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Table of Content:

Plan/Plant/Planet by Terence McKenna .. 5

Ordinary Language, Visible Language & Virtual Reality by Terence McKenna 13
The Over-soul as Saucer & Open Ending - The lost chapters of True Hallucinations by Terence
McKenna .. 17
New & Old Maps of Hyperspace by Terence McKenna .. 26
From the Grasslands to the Starship - Excerpt from Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna . 39
The Great Timestream Bifurcation by Terence McKenna . 41
True Conversations with Terence Mckenna - Kona - September 1999 44
Art Bell interviews Terence McKenna on Coast to Coast AM . 48
Surfing on Finnegan's Wake by Terence McKenna . 58
"The Human Future" with Terence McKenna and Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove . 77
Spacetime Tsunami .. 85
Evolution and Freedom . 89
Alien Dreamtime by Space Time Continuum feat. Terence McKenna .. 94
Terence McKenna and Fraser Clark - Is There Any Reason to Hope? . 101
A short excerpt of Chapter 6: Entities from Trialogues at the Edge of the West by Ralph
Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake .. 112
High Times Interviews Terence McKenna . 112
Psychedelic Culture an Interview with Terence McKenna by Bruce Eisner 124
Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery - Aliens and Archetypes - Dr.
Jeffrey Mishlove and Terence McKenna . 142

Plan/Plant/Planet by Terence McKenna

Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our
solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the
organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the
dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the
guiding image of the nineteenth century.

This means reaching back in time to models that were successful fifteen thousand to twenty
thousand years ago. When this is done it becomes possible to see plants as food, shelter,
clothing, and sources of education and religion.

The process begins by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Let us declare
nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The
notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind
nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls
of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of
lenses to see our way into the world. When the medieval world shifted its worldview,
secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of classical Greek and Roman
approaches to law, philosophy, aesthetics, city planning, and agriculture. Our dilemma will cast
us further back into time in search for models and answers.

The solution to much of modern malaise, including chemical dependencies and repressed
psychoses and neuroses, is direct exposure to the authentic dimensions of risk represented by
the experience of psychedelic plants. The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an anti-drug
position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behaviour;
these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makeup that the psychedelics mitigate.
The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less
egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual. It is foolish to suggest that
there is no risk, but it is equally uninformed to suggest that the risk is not worth taking. What is
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needed is experiential validation of a new guiding image, an overarching metaphor able to

serve as the basis for a new model of society and the individual.

The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our individual and group
existence in the world. What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of reawakening awareness
of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The
Archaic Revival spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy
based on animal organization, something that can not be changed overnight by a sudden shift
in collective awareness. Rather, it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition that the
overarching theme that directs the Archaic Revival is the idea/ideal of a vegetation Goddess,
the Earth herself as the much ballyhooed Gaiaa fact well documented by nineteenth-century
anthropologists, most notably Frazer, but recently given a new respectability by RianeEisler,
MarijaGimbutas, James Mellaart, and others.

The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vegetable mindthe Gaian collectivity of
organic lifethe coser their connection to the archetype of the Goddess and hence to the
partnership style of social organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought
was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic Era, before
the Mystery religions were finally suppressed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.

My conclusion is that taking the next evolutionary step toward the Archaic Revival, the rebirth
of the Goddess, and the ending of profane history will require an agenda that includes the
notion of our reinvolvement with and the emergence of the vegetable mind. That same mind
that coaxed us into self-reflecting language now offers us the boundless landscapes of the
imagination. Without such a relationship to psychedelic exopheromones regulating our
symbiotic relationship with the plant kingdom, we stand outside of an understanding of
planetary purpose. And an understanding of planetary purpose may be the major contribution
we can make to the evolutionary process. Returning to the bosom of the planetary partnership
means trading the point of view of the history-created ego for a more maternal and intuitional
style.

The widely felt intuition of the presence of the Other as a female companion to the human
navigation of history can, I believe, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind,
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which provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of selfawareness, self-reflection, and self-articulation: the light of the Great Goddess.

What does it mean to accept the solutions of vegetable forms of life as metaphors for the
conduct of the affairs of the human world? Two important changes would follow from adopting
this assumption:

The feminizing of culture. Culture would be feminized on a level that has yet to be fully
explored. Green Consciousness means recognizing that the real division between the masculine
and the feminine is not a division between men and women but rather a division between
ourselves as conscious animalsomnivorous, land-clearing, war makers, supreme expression of
the yangand the circumglobal mantle of vegetationthe ancient metastable yin element that
constitutes by far the major portion of the biomass of the living earth.

An inward search for values. Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather
than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate, and swarm, while plants
hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterized by the solid state, the fixed, and the enduring.
If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and
attention in the domain of the vegetal imagination. Perhaps this is what the reconnection to
the vegetal Goddess through psychedelic plants, the Archaic Revival, actually points toward:
that the life of the spirit is the life that gains access to the visionary realms resident in magical
plant teachers. This is the truth that shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of
the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth-century visionary Hildegard von
Bingen.

