this is the proof that were reaching beyond the confines of the human personality and even beyond the human species. That this information – don’t ask me how – is somehow holographically deployed throughout space and you tune in and it’s a – so I care about vision and if a drug doesn’t cause vision I can’t resist to put it lower on my list. I smoke a lot of cannabis – and I think – that’s why I do lot of cannabis – I can think on it. And I think several hours a day when I’m able to, but the visual thing is for me to be in the presence of the mystery, is to be in the presence of the hallucination. To me the word hallucination has no connotation of illusion. It comes from a Greek root and what it means is ‘to wander in the mind’. That’s what hallucination is, it’s a wandering in the mind. Yeah... [Inaudible Question] No, I took all kinds of doses. The question


I took all kinds of doses. The question is, What dose of LSD did I take. I should be clear what I mean. I mean, yes on LSD. Even with eyes open the little thinks that look like open fans that are going like ‘nikniknik, nikniknik’ on wallpaper, but I – LSD never gave me these architectural – if it is what’s meaning I couldn’t dis…[Inaudible] … the LSD hallucination looked to me like being in the [Inaudible] non in the [Inaudible]. They were more like ripples and centric circles, flashes of light. So what you see on psilocybin are cities, faces, houses, machines, the stuff of cognitive processes at its most expressive. Okay, yeah… [Question: Is it theoretically possible to develop your process to go to the point that you can go there without the drug?] I grant the possibility but in my heartest heart I don’t think so. The question is, ‘Can you get there on the natch?’ I


‘Can you get there on the natch?’ I get lots of resistance because I’m willing to say just flat out, ‘No, no.’ And, you know, people are shocked. That’s no good and flagellation, being touched by poverty and whatever. I don’t know, I tried it all. And the other thing is what I’m talking about you couldn’t want that happen on the natch. These are states of serious discombobulation. These are not mood shifts or attitudes we’re talking about. I mean, if I woke up and I could do it on the natch my first phone call would be to my friend Ralph Metzner who’s a shrink, and I said, ‘Ralph, uhm, I’ve got problems here.’ This is [Inaudible] and again I’m a [Inaudible]. I don’t know even who’s here or who I’m insulting. But let me unburden myself on this stuff. Van Morrison put it very, very well, ‘No guru, no master, no teacher, just you and


guru, no master, no teacher, just you and me, and mother nature, in the darkness, in the darken vested range.’ I think all religion is con-games, I think that all esoterica is a con-game, I think that revealed secrets are self-protecting and that seeking is the way to find. And take yourself serious. You are the vessel, the stage and the theater of your transformation. The mushroom is very explicit on that point to me. Once, it said, I quote, ‘One human being that is seeking enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another grain of sand.’ And my interpretation of that is that we’re all as good as the best among us. There is no hierarchy among human beings, you know, if you’ve got the chromosomes you’re into the game. And the test then is to accentuate primary experience, the here and now. Teaching Fujang from far away, unsubstantiated rumors that circulate among the


away, unsubstantiated rumors that circulate among the people. Magicians have always worked the marketplace. It’s older than Ur. But this [Inaudible] mystery is absolutely authentic and having once found it I stopped searching for other authentic mysteries. So I don’t know what lies behind the deeper levels of the Kalichakra Tantra, I don’t know what lies behind the [Inaudible] prints of Hawaiian Kahuna, but I do know that his one thing fulfills the bill. It’s real and you only need one doorway to enter into the palace of the [Inaudible]. So why obsess about numbering doorways? That’s a [Inaudible]. Yeah… [Inaudible Question] I have actually never combined DMT and psilocybin. I have smoked DMT at the top of an LSD trip. That’s a young man’s game, believe me. If you’re interested in that hurry up, it’s like [Inaudible] the matter for it. What happened to me, well I did it several times but I’ll


me, well I did it several times but I’ll tell you a story that’s for your edification maybe, but amusement perhaps. I once [Inaudible] was a landlord in Berkley many years ago. And, uh …, that’s sufficient. And everybody left one easter vacation or thanksgiving vacation, so I decided I would do this acid trip, I did plan to smoke DMT at the top of the trip, and so I did and I did and I had this very long involved DMT trip with the elves and all of this was totally out of control. And at the very height of this thing this woman who I rented to upstairs who I thought had gone home to Minneapolis came back and arrived by cab and came pounding up the stairs with these two suitcases [Inaudible] stomp into the house and ran around to my bedroom door and beat on the door. And, you know, you don’t know me that well, but if I’m 500 miles up a jungle river smoking a joint


500 miles up a jungle river smoking a joint and a stick cracks 50 feet away the first thing I do is hide the joint – I’m a very paranoid person – being, you know, on 500 mics of acid smoking DMT and suddenly having this woman and I, I literally, I kept my some kind of a [Inaudible], and I leaped off my bed and I landed on my feet and, you know, if you want you may try this, something about this enormous flash of adrenalin added into the DMT added in to this sudden incredible physical exertion it was as though I ripped the membrane, I ripped the membrane, and I was now standing in my room, but I have dragged this trip through with me and the room was full of elves, ricocheting off the [Inaudible] and I had them, they were hanging on me like weasels [Inaudible] turning me around in the room. And also simultaneously one of these machines had been dragged


simultaneously one of these machines had been dragged through into my bedroom at the same time and this is like about the size, well, like this, and it had all kinds of this faceted, and opalescent, and glassy, and strange, but what was important about it had a kind of a faceted [Inaudible] on it that was clicking [Inaudible] and every time it would click, it would launch a small plastic chip across the room that had an alien letter written on it. And these little plastic chips were ricocheting off the wall and piling up, and I was standing appalled, appalled looking at this situation, and then, Rosemary, what the hell is [Inaudible] I stagger over to the door which was a sliding wooden door and I just threw it open and I looked at her and said, [language disassociated from meaning]. ‘Oh so you’re doing that, all right.’ she said and backed up and then I would slam the door back and I pushed my


would slam the door back and I pushed my way across the room and I crawled under the bed. And I closed my eyes and I said, ‘I’m gonna stay here ’til I’m dead or it’s over. And I did. But it was, it was, uh…, I mean, what the fuck, you know, you are supposed to learn something [Inaudible] It’s ridiculous. [Inaudible question] Well, this thing that I have done several times this afternoon in various [Inaudible], language thing, that’s glossolalia, called speaking in tongues, but the good news is the fundies don’t have any kind of monopoly on this. Speaking in tongues is as old as human beings, it’s shamanic, it’s paleolithic, it’s done all over the world. And I think that, well, psilocybin will induce this spontaneously. And I think, to add to my little scenario yesterday about hunting, fucking, tripping, which – I would also add in there – ‘and talking.’


I would also add in there – ‘and talking.’ Now, probably long before the invention of what we call meaning people amused each other with funny noises. And people would say, ‘What’s that? Somebody else?’ So, being physiologically set up for a production of small mouth noises, notice that language is a very primitive form of telepathy. Because here is how it works: I have an idea. I look in my dictionary, I translate the idea into what we call ‘English’. I then move my lips, throat muscles and aspirate in a certain way and I send an acoustical pressure wave across space, which enters into the holes on the side of your head. Your brain reconstructs this acoustical wave and tries to match the incoming pattern against an interior dictionary which has been learned. Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are congruent, lo and behold, you can reconstruct my thought in your mind. Now if this thought is something fairly straight forward like ‘Please shut the door’ ambiguity


straight forward like ‘Please shut the door’ ambiguity doesn’t enter. But notice that one of the most uncool things we can do with each other is to say to somebody ‘Would you mind explain me what it was that you just said?’, you know, or, ‘Would you mind explaining me what it was that I just said?’ And then he say: ‘Oh shit, now the cover is blown, you know, I am of the faintest [Inaudible] that you can meet. So, language, spoken language, small mouth noises, is a very inefficient way of communicating. This is why I think that the visual initiation in the DMT is they cough up language. This is not the first initiation from the elves. The first initiation occurred 100,000 years ago. The second initiation is occurring now. First they gave us language. Now they’re going to show us how to make that language visible. And you see, if you and I both read the same piece of thin page of a book we can then


piece of thin page of a book we can then have an enormous argument about what’s written there. But if you and I both step into a place where a piece of sculpture is being visited we may argue about what the piece of sculpture meaning is but we agree what it is. We see it. We see it. And when we can [Inaudible] with each other and understand each other we instinctively reach for visual metaphors. ‘I see what you mean.’ ‘What’s here fella?’ ‘She painted a picture’ ‘His words were so beautiful’. It means that we really associate meaning with seeing something. And I believe that we’re on the brink of a transformation of how we communicate with each other. And I don’t know whether we are gonna require a prosthesis that is electronic or something like that or whether we can invent drugs? This will allow us that the cerebral cortex will switch it’s linguistic analysis from the audio channel to the visual channel. It’s very suggestive that these


