some astrophysics conference.

TM: Yeah, time is the great, misunderstood, or ununderstood quantity in our lives, for sure. [9:09:30]

Audience: Terence,

TM: Yep

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Right

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: I don’t necessarily reject it, I just think they shouldn’t sneer at me. When their theory is so kakamany. I mean, in other words, I haven’t proposed anything weirder than the big-bang. Saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster [9:10:00] down into a supernovel object, sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement than to say that a universe can spring from nothing, for no reason, in any single instant. They cornered the market on unlikely approach to cosmology.

Audience: [inaudible] alternative to their stuff.

TM: To their theory? No, but I’m gonna write one.

Audience: There is actually serious debate on the whole topic. There was a book recently published [9:10:30], in the last year. Called ‘Did the big bang happen?’ which was written by another cosmologist,


TM: Well, the big bang looked like it was a real trouble as recent as six months ago but the new data from this, is is ogos three or, one of these satellites. They finally actually found, uhh, irregularities in the microwave background, and until they found some irregularity. Because they couldn’t figure out how you get from the supersmooth initial conditions [9:11:00], to the clumpy present situation. Now, this new data appears to have pulled their chestnuts out of the fire. But I think the big bang may be in need of serious review. I mean, you have the inflationary, the super inflationary cosmology is an attempt to fix some of those problems, but it gets you know.. There are problems yeah.

Audience: [inaudible] [9:11:30]

TM: That’s right.

Audience: [inaudible].. are also.. [inaudible]

TM: What does he say exactly?

Audience: Uh, I can’t remember the exact book but he.. [inaudible].. speeded up.. [inaudible]

TM: Yeah, that’s absolutely right, if we get a little deeper into this we can actually discuss..[9:12:00]

Transcribed by Dirk


TM: [9:12:00]...discuss maybe why he would have said such a thing because i think we can illuminate it. Here let's (ahh), do a little more. We've got 22 thousand years on the screen, 11 thousand years on the screen, 5 thousand and some. This is in a way my favorite screen because this book i want to write i'm going to call, History's Fractal Mountain and there it is folks. [9:12:30] History's Fractal Mountain (ahh), Çatal Höyük is over here in the bottom of this. Along this descending gradient here, like pearls on a string, you get the great ancient civilizations, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt. And, this actually, the graph actually confirms the intuition of the theosophical mentality [9:13:00] that Egypt did achieve, some level of advance that was not surpassed, until late Roman times. That there was a-a tremendous breakthrough on the part of these civilizations. This, negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is


This, negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is studded with a whole bunch of a, of war-like [9:13:30] male dominator civilizations. The Hittites, the Mitanni, the Assyrians and up here at the top, Mycenaean Pirates overwhelmed the last outpost of the Goddess Culture on Minoan creed. This is Homer, right there. Homer sings his song and it's that, that to me fits because i had a professor who once said to me, you want to know where it went wrong? I'll tell you where it went wrong. When these Greeks pulled their boats [9:14:00] up on the shore and stopped being fisherman and started talking philosophy the shit hit the fan [audience laughs] and that's precisely what happened. There it is. You see the steep, steep descent into novelty and then after the fall of Rome, oscillation around the mean, where it's sort of up it's sort of down but there's no real progress until the Industrial


of down but there's no real progress until the Industrial Reformation. I mean in the Industrial Revolution of the 17th forties. [9:14:30] Let's…


Audience: [inaudible]...makes sense because any, any-any...[inaudible]...attempted, (ahh), descend into novelty ascend into novelty...[inaudible]...by the emerging church at the time.

TM: That's right. Of course this isn't Eurocentric, it's global.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Oh you mean, where is the birth of Christ? Roughly, i-is right here. It's this, it's (ahh), there's a little kind of a choke and then a very steep fall right afterwards. That's the birth of Christianity [9:15:00] of Roman, of the Roman Empire vs The Republic and so forth.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah, sort of.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah, right about there. Let's see, we may get it on the next pass.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Well it wasn't. [9:15:30] At first it was (ahh), physical. It was that, chemis-it was that atomic physics gave way to chemistry which gave way to molecular biology, which gave way to life. It keeps moving, it keeps being active at the front of the wave but it leaves a residuum behind it of this previously created structures. Right now the wave is clearly lodged in all-in our species while everything else [9:16:00] is, is, under the Aegis of Darwinian mechanics.

We're apparently under the Aegis of cultural, mechanics.

Audience: [inaudible]...absolutely. Depends on the intensity of the prominent future. You know, if a meteor came in, in the middle of the...[inaudible]


TM: Yeah, that's right.

Audience: It's not really...[inaudible]...or dictate by human law. It just so happens...[inaudible]

TM: Wow…

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: How so? [9:16:30]

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: It-it keeps condensing toward, it keeps-it builds on complexity. Wherever there is complexity, you will get more, complexity. It doesn't build on simplicity. It-it builds on the last most complex achievement see? [9:17:00] So intelligence rest on animal organization which rests on, cellular biology which rests on molecular biology which rests on physio…

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: You got it, okay. (ahh) to…

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Now pretty soon we're... Now there's the descent. Here let's stop and look (ahh), the-the [9:17:30] crucifixion is right there and it's interesting you know, Christ was an absolute contemporary of Caesar Augustus, so you get this great religious reformer at the same time that you get the great reformer of Roman Politic. So two of the most important personalities who ever lived are alive at that point. That strangely enough does not win the prize. See this deep little chip here? [9:18:00]

Transcribed by Tiago Ramos


Transcribed by Tiago Ramos

TM: ..See this deep little chip here? [9:18:00] If we were to blow that up and look at the bottom of that trough, there was a moment when you could have had a dinner party, when Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Pythagoras and Ezekiel could have all gotten drunk together, uh, had they.. been able to find each other. Right back there, in the.. immediately preceding the Greek Renaissance. Now the fall of Rome is in 475 [9:18:30] right there. And you see how the time after the fall of Rome is all of a certain general character, clear up to seventeen-hundred. And then certain technologies and mathematical techniques propel to an even deeper level of novelty. Now the next screen is the one that I think that is probably where we either win or lose you.

Audience: Look at the overall shape of that wave. It’s clear that there’s an [9:19:00] overlining principle at work here. I mean the birth and death of Christ is practically [inaudible] on that curve.

TM: uh, yi-.. mmm..

Audience: No, I mean there is a deep and strong move into novelty in those positions and [inaudible] and those events are relatively [inaudible]..

TM: That’s true.

Audience: It just points out that it’s not being driven by what we do [inaudible].


TM: No, it’s not being driven by these great personalities. They are being driven by it. I’m sure that if you could’ve [9:19:30] stepped into Christ’s mind while he was undergoing the passion, the main question he was asking himself was: “What.. is going on? You know, why do I say what I do? Why do I do, what I do? I don’t seem to be my own person. You know, I seem to be a puppet of some cosmic force.”