A new paradigm capable of offering hope of a path out of the cultural quicksand must provide a
real-world agenda addressed to the escalating problems that the planet faces. There are several
domains in which the rise of awareness of Veriditas might help stave off armageddon:

Detoxification of the natural environment. The process of detoxification is naturally carried out
by the combined action of the atmosphere, the biological matrix, and the oceans. This
planetwide process was able to take care of even urban industrial waste, until modern
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industrial technology became a truly global phenomenon. Planting species of datura, the plants
once a part of the religious rites of the Indians of Southern California, and other plants that
leach heavy metals from the earth and sequester them in their cellular tissue are examples of a
natural process that could help clean up our environment. Recognizing the many ways in which
the biological matrix of the earth functions to avert toxification, recognizing that nature is
working to sustain life, might go a long way toward building a political consensus to actively
participate in saving that same life.

Connectedness and symbiosis. Like plants, we need to maximize the quality of connectedness
and symbiosis. Plant-based approaches to modeling the world include awareness of the fractal
and branching nature of community action. A treelike network of symbiotic relationships can
now replace the model of evolution that we inherited from the nineteenth-century. The earlier
model, that of the tooth-and-claw struggle for existence, with the survivor taking the hindmost,
is a model based on naive observation of animal behaviour. Yet it was cheerfully extended into
the realm of plants to explain the evolutionary interactions thought to cause speciation in the
botanical world. Later, more sophisticated observers (C.H. Waddington and Erich Jantsch) found
not the War in Nature that Darwinists reported but rather a situation in which it was not
competitive ability but ability to maximize cooperation with other species that most directly
contributed to an organism's being able to function and endure as a member of a biome. Plants
interact with each other through the tangled mat of roots that connects them all to the source
of their nutrition and to each other.

The matted floor of a tropical rain forest is an environment of great chemical diversity; the
topology approaches that of brain tissue in its complexity. Within the network of
interconnected roots, complex chemical signals are constantly being transmitted and received.
Co-adaptive evolution and symbiotic relationships regulate this entire system with a
ubiquitousness that argues for the evolutionary primacy of these cooperative strategies. For
example, mycirrhizal fungi live in symbiosis on the outside of plant roots and gently balance and
buffer the mineral-laden water that is moving through them to the roots of their host.

Whole-system fine tuning. If the phenomena associated with biological harmony and
resonance could be understood, then such large-scale systems as global banking or global food
production could be more properly managed. The gaian biologists, Lovelock, Margulies, and
others, have argued persuasively that the entire planet has been self-organized by microbial
and planktonic life into a metastable regime favorable to biology and maintained there for over
8

two billion years. Plant-based Gaia has kept a balance throughout time and space,and in spite
of the repeated bombardment of the earth by asteroidal material sufficient to severely disrupt
the planetary equilibrium. We can only admireand we should seek to imitate such a Tao-like
sense of the planet's multidimensional homeostatic balance. But how? I suggest we look at
plantslook more deeply, more closely, and with a more open mind than we have done before.

Recycling. Like plants, we need to recycle. On a cosmic scale we are no more mobile than
plants. Until this point in history we have modeled our more successful economic systems on
animal predation. Animals can potentially move on to another resource when they exhaust the
one at hand. Since they can move to new food sources, they potentially have unlimited
resources. Plants are fixed. They can not easily move to richer nutrients or leave an area if they
foul or deplete it. They must recycle well. The fostering of a plant-based ethic that emulates the
way in which the botanical world uses and replaces resources is a sine qua non for planetary
survival. All capitalistic models models presuppose unlimited exploitable resources and labor
pools, yet neither should now be assumed. I do not know the methods, but I suggest we start
turning to the plant world to discover the right question to ask.

Photovoltaic power. Appreciation of photovoltaic power is part of the shift toward an

appreciation of the elegance of solid state that plants possess. Plants practice photosynthetic
solutions to the problems of power acquisition. Compared to the water or animal-turned
wheels, which are the Ur-methaphors for power production in the human world, the solid-state
quantum-molecular miracle that involves dropping a photon of sunlight into a molecular device
that will kick out an electron capable of energetically participating in the life of a cell seems like
extravagant science fiction. Yet this is, in fact, the principle upon which photosynthesis
operates. While the first solid-state devices arrived on the human cultural frontier in the late
1940's, solid-state engineering had been the preferred design approach of plants for some two
thousand million years. High efficiency photovoltaics could today meet the daily needs of most
people for electricity. It is the running of basic industries on solar energy that has proved
difficult. Perhaps this is nature's way of telling us that we aspire to too much manufacturing.

A global atmosphere-based economy. The approach of vegetational life to energy production is

called photosynthesis. This process could be modeled by the creation of a global economy
based on using solar energy to obtain hydrogen from seawater. Solar electricity could supply
most electricity needs, but the smelting of aluminium and steel and other energy-intensive
industrial processes make demands that photovoltaic electricity is unlikely to be able to meet.
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However, there is a solution; plants split atmospheric carbon dioxide to release energy and
oxygen as by-products. A similar but different process could use solar electricity to split water
to obtain hydrogen. This hydrogen could be collected and concentrated for later distribution.
Plants have been very successful at finding elegant solutions based on materials present at
hand; a hydrogen economy would emulate this same reliance on inexhaustible and recyclable
materials.

