(1:23:00)

to celebrate the greater mysteries, which were celebrated in September. Interesting approach to psychedelics there - you could only legitimately participate in the mystery at Eleusis once in your life.

So, imagine if you had a single, high-dose, psychedelic experience under ideal conditions. In other words, in darkness, under the care of experts, and then

(1:23:30)

the rest of your life you had to sort it all out based on what happened that one evening. It was extraordinarily powerful for the ancient world.

Eventually, it was destroyed. Alaric the Visigoth, who was a barbarian, but that didn’t stop him from being a convert to Christianity. [audience laughs] Alaric the Visigoth burned Eleusis on his way to North Africa, on his way to burn other things.

(1:24:00)

[Transcript by Jason Bastin]

[1:24:00]

Terence: “Yeah?”

Audience member: “I was wondering, Terence, if you’d had a chance to read The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose, I think? It’s an argument against the idea of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and whether you were able to follow his argument, ‘cause I would take it you would be opposed to his argument”

Terence: “I haven’t read the book. I like Roger Penrose’s early work. He’s saying Artificial Intelligence is impossible?”

Audience member: “Yeah, based on...And he goes through the Turing, uhh, and I heard you bring it up once”

Terence: “The Turing Test.”

Audience member: “The Turing test for Artificial Intelligence and he also, uh, brings in the, uh, incompleteness theorem.


Terence: “Uh huh. Oh, Girdle's little incommensurability thing?”

Audience member: “Maybe a little on that?”

Terence: “‘A little Girdle please?’ *laughs with audience* ‘in 2/4 time?’ *audience laughs* Well, uuuuhhhh, I don’t have a particularly strong opinion one way or another on A.I.. I certainly think computers wi...can be a lot more intelligent they are before we settle the question of whether they can pass the Turing test. You all know the Turing is this test...uh...Alan Turing was a mathematician. He figured it out during World War II and it’s basically ‘if you call “X” on a telephone and you can’t tell whether “X” is a person or a machine, then “X” passes the Turing test,’ and every year they have T- Turing tests, uh, where judges converse by telephone with computers and people and try and decide which are the computers and which are the people and it’s still pretty easy, uh, because the people exhibit exasperation, incorrect information, *some audience members laugh* misinterpret the question *more audience members laugh* so forth and so on. *coughs* Uh, there are some wild thinkers out there, far wilder than me of...you know, if you want to read a wild book, read, uh um, Hans Moravec's book, Mind Children: The Future of Human and Artificial Intelligence. There’s a book, uh, and, uh...I’m having a memory lapse here, help me out…”

Creon: “Tipler”


Terence: “Tipler, thank you. I said help me out with a memory lapse. You didn’t have to read my mind, for God’s sake! *audience laughs* *Terence laughs* Yes! *laughs* Thanks you Creon. *chuckles* Tip...Tipler’s book is, uh uh, the end of all speculation where artificial intelligence, uh, is concerned. Uh, I think machine/human interfacing is, is very important. I think the debate about whether a computer can think like a human being is kind of not very interesting. Computers think like computers. Already vast amounts of what we call ‘human society’ are entirely run by machines including very important financial sectors, market decisions, uh, resource extraction decisions, inventory resupply decisions that feed clear back from the warehouse to the mine; in other words machines say how much tin should be extracted and at what rate and therefore, to certain degree, say who should come to work and who shouldn’t on certain days. Uh, a lot of design work


on certain days. Uh, a lot of design work of circuitry, engineers will simply tell the machine what the circuit should do and leave the actual architecture of the circuitry to machine decision. Uh, this means, you know, lar..m-more and more parts of the human world are being over...given over to machines to design, but when you see how much the world looks like the arrival concourse of an international airport, uh, having computers design the world might not be, uh, a bad idea. Uh, definitely computers figure in our future. I mean, I wasn’t joking when I said that drugs and computers are migrating toward each other. I can imagine, uh, a world, and this is not the ultimate world by any means, a world 5, 6, 7 years in the future where the equivalent of today’s advanced Macintosh would be something you glue on your thumbnail and communicate with that way. And, you know, beyond that lie, you know, enormous computational and data-accessing abilities that


know, enormous computational and data-accessing abilities that may be accessed through implants. Uh, we’re going to have to decide, you know, how much of the monkey we want to take with us into the future. We don’t want to take the homicidal killer, we don’t want to take, uh, the male dominator, but we...it would probably be a mistake to leave the body entirely behind. Uh, after all the body gives us our orientation in the world and our sense of ourselves as somehow co...coextensive with animal life. But how much of what we call ‘human’ is really human is going to be major topic for discussion, uh, from here to the end of time. Yeah, [1:30:00] in the back.”


[Transcript by Jaska Isola]

T: Yeah, in the back….

Q: Ahh, two questions on ecstasy. Aah. What’s your take on MDMA? And ahh, what’s the optimum grams to take ahh to achieve ahh sexual ecstasy?

T: Sexual ecstasy on XTC? (*laughs, *audience laughs)

A. On mushrooms.


T: Oh, on mushrooms! Oh I see. “W- well” first about MDMA… w-well there is no doubt, that from here to the end of time, whether it be eighteen years or a thousand years away, science is going to produce more and more psychoactive drugs. There a psychoactive drugs on the shelve now, waiting for human testing and government approvement, ahh, around the world. We cannot explore the brain, we cannot explore neurochemistry, without these drugs being, ahh, a natural consequence of this program of research. MDMA is a cyclised amphetamine, like MDA, like mescaline, which is “a- a” natural occurring compound of this type. Uhm, “i-in” the hands of a skilled psychotherapist ahh MDMA leads to conflict resolution, “relationsh- insights into relationships”, this sort of thing. I am not entirely convinced that it’s, ahh, the silver bullet for these conditions. Every drug that has made it’s way on to the, ahh, the alternative scene


way on to the, ahh, the alternative scene has first built itself as a love drug.That’s an unfailing market ploy. (*audience laughs)To get a drug to the forefront of public attention. Cannabis was sold to us as a love drug. Ahh, LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine. MDMA, ahh, is no different. (“MD- MDMA does promote a certain kind of empathy”), not a whole lot of, ahh, vigorous sexal activity. In terms of what dose of psilocybin leads you (“int- into”), ahh, a sexual rather than a visual acute or visionarilly ecstatified situation. Ahh, I would say for a hundred and thirty five pound person, probably two to three grams is this agitated, sexually active or if no sex is happening maybe dancing or drumming. In other words thoroughly aroused, busy, active dose. As the dose rises, you know, activity slows and finally you just want to sit down and then finally you just want to lay


sit down and then finally you just want to lay down, and ahh, (*audience laughs). Then you’re into the other fase.


Behind you there was another question.

Q: Yeah, I was gonna say that John

Nully?

Has an interesting kinda speculation about the future possibilities of solid state (unintelligible) on an autobiography of a scientist. But I was really curious what, if you have anything to say or, you know, about the credibility of the author William Cooper, who wrote the book called ‘Behold A Pale Horse’. You know that book?

T: This is the flying saucer debunker.

A: (unintelligible)

T: And isn’t he the one who said he was the CIA guy for a long time.

A: (unintelligible)


T: Well this is slightly off the track or might be seen by some people to be slightly off the track. Ahh, I don’t know William Coopers book., I regard that, ahh, whole flying saucer thing as a civil war in a leper colony. Ahh, (*audience laughs) but I do think, I do think, having been, like probably most of you, very interested in flying saucers from the time I was a kid. And I grew up when it was alle happening. Ahh, a (“few- couple of years ago”) I accepted an invitation for the first time to go to a flying saucer conference. If you’ve never been to one and you’re interested in flying saucers. Go! You will, (“b- ch- have more insights in the phenomenon then in ten years of studying it, because what’s perfectly clear is that people are self-selected for gullibility. (*audience laughs) Ahh, it’s not their fault, it’s just that (“the- the ticket through the front


just that (“the- the ticket through the front door is”), ahh, you know, ‘would you believe this’? ‘Would you believe this’? (*audience laughs) Ahh, I think probably what happened, historically speaking, you know, in 1947 the first UFO’s were seen, “they- it was a weird world.” The explosion of the atom bomb, the work toward the hydrogen bomb… People didn’t know. Einstein and Trumann and all those, ahh, they didn’t know what it really meant. “If- they thought that it is conceivable that the solar system is monitored. And it is conceivable that this is the switch which turns on the monitor and brings attention. I mean, they were in awe of the atom bomb and they realized they were tampering with cosmic forces. And then, at this moment of cosmic awe and realization of tampering they began to get reports of spacecraft entering the skies of earth and interacting with human beings. Well, what they did, the CIA had


beings. Well, what they did, the CIA had just been founded in ‘48 and so forth and so. What they did, they put a lot of time and effort into infiltrating all these groups that claimed knowledge of what was going on. And as a survivor..