Because he was a puppet of some cosmic force. You see, the transcendental object at the end of time is like [9:20:00] one of those reflecto balls that hang in discos, you know. And as it turns and spins it sends off distorted reflections of itself which ricocheted into the past. And if you are correctly situated, it’ll turn you into a Christ, or a Buddha, or a Lao-Tzu. If you’re not quite correctly situated, it turns you into a Madame Blavatsky, a Meister Eckh-.. in other words second stringers. [9:20:30] If it.. uh if.. if it’s you know just get a little of it well then you are a person with strange insights and great personal charisma, and the people around you love you. We all are very close to this thing. Every night when you dream you come into the presence of the transcendental object of the end of time. We are all distorted reflections of the last thing. And as we get closer and closer [9:21:00] to the eschaton, the last thing, the distortion begins to leave. And you say, “my god, it’s like watching a photograph from a SX-70 develop. First it’s just mirk, and then you say, oh there’s a person there and it’s getting clearer and clearer”. You know, we are actually being pulled into the attractor. The veils are being parted. The truth is becoming more and more and more immanent. [9:21:30] And in the final confrontation with it, you know it’s the apotheosis. It’s the apocalypse, the apotheosis, the apocatastasis. A whole bunch of Greek words beginning with ‘a’. [audience laughs]

Audience: We are all [inaudible]..

TM: [laughs] No.


Audience: We are all [inaudible]..

TM: [laughs] No.

Audience: [inaudible] [audience laughs]

TM: ..okay.. [audience laughs]

Audience: [9:22:00] Did you address the time-span [inaudible]..?

TM: Well, no it picked up the time-span that we had. See it just accepted the correction. Thank you very much. Good thinking. Now is it alright? Yes. Okay now, this is the screen upon which the theory will stand or fall. Because this is the screen that is filled with the history that we know. We’re not talking fossil records or

Çatalhöyü

k [archaeological site in Turkey, of a 7500 BC to 5700 BC Neolithic era settlement] or any of that. [9:22:30] We’re talking very precise dates. It’s saying that there was a very steep descent into novelty around 948 AD. What is this?

Audience: What is its center again?

TM: W-.. 1400 years. And this first steep descent into novelty is, uh the intellectual flower of Islam within the confines of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphate and the invention of algebra. [9:23:00] An intellectual tool that sets the stage for modern science. Essentially *this is* the birth of modern science. And you see how steep, sudden and precipitous it was. Okay, then you go over to this next one. ..and let me try something over here since this is such a fast machine.. See I’m moving the little pointer. [9:23:30] And it’s telling me exactly what I’m pointing at. I haven’t done for you before. But this is very good for checking these things.


Audience: Oh, to know exactly the dates.

TM: To know exactly, yes. We’re pointing at the exact date. And I wanna get it over here. To the bottom of this sucker. 1121, [9:24:00] the first crusade. The collapse of fortress Europe.

Transcribed by Andrea Casanova

TM: [9:24:00] 1121, The First Crusade, the collapse of Fortress Europe. This is the beginning of

the globalization of the European mind. We're dead on here. Okay now the next steep descent

into novelty is this one, obviously. Let's go over there and see what it is. [9:24:30] There it is,

12-1430, oh no 1358 i'm sorry, just a minute here let me get my... Okay, do we all agree it's

pointing at the bottom of the thing? Yes?

Audience: That's the end of the novelty, not the beginning of the novelty.

TM: No, that's the densest point of the novelty. It's 1354, what happens in 1354?

Audience: The Black Plague.

TM: [9:25:00] That's right. One third of the population of Europe is dies in an 18-month period


beginning in the late 1354. The greatest demographic collapse that Europe has ever experienced, it's an absolute hit, dead on (ahh). Now let's (ahh), go over here to this... Now notice though that the recovery is quick, there's a steep descent into novelty and an almost immediate reversion back up to the [9:25:30] the same level of (ahh) habit exactly, business as usual. But this next one is different, it's a steep descent into novelty and then it really stays down, for a long time and explores this. So let's go over to the turning point, which is up at the top.

Audience: [inaudible]... It's global.

TM: It's global, but having said that you have to notice that [9:26:00] (ahh), the world is now dominated by European values and culture so, while we can chart the ebb and flow of the Han Dynasty at this point European culture is moving to the four because European culture is beginning to put its imprint on all of world history.

[This concludes tape 7, our program continues with tape 8. [9:26:30] Continues with tape 8]

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: That's right. This is a picture of a resonance pattern, an interference pattern of many times and places. Now up here at the top of this thing, at the very top, it's, 1455. What happened in 1455, does anyone know? [9:27:00]

Audience: Christopher Columbus?


Audience: Christopher Columbus?

TM: What? [audience laughs] Columbus was born? Thanks for playing! (ahh) [Terence and audience laughs] (ahh) In 1455 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks making European access to the Far East impossible, therefore the Age of Exploration, begins and (ahh), and you get Vasco de Gama and all those people. This was a tremendously shattering [9:27:30] event for European civilization to lose Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. (ahh) Now let's go over to, (ahh) wait, back i mean, to, this place. This is another very seminal event which combined with this Constantinople loss set the stage for this descent into novelty, even though it's way up here in habit there's a little chip out as there's a, [9:28:00] a-a novel invention of some, sort that happens in 1540, (ahh)...

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: 1440 i'm sorry. The invention is, the invention of printing in months in 1440 (ahh), that did it friends (ahh), as far as most people are concerned.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Enlarge at one set now? Good idea.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah, let's do one Zoom (ahh)... [9:28:30] I think i have to move it over clear all the way before we do that zoom or it'll be some kind of a screw-up.

Audience: [inaudible]...focus on your right.

TM: Right, let me (ahh)...

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Well, i'm glad you like it because it's my best trick. [audience laughs]


Audience: Not bad. [inaudible]

TM: I do, i do.

Audience: Oh you do?

TM: It's just we haven't written a manual yet. [9:29:00]

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Ooh, hard to say. [audience laughs] Okay, now it's pointing at today. Now let's do our zoom. Approach factor, 2, strange that it didn't ask for the seek minimum, isn't it?

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: [9:29:30] Okay. Now we're seeing the same thing again, we're just seeing in higher detail (ahh), but what i'll, i'll fudge by telling you that up here 1455, down here 1492. Along this screaming descent into novelty are all the painters of the Quattrocento. This is the Italian Renaissance. [9:30:00]

Transcribed by Tiago Ramos


TM: All the painters of the Quattrocento, this is [9:30:00] the Italian Renaissance, this descent into novelty. And this, is the era of exploration. 1492, good huh? Good, good! The absolute thing is in 1485, and all the painters of the Italian Renaissance are along this thing. Now notice that in 1492, there isn’t an instant rebound. [9:30:30] There’s 1492. But instead, because this lost half of the planet has been discovered, this sets off the age of discovery and, and habit is unable to reassert itself, because too much peculiar data is flowing in, too many lands, people, materials, philosophie, alphabets, languages, sexual styles, cuisines.. It’s like they’re overwhelmed. [9:31:00] However after a while they get their act together, and manage to turn it into, uh hell itself. RIght there, right… [audience laughs]. What that is, what ends the era of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica,