The notion is a simple one really; it has long been realized by planners that hydrogen is the
ideal resource to fuel a global economy. Hydrogen is clean: when burned it recombines with the
water it was chemically derived from. Hydrogen is plentiful: one-third of all water is hydrogen.
And all existing technologiesinternal combustion engines, coal-, oil-, and nuclear-fired
generatorscould be retrofitted to run on hydrogen. Thus we are not talking about having to
scrap the current standing crop of existing power production and distribution systems.
Hydrogen could be cracked from seawater at a remote island location and then moved by the
already existing technology that is used for the ocean transport of liquid natural gas from its
production points to market. The objection that hydrogen is highly explosive and that proven
technologies for handling it do not exist has largely been met by the LNG industry and its
excellent safety record. Hydrogen accidents could be extremely destructive, but they would be
ordinary explosionslocal, nontoxic, and without release of radioactivity. Like plant life itself,
the hydrogen economy would be nonpolluting and self-sustaining; burned hydrogen
recombines with oxygen to again become water.

An internal effort of extraordinary scope would be necessary to begin to move toward a proof
of concept demonstration of the feasibility of a hydrogen economy. Granted, there are many
possible problems with such a scheme. But no plan for the production on energy sufficient to
meet the demands of twenty-first century is going to be without difficulties.

Nanotechnology. The era of molecular mechanism promises the most radical of green visions,
since it proposes that human-engineered quasibiological cells and organelles take over the
manufacturing of products and culture. nanotechnology takes very seriously the notion that
manufacturing techniques and methods of manipulating matter on the microphysical scale can
affect the design process of the human-scale world. In the nanotech world, dwellings and
machines can be grown, and everything that is manufactured is closer to flesh than stone.
The distinction between living and nonliving and organic and artificial is blurred in the
10

electronic coral reef of human-machine symbiosis contemplated by the savants of

nanotechnology.

Preservation of biological diversity. The life on this planet and the chemical diversity that it
represents is likely to be the only source of biologically evolved compounds until the day that
we discover another planet as teeming with life as our own. Yet we are destroying the living
diversity of our world at an appalling rate. This must be stopped, not only through the
preservation of ecosystems but also through the preservation of information about those
ecosystems that has been accumulated over thousands of years by the people who live
adjacent to them. It is impossible to underestimate the importance for human health of
preservation of folk knowledge concerning healing plants. All the major healing drugs that have
changed history have come from living plants and fungi. Quinine made conquest of the tropics
possible, penicillin and birth control pills remade the social fabric of the twentieth century. All
three of these are plant-derived pharmaceuticals. My partner Kat and I work in this area by
managing Botanical Dimensions, a botanical garden in Hawaii that seeks to preserve the plants
utilized in Amazonian shamanism, one of the many such systems of knowledge that are fast
disappearing.

The measures outlined above would tend to promote what might be called a sense of Gaian
Holism, that is, a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position
within the dynamic and evolving balance. It is a plant-based view. This return to a perspective
on self and ego that places them within the larger context of planetary life and evolution is the
essence of the Archaic Revival. Marshall McLuhan was correct to see that planetary human
culture, the global village, would be tribal in character. The next great step toward a planetary
holism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic
matrix of vegetable intelligence that is the Overmind of the planet.

I hesitate to call this dawning awareness religious, yet that is what it surely is. And it will involve
a full exploration of the dimensions revealed by plant hallucinogens, especially those
structurally related to neurotransmitters already present and functioning in the human brain.
Careful exploration of the plant hallucinogens will probe the most archaic and sensitive level of
the drama of the emergence of consciousness; it was in the plant-human symbiotic
relationships that characterized archaic society and religion that the numinous mystery was
originally experienced. And this experience is no less mysterious for us today, in spite of the
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general assumption that we have replaced the simple awe of our ancestors with philosophical
and epistemic tools of the utmost sophistication and analytical power.

Our choice as a planetary culture is a simple one: go Green or die.

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Ordinary Language, Visible Language & Virtual Reality by Terence McKenna

Shall we talk about language?

First of all lets talk about ordinary language which is probably the closest thing to a miracle in
the natural world. It's the major neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves
and other animals and primates and it's not a physiological difference it's a difference in
behavior. Language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal and
certainly it's the most complex thing any of us ever learns to do. We're born into what William
James calls a blooming buzzing confusion, but by the acquisition of words we mosaic over
various sectors of this blooming buzzing confusion with words. We replace the unknown with
the known through the substitution of words and by the time a child is two or three they have
completely created a cultural mosaic of words that is interposed between them and reality.
Reality from that point on is only an unconfirmed rumor brought through the medium of
language and every culture accentuates different parts of reality so that in a sense every culture
is a different reality. Language is the stuff of the world, not quarks or wave-packets or
neutrinos, but language. Everything is made of language. All the constructs of science are
actually interlocking constructs of syntax. So that's ordinary language which seems to define
reality through a kind of process of lying about it. For instance by creating subject-object
distinctions which are, in fact, not true to the matter, but somehow operationally necessary for
us to navigate in the kind of lower dimensional space that we inhabit.