to the visual channel. It’s very suggestive that these tryptamines are in different parts of the brain. And I think that we are on the brink of transforming our abilities to [Inaudible]. [Inaudible Question] What was said was that using LSD and having used DMT one can begin to trip into, you know, if you like dimensions on LSD. This certainly seems reasonable to me. I haven’t have had that specific experience. But there is something you can do with psilocybin. Here’s another technique if you don’t like what’s happening on a mushroom trip. Just say to it, ‘Be MDMA’, and it will. No problem. You can say to it, ‘Be LSD’. And it will. It has no problem. I didn’t try that. You wanna be sure before you summon the genies. Let me say one more thing about this language thing. Because I think nature is always our model. No matter how deep into technology we go nature will provide nontoxic models. Well it just so


nature will provide nontoxic models. Well it just so happens that in this area of communication nature has provided a wonderful nontoxic model. And that is the way in which squids and octopi communicate. Squids and octopi as you know from watching far too much TV can change color. May think that this is camouflage. It’s not camouflage. Octopi change color in order to communicate. Octopi don’t generate language. They are language. Think of an octopus, it’s soft body. It folds and unfolds itself like a dancer and exposes various parts of its body very rapidly. It also can make your body tissue smooth and [inaudible] or rugose and rough and it can undergo all these color changes. Blotches, stripes, spreading pastels, so forth and so on. These behaviors of the octopus are under the genetic control of of its linguistic intentionality. It doesn’t make words it becomes words. And when one octopus encounters an other by the mere act of beholding each


an other by the mere act of beholding each other they say ‘Aha! You haven’t eaten recently. You’re having too much sex. You’ve been traveling. And so forth and so on. The octopus becomes its thought. It wears language on its surface the way we wear our clothing. And this system of communication is so important to the octopus that those species that are devolved into the very deep part of the ocean – so called abyssal octopi – where no light ever reaches have evolved phosphorescent organs all over bodies and eyelids like membranes? all over their bodies so that in the absolute darkness of the abyssal ocean they communicate by flashing grammar and syntax to each other across the abyssal depth. They are free in the imagination. And this is where I think we are headed. We’re going to make that model of communication our model. Psychedelics, technology, and visionary magic, will show how this can be done. [Inaudible Question] No you’re right. The


done. [Inaudible Question] No you’re right. The human faith is like this. That’s right. You see, no other higher animal has faith. A faith is like a little piece of squid skin that we’re wearing where we can transmit all of these – one time I was in India and I was cornered and this guy - I was loaded actually on mescaline – and this guy swam aboard my houseboat. And normally I would just run these guys off. [End of tape]


Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Packing for the Long Strange Trip

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Youtube

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

19 July 1994

Starwood Festival XIV, Association for Conciousness Exploration, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

End of Results

No transcript available for this talk!

Help Transcribe

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Conversations on the Edge of Magic

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

19-24 July 1994

Brushwood Folklore Center, Sherman, NY @ Starwood Festival XIV

7501

End of Results

No youtube link available, try the following:


7501

End of Results

No youtube link available, try the following:

What I’ll do today is I assume most of you are not familiar with my work, but I also assume you’re intelligent, so I’m not going to give an introductory talk. I’ll just cut to the chase and if you don’t understand what’s said, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing nobody talked down to you, right? [audience laughter] Okay, it’s very hard to know where exactly to slice into this pie. I mean, I am an advocate of the psychedelic experience for [audience applause] [Terence chuckles]… for personal growth work, for shamanic exploration, as an enzyme for the imagination, as a force that forces us to grow up and, uh, clean up. However, what I want to talk to you today about because this is a pagan community, and because I think the argument, if it’s not understood here won’t be understood anywhere, is, I want to talk about the social impact of psychedelic plants on human consciousness both in the present and in the remote past. Because my approach to psychedelics is not to see it as a religious freedom issue, or a personal self-exploration issue, uh, that’s all there, but I believe we cannot really understand what it is to be human being and how we came to be human beings without factoring in to our explanations this most taboo of all subjects for the Western dominator mind, the subject of boundary dissolving, consciousness expanding plants. And so every point of view has a cosmology, a myth of its meaning. And as quickly as I can I want to tell you the myth that to my mind unites paganism, psilocybin, sexual freedom, the peril to the earth, and the hope for the future, all into one very nice, neat package. And it requires a, a kind of an anthropology lesson.


First of all our fellow voyagers along the way – the scientists – have created, as you all know, the theory of evolution, which has been incr- the great crowning achievement of biology over the past hundred years. First the Darwinian understanding of natural selection and random mutation, then Mendelian genetics, the discovery of the particulate nature of the gene, then, uh, still later molecular genetics, the elucidation of DNA so forth and so on. The theory of evolution has been very successful in explaining the state of nature on this planet with one tremendously embarrassing exception which is ourselves. Biological evolution cannot account for a phenomenon like minded human beings involved in building and maintenance of global electronically-sustained societies. How do we do it? Well, we do it because we have a vastly superior cerebral architecture to any other organism in nature. And the interesting thing about that architecture is that it sprang into being in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking. The human brain size doubled in less than two million years. This is the most dramatic expansion in the size of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. It would be under any circumstances an embarrassment to the theory of evolution, but notice that the theory of evolution was generated by the very organ we’re discussing. So it is doubly embarrassing.

Now, obviously we are the inheritors of extraordinary circumstances. Higher animals have existed on this planet for 200 million years in all kinds of forms. Uh, reptilian life, amphibian life, avian life mammalian life, and never, so far as the geological history of the planet can tell us, never did machine-building, language-using, technology-producing societies arrive. Some extraordinary interaction in our early history is responsible for our circumstance as language-using, technology-producing creatures.


Okay, end of introduction. Here’s the scenario, and I hope it has special resonance for this community. All animal species tend to evolve into a- an ecological niche and stabilize themselves there. Ants and termites have been at equilibrium for hundreds of millions of years. Our remote ancestors also were on a direct course toward that kind of dynamic equilibrium. Uh, we were evolving toward being fruit eating, canopy living, insectivorous, uh, primates with an advanced repertoire of pack signals and this was apparently to be our evolutionary destiny. Were it not for the fact that sometime in the last five million years or so the African continent, which was the site of our environmental proto-system, began to dry up. And the forests that had always been our arboreal home began to shrink. And what this spelled for our remote protohominid ancestors was nutritional pressure. There wasn’t enough food. Our remote ancestors began descending from the canopy and exploring the new environment that the aridity was bringing into existence. A grassland environment, an environment of limited numbers of plant and animal species relative to the climax tropical rain forests that were in retreat.


Now, the reason animals specialize their food supply is to avoid contact with mutagens in the environment. If you begin experimenting with foods and begin eating everything, uh, you will produce more children with mutations. Some of these mutations will be positive, most will be lethal. Uh, when our remote ancestors came under nutritional pressure they began expanding their diet. This was the moment when we became, uh, partially carnivorous, when we became omnivores. And had I more time, I would lay out many examples of specific plants – such as plants that contain birth control alkaloids and things like that – specific plants that would have impacted, uh, early human emergence. But I want to concentrate here on one plant. And that is the psilocybin containing mushrooms that grow in the dung of cattle. Because I think that if we are looking for a missing link it isn’t a transitional skeleton, it isn’t meddling by extraterrestrials, uh, at least not of the overt thousand-ton beryllium ship variety [audience laughter]. It has to do with the fact that we began to allow into our diet an exotic pseudo-neurotransmitter that was part of the native flora of the grassland. And I believe that, you know, in the next ten minutes I can at least make it seem plausible to you, that this mushroom was the triggering factor that moved us from being an advanced hominid, an advanced animal, to being in fact a conscious, self-reflecting, caring, thinking, dreaming, striving human being.


And here is my answer to this riddle, “where did human consciousness come from?” It begins like this: In that foraging phase where we were testing all kinds of plants on the grassland, small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms would have naturally been eaten in the process of eating corms and things like that. I personally have seen baboons, uh, in Kenya investigating cow patties on the savannah because they know that bug, uh, pupa will be under the cow paddies. So, the cow patties are already set up as vectors for possible sources of nutrition. So there is no question that these proto-hominids would have eaten psilocybin in small amounts. And by small amounts I mean amounts so small, that if you were to eat that much you wouldn’t feel nothing. But it’s-this dose-level has been studied and it causes increased acuity of vision. You can actually give people small amounts of psilocybin and then give them eye tests and they do better if they’re slightly intoxicated than if they are not. The guy who proved this, the Viennese psychologist Roland Fischer, when he described those experiments to me, he said, “and so you see, my young friend, here we have a case where the use of drugs actually introduces us to a more true vision of reality than if we have avoided the drug.” [laughter]. Scientific proof that the drug is telling you more about reality than if you had refused it.