of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica, [9:31:30] is the 30-years war. The 30-years war begins 1619 [actually 1618], it ends 1648. It begins with Europe Medieval. It ends with Europe Modern: Parliaments have replaced popes and kings. The whooole name of the game has been changed. Now, the 30-years war lasts until 1648. Sorry. 1648. [9:32:00] At the bottom of this cut in here, which is in a situation of rising habit, there nevertheless is a strong tendency towards novelty, reaching a culmination.. in 1677. Newton publishes the Principia, the celestial mechanics are put on a firm basis, the Calculus has been invented. The modern-, the world of modern science is now [9:32:30] completely in place. Then an- an-, wha- an- aside from the 30-years war, what Europe is exporting to the rest of the world on this hellish offswing, is slavery, the Patron system, forced labor, uh


slavery, the Patron system, forced labor, uh brutal return to habitual methods of the past. You may not know that slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire. If you’ve owned a slave [9:33:00] during the medieval period, you owned ONE slave. It was a house slave. And it proved, your own ownership of this person proved, that you were a person of IMMENSE wealth. It would be like owning a beach bonanza today, it’s beyond owning a Rolls Royce. But, the need for a drug strangely enough, the drug being sugar reversed this, and in the 1440’s [9:33:30] they began buying Africans and taking them to the Canary island to work sugar. So, uh you know, the moral power of Western civilization could not stand in the way of the re-establishment of slavery and the sugar trade. Now, up here at the top of this thing there is a steep, there is a twist, a turn, right there,


there is a twist, a turn, right there, in 1739. This is the European Enlightenment. [9:34:00] The European, uh Enlightenment was the great uh intellectual step that set the step of secular civilization. People like Voltaire. And out of that came two revolutions.


Audience: [inaudible question]

TM: Well, the inquisition would have been I presume a fairly un-novel thing. Since what it was, was a power group [9:34:30] torturing the helpless. Which there’s nothing new in that for heaven’s sake.

Audience: It went on for a long time too.

TM: It went on for a long time, and enough of that. It was a Spanish phenomenon. I- It was confined geographically to a number, to a very small number of places. Right.. there. August 1, 1776. The American Revolution takes place as a consequence of this steep descent into [9:35:00] novelty at the beginning of the European Enlightenment. Well as you know, the American Revolution is generally thought to have had a happy conclusion. The French Revolution.. not so happy. And if you explode that Arean look, you can see that they’re happening at different slopes of that thing. Then the restoration of Louis Napoleon in 1803, is there. [9:35:30] This bump is the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war, which were the first modern wars and completely distorted the demographics of the United States and Europe. And, now i want to..

Audience: What year is that?

TM: The Franco-Prussian war began in.. 1848, I think. And the Civil War was 1865. Let’s uh, I wanna go over here tooooooo.. [9:36:00]

Transcribed by Andrea Casanova

TM: tooooo [9:36:00]

Audience: [inaudible statement]

TM: I think you’re right. I didn’t feel right about saying that. And that would-

Audience: 1848 was the other one.


Audience: 1848 was the other one.

TM: Was-, 1848 was the year of revolution. But the Franco-Prussian was at the same of the American Civil War, you are right. Ok, there’s today’s date. Now let’s do the approach. [9:36:30] Approach factor.. two. [beep] Ah, okay that’s 357 years on the screen. You see the American and French revolution. The Franco-Prussian War, the American Civil War, the Twentieth Century. Now let’s look at the Twentieth Century. And this is, remember how I said that the Great Pyramids were at the bottom of this trough, at a higher level. Now we are seeing the same pattern again. What we get [9:37:00]at the bottom of this trough here, is the Third Reich. And to show you how the resonances work, think about the Third Reich in relationship to Ancient Egypt. First of all, probably the word ‘Führer’ can be traced to the word ‘pharaoh’. These-, this is the same concept [9:37:30] of a master leader. In addition, the Third Reich and Ancient Egypt shared an obsession with large-scale tasteless architecture. In addition, both civilizations had a real tendency to lean on the jews. So you see, you get this strange kind of microscope on the histor-. Most people would not associate Ancient Egypt to the Third Reich. But when you begin listing [9:38:00] the similarities you see, one is a reflection of the other. Okay within the Twentieth Century, ah this is somewhere like 1903. The- uh, uh invent- you know, uh, Einstein was in 1905, the general theory, I think. Which came first, the general of the special?

Audience: The special.


Audience: The special.

TM: The special came first [9:38:30] in 1905, and the general came slightly later. Down here in the bottom of this trough, let me show you. Right there. Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. And then all of World War II is fought in the bottom of that trench. Here’s 39’, here’s August 39’. That’s June, that’s September [9:39:00]. So that when it begins. Even though it’s a novel situation, because it’s a war it’s a recursion to habit. So at the bottom of a trough of novelty you get a little upward pimple of recursion to habit. Then, uh let's look at.. There it is. That’s Hiroshima right there, and Nagasaki right there. The war ends, and novelty is left behind [9:39:30]. And remember that the psychology of the post-war mind was everybody wanted things to get back to normal. I mean, certainly the Europeans wanted things to get back to normal. Their whole scene had been bombed into the Stone Age. And in this country, people just wanted to get their place in the suburbs and marry the girl next door, and have a slew of kids, and buy a Chevrolet. And forget about, you know thousand year millennial plans, and all the rest of it. [9:40:00] And so this is the post-war, cold-war era. And it lasts, let’s look. Oh there’s 1952. Uhm, 19-, here’s-, the launching of Sputnik is there.

Audience: It was in 59’.

TM: No no, Oct- October first 1957. A day graven in my mind till they lower my box. [9.40:30]. Uhm. The first american satellite was launched right around there, Explorer 1.


Audience: [inaudible].

TM: Give me the date! [audience laughs]. Ok there’s the assassination of John Kennedy, as close as I can get it at this resolution. If I go back one, I’m before it. So you see, [9:41:00] it’s right at the bottom of that steep stab, that takes place against this other thing.

Audience: What turned it around?

TM: What turned it around? What’s- What’s the turning point? I thought you’d never ask.

Audience: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, and what is it?

TM: Oh, I’m about to get it for you. There it is. August 1967. It’s the summer of looove. Not only does this thing illuminate history it also, you know fulfills my deepest inner delusions [audience laughs] [9:41:30]. So, and remember I said when we were looking at history’s fractal mountain, that this was Homer, up here. So, then you can see that the freak thing, the hippies were like the pre-hellenic Greeks. I mean, all those, you know all that bra-lessness, and loose-fitting clothes and tambourines and ecstatic Bacchanalian with a [9:42:00]

Transcribed by Andrea Casanova

TM: [9:42:00]...with a philosophical undertone. I mean it was a Greek mentality, that broke out in 1967. Then here's the long descent into, you know, the dreary present moment and (ahh), (ahh)

what can i show you hereeee? Richard Nixon getting the axe.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah. Now we're into the Reagan-era down here. [9:42:30]

Audience: [inaudible]


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah.

Audience: Can you enlarge?