[Transcript by

Melvin Goudbeek

[Terence Mckenna] : ....of the new left I can tell you when the government gets interested in infiltrating, I mean I, ...there wu eh, [fff], two out of every three members of SDS was a government informant [audience laughter] at the height of its membership! So, I believe that what happened was these flying saucer groups were massively infiltrated by the government in the course of its,... pursuing its constitutional obligation to, maintain the public welfare. And by ‘54 or ‘55 the government was perfectly convinced that whatever flying saucers were, they did not pose a threat to the integrity of the Air Defenses of North America and that was their real concern.

But bureaucracies are weird creatures, they really exist only to perpetuate themselves. So at some point inside these agencies, they must’ve had to face the fact that they had massively infiltrated a bunch of very flaky people and now their choice was to either end the program, tell the budget people that, “No, they wouldn’t be needing that 10 million dollars this year” [audience laughter], OR keep going with it because they now had a group of people self selected for gullibility. And that group of people became the victims of every chemical experiment, weird technology, propaganda experiment, and so forth and so on, because their friends and relatives had already written them off [audience laughter] as completely, uhh, untrustworthy. Who would believe them no matter what story they told?


So, I really felt I was among severely damaged people [audience laughter] , uh, and it wa-it wasn’t their fault it’s that they-they had become part of something, that had become part of something, that had become part of something, and they never really had a fighting chance. Do strange lights haunt the skies of Earth? You bet their booties they do. But, the flying saucer cults are a social phenomenon and largely unrelated to whatever this anomaly is.

Terence McKenna: *Points at Audience member* Yeah.

Question: “Um, (could not make this part out, i tried) ...of doctor Pugnitzen Polar [sp?] often spoke of the ephemeralization of technology. Do you think there will come a time when, we are indistinguishable from our technology and would that be sort of apotheosis that you speak about in your-in your books?


TM: No, I think it would go the other way that we’re moving toward a time when our technology is indistinguishable from us. In other words, I don’t want us to all turn into, uh, 7100 ADAV, that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Uh, but on the other hand I could, imagine, as a hopeful scenario a future world of let’s say 500 or a billion, healthy, happy, well fed people of all races, political persuasions, gender preferences, and so forth and so on. And, uh, those people would essentially live as our archaic ancestors did. Very little material culture, uhh, very-ve, nomadic, uh, but if you could transport yourself into the body of one of these people you would discover that when they close their eyes, there are menus, hanging in space. In other words, the computer that was on the back of the thumbnail, 5 years later that computer moves into being a kind of an implant, a black contact lens that is sewn into your eyelids at age 6 so that when you close your eyes you're actually looking at an interface. And the entire, uh, database of the culture could be placed there.


You see really what computers are doing is they’re making what we call the collective unconcious, concious! All data, all images, uh, are potentially accessible through, uh, the network. And, uh, ya know, I’m still getting used to the idea of the network myself. Like I keep thinking, “Oh, I have this timeline, I could get somebody's chronology and put it at my website”. And then I remember “No, No, all I have to do is point to their website. I don’t have to copy or move anything”. If there is one list, that’s all the world needs. Anybody else who needs that list can point to it from their website. So the speed at which new structures can be created, is, astonishing! I mean it- almost literally overnight, you can build a website, and begin to point at other websites and bring resources into yours.

Uhh, this is a technology which is gonna turn out to not be what people think it is. It’s going to be a technology for showing each other the inside of our heads. For showing each other our dreams. Uh, you know one thing I didn’t talk about in the main part of the lecture is that psychedelics are catalysts for language. They speed up and catalyse the language formation process. And a culture cannot evolve any faster...

1:42:00

[Transcript by

Wesley LaVassaur

[Starting at 01:42:00]


Wesley LaVassaur

[Starting at 01:42:00]

... than its language evolves and it cannot be anymore glued together than the bandwidth that its languages will tolerate, and so what this technology that is putting in place is going to mean is.. the way in which it will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent to each other. I mean I can imagine a child of the future, uh... we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators and things like that, in the future we won’t stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website and everything will go into our website and by the time we are twenty-five or something, our website will be the size of the American museum of natural history and you can wander through it and a.. as… [01:43:00] as a gesture of intimacy, you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that’s who you are. It’s your imagination. And… I think in a sense I have said it times that the cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. But it will have to run on psychedelic design principles or it’s certain to be a mess. Yeah *pointing towards the audience*

Q-What can you tell us about the problems of that some people experience with the digestibility of the mushrooms and how can it lead to pain an- and discomfort uh.. sometimes to like a nightmarish type of experience?

Terence nods*


A- Well, first of all let me say this, there are several mushrooms which contain psilocybin [01:44:00] which grow in cow dung. What I urge people to do, if you are serious about this, is to grow your own. Uhh… this is moderately self serving because I wrote a book about how to grow your own mushrooms *audience laughter*. But there are many such books. You don’t have to buy mine, you only need it if you want the best one *audience laughter*. Ahh.. but- you see- ah- Stamatson’s book is excellent, and if you wanna go large scale, Stamatson’s book is the one. But let me say something then, ah… after the brain, the stomach is the most heavily innervated organ in the body and anxiety has a way of cropping up as a stomach ache. So, its- a lot of people have anxiety in the first hour of taking mushrooms and they believe that [01:45:00] something in the


they believe that [01:45:00] something in the mushroom is giving them gastric distress. It really isn’t, it’s more like a case of butterflies on an empty stomach because you should take mushrooms on an empty stomach. Ah… you can try a suppository, you can try another drug if you want. But there is in this psychedelic business something to be said for simply disciplining your hind brain. Also you can suppress nausea with cannabis. So, you know, a mixture of self-discipline, pharmacological steering, uh… so forth and so on. Ah.. if you have- if you have a severe reaction to the mushroom, you probably shouldn’t take it. I mean after all it is a fungus and as mammals we have developed some pretty strong uh... allergenic reactions to fungi, [01:46:00] some of us. And- certain reactions to psilocybin are not psychedelic reactions like uh... enormous sweating or something like that. That’s more


sweating or something like that. That’s more an indication of an allergy. If you are going to get into psychedelics, one of the things that you have to do is learn your way around. Psychedelic sophistication doesn’t mean you took everything there is in combination with everything there el- else there is, at high doses, with your friends, at rock concerts *audience laughter*. *clears throat* It- it means that you figured out what worked for you, and then really put the pedal to the metal, you know. Yeah* pointing towards the audience*


Q- I recently came by David Hudson’s work on Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements and found that these monoatomic heavy metals [01:47:00] conduct- act as superconductors- conduct lightforce through our nervous system. Are you familiar with this work at all?

A- No you- you have stumped the star *audience laughter*. Ah.. I mean uh.. I am interested in organic superconductivity and room temperature superconductivity, ah.. but i don’t know his work so i can’t comment on

Q- It’s fairly new, its- its- its you say will be *inaudible* coming out a book called ORMEs *spells out* which is Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements.

A- I am sure it will find it’s way to my de- now all these hands, oh he should be the guy, you tell me,alright.

Q- How much of our consensus reality do you think is based on um.. inexorable physical laws things that aren’t the *inaudible* creations and how much if any is subject to change without notice simply based on a consensus belief of what should be or what is going to be?