Then there is the phenomenon of non-ordinary, or what I call visible language and this is
very interesting to me. This is where technology, virtual-reality, cybernetics, human-machine
interfacing can actually make an impact and explore a frontier. Visual language is a
transformation of the physiological impulse towards syntax into a final product, speech, which
is not heard with the ears, but beheld with the eyes. It's very interesting that all our metaphors
of clarity of speech are visual metaphors. We say, "I see what you mean, he spoke clearly." This
means that at the organismic level we associate a higher signal clarity with visual input, and on
DMT and other tryptamine psychedelics you actually experience the field of language both
heard and self generated as something that is visibly beheld. It's almost as though the project of
communication becomes high-speed sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and
intentionality. This would remain a kind of esoteric performance on the part of shamans at the
height of intoxication if it were not for the fact that electronics and electronic cultural media,
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computers, make it possible for us to actually create records of these higher linguistic
modalities. In other words it's possible to imagine a virtual reality that was driven by a speech
operated synthesizer where the various parts of ordinary speech adjectives, modifiers, subjects
and objects were interpreted by the cybernetic environment as topological manifolds of various
shapes so that speech would then generate a visibly beheld topology and it's possible to
imagine a future world where in setting up marriage contracts or in negotiating corporate
takeovers, in areas where clear communication, clear expression of intentionality was very
important, that people would actually go into the virtual reality to use the visible language
because its capacity for conveying intent would be much greater than ordinary spoken
language. It's not for nothing that Plato connected up the notion of the Good, the True, and
ultimately, the Beautiful. The beautiful of those three concepts is the primary concept because
it is visibly beheld, because it is seen. This is the great convincing power of the psychedelic
experience.That it ultimately appeals to us through the sense that we value most. That we
existentially relate to as the most authentic and that is the visual.Visible language is a kind of
telepathy because if I make a statement in visual language and then you and I regard my
statement, we are somehow, in the act of regarding, made one. Because meaning is not being
created out of interiorized dictionaries which we each consult in the privacy of our own mind
but rather meaning is a visible manifold in the public domain. Meaning goes public and the
differences between people then decline toward being insignificant. It's a kind of final
confirmation of the McLuhan apotheosis and I think visible language is coming. Life in the
imagination is to be the life of creativity carried on through these virtual environments driven
by linguistic engines.

The star-ships of the future, in other words the vehicles of the future,which will explore the
high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the future will be poets. This
is what virtual reality holds out to usthe possibility of walking in to the constructs of the
imagination.In a way culture is that. I mean our cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art
galleries are condensations out of the imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must
make them out of matter. Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we won't
build skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high, we'll build them as high as we want. Roof
height will no longer be a factor ruled by cost effectiveness and gravity, it will be a parameter
ruled by the imagination as will all other parameters and then we will discover what man truly
iswhen we are able to erect, stabilize. share and explore our dreams in a kind of virtual
hyperspace that, carefully analyzed, is seen to be linguistic. That's what its connectors are made
out of, that's what its ferro-concrete and steel is, is the edifice of language.This is what the stuff
of the imagination is made of and I think this is what we're moving toward. The psychedelic

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shamans have always known this. Now the psychedelic underground art community points
toward this goal and leads the way.

This is a segue from yesterday's discussion about visible language. The notion being that,
well let me review what yesterday was about. It was about the idea that if we could see
language, if language were a project of understanding that used the eyes for the extraction of
meaning rather than the ears, that it would be a kind of telepathy. There would be both a
fusion of the observer with the object observed, and with the person communicated with. The
place in nature where something like this has actually evolved and occurred is in the
cephalopods; the squid and the circo-liveraloctopi.These are animals that divided from the line
of development that leads to human beings over six hundred million years ago. They're
mollusks, they're related to escargot, it's an organism very different from
ourselves.Nevertheless, one of the things that evolutionary biologists always talk about is the
convergent evolution between the eyes of cephalopods and the eyes of higher mammals. This
is because the cephalopods live in an extremely complex visual environment and in fact, they
have evolved a form of communication that approximates this visible language that I'm talking
about because these octopi have chromataphores all over the exterior of their bodies.
Chromataphores are cells that can change color. Now many people know that octopi can
change color but they think it's for camouflage, for blending in with the environment, this is not
at all the case. The reason octopi change colors in a very large repertoire of stripes, dots,
blushes, traveling shades and tonal shifts is because this is for them a channel of linguistic
communication. In other words they don't transduce their linguistic intentionality into small
mouth noises like we do. Small mouth noises which then move as sound across space in the
form of vibrations of the air. Rather,they actually change their appearance in accordance with
their linguistic intent. What this boils down to is they physically become their meaning, and one
octopus observing another is watching the unfolding of internalized neurological states within
the organism being reflected in color changes on the surface of the skin. Now these octopi not
only can change their color because their soft-bodied creatures. They can also change the
texture of their surface from smooth to rugose and folded. They can also, because they're softbodied, fold and unfold and reveal and conceal, very rapidly,different parts of their body. So
they're capable of a visual dance of communication that is an extremely dense kind of visual
signal and in the so-called benthic octopi, the species that have evolved in very deep water
where very little light reaches, they have evolved light-emitting phosphorescent organs, some
of them with membranes like eyelids over them,so that even in the darkness of the abyssal
depth of the ocean they can carry out this dance of light, self-enfoldment, color change and
surface texture which is their linguistic style. In fact the only way an octopus can experience a
private thought is to release a cloud of ink into the water into which it can retreat briefly and
15