TM: Yeah i'm gonna cut it. I'm just trying to get back to today. There it is. Oh, okay. Cut it, zoom yes, approach factor 2, enter.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Ah well it's gonna be…

Audience: [inaudible] [9:43:00]

TM: There it is. That's the Hippie thing and then the descent. Now that's in the, that's the 8-the 70s and 80s. That's the last 11 years (ahh), i wanna stop it here. Now, now, see how tight, it has to be, to work. Remember that we've been looking at this thing from, we've descended from 6 billion years, [9:43:30] to 11 years. We have predicted asteroid impacts, glaciation, speciation, the rise and fall of Empires, now we're down to the short and curly i would think. (ahh), [audience laughs] Let's take a look here at what we've got.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Who, i suppose, now we're all experts on this phase of things cause we've all just lived through (ahh), i don't see anyone here under 11, [9:44:00] so we've just lived through all of this. So let's take a look at what it is (ahh). Now, let's see, when was George Bush elected president?

Audience: 88.


Audience: 88.

TM: 88. So would have been November 88. That's October, that's November. Now what is the resonance to that moment? I don't think of it so much as, as Bush being elected as Reagan leaving office. The resonance here is the fall of Rome [9:44:30]. Rome falls right there. Well then, then see we have a series of, of high and low points which we should be able to correlate to, (ahh) recent, catastrophic or world-changing events. So let's play the game... [9:45:00] What's happening down here, for the 30 days preceding, that day, is a million people are camping out in Tiananmen Square. They, the-they, at the very bottom of the trough is the night that they had the most people in the square and then it turns upward as you can see because the, constipated fascist oligarchs in [9:45:30] charge of that society were preparing to do murder and there's nothing novel or new about murder, it's the oldest game in the book. So that went on there, then remember the Romanian, oh-no no. Let's go over here, the next steep descent into novelty is right, there. Right, that's too far. No, no no, that's right. Okay right there, who knows what happened very close [9:46:00] to 11-, 11/89?

Audience: The Berlin Wall.

TM: The Berlin Wall fell down. Germany is unified right there. So Tiananmen, Germany, then a bummer of some sort and what is that bummer? It's the Romanian Revolution which as you'll recall was handled in a messier style, where you hurl, put people up against walls and machine-gunned them and so forth and so on.


Audience: [inaudible]...convergence...[inaudible]...August 87.

TM: August 87?

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Along that line. Well then let's go over to here.

Audience: I wanna see that harmonic convergence.

TM: Oh you want to see the harmonic convergence? Give me the date.

Audience: August 87. 8/87.

TM: 8/87. In judging this you have to ask yourself, was the harmonic…

Audience: [9:47:00] [inaudible]...1st anniversary Iran-Iraq war...[inaudible]...Wait we'll go back to 87.

TM: But don't you want to go back to 87?

Audience: Yeah.

TM: Yeah.

Audience: [inaudible]...harmonic convergences on the anniversary every year...[inaudible]...six month...[inaudible]

TM: Well maybe it's not... Oh, okay. August what?

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: There is the closest we can get. What it shows that, is, that a long descent into [9:47:30] novelty that had previously been impeded but there isn't anything particularly special about that day but it does fall in the domain of going over this hump. Over here (ahh), you'll recall the, the Gulf War and all that. Here's how that looks. [9:48:00]

Transcribed by Tiago Ramos


Transcribed by Tiago Ramos

[9:48:00] Terence: “Mmkay now, look here, August 3rd, 1990, there’s where saddam hussein invades kuwait, it’s also where mohammed is born one level up. Uhm, I can get higher and lower resonances simply by touching eye here, we haven’t done that but it’s possible. [9:48:30] Now remember how after he invaded - then there was a lot of breast beating and armies being moved into position and so forth that goes on until there, now there, no, no, there is where the 30 day ultimatum from the security council is issued. The war begins, the air war on the 17th of January right there [9:49:00] and the land war, well you can see that it’s - it’s, there’s a steep descent into novelty which then is slightly moderated and at the kink is where the war begins. Now the next steep descent into novelty-”

[AUDIENCE: “So lining people up and machine gunning them happens during the periods returning to, to -” ]

Terence: “- to habit, that’s the usual habit.”

[AUDIENCE: “and war happens during novelty?” ]


[AUDIENCE: “and war happens during novelty?” ]

Terence: [9:49:30] “well, wars can have, war is kind of an ambiguous thing, was is a habitual activity but it does cause novelty, especially technological novelty so you know that’s why it’s nice that you can blow up these waves and see the variation within the theme. Now this point, that’s it, there it is [9:50:00] the coup in the soviet union, right at the bottom of this one, and now the next one is really intriguing to me and i'll show you why, there it is, it’s february 21st of this year and it’s the lowest point of novelty for this year. Now, i was really puzzled by this because i watched very carefully that [9:50:30] week and there didn’t seem to be anything very novel going on-”

[AUDIENCE: “Your book came out” ]

Terence: “My book did come out, you’re right but i was modest enough to not place that in a context of world history.”

[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]

Terence: “Well you know what happened and this leads us to the slippery edge of prophecy, there was an event which happened not on the 21st of February but on the 20th which may be [9:51:00] trivial and forgettable and absolutely not worth talking about or maybe one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century. Do you know what it was?”

[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]


[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]

Terence: “No no, Ross Perot goes on Larry King and offers a suggestion about his availability for the presidency now if the guy fades and becomes a nothing-burger it doesn’t count but he does have the wave [9:51:30] blowing at his back, uhh that’s for sure. So that’s basically it uhh, if you want to see, let’s see”

[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]

Terence: “No, well, let’s look at the future, let me get the *shmiggy* somewhere roughly into the middle and then we’ll build. [9:52:00] Okay now let’s see if i can figure out how to do this. Specify target date , C, target date months, let’s do today, today is the 5th month, the 31st day, of 1992, we don’t want to add days, okay we want to move that over to [9:52:30] 50 percent. “

[AUDIENCE: “Target date..” *inaudible* ]


[AUDIENCE: “Target date..” *inaudible* ]

Terence: “Yes, that’s where the cursor pops up. Now let’s choose the timespan, E, let’s do 10 years, plus months zero, plus days zero, now let’s graph the wave. Yes, yes. [9:53:00] So it’s pointing at today. 10 years. The last 5, the next 5. And what it shows is that we are actually as if you didn’t know, exploring a very deep trough of novelty, it will last until August of next year and then there will be some kind of uhh, some kind of return to habit with a vengeance [9:53:30] now the november election is, now wait a minute there’s something wrong here let me see, no i want to point it at today.

[AUDIENCE: “You see it right there, right there right?” ]

Terence: “Yeah, okay that’s as close to today as we can get. ”

[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* “ very creative..” *inaudible* ]

Terence: “Yeah, we’re definitely getting ready to go down into novelty.”

[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* “thing next to the novelty thing..” *inaudible* ]

Terence: “[9:54:00] You mean clear to here?”

Transcribed by Jonathan Laliberte

TM: You mean clear to here?

Audience: Yes

TM: Ok well it’s gonna last until… August ‘93. The thing to keep you eye on is this. Which is such a spectacular drop. I mean look how much weirdness we’ve been through, but it’s taken us this much time to do it. This sucker is gonna do it in a three month period in early ‘96.


Audience: [Inaudible] [9:54:30]

TM: I haven’t the faintest.

Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: Well, I hope you’ll do this. Uhm, I think it should be done. Here I’ll show you [9:55:00] a function you haven’t seen. Instead of zooming in we’ll zoom out.

Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: Uhm, well no I’ll just- instead of ten years on the screen we’ll see 20

Audience: Oh I see

TM: Now it’s still pointing- uhm, well no wait a minute. Ok there you see it.