Alright, now, what kind of visual acuity is it that is being improved? Well it turns out it’s what’s called edge detection. In the grassland environment where the movement of small animals means dinner and the movement of large animals means you become dinner [audience laughter] a plant which confers increased visual acuity is going to immediately confer an adaptive advantage on those members of the group that let it in. Those members of the group that refuse it out of esthetic or, or gastronomic reasons will tend to be out-bred, because the psilocybin using members of the species will be more successful at obtaining food and at surviving to raise their own children to reproductive age which is the name of the game in, uh, in evolution. So that’s step one of a three step process that leads to the explosion of consciousness in the hominid brain. Step two, which should have special appeal for this crowd, is that when you takes lightly larger doses of psilocybin, not religiously profound doses, but, but doses which you definitely feel, psilocybin is what’s called a CNS stimulant, a central nervous system stimulant. What it causes in, in animals is what, uh, neurophysiologists call arousal. And in highly sexed animals like primates arousal means, in the male, erection. So what-an animal then, which is allowing, what is essentially a sexual stimulator an aphrodisiac to enter into the diet, there will be more instances of what anthropologists call successful copulations, and God knows we need that. So, if you have more successful copulations you have more pregnancies. You have another-a second factor outbreeding the non-psilocybin using member of the population.


Now, something really important here that is my, well this whole thing is my theory, but here is the part of it that I like the best: All primates, all primates, have what are called dominance hierarchies, or male dominance hierarchies. This goes right back clear to Lemurs and the old world monkeys- yes, well the new world monkeys which are more primitive. All primates have this dominance hierarchy and what it means is, the sharp fanged, hard bodied young males, they control the women, the children, the elderly, all sexual minorities, everybody is under the thumb of the alpha males. And as we sit here today, though this community may strive to be an exception, as a society male dominance is an enormous dilemma for us, and an enormous distorting factor in our politics and in our lives. So my notion is that psilocybin, by promoting this polymorphic sexual style, actually acted as an inoculation against monogamous sexual styles of bonding, you see. And it isn’t that the monogamous style, the dominator style disappeared- it was simply medicated out of existence. For perhaps 100,000 years it was medicated out of existence.


Now, and, and what it promoted, this arousal, this psilocybin-taking around the African campfires by these primitive nomadic pastoralists, what the social change that came with it was, was an orgiastic sexual style. A style were everybody would get loaded around the camp fire and then hump in an enormous writhing heap. [audience laughter and whooping] Now, besides the fact that this is a great deal of fun it has a very, very profound social effect, which is: in societies which allow orgy men cannot trace lines of male paternity, men cannot trace lines of male paternity. What does this mean? It means that men do not identify with children as property. It means that the men of that kind of a social group can only think in terms of our children, we the group, our children. And it creates an immensely cohesive social glue that I believe held these societies together for millennia. And I believe that during this period of pharmacological suppression of male dominance we became human beings.


Theatre, poetry, magic, art, altruism, uh, dance, symbolic and cognitive activity of every sort was born in that window of opportunity when there was simultaneously a chemical suppression of male dominance and consequently an opening to Gaian intentionality, to the intent of the larger biological systems in which the human system was embedded. And a kind of paradise came into existence. There were actually two phases: one from about forty to thirty thousand years ago in the interglacial 6 and in that early phase human beings, cattle and mushrooms were sort of all swirling together there on the African grassland in contact but not yet a coherent triad. The second partnership paradise arose at the last glaciation, uh, at the melt, during the last glacial melt and it lasted from about 20,000 years ago to perhaps as much, as, as recently 10,000 years ago. And it was in that later phase that, uh, uh, the Magdalenian explosion occurred and the social forms were put in place that Hellenistic paganism was looking back at with a nostalgic and barely cognizable memory. There was an old, old memory of a kind of paganism that was old 5,000 years before Eleusis laid its cornerstone.


I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival, in which I try to say that the entire cultural impulse of the 20th century, beginning with Freud and Jung discovering the unconscious, beginning with Picasso dragging back primitive West African masks to Paris and inserting them into his paintings, Dada, pataphysics, jazz, abstract expressionism, even phenomena like National Socialism, all of these various impulses in the 20th century, some positive, some negative, all have a common theme: archaism. Archaism, a nostalgia for a state before history. And as this tendency, this nostalgia has been sorted out over the last 100 years by generations of scholars beginning with, you know, Freud and Jung and Blavatsky and Crowley and then coming up through all the folklorists and deconstructionists, as this thing has been teased apart, it has become clearer and clearer that the paradigmatic figure in any archetypal revival is the maker of magic, the shaman, the wizard, the seeress, the person who is in control with invisible forces. And as I have lived my life and explored these things for a longtime I’ve come to the conclusion that the shaman without the hallucinogenic plants is well on the way to becoming priest or priestess, well on the way to being downloaded into a fixed canon, a, a moral vision, uh, a societal, religious structure, which is not what shamanism is about. It’s about discordian ecstasy; it’s about the felt presence of immediate experience in the absence of theory. That’s what it’s about.


So, this, this, uh, well, and then I want to get back to our little process. We’ve now covered step one, better vision through mushroom taking leads to better diets and healthier children. Bigger doses lead to an end to monogamy, a dissolution of pair bonding and a replacement of, of monogamous anxiety, with, uh, polymorphic amorousness or whatever you want to call it. Uh, then – that’s only the second step – the third step is when you double the polyamorous dose, and now, hunting is out of the question [audience laughter] and even fucking is out of the question because you are nailed to the ground somewhere off at the edge of the firelight wrestling with a mystery so profound, so bizarre that even as we sit here with Husserl and Heidegger and Heisenberg and all these clowns under our belts it is still absolutely mysterious, appalling, challenging, boundary dissolving and unavoidably ecstatic. It is the living mystery. And I don’t know how many of them there are in the world but for my money there only has to be one [audience laughter] to rescue the entire concept from, you know, the dirty claws of the reductionist, the materialist, the Christers, the nothing-but-ers, the merely-this-and simply-that-ers [audience laughter, applause]. Yea, I know that I am preaching to the converted but I [clears throat] if I’d preach to the unconverted I’d be hung from the yardarm. [audience laughs]


So, you may say to yourself, “Well, this is all very interesting. This guy has some kind of anthropological revisionist theory and, you know, that’s all well and good, in other words, so what? What does it have to do with us? Well, what it has to do with us is, we are in a state of enormous dysfunctional anxiety as a result of the fall into history, which has caused us to have to compromise our sensuality, our connection to the Gaian Goddess, our polymorphic sexuality. All of these things have been poured into a new set of social institutions that derive, essentially, from the invention of agriculture, which is where I think the shit hit the fan. I mean I’m fairly radical on that. I think that agriculture is the end, because it’s incredibly successful as a strategy for food production. Well, what does that mean? It means you can’t be nomads anymore. Oh no, you have to build a stone tower to put the grain in. And you have to make sure you can haul large rocks upon top of your tower to drop on people who’s grain crop wasn’t as big as yours was. We see this at Jericho. The most advanced building of the world at 10,000 BC was the grain tower at Jericho. And it was defensive, and it bespeaks, you know, the primal paranoia.


Once people stopped moving across the land, once they violated it with the blade of the plough, then you get sedentary populations, the division between the profane world of the city and the wilderness outside. That’s the moment when the division between the unconscious and the conscious mind comes into play and an entire set of institutions arise then: male kingship, standing armies, role specialization, slavery, women as chattel, uh, so forth and so on. I mean, we are the unhappy inheritors of this hideous plunge into dysfunctionality. Now why is it such a hideous plunge into dysfunctionality to live without psilocybin or close relatives thereof? The answer is that his thing which to now I’ve described as male dominance and a tendency to form dominance hierarchies we can describe another way and bring much closer to home by saying “It is the ego”. The ego is a late arriving, very tenuous, highly uncertain of itself, social structure that has taken root in the human


social structure that has taken root in the human psyche like a tumor, like uh, a, a growth of some sort. It is the leftover of this primate dominance complex and the way it manifests itself is by the establishment of boundaries. First of all, this is my body, do not touch it. Second of all, these are my weapons and, and agricultural tools, do not touch them, this is my woman, these are my children, I hunt there, so forth and so on. It’s this division of the world which allows the illusion of the ego to come into existence. Now, what do psychedelics do and why are they such social dynamite? The answer is, it’s not a health issue, it’s not an addiction issue, I mean, that’s preposterous, it’s about boundary dissolution. Every society from the classic Maya to Fujiwara, Japan, to the France of the Bourbons, every society establishes a set of boundaries which it then calls "reality" and woe betide you if


then calls "reality" and woe betide you if you go across the boundary, because then you are outcast, outclassed, outlandish, and the full fury of the community can be turned against you. And we all know what that can mean, as pagans.