hide its mental nakedness from its followers. This kind of biologically intrinsic wiring into the
potential of language is something that we may be able to mimic and achieve using psychedelic
drugs as the inspiration for the direction given to a virtual reality development program. In
other words we might be able to create kinds of visibly beheld syntax that would be the human
equivalent of the dance of light, texture and positioning that constitutes the grammar and
syntax of squids and octopi.

Operationally what these psychedelics do is they dissolve cultural conditioning. Cultural

conditioning is like software, but beneath the software is the hardware of brain and organism
and by dissolving the cultural conditioning to speak English, German, Swahili or whatever, then
one returns to this ur-sprach, this primal language of the animal body and can explore the real
dimension of feeling that culture has a tendency to cut us off from. Culture replaces authentic
feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window
is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light
of many colors, movement, sound, a trans-formative hierophany of integrated perception and
the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child,
"that's a bird, baby, that's a bird." Instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent
trans-formative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a
bird, this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been
carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal
ourselves in within a linguistic shell of dis-empowered perception, and what the psychedelics
do is they burst apart this cultural envelope of confinement and return us really to the legacy
and birthright of the organism.

Language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal and certainly it's the most complex
thing any of us ever learns to do.

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The Over-soul as Saucer & Open Ending - The lost chapters of True
Hallucinations by Terence McKenna

The following chapters were not included in the Harper Collins printed edition.

Chapter 20: The Over-soul as Saucer

There is building in global society an increasingly intense expectation of the intervention into
human history by UFOs. It is very similar in tone to the buildup of messianic expectation in the
Hellenistic world in the several centuries preceding the birth of Christ. The leaders of Roman
society may have been caught off guard by the appearance of Christ, but they had no one to
blame but themselves since millions of people in the ancient world were expectantly awaiting
some kind of messiah. So today, science and government coo-koo the idea of world contact
with the UFOs, while the contact cults grow ever larger and more insistent that contact is about
to occur.

Imagine, therefore, what you may never have seriously imagined before. Imagine what would
happen if the UFOs were to appear. Imagine a spaceship of the close encounters of the third
kind variety suddenly appearing in orbit around the Earth. Television and mass media would
carry its image to every man, woman and child on the planet. Governments would be
paralyzed. Science would be helpless to explain where it came from or how it got here.
Millenarian hysteria would break out everywhere. The UFO would be hailed as savior and
denounced as antichrist. The end of the world would appear imminent, and all this would occur
before the contact was more than a visual image. Then the UFO would begin its revelation. Vast
displays of beneficent power can be expected. Perhaps it would mysteriously neutralize all
weapons of mass destruction, or it might use some sort of ray to cure all terrestrial cancer.
Whatever it does one may be sure that its actions will be impressive. Its actions will convert
millions to the UFO religion in a space of hours. Indeed, its actions will be specifically designed
to overwhelm us with the reality of its power and presence. That will close the first stage of the
revelation.

The second stage will be the teachings. Telepathically imparted, the specifics of the teachings
cannot be anticipated, but they will urge love, voluntary simplicity, concern for one another,
17

renunciation of war, perhaps renunciation of the destructive application of science. Whatever

the teachings, the UFO will promise immense reward to those who follow them and dire
consequences for those who do not. And the teachings will be delivered in so poetically perfect
a way, so rich in understanding and appealing nuances that no one will doubt their origin in a
being wise and good and immensely superior to ourselves. The delivery of the teachings will set
the stage for the third and last and most shocking phase of the revelation: the departure.

The saucer, promising vaguely to return, will simply disappear. The entire process could take
less than a month. If this seems a short time recall that the entire public career of Christ lasted
only three years. Christ's career occurred in a world where information could move no faster
than a horse's gallop. Yet three years in one small part of the world was all that was necessary
to launch a world religion that was vital for 1500 years. In a world of electronic communication
the impact of the saucer's arrival, miracles, teaching and departure would be incalculable - even
if it all occurred within a month. The saucer would leave in its wake a science utterly unable to
provide any answers to the important questions concerning what had gone on. The vast
majority of people would be fanatical converts to the teachings of the saucer, and any
institution in opposition to those teachings could expect to be swept away almost overnight.
The departure of the UFO would create a sense of abandonment, the agony of which could be
expected to echo in the human psyche for centuries. The only panacea would be the religion of
the saucer, the religion left behind. Science would be discredited and soon abandoned in favor
of a thousand or more years of exegesis of the saucerian message. Is it not a familiar pattern in
the light of our discussion of Christ and Rome?