Audience: [Inaudible]


TM: Yea, right, then there’s the whole thing. [9:55:30] So that’s the idea. Now, the notion is that- remember how I kept talking about how a cone contains all possible ellipses and you section it? What the psychedelic experience is, is a sectioning of eternity. And you can build up a picture of the cone by sectioning eternity sufficiently that you get a map like this. I mean I’m convinced by this that [9:56:00] time is fractal. That instead of treating time as a zero quantity as the newtonian equations do, or as a very gentle curvature as the Einstein equations do, but we have to sub in this fractal dimension. And that this will make possible a science as mo- more powerful, relatively, to present science as present science is through the power of the calculus to Greek science. Time, [9:56:30] about which we previously knew next to nothing except that it seemed to keep happening, can actually be described,


to keep happening, can actually be described, uhm, in the same way that energy and, uhm, other factors in the universe can be described. Now what I- the last thought I want to leave you with, is I don’t think anybody could fig- could make this up. Certainly not me. A person with no training in mathematics, no interest in this kind of [9:57:00] thing. I was told this stuff. And, you know, most, God forbid, channeling is of the horrible variety which tells you to eat brown rice and love your neighbor. You don’t need channels to tell you that, you have channels in your own head which tell you that. This is a mathematical equation. I mean, it’s embedded in a lot of rap. But the real channel is [9:57:30] an equation for the description of time which makes, uhm, assertions, makes predictions, uhm, is willing to be held to mathematical analysis. All the things scientists are always screaming that


All the things scientists are always screaming that occultists never will provide them with their theories, this provides. So I’m willing, since it’s only one person, one person’s life, I’m willing to, uhm, preach this, a little bit, because I’m not- [9:58:00] maybe I- I can’t believe- see the choice here is pretty stark. Either I’m nuts or I’m Newton. There’s no inbetween. Becau- there is no inbetween!


Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: Uhm, yea, def, uhm,it’s- it’s- It’s right, I’m the greatest intellectual synthesizer in the history of man. If Im wrong, it’s just horse shit. So then the question is which is it? [audience laughs]

Audience: [Inaudible] [9:58:30]

TM: You- you mean, who am I the resonance of?

Audience: Yea

TM: A question I’ve never asked, uhm. [laughs]

Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: I figured this out… There were many- it took a long time but from 1971 to 1973 [9:59:00] is when I figured it out.

Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: Here to- let’s see. Let’s go back. Let’s go there and see.

Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: Then you would have it. Then you would have it. [9:59:30] Okay Let’s see.

Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: No, the life changing experience was in 1971. Well let’s- let’s point at this little dip here, giving me the benefit of the doubt, and say that it was April 26, ‘73. I’m sure that had you visited me in April 26, ‘73 you would have found me hunched over graph paper and working seriously. Now let’s see what the resonance of that is. [10:00:00]

Transcribed by Paul Mullins


™:Now let’s see what the resonance of that is, I, is the resonance call. It asks higher or lower. We answer higher, that means earlier..Higher. Major or trigonometric resonance, forget that, major is the answer. Which point, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 99th, I have no idea what that means, let’s answer, first. Uuuuumm 526 B.C., Oh it’s the Greek renaissance, Plato Pythagoras, Ezekiel Confucius Lousive? …(talking to the guy that asked the question) hey I think it’s time to knock off , you should quit when you’re ahead, you know?…(audience laughs)....Inaudible question… ™:Well in a sense there is, no no (audience laughing), wait a minute, in a sense there is, this is a fractal, it was invented or channeled by me before fractals became the absolute obsession of frontier mathematics, now everybody wants to talk about fractals and everybody says, you know population growth, river mouths, everything can


you know population growth, river mouths, everything can be modeled by fractals, but nobody says Time can be modeled by a fractal. So I think probably the rise of fractal mathematics is indicative of this, the other thing is, this could never have been brought to the public without small personal computers. I developed this/finished in 75 and in 77 they began selling small computers, so uh, it’s uh. It’s a weirdness, it’s a hallucination. That’s what it is. My dream has always been to bring something here from there, and apparently the only things which travel well from there to here are ideas, and I’m not an artist so I couldn’t paint, so this is a psychedelic idea, I think there are millions of these kinds of ideas swimming in the psychedelic ocean..Yeah (Inaudible question) [10:02:28] Well that’s because we really haven’t talked about the nature of the concrescence, you know what is, what is, this all argues for an impossible


what is, this all argues for an impossible conclusion, that the world is going to disappear up it’s own wazoo at dawn December 22, 2012…(inaudible crowd mumbling) ™ what?...oh you want to see the last day? (more crowd mumbling) ™ well here lemme uh, well here, yeah I’ll show you, I’ll show you the final thing, we’re running over but anybody that wants to leave has my blessing and my sympathy. (More crowd mumbling) (Sounds like they are working out a math problem on the white board) [10:05:00] ™ You see there it is, it runs down, he don’t go no mo, that’s the end. Now I have created one way out that preserves the theory and a rational universe and it is simply this, that what happens on december 22, 2012 is that time travel is invented and because it is invented it is no longer possible to portray historical data on a linear graph, so that’s all. It’s


on a linear graph, so that’s all. It’s just it was a thing about technology and eventually a technology was created which made the three dimensional spacetime matrix itself, obsolete….(crowd member says it’s the dimensional octave jump)™ The transcendental object is the despair of description, it cannot be known it can only be approximated, it’s the sacred heart of Jesus, it’s the flying saucer, it’s the philosophers stone….[10:06:00]


Transcribed by Shane Poe


TM: [10:06:00]...it's the Philosopher's Stone, it's tantric union, it's good LSD, it's all of these things and more! It cannot-it transcends, language and understanding but the closer we get to it, the more it will be revealed. And the reason the 20th century is so peculiar, it's because we're so close to the zero point, we're so close to the transcendental object but, you know, take a hit, there it is! [10:06:30] Close your eyes and daydream, there it is! Have an orgasm, there it is! It's trying to breakthrough, it's almost upon us. We've been sailing towards this thing for, 72 billion years and we are now 22 years from impact, the walls are so steep, the acceleration is so great, we are there, for all practical purposes and then what spiritual life and head-dom and all that means is, realize [10:07:00] that we are there, so that anxiety drains from your life body and


so that anxiety drains from your life body and world view and then you just ride the wave and when people talk of catastrophe, revelation, salvation and destruction, you just smile a small smile knowing that it will be all that and more and more and more, It's something, i think it's to reassure us, you see i think the world is going to get hip to the fact that we are actually [10:07:30] caught in a plural pool in time that is sucking us into another dimension, without something like Timewave Zero a notion like that could get fairly alarming and spread a lot of panic. With Timewave Zero you just say, look we have a map of what's going on, we'll check off the milestones, as long as the wave keeps working nobody should freak out. Just settle in, hang on and we'll [10:08:00] navigate through this. So it's a vital piece of knowledge necessary to face the eschaton without panic because this crazy religions want


eschaton without panic because this crazy religions want to tell you that you're going to be judged and damned and fired and roasted, no no that's not it, they got the story wrong. We're just being sucked into hyperspace, and hyperspace is, the human imagination, the human heart, the human soul, it's the domain of our dreams. [10:08:30] Our imagination is a flickering image of what it will but what it really will be, (ahh) is the despair of prose. What it will really be, can only be, approached in, silent darkness on 5 grams and then you can't tell anybody about it. Thank you very much. [audience applauses] [This concludes In Search of the [10:09:00] Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence Mckenna. If you would like additional copies of this recording or a complete catalog of transformational audio tapes, please call Sounds True. 1-800-333-9185 or write, Sounds True 735 Walnut Street,


or write, Sounds True 735 Walnut Street, Boulder Colorado 80302] [10:09:30]