So, I believe that the ego is a dysfunctional, uh, psychic invader. And that it will continue and strengthen to perpetuate itself as long as we do not institute either as groups or within our relationships or as individuals, a regular ritual encounter with the forces which dissolve these boundaries. And the only force I know that works are these plants. And as I say, I’m not interested in arguing whether there are other methods or not, God I would hope so, but anything I ever looked into, and I shopped the spiritual supermarket from stem to stern, was horse shit as far as I could see, [audience laughter, applause] Now, I am not a sensitive, let me say that, people say, “Well, but what about Ramana Maharshi, what about Jaka Berma – hey, it’s great for those folks. I applaud our hots and avatars and so forth and so on, but what I’m interested in is democratic ecstasies. It should be for themost lumpen among us. It, it is not to be attained by an act of dietary control, sexual abstinence or, uh, you know, whatever. It is a human birth right – it is a human birthright to touch the incorporeal body of the Goddess, [audience applause] it isn’t something … [more applause, laughs]


So, uh…, well let’s see, where can we go from here? I say all this, if you are interested, I say it better than I’m saying it here, in my book Food of the Gods, which was not written for you people, it’s an argument for people who do not know a great deal about drugs, may never have taken drugs, but through some miracle have managed to maintain an open mind. Uh, [audience laughter] I don’t know how much you know about my shtick– and I can’t get into it now – but for me these things are more than tools for the Freudian or Jungian unconscious. I mean, I journey to inhabited worlds that are, there are echos in Elf land and Faye but, you know, as a rationalist, as a, as an aspiring astronautical engineer at age 13 it’s astonishing to me that I could validate the mystery through doubt, through doubt.


The truth does not require your belief. The truth is real. You can beat it on the ground, you can rip it apart, you can look inside it. Nobody needs to guard the truth from inspection. Nobody needs to tell you that, you know, you can’t look behind the stage. And so, my motivation is to try to – number one – bring people to the realization that the spiritual path – if you want to think of it that way – that is a real thing. And it will carry you to the real thing. All spiritual disciplines that I know except for psychedelics, put a great deal of emphasis on putting the pedal to the metal. Push, push, push, you know, meditate, make offerings, do Mantrayana, do Pranayama, do Pusha, push, push, push! With psychedelics suddenly there is a very deep interest in “And where are the breaks?” [audience laughter] You see? You’re no longer pushing. Once you get to the psychedelics, seeking is an attitude which ill becomes you. [audience laughter] You have found it! You have found it. Now what in the hell are you going to do with it?


And, and this is a great dilemma for anyone who goes into this. I mean, I am, as I see myself, I’m a preacher in the marketplace, but I know – and I’m sure most of you know – that I could walk out of here, you could walk out of here, and you could go as far as your courage would carry you. There is no barrier. There are no more barriers. You can go as far as your fuckin’ courage will carry you. And at that point you have to ask the question, you know, “Do I want to be the Mad Monk of Cold Mountain? Do I want the villagers down in the valley to say: Oh yes, we see him occasionally up in the mist naked, flying with the eagles …” uh, [audience laughter] because you can be that person. You know, you don’t have to go back to your job as Addict-Sachs stock broker or whatever it is. And so we stand on the edge of being able to leave history. We can leave it.


You know, we tend to forget because our lives are so brief, but what we call the psychedelic experience is very, very new on the plate of Western, uh, uh, occultism and science. I mean hashish did not make great inroads into Medieval Europe, that all came later in the 18th and 19th century. Chloroform, ether, these things don’t cut it. Mescaline was, uh, synthesized for the first time in 1888. These things had to compete with many other interesting areas of scientific exploration in 20th century. We have not come to terms with what they mean and what they are. Uh, and it’s a curious area because the counterculture – whatever that may mean – knows a great deal more about this than science. I mean, science does not explore this area because it senses enormous danger for its ontological machinery. It probably couldn't survive the encounter. And therefore its just said, “Well, it’s psychology, it’s marginal, it’s fleeting, it’s non irreproducible, and so forth and so on. This is all nonsense. You can, by unplugging the telephone, by fasting for six hours, and by taking 5 dried grams of Stropharia cubensis in silent darkness, you can go up to the great simulacra of human explorers Hypatia, Maria, Newton, Da Vinci, you can take that ride. I have the feeling that when we go into those psychedelic spaces we not only see things no one has ever seen before, we see things no one will ever, ever see again.

Okay, one last thought I wanna put out and then I’ll try for some questions.


Okay, one last thought I wanna put out and then I’ll try for some questions.

I have a sort of a rational mind, in that I like to make sense. I don’t mean experimental sense, but I mean if you can build a verbal metaphor to get from one thing to another then you understand it much better. And so I-the magical dimension is real. It isn’t psychological, it isn’t based on the strength of will. It’s as real as Mars in its orbit. I mean, there is real estate out there, folks. It’s that real. And so then, uh, the question becomes, uh, how to vivify it. And the answer is by creating a consensus in language. By having it made illegal it’s like where sex was with the Victorians. You know, everybody was inventing the wheel over and over again.

We have lost touch with our moral compass because we have lost touch with the Gaian mind. And this is not a metaphor. If you take these neurotransmitters, these exopheromones that connect you up with the natural environment, the Gaian intent becomes known. It’s an act of feeling. If we could feel what we are doing we would stop doing it. But we live in a realm of abstraction, excuses, incredible wealth, incredible levels of pampering and softness lay between us, the upper five percent of the intellectual and material elite on the planet, and the problems. I mean, how many of us have been to Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Somalia? These things are only images on a dehumanizing screen. If we could feel what we are doing, we would awaken to the mystery of each other and to the mystery of the historical process of recovering what was lost.


We don’t need this material civilization. We don’t need five billion people on this planet. We have to think very, very radically about how we are going to change ourselves or we’re not going to make the cut. And orthodoxy is utterly and completely bankrupt. All it can do is suppress. They suppress, they suppress, they suppress. But there’s only one argument that will forgive suppression: deliverance. And they can’t give us deliverance. All they can give us is the Menendez trial, O.J., Baby M, The Skaters, Claus von Bülow, horse shit, horse shit, horse shit. [applause]


We are locked inside, uh, a nightmare, a nightmare of contaminated and toxic imagery that is designed to disempower you and make it impossible for you to think straight. And the way out is straight back to the reality of the vegetable Gnosis. It is there, it has always been there. The societies that never broke the connection live in dynamic and loving balance with each other and the planet today were it not for the input of our disruptive social and economic systems. So I, I talk to all kinds of people who I see as part of my community, but it stretches from virtual reality, to the radical gay movement, to the house movement, to the pagan movement, to the younger molecular pharmacologists, to the radical art historians and psychotherapists – all of these communities are fragmented and suspicious of each other, and this is precisely what orthodoxy enjoys. If all of these countercultural impulses could make common cause, we would probably discover that we are 65-70% of the population. And so what is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling-toned types. If this can happen then we will make a new world. And if this doesn’t happen nature is fairly pitiless, uh, and has a place for us in the shale of this planet where so many have preceded us. [audience laughter] Well, I think that’s the basic rave. It raises a lot of issues. If somebody is burning to ask a question, uh …yes, burning to ask …

[44:32]Q & A

[Q: ?]