What will never be said in the wake of such an event and so must be said now while there is still
time for all of the above to occur and yet still be deception. A benign deception designed to
save us from our advanced science and infantile ethics, but a deception nevertheless. The
saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no matter how advanced its demonstrations of power,
is NOT a vehicle from some other star system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest
trick. If one knows this one can live through the revelation and the destruction of our scientific
world and yet evade the immense power of this most powerful of all transference phenomenon
and thereby maintain the integrity of one's own soul and spirit. Remember, I am not a
debunker of flying saucers or a defender of science, I am a contactee, and this book is the
painstakingly told story of my own involvement with the UFOs. I am one of those Vallee has
pinpointed as being a carrier of ideas that pave the way for the scenario I have just described.
Yet from it all I have learned that there is no religious revelation more satisfying than the hard

18

won fruits of simple understanding. And there is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself
from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

I reach these conclusions through my use and familiarity with psilocybin and other psychedelic
drugs. They immerse their user in the world of the oversoul and make one privileged to at least
a part of its mechanics of operation. They allow a private dialogue with the over-soul that is
outside the context of the struggle between science and revelation that leaves no choice
between the alienation of the rationalist and the tired formulas of the fanatic believer.
Psychedelic drugs hold out the possibility of healing the breach between science and morality
at the level of the individual, thus freeing one to evolve independent of the chaos and
transformation the UFOs may soon bring to humanity.

Vallee's recent book 'Messengers of Deception' vibrates with fear of the unconscious and
alienation from the matrix of the larger psyche out of which rational thought has emerged. He
fears the destruction of rationalism and scientific thought, yet never once does he mention the
potential world wrecking crisis that the undirected development of science and technology has
brought into being. He paints himself as an open-minded investigator of UFOs, yet never
questions the motives of the retired and unnamed intelligence officers in which he places so
much faith. It is impossible that the CIA is unaware of the social impact belief in UFOs is having?
If they were unaware of it before then surely the recent writings of Vallee himself must have
alerted them to the potential challenge UFO beliefs pose to orthodox institutions. Based on
Vallee's own ideas of an informational struggle between rational and irrational elements, how
was he able to ignore the possibility that the mutilations which he is so eager to connect with
UFOs are nothing more that a government agency's clumsy attempt to discredit the genuine
UFO phenomenon? It is a typical method of the intelligence community to discredit human
groups it opposes by faking atrocities in such a way that they appear to have been committed
by the group whose discrediting is sought. Vallee gives examples of this but never suspects that
some government agency might be using this technique to impede the transfer of loyalties
from political institutions to the UFOs. He mentions the proximity of animal mutilations to highsecurity government installations but never suggests this might be because such installations
are the source of these mutilations.

Few UFO sightings involve confusion among witnesses over whether or not what they saw was
a UFO or a helicopter. Yet in the animal mutilation cases many witnesses insist a helicopter was
involved. Vallee is at pains to say no physical evidence of a UFO has ever been collected. Yet
19

later he passes over the fact that a quite ordinary surgical scalpel was found at one cattle
mutilation site. It seems possible to me that some people in government have read Vallee and
are familiar with his theories regarding UFOs as a factor introducing shifts in belief systems and
institutional loyalties on a global scale. Without knowing what UFOs really are these persons
and agencies have launched smokescreen operations designed to cast doubt on the motives
and harmlessness of UFOs and so to retard or halt the shift of loyalties and beliefs now reaching
epidemic proportions. I suspect that Vallee's book may be the opening shot in a media war
whose purpose will be to connect the occult, right-wing fanaticism, and animal mutilations to
the UFO, all in an effort to cast doubt on the vast power and benign intent of the saucer
phenomenon. Vallee's title 'Messengers of Deception' bears a curious resemblance to J. Edgar
Hoover's 'Masters of Deceit'. There the boogey man was communism. In Vallee's book we are
told the new boogey man is UFO phenomenon. Who chose the title for Vallee's book? Was it
Vallee or the mysterious major who was so helpful in guiding Vallee down these new avenues
of speculation? I believe that Vallee whether wittingly or unwittingly is himself a messenger of
deception and has become the spearhead of a conscious effort to sow even deeper confusion in
society regarding UFOs.

We might say it is an effort foredoomed to failure. The collective over-mind of our species is the
source of the UFO and its designs cannot be deflected or turned aside. Its viewpoint is one of
thousands of years and its means visionary and charismatic belief systems which act to restore
the balance between understanding of and reverence for the universe is a message more
powerful than any offered by the profane materialist societies that have grown so foolish as to
imagine themselves the stewards of human destiny. Humanity alone and each of us individual is
the steward of human destiny. This is the real meaning of the UFOs and the experiment at La
Chorrera.