TM: Does anyone want to ask a question or is it all just perfectly clear utterly convincing and…

Audience: [inaudible]


TM: Bad effects of psilocybin? Somebody once said, what's wrong with DMT and i said, well nothing unless you fear death by astonishment. [audience laughs] (Ahh), but-but your question is a good one. [10:10:00] First of all, (ahh) you know, i talked a lot about how all we have to do is destroy and oblate ego, however there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever and the-for this people boundary dissolution is no problem, their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them. I would say that they are at the, (ahh) contraindicated end of the spectrum. [10:10:30] That if you're, fearful already and fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's going on in your life at the paper box factory or something, [audience laughs] then probably tossing in mega doses of hallucinogens is not, the way, [audience laughs] for you, to do it or if you


laughs] for you, to do it or if you do, if you're, just bent on doing that, then i would say (ahh), do it in the presence of some kind of professional and how you find a professional [10:11:00] in this legal climate you'll have to discuss with me in privately (ahh), (ahh). I don't want to make it sound dull, i mean, it's a tricky thing. I don't want to make it sound like it's absolutely riskless. Physically, i think it's pretty safe, unless you are odd in some way but you need to know, you know, you don't want to find out you're odd an hour and a half into it. [audience laughs] But the, the-the problem comes, [10:11:30] with the mind, you know. If, if-if you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that, or that, or that, then this is not your game, you know, you should go back to, watching Jeopardy


know, you should go back to, watching Jeopardy [audience laughs] and... (ahh), the, the kind of person, the kind of person who is called to this, is a person who has an exploring soul. [10:12:00]


Transcribed by Tiago Ramos

Soul, I mean my- I..I..I am not a courageous person in the sense that you won’t find me shooting white water, you don’t see me, ah, you know- rappelling down the faces of cliffs, but from the time I was a..a, the tiniest little kid I was into the weird. What weird- “Weird is the compass heading, and if you keep your compass always pointed toward the peculiar, toward the acrab, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien - then, you know, you'll find these places… [audience laughter]...the people...the people who think life is all cut and dried, and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality [audience laughter] have never left the broad, swift stream of mundane thinking, but you know, off in the byways

[10:12:57]


...and tributaries, there’s a wonderful alchemical saying, which I generally mangle, but I think it goes something like this: “the tallest mountains, the oldest books, the widest deserts - there you will find the stone”... and what it is, is it’s a prescription for exploring weirdness, that’s all. It’s not gonna be on MTV… it’s not gonna be in, god forbid, Esquire… [audience laughs] it’s going to come, uh from, you know… doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands, and checking it out. The… what, what I can’t give you, to return to your question, is… I can’t give you a guarantee that it will be fun. You know, the Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, “You don’t get what you want, you get what you need” [10:13:50] This stuff is ruthless… and if there’s something you’re trying not to look at, it’s gonna get you, for sure… but… ask the


gonna get you, for sure… but… ask the veterans, most people will tell you, you learn more from the bad trips than you do from the good ones… the good ones are ecstatic, and connect you up to nature and other people… the bad ones show you your kinks and your limitations and your thought *ferrers, and that sort of thing… it’s not an easy road to hope… that’s why I think, uh, there’s a little bit of social confusion about it… one of the things I should make [10:14:30] clear is, I really advocate high doses rarely… I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic diddling, where you know, you take half a gram every day… all this is doing, is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin… you’re not having The psilocybin experience, you’re having the tolerance to psilocybin experience. The, really the [10:15:00] way to do these things is to, um, do them


to do these things is to, um, do them rarely, so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium, and then, just slam it! [audience laughs] And, uh, this is amazing… I mean, I think… I think this works for all these psychedelics… I’m, uh, I’m an inveterate cannabis user, and I wish, in a way, that I could get a slightly better grip [10:15:30] on my cannabis use because, I think the real way to do cannabis is like... once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness, with the strongest stuff you can get… and then immense amounts of it [audience laughs]... and you know, people call it a recreational drug, and a this and a that… hey, done that way, [10:16:00] it will catapult you into places where it’s the… I love it, it’s a great place to get to on cannabis, and some people never in their whole life touch it, is


some people never in their whole life touch it, is the place where you say, “My god, I’ve done… too much!” [audience and Terence laugh] It’s not easy, folks but… it’s worth shooting for! [laughter continues] basically, what you should do is, is, you know, do some homework, [10:16:30] read some books, talk to your friends, and then, hang on hammoth! It’s like,[laughter] you know… it’s very much like riding an enormous roller coaster.. You know, once that baby rolls out of the station, do not stand up… do not try to climb out of your car… shut up and hang on, with the faith that most people have lived through this! [laughter] [10:17:00]


TM: Someone else… yeah?!

Audience: [inaudible] …

TM: Well, I… uh.. my argument would be, that people don't take it enough [10:18:00], and they don't take it, uh, frequently enough… that, there are a lot of people who would really rather not get loaded, but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group…

Transcribed by Randy Sloane


Transcribed by Randy Sloane

... and they don't take it, uh, frequently enough… that, there are a lot of people who, who really would rather not get loaded, but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group… so what they did, you know, you can always spot these people, because their first question off at the get-go is, “will I be able to drive?” … I love this question! [audience laughs] because, you know, it indicates you’ve got a real tough nut [10:18:30] on your hands... in every sense of the word - “No, you will not be able to drive.” Uh, so, you know, I , uh, one of the things that inspires me to do this is, I want to get to the people who’ve taken 3 grams of mushrooms, and the people who’ve taken 150 mics of LSD, and I want to convince those people that they never got close to what I’m talking about, [10:19:00] even though they had a life-transforming experience and saw things totally differently… they never got close to what I’m talking about… and so, what you have to do is convince people to take high doses, and then, that can break them through, and then, frequently enough that they don’t forget what the deal is… so I think if you take a psychedelic population and divide it into those who’ve done 5 grams and above… then you will see [10:19:30] an exceptional, uh, slice… but not the dabblers… the dabblers don’t count, and we can all be at times guilty of this, I think…

™- Is that your last question? Does that do it for you? [inaudible] Or do you want to be ? psychotic, you choose. [laughs]

[inaudible]


[inaudible]

[laughter]

™- Well I love competition, I mean I… The competition is terrible, that’s the entire basis of my success… Yes, you because you were before, if you still wish.