TM: Well, I think that it’s very hard to find pristine pseudo-Paleolithic, or “pseudo-Neolithic” culture. Even the Amazon, where I’ve spent a lot of time, uh, tribes that were nomadic at the time of, of, uh, contact are now agriculturalist simply because missionary medicine has swollen aboriginal populations to the point where they can’t be nomads as they used to be. So, you’re right. There are some psychedelic-using cultures that are pretty, uh, uh, unappealing – although actually I can only think of one, that I find politically very unappealing. And I don’t wanna knock them because I haven’t lived with them. So I may be misled. But I think it’s not simply taking psychedelics but it’s also to decondition oneself to the notion of ego and all the concepts which constellate around that, such as place, property, ownership, and stability. You see, the idea that we have inherited from Western religion and science is the idea that things should


Western religion and science is the idea that things should be stable. This is a very male dominant notion, the wish for stability, eternity, when in fact the message life hands you over and over again is “nothing lasts”. Nothing lasts. Not what you love, not what you hate, not your enemies, your friends, not even your dear, dear self. Nothing lasts. And the ego goes mad in the presence of that truth; it, it, it can’t swallow it. And so we have anxiety of death, need to dominate people, need to possess property, terror of illness, resentment of fate, because we are not in the flow. And I think what these psychedelics do is they put you very much in the ‘here and now’. And it’s nothing more than that. I mean, obviously I’m an egghead and an abstract thinker, and I hope to make my reputation in mathematics, but feeling is the primary validator of existence. I mean, if you don’t know that, you gotta


mean, if you don’t know that, you gotta go back to square one. And these things empower feeling. They are catalysts for the imagination. I mean, you may not like what psychedelics do to you, they may terrify you. But if it terrifies you then surely it must have catalyzed your imagination, or you wouldn’t have known that terror. So catalysis of the imagination in a fairly loving and yet ruthless way is what the psychedelics deliver. Anybody who calls this escapism is sitting on their thumb. I mean they don’t know what they’re talking about. Reality is for people who can’t handle this stuff! [audience laughter, applause]


I do want to say one thing. It almost slipped my mind and for those of you who have your hands up I apologize but I think this needs to be said. And I don’t know how many of you know it, but this is a news flash, folks. We interrupt thisprogram to bring you a special announcement. A new psychoactive substance has been discovered. A very powerful psychoactive substance, the most powerful since the discovery of LSD. A substance so powerful that 300 µg is the dose. That means 1 gram will dose 7,000 people. This compound comes from a plant. The plant is – and I hope you’re paying attention – the plant is legal. The compound is legal. You can possess it. You can manufacture it. [audience laughter] You can transport it across borders. You can give it away. You can sell it and you can do it on stage. [audience laughter] And it comes from a plant. And the plant is also available, and I wanna tell


the plant is also available, and I wanna tell you about this because [laughter], Okay, no shoving, no shoving! [audience laughter] Alright, not to keep you in suspense any longer. The plant is Salvia divinorum, Salvia divinorum which, some of you who are real mavens of this stuff know it. It’s been in the books for 30 years. The problem was nobody knew how to get off. And so it was always carried in these lists as ‘suspect hallucinogen’. The thing is, any scientist, confronted with a plant where somebody says it’s a hallucinogen, will test to see if it’s an alkaloid. All hallucinogens, almost all, are alkaloids. So, Salvia divinorum – negative for alkaloids. Doesn’t matter. It has a new, unknown compound in it – now known – Salvinorin alpha. And the interesting thing about Salvinorin alpha is, we have in this country a structural near-relatives or cognener law, which says, if a compound is


cognener law, which says, if a compound is a structural near-relative, isomer and enantiomer or stereoisomer of an illegal compound then it too can be made illegal. Salvia divinorum doesn’t fit this description. That means that in order to make this stuff illegal the government will have to present medical data showing there is something wrong with it. And at this stage nobody on earth knows the real pharmacological parameters of this compound.


So, here is the deal: you can grow this plant in a window box in your apartment, in your backyard. It looks like ‘Joe Plant’ [audience laughter]. There is nothing particularly distinguishing about this plant. And if you have three or four cuttings in six or seven months you will have more than you know what to do with. And, then, then I’ll just describe how I do it. I’m slightly chicken shit to do the pure compound, which, by the way, you do 300 µg. Understand that what it looks like is a grain of salt. A small grain of salt is a human-effective dose. It comes on so fast that you have no impression of it coming on at all. You do it and then after a while you notice that for a long time you have been staring at something incomprehensible.


[audience laughter] Well let me ta- here is how I recommend that you do it while we get the chemical thing sorted out. Because the chemical – it could be dangerous. It would be very easy to overdose by a factor of ten, twenty, thirty and you would still just be doing a smidgeon. So I say let’s honor the plants. Let’s not hand the government a bunch of casualties that it can clock over and put on national TV, you know, the bibble, bibble, bibble show [laughter], uh…, let’s use the plant. And the way you do it is you grow up a batch of this stuff and get between fifteen and twenty leaves. Remove the mid-vein with your fingernail, just to lower the mass, fold it all into a little pile, put it in your mouth, and twenty leaves is a whopping mouthful, so basically as much as you can get in your mouth. Put it in your mouth- lie down in silent darkness and squeeze the stuff with your jaws. Tastes like …, it’s horrible. It’s not as bad as ayahuasca, but it’s horrible. But you could acquire a taste for it. [audience laughter]


So, lie down in darkness where you can see a digital watch – one of these red-flashing jobs like a K-mart deal and, and then let it …don’t swallow it, but just squeeze it and masticate it. At fifteen minutes by the clock spit it out into a bowl or Kleenex or something. And then just lie there. Lie still in the darkness with your eyes closed and look. And this is almost the key empowerment though it’s idiotic. People fail to do it. Look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation of seeing something. And when you do that, after just three or four minutes there will be what, uh, we professionals call streaming. Which means ameboid lights of after image colors, the chartreuse and purple flowing by, and about three minutes after that it will deepen very, very quickly into extraordinarily bizarre, uh …dare we say it, fairly DMT-like hallucinations. And it, it, it builds fast. I mean so fast that either is this wonderful moment in it where you actually know real fear, which shows you that it’s working. Yeah, I mean, I really believe if you take a psychedelic and you’re not afraid you did too much, you didn’t do enough. [audience laughter, applause]


The experience then will unfold for about 45 minutes. And just lie there and look. And it is beautiful, it is beautiful. I mean, I’m a, a, a connoisseur of hallucination and these deep indigo blues, these cerulean blues against blackness that are like neon and these amorphous Yves Tanguy kind of shapes that are moving and transforming themselves. I mean, I was amazed, I couldn’t believe it. I was saying, “My God, this, legal? This is legal? And it’s working! It’s working!” And I am the hardest of the hard heads. I mean I know people say, you know, here is Tagetes lucida,this will get you off. here is this, smoke this, knick’anick this, something…no, no, no, no, no, uh-huh no, it doesn’t, it’s not like that, these things are rare. But this one works. And I commend it to your attention and your friends’ attention and anyone with shamanic intent. As I say, it’s perfectly legal to possess, advocate the whole bit, yes.

[Q]

Salvia. It’s in the genus Salvia. That’s the mint family. Sacred to pagans for millennia. Salvia S-A-L-V-I-A and then divinorum [spells it]. The diviner’s mint.

[Q]

Well, yes. Let me say something about this that’s very interesting.

[Q:]

Pardon me?

Q: What’s its common name?


[Q:]

Pardon me?

Q: What’s its common name?

Well That’s what I was gonna talk about. It’s native from Mexico. So it has no common name in English. In Spanish it has a very interesting common name. It’s called ‘Ojos de la pastora’, now, ‘The eyes of the shepherdess’. What a strange name. Think about it for a moment. First of all, notice that in Christian iconography there are no shepherdesses, period. Not one. We got shepherds, you got your shepherds there Christmas. Shepherdess? No. So it’s called ‘Ojos de la pastora’. Well then the anthropologist who studied this, Bret Blosser, to whom we all owe a great debt, Hail Bret! [laughter, applause] Naturally these people are Tzotzil and Sotil. They’re in the mountains of Oaxaca. And so we said to them, “Well yes, Ojos de la pastora, very interesting, but what do you call it in your language? What do you call it in Tzotzil?” And they said, “Well, we have no name for it in our language.”


This is very, very interesting and if any of you have any thoughts or want work on this, it’s inconceivable, if these people had used this for centuries that they would not have a local Tzotzil name for it. So he said, “Why don’t you have a name for it?” And they said, “Because our grandfathers were the first to use it.” And this, we do not know what to make of it. Because Salvia divinorum is known only in this very indemnified locality in the Sierra Mazateca. Where did it come from? Has it always been there? But these Indians only discovered it 200 years ago? Did it come from somewhere else? And if so where? Because it’s never been located anywhere else on the planet. So this is a great puzzlement. And I think if we move fast enough, we psychedelicos, we pagans, we neuronauts, we magicians, if we move fast enough, this will just be moot. And this is a far more powerful thing than Cannabis. I mean, not if you’ve never smoked Cannabis and then you sit down and smoke the best aff there is. But as we all know, after a while Cannabis loses its ability to really catapult you into the unspeakable. The Salvia divinorum, every time I have taken it it’s gotten better and stronger and weirder. So, I think it is sent from the Goddess at this time, Eyes of the Shepherdess, these are the eyes we should be looking through. [audience applause]


Okay. I think several people at once asked, “Where do you get it?” You must each have your own favorite rare plant dealer. I, I don’t work for any rare plant dealer and every time I mention one thousands of dollars flow into their coffers which leaves me feeling slightly weird. Nevertheless, Of The Jungle, PO Box 1801, Sebastopol, California. Somebody sitting next to you already knows this. So I’m not gonna repeat it. That’s the one. And …

Q: We have the plant. I just have a harvesting question.