[01:48:00]

[Transcript by

Rohan Singh


™: Well, I mean, this is, you’ve... this is sort of where I’m at. I mean, as you were asking the question I was... my tendency would be to say none. That none of our reality is based on inexorable physical law. But, I only want that to be true. I’m not sure it is true. Whitehead used to sa- he had this thing about what he called stubborn facts. And he said there are some stubborn facts and you can cut your philosophy any way you want but if you don’t take account of the stubborn facts, you’ll have a problem. Uh, a lot of reality is made of language. How much I’m not sure. But, I, my hope is that a great deal is made of language. Rupert Sheldrake, who’s a good friend of mine, and we sort of think along the same lines, he believes that there are not inexorable physical laws, that there are just very old habbits. He would think of the speed of light as a very


would think of the speed of light as a very old habbit. Uh, these physical constants may be changing. We don’t know, I mean take the speed of light, we’ve measured it on one planet since 1906, and cheerfully extrapolate it to every corner of the known universe with no sense that there might be a problem there at all. Yet, you know, if you’re a critic of this, you can look at the speed of light as measured from 1906 and you will notice that the values have been slowly going up. It’s apparently going slightly faster than it was a century ago. Well, people just dump on that and say ‘no no, you poor moron, you don’t understand, it’s that the instrumentality has become more precise and so the measurement may have changed slightly’. Oh yeah? Well it seems to me in that case the points should cluster. How come the more recent ones are faster than the earlier ones consistently? In other words it’s not that we’re getting


In other words it’s not that we’re getting measurements which cluster around a value, it’s that we’re getting measurements which are going out this way toward faster. Uh, I think language is the key to making reality. I think our language is a, is a very weak language computer languages may be more powerful. Uh, you know, VRML, or mathematics, but i believe the world is made of language, that’s the magical belief but then the challenge to that belief is how come the world isn’t the way you say it it? Well, that’s ungenerous. Uh, it...it uh, I think because it doesn’t work quite like that. Consensus is set by societies. By millions of people. Reality is a phenomenon of many linguistically operating subsystems. Maybe if you and I were stranded on a desert island we could get a reality going. We probably could but it would surely be shattered when somebody showed up to take us home again. Over here (points to audience) uh, the


again. Over here (points to audience) uh, the documentation, um, well there wouldn’t be anything written, of course, it’s earlier than that, but the documentation, it is well known that the Sahara was wetter in the past, even as recently as Roman times, Pliny called it the breadbasket of Rome. And we know that human populations were out there. We, in the Teselly Plateau of southern Algeria there are rock paintings ruprestice paintings that show shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies and in their hands. So, we have mushroom use, we have evidence of mushroom use at the era of the great horned paleolithic goddess, um, the um, the presence or absence of monogamy and polygamy is debatable. So I, however the archeology of this area has not been well studied, and won’t be soon, thanks to islamic fundamentalism, Algeria is no place to do archeology right now. Now to the first part of your question,


now. Now to the first part of your question, why was it human beings who ate the mushroom? Uh, well, we, you had to, to use the mushrooms as a doorway to higher intelligence, you would have had to already come a certain distance down the path of higher animal organization. We were bipedal, we had a pack signaling repertoire, we had binocular vision, and the reason we used the mushrooms is because we were under nutritional pressure. Uh, there may have been other animals under nutritional pressure but they may have been more tightly, uh, bound to their original diet, or they may simply have had behavioral organization that the mushroom couldn’t dissolve or break through.


[Transcript by Suzanne Tracey]

[Start 1:54:07]

There has been talk among evolutionary biologists about if there were no primates on this planet, what order of animals might occupy the conscious niche or be able to come in there. And interestingly raccoons are candidates. Raccoons have, bah, have well positioned eyes. They have a very complex hand and, uh, uh, years and years ago I used to grow mushrooms in, and I grew them by my own method naturally in jars. And uh I would have waste rye infected with jars. I mean, jars infected with mycelium permeated rye and I would put them out on the back porch at night or I did once. And I awoke in the middle of the night to this terrific racket and there were racoons on the back porch. They could smell the rye infested with the psilocybin containing mycelium. They could unscrew the lids and plunge their mitts into this stuff and, and, as I turned on the lights I saw these little bandit faces with this mycelial crumbs on their little upturned muzzles and their didn’t, they wouldn’t back off. They would, the other thing was they were standing up on the they hind legs, so they were standing on the their hind legs holding a jar, holding this stuff, and tottering toward me. So um I just took one look and backed off. And for the rest of the eventing you could tell they were approaching the orgiastic boundary, ah because the carrying on, the sexual squeaking and squealing, thumping and pounding going on in the backyard was just incredible. So ahh, you know they might be interesting test animals to put through this.

Yeah *points at new questioner*


Yeah *points at new questioner*

inaudible* I want to have your comments on the numerous dangers of the ufo phenomena with regard to *inaudible* and the role of this phenomena which I think you referred to as the other earlier in your talk has been the transformation you have us going through in the future.


Yeah, yes Jaque Belay was a UFO and the book that was mentioned, passport to Magonia was one of his earliest books on the subject. He’s gone through a lot of changes about it. Um, the numinous, I think whats going on is that in a sense there is leakage from the future. This is a broad subject and it late in the evening so I’ll give it to you in headlines. But basically science takes the position that nature is without purpose. In other words nature has no goal. Nature proceeds forward according the unfolding of chance and necessity. But I don’t believe this. I think nature is an engine for the conservation of novelty. Natures purpose is to generate ever greater novelty. In fact history is the dawning realisation that we are about to descend down a very steep novelty sink as it were, into immense amounts of novelty. And this is why we image the other in the 20th century as the extraterrestrial because out of the


century as the extraterrestrial because out of the unconscious comes this image of the other as the extraterrestrial . I think we are in the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time and that religions call it the messiah, or the maitreya, secularists call it utopia, millenarians call it something else, mushroom enthusiasts call it something else. But we are in the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time. And that it casts and enormous reflection back through history, especially recent history. But any person encountering this backward moving shadow of the transcendental object will attempt to interpret it in cultural terms that they can relate too. So if they happen to be a french peasant in the 11th century they will assume its the virgin mary. If they’re a sexual scientific rationalist in the 20th century they will assume it’s a spacecraft of some sort. [1:54:00] The Celts and their relationship to little people and an invisible world this


their relationship to little people and an invisible world this is a generally held belief that they are exemplifying that is world wide which is that the dead are somehow co-present in the space of the living, but invisibly so. Except to those who have the gift of second sight or are magically empowered or shamanically adept. Uhhm the last thought i should leave you with this and it’s adumbration of this question, but also has deeper implications.. The model that you’re usually given of the psychedelic experience is a religious model, that the mysterious of religions, Hindu, Buddhist, or something or other are somehow illuminated by this boundary dissolving experience, my model is a little different, a little cooler and a little more formal, and it’s this. That consciousness is an omnidirectional threat detection response.


[ Transcript by

Christian Sherriff

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Plants, Consciousness, and Transformation

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The New Psychedelics

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Riding the Range with Marshall McLuhan

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Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

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fractal mathematics have introduced us to a new superspace. For the Renaissance, spatial perspective was essentially a filing system for visual data.

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Surfing on Finnegans Wake

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The Books at the Wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here's Atherton's quote: "Amongst other things, Finnegans Wake is a history of writing. We begin with writing on a bone, a pebble, a ram's skin, leave them to cook in the mothering pot, and guten morg with his cro magnon charter, tinting fats and grate prime must once for omnibus step rubric-red out of the word press. The mothering pot is an allusion to alchemy- that there is some other significance connected with writing, for the next time the word appears it is again in a context concerning improvement in a system of- in systems of communication. The passage is "all the airish cygnics of her dippendump helpabit from an father hogum told them mutter maskins. Dippendump helpabit combined the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air or 'airish signs' with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish oggam writing. The mason, following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs, but all I can suggest for mother is the mothering of freemasons which does not fit the context, although they of course also make signs in the air. Is that perfectly clear? [audience chuckles]


McLuhan. "Guten Morg with his cromagnon charter" expounds by mythic gloss the fact that that writing meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audible world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight. The reference to the masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself. On the second page of the Wake Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, of all the themes and modes of human speech and communication. "Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rush-lit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers ..." Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of all human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake, or awake, or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. This means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias in his "collideroscope." This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor," savage, the oral or sacral, "scope", the visual or profane and civilized.

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Psychedelic Skepticism

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Autumn 1996

Whole Life Expo, Austin, TX

7104

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Luc Sala 'on Drugs' Interview

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1996

Entheobotany Seminar, Palenque, Mexico

1407

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The Evolutionary Importance of Technology

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August 1996

Esalen

1755

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A Better World (Toward The End Of History)

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10, July 1996

New York New York

7742

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Poets and Prophesiers

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9 May 1996

Unknown

5525

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PB: [laughter, Terence laughter] And this Timewave we've talked about, uh, over the years. Many pr- people are familiar with that but for those of you just tuning in let me tell you that Terence McKenna is, ah, an author of, uh, a number of books and very interesting, uh, uh, looking at the , uh, oh, things about our beginnings as human creatures, uh, what it meant for us to live on the plains and eat certain kinds of foods. Uh, you've been an explorer of, uh, mind, and, uh, oftentimes we've had gatherings with you when you've, you and your brother Dennis have talked about different, uh, chemicals and how altered states of consciousness are evidently essential, historically, for human beings. And right n- and one of the things you have, have talked about is this Timewave Zero. It goes back- we go back to, is it Mayan calendars that you predicted this on?