Audience: [inaudible] [10:20:30]

™- Why? Because, I mean I don’t know if it’s preferable but, here's the thing- people are going to think you're a nut if you come down and say, Johann Sebastian Bach or Jerry [10:21:00] Garcia is God, and this is what you'll have to say if you listen to the dead or the B Minor (mass)… so what I’m interested in, is, um, I want to know the thing in itself… not what it does to Bach, not what it does to a river flowing through a forested valley… I want to see what it can do with darkness, [1:21:30] and silence… and I think most people think it will be boring. Probably because they’ve been hanging out with these beady-eyed gurus meditating, and god knows there’s nothing more boring on earth than most meditation - however, psychedelic... sitting in a darkened room on 5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms is nothing like meditating, and that's where it can get at you. My relationship to it is always one of, [10:22:00] I want to know


what it is… and so, I think this sensory deprivation method is the only way to get at that… other people might not like that, people say “you mean you put down that whole thing of going into nature? Isn’t nature the great affirmation?” and all this, and my answer is, yeah, but it works for me sortof without the drugs, plus, and this is maybe my own weirdness and I’ll share it with you… I have noticed [10:22:30] that these things are incredibly disruptive of the ordinary flow of casuistry… you all know the ordinary concept of synchronicity? Well if you don’t stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged.. And the damndest things will happen to you. I mean, I- you couldn’t pay me to go into an American city even mildly loaded because... adventures beckon. Now, some people like that… you know, some people [10:23:00] say, you know, “Let’s take 500 mics and go meet weird people!” [laughs] nuh-uh, not this cookie! uh...

Transcribed by Randy Sloane

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Limits of Art & Edges of Science

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March 1992

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Mapping the End of History

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Calling the Butterflies Workshop

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7 February 1992

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA

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A Conversation with Terence McKenna and Ram Dass

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Hermeticism & Alchemy

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The World And Its Double

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11 September 1993

Nature Friends Lodge, Sierra Madre, CA 91024

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


Now, this, on the face of it, is a tremendously naïve position, because what it says is the animal body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture… which is- is highly improbable. It seems to me, metaphysical conjecture begins with, uh, the logic of the situation, and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic will carry you. Well, if logic is true to experience, then, uh, we have to make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people; anticipation of a future that has not yet occurred; uh, uh, shared dreaming; all kinds of possibilities that materialism has denied. For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science, materialism has had it's a- the field all to itself; and its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that isn't- that is a fool’s argument for truth! I mean, that’s after all how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better!

Uh, this is not an entirely rational way to proceed. And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of “rational” scientific culture, we are literally at the end of our rope! Reason, and, uh, science, and, uh, the practice of unbridled capitalism, have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary: they've delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about what’s happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it!


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


However, the psychedelic experience, as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the world, is, uh, apparently a bite too large to swallow. Psychedelics arrived on the Western, uh, agenda only about 100 years ago, when, uh, German chemists, uh, brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline; and for the next 50 years, up until about 1945 (55 years, make it), very little happened. Uh, uh, mescaline did not – though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and, and William James, and F. Weir Mitchell, and – it did not spawn a craze; it did not influence large numbers of intellectuals particularly. Then in the l- in the 40s, LSD was discovered; in the 50s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered; and then, in 1966, all these things were made illegal. There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things before they were decided to be too hot to handle- made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people, but taken off the agenda of scientific research.

In the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies, and medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night, and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology. Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don’t know; but there is very little of it left. Now, people feed at the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of actually pursuing truth, or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion, divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of.


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

I mean, think about… and I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn't perturb it, because as Marshall McLuhan said, “whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn't a fish”. Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness; and yet we know it’s there. Well, the reason we know it’s there is because if you perturb it, then you see it; and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it, which is the mind/brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion, then you see: it’s like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water – suddenly the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible, because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic is like a dye-marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, “Oh, I see – it works like this… and like this."


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


But ever-accelerating; this is the important point – because the ever-accelerating accretion of technology means that history is strangely foreshortened at the future end, because it happens faster and faster. It’s like a process that begins very slowly, but once started has the quality of a cascade – or, you know, the rate at which falling bodies move: 32.5 feet per second, per second! Each second, it accelerates to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second. Technology is like this; and we now are in a domain where, if we attempt to propagate technological development forward 50 years, it becomes unmanageable as an intellectual task. We can talk about the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now: it would float, it would go 500 miles an hour, it would be guided by your mind, so forth and so on… these kinds of ideas. But when you think that every artefact of our world will undergo that kind of transformation,


of our world will undergo that kind of transformation, and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena and situations that we can’t anticipate – that’s the key thing: our inability to anticipate the synergies between our technologies. I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity – those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable consequences! The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego. I mean, we hope – we straight people – hope that they never meet it except at death; of course, they don’t realize that going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution. But the government is expressive of this dominator culture that we’re living in. The ego is a very recent invention, and its hold on reality is very tenuous. And consequently it walks around imbued with fear: I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs. That’s because it’s a very


world of dinosaurs. That’s because it’s a very recent development.


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


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


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


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


And I believe it’s because – and slowly you've forced me to do this whole rap, which I swore I wouldn't do – I believe it’s because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead, but then it disappeared, and we are left in this very peculiar situation. This is the myth of the Fall; you know, we are half angel, half beast – and these two natures are united in every one of us. And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community, an ascent to a higher level. If you completely restrict your intake of intoxicants of any sort, then you get the teetotaller type personality, which is characterized by incredible smugness, limited intellectual horizons, and an unbearable aura of self-congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.


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


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

Well, that’s how it seemed to me. It seemed to me, culture is a shabby lie – or at least, this culture is a shabby lie. I mean, if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and a German automobile! What kind of perfection is that?! We have our secular society – religion is completely devalued – and consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize. I’m sure you’ve all seen the T-shirt that says “He” – notice, he – “who dies with the most toys, wins”. That is in fact the banner under which we’re flying here. And the level of unhappiness is immense. I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, they’ve always been miserable; but we’ve managed to create something entirely new in human history – an utterly miserable ruling class! I mean, there seems no excuse for that!


Well, I guess this leads us to a subject worth talking about, which is, it's very important to talk to the state or the substance or...if you don't talk to it, it won't talk to you. It follows the rules of ordinary etiquette, and it does not speak to strangers. But if you will say to it the simplest thing like "Hello?" then it will say, "Hello", and you say "is someone there?" it says "Yes..ready and willing, what's up?" But if you don't speak to it, it won't do that. That is to me the strangest property of psilocybin, is this speaking in English business. I mean, LSD doesn't do that. Ayahuasca doesn't do that. Psilocybin does for some reason. This is not my illusion. Nearly everybody who's spent time with it has commented on this. On DMT you see who you hear on the mushrooms. On the mushrooms you almost never encounter something that you can see. You see hallucinations, but you


you can see. You see hallucinations, but you do not see the author of the data stream that's saying "did you know? I'll bet you did know!' The standard form of address. But on DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork. The strangest things happen on DMT. The most intense, and you can remember them. DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of your hopes, memories, fears and dreams. It's much more like a parallel continuum. It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data space. One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it does not affect your mind, you know? It simply replaces the world one hundred percent with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear or exaggerated acceptance as in 'oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery'! Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it


Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled!