TM: A harvesting question.

Q: … herbalist we’ve always harvest when the vital whatever are in the part of the plant that you would ingest. So normally, you’re going for a leave, you harvest when leaves are in a strength. So once the purple flower sprites go on, do you wait until they die down ‘till you harvest? Or do you …harvest and just eat as you go?]

TM: Well, we’re learning, we’re learning. And so far we’ve been fairly careful to eat it just as it’s approaching flowering.

Q: … before the power hasn’t gotten into the flowering yet.

TM: Right. But you do know, don’t you, that it’s, it may look like an annual but it’s a perennial. You can clip it off above a node and it will grow more.

Q: ?

TM: Yeah, no, seed is a pain. Try and do it with the cuttings. That’s about all I can say about it. Alright, I’m gonna knock off. Thank you very much. [audience applause]

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page


Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Laws and Freedom, Habits, and Novelty

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Youtube

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

June 1994

Unknown

End of Results

No transcript available for this talk!

Help Transcribe

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Permitting Smart People to Hope

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Youtube

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

June 1994

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA

10536

End of Results

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Vertigo at History's Edge

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Youtube

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

29 April 1994

New York MA

End of Results

No transcript available for this talk!

Help Transcribe

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Interview on WFMU

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

21 April 1994

Unknown

39

End of Results

No youtube link available, try the following:

No transcript available for this talk!

Help Transcribe

TRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.

Firstname Lastname: question?

FL: question?

FL: question?

FL: question?

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

Eros and the Eschaton

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Youtube

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

25 March 1994

Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

6958

End of Results

So everyone can hear, yes? I can hear anyway. Good. Well I want to thank Mandala books, Jan, I want to thank Jay Weidner for bringing me back to Seattle, the home of real grunge and real peculiarity. Before I plunge into this I should tell you, because Harper would like me to do that, The Invisible Landscape after years and years of being out of print is shipping right now. I don’t know if it’s in the bookstores but it’s real. True Hallucinations is going into paper at the same time so if you couldn’t afford the $22, wait for the $12 or the 2012.

What I wanted to talk about tonight simply because it’s the thing that is moving me to the edge of my chair at the moment is: I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton. What I could have called it is Eros and the Eschaton, What Science Forgot. Somebody asked me recently is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? It’s easy to hope if you’re stupid. Is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? I wanted to deal with that because I think so. It was to me a shocking question because I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy. I forget that not everyone is so fortunate and that there’s a lot of despair and uncertainty out there.


So I wanted to talk about this. I’ll talk for a while and then we’ll break and have an intermission. I’ll sign books if anybody needs a book signed. Then we’ll come back and do Q&A on this until we’re sick of it basically.

If there’s a technician adjusting this, help me out a little bit.

Eros and the Eschaton – these are the two areas that I think compromise the old paradigm and give permission to hope. Strangely, neither of these words is that well known, which gives you a measure of how completely the dominator position has squelched, subverted and downplayed any opposition to its worldview. Eros we know about in some kind of devalued, shticky kind of glitzy way because we get it in the eroticization of media and society. Really what Eros means in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature, a kind of all-pervasive order that bridges one ontological level to another. This is not permitted in the official worldview of our civilization, which is science. The world of inorganic chemistry is not thought to make any statement about the organic world and the organic world is not thought to be extrapolatable into the world of culture and thought. There are imagined to be clear breaks in these categories.


I had a biologist tell me once, “If genes aren’t involved, it ain’t evolution.” So that means you can’t talk about the evolution of the Earth as a physical body. You can’t talk about the evolution of human social institutions. Evolution is somehow a word appropriate to biology and appropriate nowhere else. This brings me then to the first factor easily discerned by anybody who has their eyes open that compromises and erodes the hopeless, existential view of the world that we’re getting from science. That is the idea that nature is in fact across all scales and all levels of phenomena, a unity. It’s not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going around a star and star clusters orbiting around the gravitational center of a galaxy; it’s no coincidence that these systems exhibit the same kind of order on different scales. Yet, science would say that is a coincidence.

P.W. Bridgeman, who was a philosopher of science, defined a coincidence as what you have left over when you apply a bad theory. It means that you’ve overlooked something and what jumps out at you as a coincidence is actually a set of relationships whose casuistry and whose relationships to each other are simply hidden from you. What I’ve observed and I think it’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this - what I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity. This is a great general, natural law that your own senses will confirm for you but has never been allowed into the canon of science. What I mean by that nature builds on complexity is the following. When the universe was born in the dubious and controversial circumstance called the Big Bang, it was at first simply a pure plasma of electrons. It was the simplest that it could possibly be. There were no atoms. There were no molecules. There were no highly organized systems of any kind. There was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy.


As the universe cooled, simply cooled, new kinds of phenomena, we say emerged out of the situation. As the universe cooled, atomic nuclei could form and electrons could settle in to stable orbits. As the universe further cooled, the chemical bond became a possibility. Still later the hydrogen bond…which is a weaker bond, which is the basis of biology. So as the universe aged, it complexified. This is so obvious that it’s never really been challenged. But on the other hand, it’s never been embraced as a general and dependable principle either. Follow it through with me. Out of atomic systems come chemical systems. Out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond, the carbon bond; complex chemistry that is prebiotic, organic. Out of that chemistry come the macro-physical systems that we call membranes, jells, charge transfer complexes, this sort of thing. These systems are the chemical preconditions for life - simple life, the life of the prokaryotes, the life of naked unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet.


Out of that life come eukaryotes, nucleated cells and then complex colonies of cells. Then cell specialization – leading to higher animals, to social animals, leading to complex social systems, leading to technologies, leading to globe girdling, electronically based, information transfer oriented cultures like ourselves. Someone once said, ‘what’s so progressive about media?’ ‘It’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.’ It can be, it can be. So this is very interesting that apparently the way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity; chemical, electrical, social, biological, whatever. New forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry but it is more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life and yet it is more than animal life.


So this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science. Out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty conserving or complexity conversing engine. It makes complexity and it preserves it and it uses it as the basis for further complexity. Now, there’s more to this than simply that. I think we all observationally could agree what has been said so far. The added wrinkle, or an added wrinkle, is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, precedes more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound because if accepted as a serious first principle, it ends the marginalization of our own species to the level of spectator status in a universe that knows nothing of us and cares nothing for us. This is the most advanced position that modern science will allow us – spectators to a drama we didn’t write, shouldn’t expect to understand and cannot influence. But I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game, if in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently players in the cosmic drama and in this particular act of the cosmic drama; we hold a very central role.

We are at the pinnacle of the expression of complexification in the animal world and somehow this complexity which is concentrated in us has flowed over out of the domain of animal organization and into this mysterious domain which we call culture, language, consciousness, higher values – each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. After the initial big bang there was a period of billions of years when the universe cooled, stars condensed, planetary systems formed and then the quickening process crossed an invisible Rubicon into the domain of animal and biological organization.


Well you see since the rise of western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that we’re getting from the impact of human culture on the earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the planet. A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic world, meaning a world not based on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized into three dimensional space as choppers, aeropoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, space craft, what have you.


All of this complexification is occurring at a faster and faster rate. This brings me then to the second quality or phenomena that science has overlooked, which is the acceleration of complexification. The early history of the universe proceeded with excruciating slowness then life took hold in the oceans of this planet. A quickening of process and evolution but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions of years to clock major change. Then the conquest of the land, higher animals, higher exposure to radiation, faster change, species following species, one upon another. Then fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years ago – anyway recently – the crossover into the domain of culture, tool making, myth making, dance, poetry, song and story that set the stage for the fall into history; the incredibly unusual and self-consuming process that has been going on for the past fifteen or twenty thousand years. A biological snap of the finger. Yet in that time everything that we call human, everything that we associate with higher values has been adumbrated, elaborated, created, set in place by one species – ourselves.

This acceleration of time or complexity shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, within the fabric of our own lives, we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute feel it speeding up, taking hold. It’s a cliché that time is moving faster and faster, a cliché of the mass media. But I want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion or a cultural mirage – that this is actually happening to the space-time matrix and that time is in fact speeding up. That history in which we are embedded because our life of fifty to eighty years is so ephemeral on a scale of ten to fifteen thousand years – but nevertheless history is a state of incredible destabilization.