PB: How was it you put that together?

PB: And does this, would this have predicted that I would have- my comp- my accounting computer would have gone down, uh, last week?

And in trying to get some, uh, material facts to me yesterday I had three fax machines go down, not one...

And a number of other things! Now, i- is there anything going on planetarily that you could tell us about? Are planets in retrograde in at this point or something?


Uh, that's actually not my bailiwick. I have been keeping track of, of weird and novel events over the past 60, 70 days, and uh, just some highlights off the top of my head, uh 40, 40 billion new galaxies discovered, uh, three extra s- uh, solar planets discovered, that means planets around other stars, uh, the completion of the preliminary mapping of the human genome, the production of anti-matter, um, the discovery, the announcement that this large asteroid impact in Canada delivered enormous amounts of Buckminsterfullerine to the Earth's surface meaning that that's an organic molecule, therefore proving that uh, lots of organic material is delivered to the Earth from space. Uh, so in areas of deep scientific discovery, discoveries that will remake uh, human medicine, our model of the universe uh, and perhaps in the antimatter discovery, the ways we produce energy, all these things have occurred in this remarkably short period of time. Uh, there has not been what some people think of as massive novelty. China did not invade Taiwan and trigger World War II and you know, there were some similar other opportunities for old-style catastrophe that didn't happen. But you have to remember novelty is novelty. It's new more than catastrophic. I mean, catastrophes are in fact rather hum-drum. They come around all the time. Wars, cyclones, floods. What we're experiencing is the emergence of new kinds of connectivity and order in the human world, and uh, and then what we are experiencing as individuals if we're in resonance with the collective timewave is I think just wild fluctuations of, of opportunity, of debt and profit, of love and hate, of uh, you name it. [Terence laughs, PB Laughs]


PB: Now you're on this tour around the United States and I did get one of your brochures. I want you to tell the audience about what you're hoping to um, be able to bring people to on this all- um, 2-day weekend. Sounds like it could be kind of an intense time.

TM: Well I'm very concerned to communicate these mathematically-based ideas about the structure of time and what their implications would be if they were found to be uh, true, and so this is not something that can be done in an hour radio interview or an evening lecture. It's uh, a pretty steep learning curve. And, and I'm interested in communicating that and having people critique it. I mean, we're reaching the place in the historical meltdown of Western society where if something like the timewave actually works, I think it's time to move it to a higher level of public awareness, and that means exposure, collegial debate, possibly experiments of some sort, and then uh, discussion. So I'm just sort of touring the country saying "I predicted this was a novel time, how does the first ten rows feel about that?" And then can we get a discussion launched based on that?

PB: What have been the responses in the two cities you've done this in?

TM: Well, I've done it in three cities. We were in New York, Santa Fe and Boulder. People were very enthusiastic. Uh, it went smoothly, uh, but there were uh, good crowds and very intelligent discussion. Um, the situation here in Los Angeles is uh, a little peculiar. Uh, we're locked in righteous battle with the Veterans Administration, and uh, UCLA right at this moment because uh, the Veterans Administration which owns the large auditorium- what is it...

PB: Wadsworth.


PB: Wadsworth.

TM: Wadsworth auditorium ordered UCLA which leases this building from the VA to cancel the event uh, just for, just Monday morning. So this has suddenly raised a whole bunch of free speech and advocacy issues. Uh, the VA's only reason for canceling Wadsworth Auditorium was my record on advocating uh, drug reform and social reform of psychedelic policy. UCLA chose not to act like a great public University and defend free speech and the Constitution but instead cravenly caved in to the VA, and uh acted as their heavy, and canceled the event and offered us a venue at uh, Griffin uh-

PB: Commons

TM: -Commons, that's right. And-

PB: And this is for Friday night. The actual weekend event is all scheduled at Paramount ranch. Correct?


TM: Yes, the weekend event is not affected by this, but the large uh, the, the chance to talk to the public at less than uh, a fair chunk of money is definitely being squeezed by someone at the VA who is being protected by the uh, events department at UCLA. They refuse to identify this person uh, so we've gone several routes at once. We have mobilized the media. We've mobilized the internet. Uh, the office of Senator Paul Wellstone, who is on the Senate committee that oversees VA affairs has made an inquiry, we understand. And the US attorney and uh, other interested parties in Southern California traditionally associated with defending free speech are uh, at this moment trying to turn the VA around uh, by friendly persuasion, whatever that means. Or if that fails I think we'll all be in court tomorrow morning seeking an injunction on them to cease and desist and we will- we're now assuming that the Veteran's Administration and UCLA are going to be forced within the next few hours to uh, allow this event to go forward at Wadsworth. If I'm wrong then it will go forward uh, at uh, Griffith Commons. But my feeling, I have to tell you Pam, is that actually there is a Constitution in this country and people can go- these government agencies can go just so far, and then uh, mechanisms swing into action and even these anonymous federal bureaucrats who would seek to control the dialogue, the agenda of public dialogue on these sensitive issues, are put in their place, and I'm pretty confident that we're going to have a Wadsworth auditorium event.


http://www.levity
  L-E-V-I-T-Y . C-O-M slash eschaton, E-S-C-H-A-T-O-N slash. And that's really my fantasy, to live out in Hawaii with high technology in the rainforest and uh, build a kind of cigar store indian version of myself and my ideas that people can relate to and wander around in and leave comments and we're gonna put the Timewave on in a Java application. We're building a chronological database. Uh, I'm very bullish on the web these days.

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Live at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall

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25 April 1996

St. John's Cathedral, New York NY

11230

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Poolside Interview

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28 January 1996

Palenque, Mexico

1370

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Interviewer: Do you think, from your experience with Ayahuasca and the mushrooms, that there is...there exists a pedagogical sense of the experience...exists a systematically teacher instance or factor which not proceed from the ego in the experience with these entheogens?

I: Exactly.

I: Is this common, eh, in the mushroom experience and in the ayahuasca experience?

I: In this case, who or what do you think that teaches us? It's inside or outside us?

I: I ask, uh, some persons that are too much time in the ayahuasca way, and, ah, is multiple factors they, they bring to explanate this, this question. Some talk about spirits, some talk about the Self, some talk about the, eh, the founder of the line of in the work or guardian angel. It is very interesting this, this, this question..

I: ..biology..

I: The super mind, that you call, you call supermind.

I: I ask you now again from your experience with these entheogens, if in your point of view, does exist an ethic religious character of the experience. Do you think that there impart a wish to become more ethic in relationship with the other man and with all nature?

I: Do you think that there apart [impart] an ecological consciousness too?

I: Uh, do you think that, uh, they have therapeutical properties, the mushrooms and the ayahuasca?

I: Mmm. Mushrooms have this kind of


I: Mmm. Mushrooms have this kind of

I: ..effect, too.

I: It's a kind of psychosomatic effect.

I: Psychosomatic. Have you perceived in the effect of them, uh, some kind of therapeutical properties in some event, some, some effective systematically...

I: What?

I: Yeah, yeah.

I: What do you think about the paranormal or parapsychological phenomena described in the experiences with these entheogens?

I: Eh, what is your personal experience about this?

I: Telepathy

I: Mhm. Can you say something more about your vision on the relationship and differences between shamanic plants and the artificial chemical compounds?

I: Mhm. What do you think about the question of the presence of advanced cultures and man in the remote past of humankind? History of Atlantis..

I: Yeah, you don't think that the pyramids and the, for example, the, the, the know-how to, to, to do, to make the ayahuasca and so how, how man discovered that that

I: Since the beginning, since the paleolithic, neolithic age?

I: Mmm..Ok. Thank you very much.

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The Winter King (aka Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century)

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1996

Mannheim, Germany

5499

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I was here about five years ago with Tim Leary one raucous evening. Maybe some of you managed to catch that event. This is a little more thoughtful and reflective. I’m not here to talk, speak, or promote my books as I have been in the past. This is the only public event that I’m doing in these ten days and I’m very grateful to David and Petrif for inviting me. This is a wonderful facility and bringing you plants, books and information. It’s great to see that the freak community is alive and well in Mannheim.