I mean, these Yogans have been over there digging away for millenia; Egyptian religion, Kabbalism, Alchemy, Western traditions of mysticism. And I am a connoisseur of all that, don’t get me wrong, but what astonishes me is how embryonic it all is. We are not the tired inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated civilization in its twilight, which is what they’re all telling us. We are the know-nothing, fresh-scrubbed babes who are the new kids on the block, who haven’t got a clue as to what the human enterprise could be about. And we are coming now through a very narrow historical neck where the accumulated stupidity of the last 5,000 years—the dues have to be paid. It ain’t fair, we didn’t do it. You know, we didn’t bring the slaves from Africa, we didn’t invent oligarchy, we didn’t do all these things. Nobody is interested in our whining about how we didn’t do it—it’s in your face. And,

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aka The Psychedelic 'Religious' Agenda

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27-29 August 1993

Esalen, Big Sur, CA

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True Hallucinations

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20 June 1993

Phoenix Book Store

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Hazelwood Trialogues

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20 June 1993

Hazelwood, Devon, England

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Live in New York

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The Fez, New York New York

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LSD is a kind of -- has a foot in both worlds. You know, you start, when you make LSD, with ergonomine, which you get from ergot, which is grown on plantations in Pakistan. But then you elaborate the molecule and make it synthetic. I certainly think LSD -- we wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't be here, if it weren't for LSD. The wonderful thing about LSD is that it's possible to manufacture so much in the underground. I mean, there is a problem with that in that it tends to promote criminal syndicalism. [

cybin. Well, here's my approach to this, and this is why I advocate the use of plants with a history of shamanic usage. Because these things are illegal, human research is essentially outlawed. As users we suffer under the prohibition, but imagine that science, one of the most powerful forces in our society, has been told, "


Sure. I'm very interested in this. Here's the great paradox in this domain, as far as I'm concerned. DMT, without contest, is the most powerful psychedelic that I know of--and I hope there's nothing stronger, cause if there is, I don't wanna know about it! [laughter] It's very brief and fast acting, and it clears your system very quickly. It occurs as a neurotransmitter in ordinary human metabolism. Now isn't that interesting? That the most powerful and radical and alien of all these hallucinogens is the one most like--in fact, exactly like--what's in your own body. This is also a Catch 22 for the Establishment cause it means we're all holding, all the time! They can come and get you, folks! It's worse than a U.A. -- you haven't got a prayer! And there's something very interesting--well, there are a number of things--but one thing very interesting about DMT is that, if you've had it, it's possible to have a


if you've had it, it's possible to have a dream, years later, in which something's going on, and going on, and then someone whips out a little glass pipe, and puts it in your mouth, and you have the complete experience. Not a pale memory or a vivid memory--the real thing happens in the dream. Well this is big news, because what it's saying is that human metabolism is very, very close to being able to produce this at any time, and sometimes it can produce it. Now, it's known that DMT is at its highest concentration in cerebrospinal fluid between 3 and 4 AM in most people. And that's the time of day when the deep REM sleep occurs, accompanied by deep dreaming. So, it looks to me like the chemistry of dream and the chemistry of the psychedelic experience are the same. In fact, you know, if the government is really serious in eliminating psychedelics, then throw down the 10 million dollars or 20 million dollars that it would take to


or 20 million dollars that it would take to develop a drug that allows people to remember their dreams. Because I think every night, we return to the psychedelic source, that the dreams you remember are the surface of the dream, and that every single night, we sink back down in to the primordial field of mind out of which we reconstruct ourselves. Now, I'm telling you, if DMT were legal, in six months, a skilled laboratory team trained in the study of biofeedback techniques, could train a human being to trigger that on the natch. Well then, this is something that we would teach our children in the seventh grade, and from then on, that would solve the entire issue of the hallucinogenic substances, their availability, their legality, and so forth. Legalize the dream! Reclaim the human mind! Let's make dreams legal, let's make plants legal, let's legalize the imagination, empower hope, and begin to build the kind of world that we would feel alright about handing our children


that we would feel alright about handing our children on to. Because if we don't do that, we're going to come off as the lamest generation in human history, and we aren't. The creativity, the connectedness, the potential for good is enormous. And most people in this planet are embedded in pre-potent systems of relationship, meaning obligation and inherited religious and cultural ideas. So you may think that you don't count, but actually we all probably are part of a sub-population of about 5% of the global population--people who have disposable income, can read, follow global advances, get good data, and feel a political and moral obligation to do something about it. We tend to feel as powerless as a Guatemalan peasant or something like that, but in fact, that's a myth They want you to accept. The real responsibility for saving the world rests on the literate middle- and upper-middle-class masses of the high-tech industrial democracies. That's US. It's our responsibility to make a change


US. It's our responsibility to make a change and to act for all those silent, downtrodden people who have been so victimized by the system that they couldn't turn out at a New York nightclub and hear an esthete rail against the evils of the Establishment. And that's probably enough railing against the evils of the Establishment. Thank you very much, thank you. [applause]


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Mushrooms, Sex and Society

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Last Updated: 15/09/18

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June 1993

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The mainstream media hasn't quite got it figured out whether Terence McKenna is putting them on or not. His theories about the origins of contemporary culture in the psychedelic trips of the distant past seem startling to those who have overdosed on Reagan/Bush/Larouche-style propaganda, but they are not without precedent if the names Aldous Huxley, John Allegro or R. Gordon Wasson mean anything to you (if they don't, check out the 'authors' section of the card catalog). McKenna's ideas have hit the media in the form of several books, most notably The Archaic Revival (HarperCollins), Food of the Gods (Bantam), and True Hallucinations (Harper San Francisco). He has also maintained a close connection to the burgeoning rave scene, lending spoken-word performances to concerts by the Shamen and recordings by Space Time Continuum. Major publications from coast to coast have lined up to give him press, generally favorable, if confused. I spoke with McKenna recently as part of an assignment for Future Sex magazine (editorial decision squelched the piece)...

PHF: Can you briefly explain the theory you put forth in Food of the Gods?


PHF: Can you briefly explain the theory you put forth in Food of the Gods?

Terence McKenna: The primate tendency to form dominance heirarchies was temporarily interrupted for about 100,000 years by the psilocybin in the paleolithic diet. This behavioral style of male dominance was chemically interrupted by psilocybin in the diet, so it allowed the style of social organization called partnership to emerge, and that that occured during the period when language, altruism, planning, moral values, esthetics, music and so forth -- everything associated with humanness -- emerged during that period. About 12,000 years ago, the mushrooms left the human diet because they were no longer available, due to climatological change and the previous tendency to form dominance heirarchies re-emerged. So, this is what the historic dilemma is: we have all these qualities that were evolved during the suppression of male dominance that are now somewhat at loggerheads with the tendency of society in a situation of re-established male dominance. The paleolithic situation was orgiastic and this made it impossible for men to trace lines of male paternity, consequently there was no concept of 'my children' for men. It was 'our children' meaning 'we, the group.' This orgiastic style worked into the effects of higher doses of psilocybin to create a situation of frequent boundary dissolution. That's what sexuality is, on one level, about and it's what psychedelics, on another level, are about. With the termination of this orgiastic, mushroom using style of existence, a very neurotic and repressive social style emerged which is now worldwide and typical of western civilization.

PHF: In what sense did the mushroom influence or create an orgiastic state?