It’s a catastrophe in the process of happening. It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection and it ends with a global Internet of electronic information transfer and a language using species hurling its instruments towards the stars. There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is ever going to slow down or be deflected. It has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature; this acceleration was built in. What poses a problem to us as thinking individuals is that the speed of involution toward concrescence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it within the confines of our own lives. There has been more change since 1960 than in the previous several thousand years. There has been more change since 1992 than in the previous thousand years. Change is accelerating. Invention, connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematics, algorithms, connectivity of people, social systems – this is all accelerating furiously and under the control of no one; not the Catholic church, the communist party, the IMF – no one is in charge of this process. This is what makes history so interesting. It’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.

This is why I’m not particularly sympathetic to a conspiracy theory because I can’t make the leap to faith that would cause you to believe that anyone could get hold of the beast enough to control it. Conspiracies, of course, we have conspiracies up the kazoo but none of them are succeeding. They’re all being swept away, compromised, astonished by new information and endlessly agonized.


So two factors relating to eros: the movement into complexity and the fact that that movement goes ever faster. The second quality, the acceleration of the movement into novelty, leads me to the third point, which is I suppose more controversial. I am frankly willing to admit that my sensitivity to this third point is based on my psychedelic experience. Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. I propose therefore to expand that enterprise and say we need a science beyond science. We need a science that plays with a full deck. The reason the psychedelic experience is so important here is not some namby-pamby notion that it expands consciousness or it makes you more perceptive or something like that.

That is all true but it isn’t strongly enough put. A cultural point of view is like a crystal. You have an amorphous cultural medium, which at certain temperatures will form a crystal of cultural convention if you will. Within the geometry of that crystal certain things make sense and certain things are excluded from making sense. Science is a condensed cultural point of view that is a rigid crystal of interlocking assumptions; assumptions such as matter is primary, mind is tertiary, causality works from the past into the future, so forth and so on. What psychedelics do in terms of their impact on the physical brain and organism of human beings is they withdraw cultural programming. They dissolve cultural assumptions. They lift you out of that reassuring crystalline matrix of interlocking truths, which are lies.

Instead, they throw you into the presence of the great ‘who knows.’ The mystery! The mystery, which has been banished from western thought since the rise of Christianity and the suppression of the mystery religions. Now the model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience is not that it makes you smarter – a kind of simple-minded idea paradoxically. Or the idea that…[Audience Laughter].


You are paying attention, aren’t you? Or the idea that it’s some kind of magnifying glass into the personal unconscious – your trauma, your childhood memories, your satanic abuse your parents laid on you, so forth and so on. The model which I like is a geometric model and says simply that since the rise of the Greek alphabet, print, linear thinking and science, we have become imprisoned in a causal universe of material connectivity and that this is a cultural myth as much as believing that we are the sons and daughters of the great father who got out of his canoe at the second waterfall to take a leak. These are just cultural myths.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience I think is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. I use higher dimensional in the mathematical sense. Literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural assumptions and can look down with a kind of godlike understanding that one obtains when one flies in an airplane over a landscape previously only viewed from the ground. In other words, from the vantage point of the psychedelic experience, the cultural landscape is seen more nearly in its correct perspective – seen as historically bounded, spatially and intellectually bounded. Now it’s no coincidence that if you analyze biology, what it is: it’s a kind of conquest of dimensionality. The earliest forms of life were probably slimes of some sort, stabilized on a clay surface - immobile, unable to perceive light, with no sense of time – merely a fingernail or a toehold in existence. Then if you look at the entire fossil record, what you see is the evolution of senses. Sensory preceptors and organs of locomotion. The preceptors, the eye, the hand, bring into the cognitive field the sense of things at a distance. Then language provides models for these things at a distance. Similarly, fins, legs, so forth…means of locomotion carry us through space.


This is a journey of dimensionality and essentially what animals are that plants are not are life forms mobile in a very conscious way in the spatial dimension. This is why from the point of view of evolutionary biologists animals are somehow more advanced than plants. Well if conquest of dimensionality is the criteria then notice that we again occupy a special and privileged position in nature because we cannot only run with the best of them, see with the best of them but we can remember and anticipate like crazy. Other animals are not doing this. Other animals may imprint past situations of danger or opportunity but they do not analyze experience and extrapolate it towards the hidden domain of the future. Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future and then suspends perceiving organism in this magical moment called the now where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it driving with the rearview mirror and the only thing that’s good about it is it’s better than driving with no mirror at all.


What this conquest of dimensionality comes to be in the presence of psychedelics is an anticipation of the future. We can anticipate the future. We know to within microseconds when the sun will rise. We know within a few percentage points where the prime rate will be in six months. Some things we can predict fairly closely, some things with less precision. But the perception of the future is very important to us. When we marry the need to perceive the future with the psychedelic experience, I believe we come up with data that is very, very difficult for science to come to terms with. This is the third item or really the second item on the list – what science forgot. It’s what I call the Eschaton. Now Eschaton is a rare word. Until very recently, unheard of outside schools of theology which I understand were a dying enterprise. Eschaton comes from the Greek word eskhatos, which just means the end. The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing.


It’s very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist because if it were to exist, it word impart to reality a purpose, you see. If the eschaton exists then it’s like a goal or an attraction point or an energy sync toward which historical process is being moved. Science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose. If you are not involved in the sciences, this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you. If you are a workbench scientist or a theoretician, you know that this is what’s called the problem of teleology. It is because modern science defined itself in the 19thcentury when the reining philosophy was Deism and Deism was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God. God wound this clock and has walked away from it. The clock will eventually run down. That theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century. So they said we must create a theory of reality that does not require a goal, does not require a purpose, everything must be pushed from the past. Nothing must be pulled toward the future.


The problem with this is that it does not fulfill out intuitions about reality. We can see that evolution, biological evolution, has built on chemical systems. We can see that social and historical systems build on biology. As people with open minds or as open as they can be inside this culture, we nevertheless have this intuition of purpose and it is dramatically underscored by the psychedelic experience, which takes the raw material of your life, your culture, your history and tells you this is not an existential mishmash to be lived out with dignity because there’s nothing else to be done with it – some kind of Camusian ‘why not’ affirmation. It says no. It says your reality is a coherent cosmos and embedded in your own sense of identity, embedded in your own sense of purpose is a microscopic reflection of the larger purpose that is built into the universe. Now this is not just blowing smoke in the sense of ‘it’s a nice idea’ or its like a religious idea like saying Jesus loves you so feel alright about yourself. It isn’t like that. It’s a theory about reality that has teeth because reality is actually following the script that this particular version of reality dictates. Reality is accelerating towards an unimaginable omega point.


We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems, our philosophical and scientific and technological approaches to the world. Because we’re driving the historical vehicle with a rearview mirror, it appears to us that we’re headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. It appears that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a future – so forth and so on. I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges; one by one we’re burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom dotted plains of Africa or the canopied rainforest of five million years ago. We can’t even go back to the era of Cayuse and six-shooters of two hundred years ago. We have burned our bridges. We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape and this question – is there cause for optimism? The answer is, it depends on where you placed your bets.

If you placed your bets on male dominated institutions based on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classicism and materialism, then God help you. You should call your broker. If on the other hand, you’ve recognized that a life boat strategy is involved here, that what is really important is empowering personal experience, backing off from consumer object fetishism, freeing the mind, empowering the imagination – then in that case, I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on.


You know there is a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement and it’s usually couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest or in Tajikistan making their rugs or milking their camels or something - and isn’t it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote? But in fact all cultural is being destroyed. All culture is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse. That’s not the victory of somebody’s culture over somebody else’s culture. Nobody ever had a culture like that, the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense.

If I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull us out of the ditch, I would be very despairing. As I said, nobody is in charge. Not the IMF, the pope, the communist party, the Jews – no, no no! Nobody has their finger on what’s going on. So then why hope? Isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so. I think the ‘out of controlness’ is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact that it’s out of control? I think if it’s out of control then our side is winning.


To me, the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience is this thing, which I call the eschaton and I want to talk about it a little bit this evening because I think it is the hardest thing for people to grasp about my particular rap. Sometimes I’ve talked to many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism, techniques, chemistry, approaches, so forth and so on – I’m approaching this evening as a graduate seminar. I figure everybody has their little mojo kit and their particular way of approaching these things and then the question is, what kind of conclusions can we draw? The conclusion that I draw is – and this is sort of pulling together what I said before – we are central to the human drama and to the drama of nature and process on this planet. The opposition, which is science… Well first let me say this. Every model of the universe has a hard swallow. What I mean by a hard swallow is a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there’s something slightly fishy about it.