Chapter 21: Open Ending

My own ideas concerning the mechanics by which the over-soul creates the UFO encounters
might take the following form. Dimethyltriptamine when smoked, snuffed, or injected induces a
brief and extremely intense psychedelic experience whose overwhelming sense of contact with
the Other is unparalleled. For the last decade or so this extraordinary property of DMT has
made it seem to many who sought a chemical basis for schizophrenia as the long sought
schizotoxin. Studies have proved inconclusive however. DMT concentration has not been
proven to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls. Studies have established the
presence of DMT in the human body, however the origin and significance of the DMT is
20

unknown. Although it may reflect endogenous synthesis, it could also result from diet, bacterial
byproducts, human laboratory error, or other sources. Bearing in mind the bizarre power of the
DMT experience, its presence and unknown role in human metabolism, add one more fact: the
strange aura of suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense hallucination phase of
the DMT experience. This period of suggestibility may last 15 seconds to a minute, and is a time
during which the assumptions which the experient projects concerning the unusual shift of
sensory input acquires enormous power. A few moments later the power of the now numinous
assumption overwhelms the consciousness of the observer with a scenario while totally bizarre
and outrageous nevertheless is somehow a complete psychological fulfillment of the
expectations formed in the few minutes of transition that preceded the visionary engulfment.

What I am proposing is that something like this happens during a UFO close encounter and the
cause may very well be something which must be partially sought in the human organism.
Imagine a person wandering alone in unfamiliar country: suddenly there's a hackle-raising
sense of weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the limbs, followed by a clearing of vision and
a loud crackling sound. At this point the sense of strangeness within and without the body
would trigger a fear reaction in most people. The fear reaction causes a rapid and automatic
search for a culturally-validated explanation of what is going on, and an explanation will always
be found. It may range from, "I am being bewitched by a demon," to "Surely it is a visitation of
the Holy Mother," to "My God! It must be a UFO!" In each case the abandonment of the ego to
a culturally prescribed explanation of the experience of the Other causes the experience to
exfoliate, exploit and elaborate all the themes that the culture's current myth of the Other
entails. It is known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced into the
human body. Is it not possible that we human beings are occasionally susceptible to a kind of
visionary seizure? When for reasons of stress or diet these factors combine with psychodynamic factors to initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT? Pheromones may play a
part in this experience and isolation may be its trigger. Whatever its cause, our conditioning as
individuals causes the experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the
deepest concerns and yearnings of the current culture toward the Other. In our own time this
has given rise to the hope of friendly visiting extraterrestrials. As late as 1917 the miracle at
Fatima was interpreted worldwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today it would surely
be hailed as an extraterrestrial contact. If my suggestion regarding DMT were found to be
correct, it would provide insight into the way in which the cultural feedback thermostat
explanation of UFOs put forth by Vallee and others actually works. Those people who
experience the DMT seizure and are plunged into the current myth of the Other actually return
as apostles of that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by those means to exert the tuning
and control of historical development that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs.
21

Stress, generalized as an impending sense of historical crisis, may be the factor that induces the
UFO/close-contact experience. As the historical crisis deepens the number of contacts will
increase until the atemporal portion of the mass psyche has effected enough individuals that
there is actually a turning away from the stress-causing course of action. How well is the
Superego able to play the role of God? Can it come in saucerian splendor to save the world
from the flames at the end of time? Or can it only beckon and warn with visions and dire
prophesy? These are questions that we might answer if we diligently explore the states of mind
that DMT and psilocybin make available. Perhaps the UFO encounters involve nothing more
than an autonomous and negative psychic complex able to emerge during the situation of
unusual energy dynamics induced in the psyche by psilocybin. However, a different explanatory
approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum whose modalities bisect each
other with equal ease. This is the approach which grants the phenomenological existence of the
constructs seen in the Stropharia trance and in UFO encounters. Indeed, the vast and dreamy
world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may merge imperceptibly into
autonomously existing worlds we would call 'hyperdimensional', indicating the paradox of their
simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence
which belies the term hallucination.

Ahead of us lies the future, where we can expect the ingression of the alternative dimension to
intensify. It is therefore important for us to have a sense of the powers in that Other world and
their shifting agencies. In a traditional society, our exploration of these matters would be firmly
imbedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these forces. Techniques tried and true
would be available to fortify our psychic constitution. Since we are members of a profane
society whose relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have no such
consolation. No dispelling ritual or words of proven self-empowerment. By reason and intuition
we must attempt to conquer the fears that attend journeys into the unknown. But reason and
intuition need data with which to construct maps of reality. If we outdistance the inflow of fact
we move beyond the safety zone of the conjuring rod of intuition and reason. For these reasons
we move slowly and steadily. We are human factors in a multi- variable equation where the
shift of unseen parameters can trigger large perturbations and resonances of unexpected types.
Knowing this, and knowing how little we do know, we should be excused for this defense of
caution when taking to ourselves the visions which the Stropharia brings.