What I’m in Europe to do is to be part of a film-making effort and I want to describe the project to you a little bit simply because it’s what’s on my mind, naturally, and to discuss the politics behind the making of this kind of a film. It’s not a film about rave culture. It’s not a film about Albert Hoffmann. It’s not a film about body piercing or any of these things that great films need to be done about and have been done about. It’s about one of your local heroes, who is a great hero of mine and should be a great hero to all freaks in Germany and everywhere. I’m talking about Frederick the Fifth, Elector Palatine, Prince of Heidelberg, King of Bohemia. Are you all familiar with this guy? No? Well - this is your guy! This is the prototypic freak of this area. A freak that was not content to sit back and let things happen but was willing to launch a grand, alchemical dream of a reformation of human society.


So just to lay in the background of those who are not familiar with the historical incident that we’re here to recreate, here and later in Prague, has to do with Prince Palatine of Heidelberg. A protestant who wedded the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth the 1st of England, Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James the 1st of England. This was arranged wedding. They were both sixteen years old at the time. Frederick went to England, the wedding was held in England and then he returned with his very English bride to Heidelberg. They were the center of a movement of alchemical reformation and revolution, that sought to take the Protestant Reformation an enormous leap forward into a new world of spiritual freedom, and to my mind, a very sort of psychedelic world. They were the heirs and the inheritors of the entire medieval worldview. It was folded into this pair of sixteen year olds who were ruling the Palatinate of Heidelberg, and Frederick was an Elector, meaning he was one of the seven princes who could choose the Emperor of what remained of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. He also conspired to become the King of Bohemia.

[Tape Skip] Visionaries moved the entire court from Heidelberg, from the small-time scene of a principality, to Prague, to reoccupy the office of the Holy Roman Empire. They would do this with an Emperor friendly to magic and alchemy, and who was the inheritor of a generation old plan - to create an alchemical reformation that had been hatched in the mind of the English alchemist and mathematician, John Dee.


The ending of the story is not a happy ending, or perhaps it is, and we can talk about that. On a superficial level, this alchemical dream, this Rosicrucian Enlightenment, ended badly because the Habsburgs back in Madrid quickly got wind of what was going on and got an army together and sent it to Prague, laid siege to Prague, and caused Elizabeth to flee to the Netherlands with her children. Frederick was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain and the alchemical dream died. This was really in some sense the beginning of the Thirty Years War. As you know - going into the Thirty Years War, Europe was a place of Popes and Kings. At the end of the Thirty Years War, it was a place ruled by parliaments and peoples and the entire medieval world was swept away. Out of the new political dispensation of the situation at the end of the Thirty Years War, especially in England, modern science took hold and was born, and these angel-dealing, horoscope casting, alchemy pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity. These people were completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present.

In the present moment, we like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins. That was what this whole alchemical revolt was about. It was about a suppressed, marginal minority of deeply pietistic original thinkers, but heterodox - non-Christian - keeping together a tradition that I think has been reborn, or rediscovered in our own time.


It’s the tradition that Nature is a great distillery of complexity: alchemical gold, novelty, and connection, whatever you want to call it. In our own time, through integrative sciences, like ecology, animal behavior and psychology, we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reductionist centuries of modern science. We’ve re-understood that the world is one thing and it’s a living thing. It’s a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.

It is this concept that the alchemists, the hermetic dreamers and the occultists of the alchemical and northern European Renaissance, were trying to strengthen, condense, distill, and make actual this sense of community. This Spiritas. Then with the rise of modern science, all of that is anathema. Rational analysis tells us that matter is simply atoms flinging themselves through space, obedient to certain mathematical laws that are invariant, and all the creativity, all the sense of connectedness that we experience as living beings, as members of a society, as human beings in contemplation of nature - all of that was denied. It reaches its ultimate culmination, just as an example, in the kind of statement such as was made by Jean-Paul Sartre - the French Existentialist, that said, “Nature is mute." Nature gives no clue, he tells you. Man is alone in the cosmos, with his complexes and his obsessions. He confers meaning. There is no a priori reality, to which ethics or intent can be attached. I reject this. I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding; the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.


All being is pregnant with language. All reality wants to include the human side of nature in its ongoing intent. The problem lies not with nature, but with ourselves. We believe that we are somehow paralyzed, disempowered, doubting, or cut from the meat of the thing.

Well, so, I’m a great believer in propaganda, obviously. My whole life is about propaganda. It is my goal to take an incident like the career of Frederick the Elector Palatine of Heidelberg and his bride and make of it a kind of exemplar, a parable. A myth if you will - the myth of the alchemical marriage, a myth that takes innocence, naiveté and belief in the power of ideas, to make a new world. Then tell that story again in film, backing it with these tremendously powerful alchemical images that Jung and others showed work inexorably on the psyche, whether you wish to be part of the process or not.


To merely gaze upon the images of alchemy is to, in a sense, enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at all - alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver. That was the charlatan’s game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people. Alchemy is the body of symbols and of literature that accreted around the effort to extract a universal medicine out of Nature for the transformation of societies and human beings – and comes to us from the times of what we call epistemological naiveté, meaning that the people then did not have the strong sense of objective and subjective reality which we inherit from science. So during those eras of epistemological naìveté - what was someone’s idea of how matter behaves, what was someone’s myth of how psyche behaves - could become entangled in a projective experience with material in a chemical vessel. The processes which we call melting, crystallization, purification, and calcination, processes now well understood through a soulless molecular model of matter, were for them, the birth of the red lion, the coming of the double-headed queen, the murder of the hermaphrodite dog, and so forth and so on.

They had these outlandish images and this outlandish vocabulary because they were trying to create powerful symbols. Powerful mnemonic hooks on which to hold the details, and there are many of them. This extremely complex worldview, were it not for people like Carl Jung, the Swedish depth psychologist, would have remained completely inexplicable to modern people.


It is not chemistry and it is not myth building per se, as we inherit from the Greeks. It is a very complicated amalgamation, a good alchemical word, of psyche and matter. The reason, I think, it is so resonant with our own times is because our generation and generations of people confined with twentieth century, have in a sense and by an oblique path, recovered that universal medicine that the alchemist’s dreamed of by going strangely enough, to some of the most aboriginal and least culturally assimilated to European and American values people in the world. Shamanism, is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone, but has found the stone!

These shamans, Jivaro, Witoto, Cubeo, notice that they have this same epistemic naiveté. It is this inability to distinguish between subjective and objective world, through the intercession of Newton and Descartes, that Frederick the Elector and the alchemists around him and the alchemists the preceded them through the centuries had. In other words, within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience as brought to us through plants - long in the possession of aboriginal people - appears to be the identical phenomenon.


The Jivaro shaman, the Cubeo shaman, does not use a glass retort with cycling sulfur and mercury inside it. The shamans of the Amazon have obtained a sufficient sophistication to explicitly understand that the vessel of alchemical transformation is the body and the head of the experient. This is the alchemical vessel! This is where you will encounter the three-headed dog, the queen dissolving in her bath, and the incestuous couple that combine Sol and Luna to produce the white essence of the panacea of the universal medicine. These are 'psycho-mental’ processes and Jung mapped this. He must have been an extraordinary person because he could approach this without psychedelics, through a very careful inspection of the dreams and the symbol-producing processes of his patients. Over decades, he produced a kind of skeletal map of the psyche. I maintain that map doesn’t fill itself in, doesn’t become a living experience, until we undergo what is rightly perceived as the alchemical process of dissolution.

Dissolution of what? Of the lumpen prima materia of the ego. This is the shit, the tar, the coal, the dark earth of Egypt, the starting material, the loam, the manure, the night soil, the lowest matter; we start with that, the ego and dissolve it through the intercession of the spirit. Spirit is a complicated concept. It’s not naive. It’s phenomenologically difficult to define. Somehow through the dissolving spirit of the plants, the plants lift the imprisoning structures of the ego and allow the ego to flow out into the world. For some people this process produces panic. "Pan”-ic, comes from the god Pan, whose screams caused people to go mad. Panic.


For other people, this process is an enormous liberation. It is an influx of material previously hidden in the unconscious, laden with symbolic meaning, and is not to be sustained in this acidic, dissolving, roiling liquid state. That’s part of the process, but it is eventually to be recombined, coagulatio, the recombining. The coagulation. It is the coming together at a higher level - usually through the process of an application analogous to heat, but psychic heat which drives off the dross of false assumptions and false attachments.