The hard swallow built into science is this business about the Big Bang. Now let’s give this a little attention here. This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Well, now before we dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed. I defy anyone. It’s just the limit case for unlikelihood that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason. If you believe that, my family has a bridge across the Hudson River that we’ll give you a lease option for five dollars. It makes no sense. It is in fact no different from saying ‘and God said let there be light.’ What these philosophers of science are saying is give us one free miracle and we will roll from that point forward from the birth of time to the crack of doom. Just one free miracle and then it will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre equations that nobody can understand but which are so holy in this enterprise.


Well I say then, if science gets one free miracle then everybody gets one free miracle. I perceive that it is true when you build these large scale cosmogonic theories that you have to have kind of an umbilical cord to start from that is different from all other points in the system. So if we have to have a singularity in our modeling of what reality is, let’s make it as modest and as non-unlikely a singularity as possible. The singularity that arises for no reason in absolutely empty space instantly is the least likely of all singularities. Doesn’t it seem more likely if we have to have a singularity that it occurs in a domain with a rich history with many causal streams feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity. In other words, to put it simply – if you have to have a singularity, doesn’t it make more sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic process than at the beginning?

I think this is the great breakthrough of psychedelics and shamanism is that science got it absolutely wrong. The universe didn’t begin in a singularity. Who knows how the universe began or even presumes to judge – but the universe ends in a singularity. It has been growing more singular, more complex, more unique, more novel every passing moment since it burst into existence. If that’s true then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not mere spectators or a cosmic accident or some sideshow or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience is the main event. The coordination of perception, of hope, of dream, of vision that occurs inside the human heart/mind/body interface is the most complex phenomenon in the universe. Now even the physicalists acknowledge that the human neo-cortex represents the most densely ramified matter known to exist in the biological world.


You don’t have to be rocket scientist to see that human society, human history, human art, human literature, represent things for which there is no analog in the world of wasps, groundhogs, killer whales and so forth and so on. In our species, complexity has turned inward upon itself and in our species. Time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution and instead historical time is generated. So I believe that science and its reluctance to deal with the psychedelic experience and the way in which science has used the law to suppress its rival in this case arises out of a profound discomfort on the part of science about this future state of complexification that is clearly the grail, the dwell point, the end point of the human historical process. Not one of us I think can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years. I mean what would it look like? At the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere – it is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history.


History then is ending. History is a kind of gestation process. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. It’s an episode in the life of a species. If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly, we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is for all practical purposes enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted and an entirely different kind of organism with different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing, with wings where no wings were before, with a different kind of feeding apparatus. This is what’s happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis. It’s a pubescent stage. It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a human/machine planet-girdling interface capable of releasing the energies that light the stars and it lasts about 15,000 or 20,000 years and during that period, the entire process hangs in the balance.


It’s a period of high risk. It’s like what a butterfly is doing in the cocoon or what is happening to a child in the womb. It’s a gestation process where one form of life is being changed into another. Well, this would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine as history builds to it’s ever more climatic and horrifying crescendo and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what’s going on were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism. Remember I said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption. Well one of the strongest symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that gathers around the concept of past and future. The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold. This is not a metaphor. It’s what’s really going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment – it is about predicting weather, predicting game movement and curing disease.


If you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding of the future, each one of us would be able to do these things. Predicting the weather, you just look into next week and there it is. Predicting the movement of game, same deal. Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice of your patients with a pre-knowledge of who will get well and who will not get well. So it’s as though the members of the culture are imprisoned in linear time and the shaman is not. And why not? Because the shaman has perturbed the brain states sanctioned by the culture, sanctioned by its educational processes, its habits, its attitudes and into that vacuum created by the perturbation by these cultural values rushes the raw unanalyzed datum of reality. This is what Aldus Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness. Suddenly culture is seen to be a relative phenomena; the stockbroker no different from the rainforest shaman, each somewhat similar to the Trobriand islander or the Eskimo.

Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience but the human organism outside the confines of culture in a direct relationship to nature transcends time and space. This was a fact, I believe, that was known in pre-history and in fact was the source of Paleolithic values which were not material, not linear, not surplus oriented, not class oriented, not power oriented but rather oriented towards a kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity. Human beings lived like that for probably a half a million years with poetry, with dance, with mathematics, with magic, with story, with humor but not with the paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late evolving, machine worshiping, monotheistic, linear, phonetic alphabet, tight ass straight culture that we are a part of.


So now at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for western civilization which has for a thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down everybody’s throat whether they liked it or not, in the last hundred years, through the science of anthropology, ethnography, ethnomedicine and botany, the news has arrived that these “primitive” people are in fact master technicians of journeying into a world of the neurological imagination. A world we didn’t even know exists. A world that is as distant to us as the world at the heart of the atom is from the rainforest fisherman. Because our own cultural values seem a little shoddy at this moment, those on the fringes of western civilization have begun to seek alternatives, begun to look at alternative religions, yoga, Tantra, Buddhism, Zen, whatever. Alternative approaches to diet – vegetarianism, macrobiotic, so forth and so on, and alternative approaches to authentic experience – which means psychedelics.

In the early stage of psychedelic involvement, everyone was sort of flying under the banner of hands on Freudianism or hands on Jungianism. ‘We’re going to see those archetypes, we’re going confront those sexual repressions, we’re going to journey into those traumatic childhood memories.’ Now it’s understood I think that those metaphors were fairly inadequate and that actually we stand on the brink of an unexplored landscape of planetary size. The world of the high Paleolithic, which is a Gaian world – a world of feeling, not analytical, intellectual constructs but a world of empowered feeling, empathy and intuitive understanding. An understanding that doesn’t arrive in a context of Greek logic but in a context of animal knowing in the authentic mode of the body.


So just to bring it all around here. The great exhibit, which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our critics, is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. That’s mind over matter. That’s the violation of every scientific principle in the books and yet it is the most trivial experience that any of us have. We expect to command our body. We expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh into action and it will follow. The body is the nexus of the mystery of life and our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on.

The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us. That’s why it’s called escape because it’s escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what’s on the tube, from consuming trash media. It’s escape from all of that into the authenticity of the body. This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society. They’d make it illegal if they could but figure out how. It’s the one drug that they can’t tear from our grip, so they lay a guilt trip about it.


But sexuality and psychedelics, by carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body, carry us back to the domain of authentic values. More and more, the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconsciousness or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. That the earth is a coherent whole. It is a thinking, feeling, intending being that in terms of our value structures, it would be foolish to image as anything other than female. When cultural values, created by male dominance, science and linearity and so forth and so on; when those values are dissolved, what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant experience of matrix – what James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious – nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came.

History as we have lived it in the west has been a turning of our back on that. Now history has failed. Western cultural institutions having become global cultural institutions now show themselves to be inadequate to inspire, lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in. At this moment then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative. So this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates or about untaxed billions or about the mental health of our youth or any of that malarkey. I mean my God, the most destructive known to the species are pedaled on every street corner without restriction.


The real issue is what kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit. What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed? The value systems that aggrandize the possessions of things, the tearing up of the Earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe. Now I think we have to abandon western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plants. That’s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature. If we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.

Very little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved. What can be saved is the sense of love and caring and mutuality that we all put into and take from the human enterprise. You know there’s a grateful dead song that says, ‘you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, if the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will.’ We now hold through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them, we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be awaiting us. But it’s a cultural test. Nature is pitiless. Intelligence is a grand experience upon which a great deal has been risked. But if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs, the trilobites and the crossopterygian fishes and all those other folks that came before.


So what we must do I think is see our future in the imagination, catalyze the imagination, form symbiotic relationships with the plants, affirm archaic values and spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact dying, is a world that had become too top heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems and too dehumanized to care about what happened to its own children. So I say good riddance to it. Bring on the archaic revival and lets create a new world. And that’s it!

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact


Ask TMK

Talks

Wiki

Login

Search

Talks

Wiki

Login

aka Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis

Share

Download PDF

Download Audio

Download Video

Last Updated: 15/09/18

Info

Audio

Reviews

Date

Location

Words

February 1994

Unknown

8383

End of Results

No youtube link available, try the following:

Audio Link (Psychedelic Salon)
Transcription
Other links

Save the following quote?

Completed this talk?

Review:

Rating:

Saved

Share Transcript

ASKTMK

Terence McKenna Search

Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.

The Terence McKenna Page

© 2016-2020 asktmk.com

Contact