All of you who have been through high-dose psychedelic experiences know that it’s very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact, your lucky if you just get your soul and yourself through and intact. So, what we have here through the psychedelics - among certain marginal populations in the twentieth century, freaks of all sorts, in all times and in places, within the twentieth century - a kind of almost accidental rediscovery of these alchemical truths.


That’s one level. We can do self-directed psychotherapy on ourselves with psychedelic substances out of plants and we can use alchemical symbolism to guide this process, and that’s all very interesting but so what? What’s so great about it? Well - One of the most famous of all alchemical axioms is, “as above, so below”, meaning always, that in every small part of reality, there is a tiny reflection of the great over structure of reality. In the largest structures are hidden the secrets of the smallest, and vice versa. We also have rediscovered this principle in the 20th century through fractal mathematics. The psychedelics have brought us back to this alchemical mystery, shorn of any vocabulary for dealing with it, and shorn of any real living notion of the spirit. So, we have sought as far afield as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Freudianism, or there have been various efforts to cast the psychedelic experience one way or another.

The hot one now, of course, is shamanism. I relate to that because I spent a lot of time in the Amazon, with these kinds of people and with these kinds of concerns. Shamanism and alchemy are a seamless enterprise. In alchemy, the connecting figure if you’re interested in this, between the shaman and the alchemist, is the smith, the worker of metal. The shaman and the smith, in primitive cultures, are always associated as brother figures. They both work in metals.


What does all this mean for us beyond the commitment to our own sort of ordering the wunderkammer of our own private imagination? What it means is important because if you look around you, you will see the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort. The prima materia to be transformed are: the nuclear stockpiles, the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands, the populations devoid of hope, and the populations at threat of fatal and epidemic disease. There is a great deal of prima materia to be worked on at the historical level of the alchemical process. Trying to manage this rationally with some political ‘ism’; fascism, Marxism, capitalism, goes nowhere. It just digs us deeper into the mire and the muck.

At the fringes, people like you, people like myself, people I associate with, offer endless solutions. We offer recycling, restraint in child bearing, and increased sexual toleration of unusual sexual styles. Many, many things are suggested but nothing happens because the primary agenda of society has not yet been dissolved. It has not yet come into a state of fluidity sufficient where a new imprint can be put upon in.


In the 1960s, we thought that all that had to happen was - everybody would take LSD and the obvious right things to do would be done. We expected no opposition to this because it’s rightness was so obvious. We didn’t realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into the waiting jaws of its oppressors. But the spirit doesn’t die. It’s interesting but in America, we refer to, and have always referred to freaks as Bohemians. I assumed, you always hear about the left bank Bohemia of Paris in the 1920s - but why Bohemia? What does Bohemia have to do with Paris? Why are freaks called Bohemians? It’s because of Frederick the Elector and the alchemical renaissance that he plotted with his wife. Since that time to now, ‘Bohemian’ has meant a marginal political position involved with bizarre sexual practices, strange drug use and ‘funny’ ideas.

In the 1960s, LSD was not sufficient even coupled with rock & roll. It only brought oppression. It was like a failed alchemy. Instead of the dissolving and recrystalizing at a higher and more angelic level, thousands of prisons were built and the entire thing failed. But this spirit is the spirit, the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself, and it will not be suppressed for long in any time or place. So now again it comes.

After thirty years and after many changes, it’s among us again. I assume, looking at all of you, that to some degree you represent this or act it out, because it’s a spirit of dissent that says we will not serve the values of materialism. We will not serve the values of the ego and the values that separate and breakdown the community.


So here it is again. What is different this time that we might have some greater hope of actually coming through to the beginning of the third millennium without having to hang our heads when we tell the story to our grandchildren? I will submit to you this evening that the difference between then – 1965 through 1970 – and now to the turn of the century, is the following. We have that experience under our belt. We shall not be so stupid again. The I Ching says, “Never confront evil directly and never name it directly because it finds weapons to defend itself.”

We are not an army; this is what Frederick didn’t understand. He was a king, but he was not an army when it came to the White Mountain. We are not an army, so our strategy must be stealth. It’s an alchemical strategy. What do I mean by stealth? I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, and by vision. What is new? There are massive technologies available to us, not available in the 1960s. They were not designed for us, they were not intended for us, and it was never ever thought that such power should flow into the hands of freaks such as ourselves. Nevertheless, through the perverse nature of the unfolding of the world, we have such tools. I’m referring, as you probably anticipate to the World Wide Web and the Internet.


No gay kind in Montana, no Chinese scholar in Botswana, and no person anywhere with a specialized interest or predilection now need feel alone. There is no aloneness. You can find your people. One of the things Tim Leary said in the 1960s that I always remembered but I never heard anybody talk about or ever really heard him quote. It was a great rallying cry. It was much better than Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out; and it was this: “find the others.” “Find the others, and then you will know what to do.” Well now you can find the others. You don’t have to stick a flower in your hair and go to San Francisco. You just go to the web.


Find the others! We all need to create affinity groups which are subsets of the much larger community that we’re part of. Then using this technology, which was designed to keep track of us, to pick our pockets and to sell us junk we don’t want, use this technology to produce art. We must produce massive amounts of subversive art, and all art is subversive. I’m not calling for an ideological agenda. All truth which springs from the individual is subversive, because, and this is a theme of mine that I’m getting more and more into the longer I live – Culture is not your friend. This is an odd message for the late 1990s because we’re all being told, you knew you were Jewish but your forgot you Sicilian grandmother – you have to honor all of your family. Romanian bring it forward, the dances of this that and the other. I hate all of this stuff. I’m Irish. It’s a weird thing to be. It’s a haunted, twisted people, as a people. All peoples, meaning tribes, have horrible stories to tell about who they did under and who they screwed over. When you’re asked to identify with your culture, you’re asked to take this on. I reject it.


My brother years ago invented this term. He called it extra-environmental. He said, this is what we want to be. We don’t want to be Americans, or Germans, or English – we want to be extra-environmentalists. Always feel wherever you go that you are a stranger, the outsider, and the one looking in. This is the viewpoint that makes all places the same to you. There’s a wonderful English poet and writer, Rudyard Kipling, and he wrote a children’s short story called The Cat Who Walked By Himself. It’s a story of how the dog came to the cave of man and would lay at the man’s feet, but the cat would never come. When the woman asked the cat why it would never come, it said, “I am the cat who walks by himself and all places are alike to me.”

I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don’t think that we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium. How do you shed your culture? How do you transcend your culture? By digging into your soul with the tools that have been given to you to make art. This is how cultures are transformed. By art, which flows up and actually submerges the previous cultural forms. The Baroque gave way to later periods simply out of exhaustion, but notice, a style can exhaust itself and still continue. Mannerism did this out of the renaissance, for example. When these exhaustive styles are allowed to continue, they become toxic, they become moribund. It’s like keeping a corpse around the house. There is an obligation to overthrow that. We are to produce the new, to produce the novel, and by the novel, I don’t mean the literary form, I mean all things new.


It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual should pour this forth. This is what you are: you are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. In that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, what is it? In that moment, art can be created. It is the only form of immortality that I have any certainty of and it’s available to everyone.

At the present moment – I make no distinction between art and ‘techne.’ To my mind, these things are the same thing. A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing; it’s changed before but not for a long time in our lives. Not since before our lives, but now its changing, and there are many, many possibilities. The English biologist, Dawkins, invented the word meme. Do you all know what a meme is? It’s the smallest unit of an idea. It’s like what a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology. Our task is to create memes. Madonna is a meme, Catholicism is a meme, Marxism is a meme, and yellow sweaters are a meme. Create memes! Rainbow colored dreadlocks are a meme.


Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate, just like genes replicate. See if your meme can infect and move into the organism of society, and believing as I do that society operates on a kind of biological economy, I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. However, unless the memes are released to play the game, there can be no progress. So I think the obligation on people such as ourselves, and I assume probably without exception, everybody in this room falls into the upper 5% of the Earths population in terms of wealth, education and freedom. Even if your some poor pierced metal-head from the dark side of Manheim, you have a better situation than most people on this planet. You have a better chance at actually reaching out toward the machinery that shapes reality and having an impact.

So then the question becomes for some: “but I have nothing to say, or I have nothing to paint, or I have nothing to communicate.” Clearly your not taking enough drugs then – those excuses simply will not be tolerated. If someone finds that decadent, flippant or destructive - then they don’t understand what these psychedelic substances are. They open the doorway to creativity. They cleanse the doors of perception, then as Blake said, “reality is perceived as it truly is, as infinite.”


Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence, with ourselves, is that we consume images. We don’t produce them. We need to produce and not consume media. Media is a huge issue. You can’t escape it, so what are you going to do about it? The only solution is to drive it, to take charge, or otherwise you will be poisoned by it. As more and more people are waking up to this – essentially we are seeing I think, a huge artistic revolution. A revolution in values that reaches into science, into politics, and into every aspect of life, but that is coming from the imagination thoroughly stimulated and activated by the discovery of all these natural and synthetic substances that perturb the mind. I’m also not denying that a certain amount of social chaos goes along with this. On the other hand, I can point to pretty psychedelically pure centuries, like the 13th in Europe, and there was still plenty of social chaos going on. I don’t think that you can lay social chaos at the feet of psychedelics. I think that social chaos is an inimical part of the system. What psychedelics do is give a direction to that chaos. They give a dimension of vertical ascent, because inevitably, out of the psychedelic situation emerges, not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism. That’s the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process. How well that idealistic idea then brokers its way to the throne, if it does, is another issue.


I don’t know if I’ve hit this technological thing hard enough. I hope that you all avail yourselves of the power of the Internet. In years past, in speaking to audiences in America, it was maddening to me to find that the environmentalists, the feminists, the gays, the psychedelic people, the space people, and the colonization people – none of these people had anything to say to each other. They didn’t seem to realize that their marginality united them far more than any difference they might perceive in their positions. They didn’t seem to realize that their political disempowerment was a product of their inability to make common cause with people similarly motivated, or similarly motivated toward social change. It’s very important to build an inclusive community and a community that has a sense of direction and I think the Internet empowers this far more than any other tool that has been handed to us, except psychedelics. If you take psychedelics, the Internet, music and put all of that together – you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code – they are all freaks. They work for capitalist dogs of course, because we all do but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me. I think this is all tremendously positive.

Finally, I’ll close on this. The alchemical return.


Finally, I’ll close on this. The alchemical return.

All culture is some kind of myth. All cultural stories then have a kind of psychic dynamic to them, which is not suspected by the civilization as it lives these myths. It has to been seen from outside. There is a consistent myth in Western civilization. In the early Jews, you get it as the idea that God will enter history. With Christianity, you get it with the idea that Man and God can be consubstantial. It appears again in Islam with the insistence that God will enter history. Modern science, strangely enough, dumps all of this theology but maintains the idea that Man can become as a God. In other words, the myth that is consistent throughout the entire Western experience is the myth of some kind of defining progressive experience.

Well now we have the power to realize this myth in some kind of, for want of a better word, an alchemical utopia. I think its very interesting that at this very high tech moment in our adventure, the plants return; the humblest of all biology. The plants return and almost stand before us as a beacon and a promise. Have you noticed that plants do all their business with dirt and air? This is something we only wish we could do. Build an industrial society based on nothing more than the ambient dirt and the air flowing past; building sugars and carbohydrates out of gaseous oxygen. This is quite a trick. The plants stand, both in the psychedelic sense but then in the larger sense of the vegetable kingdom, for absolute Tao. They stand for the correct way for life to relate to its environment. They are effortlessly recycling, vegetatively propagating when necessary, sexually propagating when necessary, immune to pain, patient to the tune of centuries. They are always building up structure and always maintaining a leavening effect upon the land.


All of these qualities of care giving and, notice for example, that all the processes of biology occur below the boiling point of water. If only we could build societies that did that. We work in the range of hundreds of degrees, thousands of degrees; fusing metals and creating toxicity. So I think the psychedelic plant revolution is leading towards the nano-technological revolution. This is, in other words, the imitating of nature at the atomic level in the building of machines and the management of processes. What all of this is leading toward is a rarefaction, good alchemical word, a rarefaction of the human imprint on this planet. This means a spiritualization of humanity and a new order of mind; part machine and part human.

Notice that the Internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They’re largely metals: silicon, glass, copper, gold, and silver – these are the products of demonic artifice. These are the things that the alchemist dreamed of. They transform space and time, they allow us to speak at a distance, and they allow us to wander through libraries thousands of miles distant. They make it so that no fact is too obscure and no person so hidden that you can’t reach them. It is, in a way, the perfection of the magical ideal that was developed and unfortunately, prematurely launched by Frederick the Elector and his wife here nearby at Heidelburg.


So I’m involved, as I’ve said, in a process of bringing this story to many people who haven’t heard it. It’s a great story, it’s a great myth that the underground community should make it’s own. I used it evening just as the scaffold for this talk but I tried to hit the things that are important to me; which are: psychedelics, recovery of archaic lifestyles, use of media to subvert existing paradigms, empowerment of the individual through dissolving the ego through psychedelics, and whatever else! Thank you for your patience and indulgence!

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John Balance Interviews Terence McKenna

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1996

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I Ching, Habit & Novelty

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October 1997

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Radio Host: Ok. 471-6291 is the pledge number...oh, you wanna hear him say that...okay, okay. Alright. Turn it up....."There's no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact it's all dark" is what he said. Okay, that was Pink Floyd. Now, here we are at 471-6291 with time running out. We have an hour left to get you to call in and make your contribution to public radio and Eclecticos. My show is ending in an hour, folks. If you are a regular listener and have not become a member, boy just don't let me find out. 471-6291. When I see you at the grocery store and I see your eyes avert quickly. Once you do see me, I'll know, I'll know you're one who didn't give up. 471-6291 is the pledge number get that call in right now. I want to hear from you.

Advertisement: Local support for this broadcast of Eclecticos is provided in part by Waterloo Records & Video, where music still matters, at the corner of 6th St. and Lamar Blvd.


Radio Host: Again, our last minute pledge number is 471-6291. We can, uh, put your name on our list very easily. Just make that call: 471-6291. Thanks to these people who did call in: Peter Bain, in loving respect for his sister Kate Brooks in Dripping Springs, Bran Nelson responding to the challenge for artists who make a living from their work, Cindy and Jim Philips, challenging everyone who enjoys John's laugh [laughs], Mary Vitzler, Bill Williams, a new member, Jack and Shasan Odom, Foxes of Harrow, okay, they, I guess they read Foxes of Harrow, Jack and Shasan Odom. Have either of you ever read the Foxes of Harrow? No? It's great, you? It's great, good. Anyway Carol & Philip Stephens, Donna Fowler, C. L. Senec saw the Rocky Horror Show 52 times; you're sick. And, uh, he was a projectionist; okay, that was his excuse. I've seen it probably about 25, but, Treece Carter, a new member, Laura Kathy challenges people who can touch their nose with their tongues; I cannot do that. But, if you can, call 471-6291 and meet Laura's challenge, Laura Kathy, if you can touch your tongue, er, touch your nose with your tongue. 471-6291. Sam Ferris, his mom Virginia pledged for him, and Bobby and Lewis Lowe, new members. Just about out of time today. 471-6291 is our pledge number. Thanks you for calling.


And, as I welcome Terence McKenna, let me first say that I have been asked to mention that there is a film called Strange Attractor, which features Terence McKenna, and it will be shown at the Adobe Theatre on October the 18th at midnight and the 19th at 2 O' Clock [indecipherable]. Alright, I'm gonna take The Umbrellas of Cherbourg away, as much as I love that music that's been on in the background, and we will say, just barely 'good morning' at 11:56, to Terence McKenna. Terence, hello.

Terence McKenna: Pleasure to be with you.

RH: And, you are here for the Whole Life Expo?

Advertisement: Local support for this broadcast of Eclecticos is provided in part by Waterloo Records & Video, where music still matters, at the corner of 6th St. and Lamar Blvd.

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Light of the Third Millenium

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Light of the Third MIllenium

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New Views of the Time Wave

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11 August 1997

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Relationships, career, drugs & our times

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8 August 1997

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Terence McKenna on Art Bell

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22 May 1997

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Surfing the Fractal Wave at the End of History

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23 April 1997

The Lighthouse, New York New York

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Brisbane Talk

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26 February 1997

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Live at The Zoo with DJ Zippy

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26 February 1997

The Zoo, Brisbane, Australia

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[music]

[audience cheering and clapping]

[music]

Terence McKenna: Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello, hello?

[audience cheering]

TM: Wonderful. Well it's a it's a pleasure to be stoned with you in Brisbane this evening.

[audience cheering]


TM: [Terence laughs] It looks to me like the tribes have turned out in all their splendid variety. So I'm here this evening to talk to you in three brief rants with Zippy's wonderful art before, in-between and after. We have commercial opportunities for you back at the pinball machine. Uh, we've, uh, hopefully provided all that we can. I'm I'm sure someone in this room has what you need. And, uh, I'll be gone on the next flight tomorrow. So the important thing I think is to look around you. This is the psychedelic community in which you find yourself. This is your affinity group. This is your cadre and not only is there someone here tonight who has what you need, there's probably someone here tonight who needs something that you have. It's no news that a worldwide movement of trance, dance, consciousness, psychedelics and archaic revivalism is taking place. And my place in all this, I suppose, is to humbly offer one version only


suppose, is to humbly offer one version only of why this is happening and why it's happening now and what it might mean for the future. This is the old style of doing things. This is how religion was practiced for the first three million years before it fell into the hands of politicians and real estate speculators. Religion is not about dogma. It's even less about laundry lists of moral do's and don'ts. Religion is about feeling and community. Feeling and community. And in the course of western history we have wandered a long long way from these things. So far in our own past is authentic shamanism, authentic community, authentic human relating, that it comes as an unconfirmed rumor. But in the last hundred years the curiosity of anthropologists, botanists, ethnographers, neurophysiologists, linguists has let the cat out of the bag. And the cat that is out of the bag is that reality is simply a state of mind. Reality is a place where


a state of mind. Reality is a place where cultures pitch their can and then defend it against all others. In the same way that we've had to learn that our sexuality doesn't come in two flavors, we have to also face that there's more to consciousness than awake and asleep. And in fact in every ecosystem, in every culture, in every part of the world from the Arctic to the Equator, there are chemically complex and shamanic plants that can be brought together to open doorways into domains of experience that are not only unsanctioned by the straight establishment, but unimagined by the straight establishment. I mean this is what lies outside of history. This is what the dreamtime is. This is what the magical world of suspended belief of South American shamanism is all about and the point that we have come to with all of this is not to talk about it or to s- long[sp?] for it, but to take the materials of our own environment and our own courage and our


of our own environment and our own courage and our own dissatisfaction with the world as we find it and remake it. Remake it through technology, through trance culture, through underground culture, through media, computer graphics, the Internet. Uh, these are all tools of transformation completely beyond the understanding or the control of the establishment. Because they have dressed the part of the mind that the establishment is completely phobic of. The wild feral untamed pre-bourgeois, pre-constipation, pre-religion, pre-money, pre-consumerist human being. The real human being that each of us senses within ourselves and that we endlessly compromise for in our dealings with, uh, straight society. The truth of the matter is there are no answers now, except technological and shamanic and psychedelic answers. Politics has failed. Business as usual failed. Science failed. Religion failed. This is why youth culture is not interested in graduating to suits and houses in the suburbs. The bankruptcy of that whole lifestyle is now evident. Why


of that whole lifestyle is now evident. Why now? I believe it's because psychedelics dissolve cultural assumptions. They are social and political dynamite. They are, uh, the equivalent of standing naked in a world of, uh, illusion, delusion, pretension, assumption and misunderstanding. All societies are frightened, all advanced, literate, industrial societies are frightened of the psychedelic experience. Because it represents a, uh, a cult of direct feeling. You don't have to believe anything to be part of this. You have to have certain experiences. Boundary dissolving experiences that, uh, teach you that the surface of things is only the beginning, not the end. That the surface is where we begin. But then we sink in, deeper and deeper, like a solvent, penetrating, dividing, washing clean, clarifying reality. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. The human mind is the source of all the riches after which we are told we should seek.


riches after which we are told we should seek. The houses, the boats, the furs, the cars, the jewels, the degrees, the social esteem. All of this is false currency compared to the authenticity of your own experience and the art that you experience coming out of your own psyche and that you can then give back to the community, to the community. Zippy? Take it away, dude[sp?].


[audience claps]

[music]


TM: Part two. Part two is what I've learned or think I've learned from psychedelics. And I offer myself as an example, because it's as important to tell your trip as to have it. Because until you tell it it's not food for the community. So, uh, my far too many years of taking psychedelics have taught me some things. And some of these things are this. First of all, very practical, nature loves courage. Nature loves courage. And the way you can tell that nature loves courage is she removes obstacles. So chance taking in the interests of knowledge is rewarded. All kinds of people may think they've had the psychedelic experience, but if it hasn't set your knees knocking and your heart racing you probably just shaved the fuzzy undertummy of the beast and never really wrestled with it. So a very practical lesson, nature loves courage. But a shaman, my definition of a shaman, is someone who understands how the world really


shaman, is someone who understands how the world really works. How does the world really work? What is it and what are we in it? The where is it from? Where is it going? Science tells you that nature is red in tooth and claw, all competition strife and random mutation, but in fact there is a hidden appetite in nature that science has overlooked, that we have not been told of. It is that nature prefers complexity. Given the choice between the simple and the complex, nature always prefers the complex. And as you move from the beginnings of time to the present, what is consistent is the increase in complexity. Millions and millions of years may go by during a period when there is a backward flowing tendency, resisting complexity. But if you look at enough time the tendency to complexification will always reassert itself. So out of a universe of gas and dust comes a universe of stars and planets. Out of a universe of inorganic life, inorganic organization comes


a universe of inorganic life, inorganic organization comes the carbon based world of organic life. At the very center of the complexification process of organic life intelligence appears some hundred thousand or million years ago. The process of intelligence existing and iterating itself through time, elaborating languages and technologies, spreading itself over the planet results in more complexity, greater complexity. So that ultimately from a psychedelic point of view the human world is seen not as an accident or an unlikelihood or some enormous privilege for which we must genuflect to an invisible god. But rather the human world is seen as inevitably the goal of all the processes that preceded it. Which doesn't mean that we are the end of the story. But it means that we are the heroes of the story now, now. And upon our shoulders rests the conscious obligation, because we are conscious to take the complexity, the novelty, the kinky, odd, heterogeneous reality that we find and further complexify it, further complicate


we find and further complexify it, further complicate it through the process of making art, forming relationships, realizing our plans, building our dreams. We are the creature that carries a sensory organ unknown to occur anywhere else in nature. We are the creatures who possess the hyperdimensional organ of perception called the imagination, the imagining mind. Perhaps a a carnivore in the act of hunting its prey briefly forms a strategy to carry out the kill, but human beings strategize over months, over years, over millennia. We launch plans and religion, scientific revolutions, styles of music, architecture, fashion. We fashion our world. We don't accept the world as given. Between ourselves and the selective processes of nature we have interposed the shifting domain of virtual reality that we call human culture and human civilization. Uh, a collective compromise that sometimes works to our advantage and sometimes works to our disadvantage. As a tribe we function as a group mind, as a mass society we are


a group mind, as a mass society we are the victims of advertising agencies and politicians. The nature of our relationship to our collective existence is constantly changing and not yet defined. This is the important thing about the human adventure. We are not locked in genetic[sp?] repetition of behaviors over millennia. We are co-creators of our own destiny with the forces of nature. And we can deny that nature and retreat into cities, industrialism, reductionism, materialism, positivism, relativism, all the shitbrained isms of post-renaissance pre-apocalypse illusionism, or we can admit that we are unfinished business. That at the center of our experience of ourselves and the world is a sense of mystery. A sense of being uncompleted. This is the this is the perception which sophisticated cultures rob their members of. The sense that their is a hidden way out, a trapdoor, a deus ex machina, a magic word, a ritual, a conjuration, a drug, a form of music, a sexual


a drug, a form of music, a sexual act, a posture in relationship to art, something that cracks apart the rigid rule defined reality of the group and shows you that beyond culture, which is a fairytale told for fools, is the uncharted, unmapped, unintegrated, unspeakable. Wittgenstein actually called it the unspeakable. He said the word of common understanding is the present at hand. You can touch it, but beyond the present at hand lies the unspeakable. The challenge for the psychedelic community as the great hope of the human community is to move that boundary of what is unspeakable far away from us. To claim evermore domains as human domains. Potential areas for the production of art, the erection of, uh, relationships, the establishment of formal systems of understanding, mathematical, scientific, uh, mythological, psychological, whatever. Uh, the, uh, and this enterprise, this extension of understanding should not be though of as a quest for ultimate knowledge, rather it should be thought of as