Carl Jung's 'MysteriumConiunctionis' reminds us of the reality of the situation that insues once
the psyche is hooked into making the transference to the alchemical or saucerian goal. Jung,
citing Gerhart Dorn, stresses that the materialization of the stone is only a prologue to the
22

experience of the perfected self in a state of illumination. Jung wrote, "Though we know from
experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say
in what this relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psyche and
the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical
somewhere beyond our present experience." Of what does this relationship consist? My own
hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimension - of a co-dimension inclusive
of our continuum - allows a hologram of other realized forms of organization, far distant, to
become visible at certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels have
been damped by selection in favor of more directly relevant lines of information relating to
animal survival. Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at
a distance since such an ability has no selective advantage, unless the information it conveys
falls upon the receptors of an organism already sophisticated enough in its use of symbols to
abstract concepts for later application in different contexts.

Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a distance only begin to
acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has already achieved sufficient sophistication to
be called conscious and mind-possessing. The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at
medical engineering which amplifies, for inspection by consciousness, the quantum resonance
of the other parts of the spatial continuum holographically at hand. This experience is the vision
which the UFOs and psilocybin impart: visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives and
societies, machines, ruins, landscapes. The hierophanies all unfold in anunc-stans that has all
space standing in it like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by human
beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the
primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination.
Imagination being the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually
existing in the present at hand.

The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the ideological content of
specific visions that empirical attention should center. What are the working details of the
worlds whose presence impinges on ours so strongly? What of the beings sometimes
confronted often furtively sensed, who seem to have some existence in a world of their own
revealed by the psilocybin and in UFO contact? There may exist a vast communication network
in the topological nature of things. A network that becomes a fact only for those species or
individuals who will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by them be
found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To
validate the idea of the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance one must emerge with some
23

idea spawned by the visionary Other but with a utility in the here and now. The wave
quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in
completeness. It took years to elaborate and its relation to the here and now is still elusive.
Fragmentary themes abound: symbiosis, saucer-lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the
higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference and fantasy. In the
classical sense of the word the experimenter with hallucinogens pursues gnosis: privileged
knowledge concerning nature and vouchsafed by her in ecstasy.

The history of consciousness is the halting exploration of the once irrational images and
processes met in dreams and trance. Such images become concepts and discoveries as
information flows through the multiple-continuum of being seeking equilibrium, yet
paradoxically carrying everywhere images of ways the flow towards entropy was locally
reversed by this being or that society or phenomenon. We are immersed in a holographic ocean
of places and ideas. We can understand this to whatever depth we are able. The ocean of
images and the intricacy of their connections is infinite. It is perhaps why great genius precedes
by apparent leaps. Because the revolutionary idea which inspires the genius comes upon one
complete, entire by itself, from the ocean of mind. History is the story of the search for the
intuitive leap that will reveal the very mechanism of that other dimension. The need for such a
leap by humanity will grow as we exhaust complexity in all realms save the micro-physical and
the psychological. My own method has been immersion in the images and self- examination of
the phenomenon of tryptaminehallucinogenesis. This means taking the Strophariapsilocybe and
pondering just what this all may mean. With confidence that as more people come to share this
experience time will deepen our understanding, if not answer all questions. For psilocybin
argues that hallucinogens are windows into higher dimensions. That even as a cone can yield
circle, ellipse or parabola to an act of two-dimensional sectioning and yet remain intrinsically a
cone, so reality is something that changes according to the angle of regarding. It argues that
human beings are many forms over vast scales of time, that all life is unified at some level, and
all intelligence in the universe are but facets of the mystery called humanness.

In probing the Other we shall always come back with images of ourselves. In probing ourselves
we shall return with images of the Other. In the phenomenon of being itself no less than in the
phenomenon of the UFO encounters we are merely privileged observers of a relationship
between what is naively called the world and the trans-personal portion of the human psyche.
How this relationship came to be, and what its limitations are, we cannot know until we gain
access to the trans-personal and atemporal part of the psyche. Of what this consists we do not
know and no hypothesis can be ruled out. My hunch is that if we could really comprehend
24

death then we could understand the UFO. But that neither can be understood unless they are
looked at in light of the question, what is humanness? I believe that the trans-personal
component of the human psyche is not distinct from matter and that therefore it can literally
do anything. It is not subject to the will of any individual. It has a will and an understanding that
is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals who compose it as
cells compose a body. It has a plan, glimpsed by individuals only as vision or religious
hierophany. Nevertheless, the plan is unfolding. There will be many more UFO sightings, many
more close contacts. Our belief systems are undergoing accelerated evolution via increased
input from the other. Somewhere ahead of us there is a critical barrier where we will at last
have enough data to obtain an integrating insight into the riddle of humanity's relation to the
UFO. I believe that as this happens the childhood of our species will pass away and when this is
done we will be free to use the staggering understanding that humankind and the UFO are one.

Excerpt from the Talking Book version of Terence McKenna's "True Hallucinations."

Cover of The Talking Book version of Terence McKenna's "True Hallucinations."

25

New & Old Maps of Hyperspace by Terence McKenna

In James Joyce's *Ulysses*, Stephen Dedalus tells us, "History is the nightmare from which I am
trying to awaken". I would turn this around and say that history is what we are trying to escape
from into dream. The dream is eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history.
We wish to escape into the dream. Escape is a key thing charged against those who would
experiment with plant hallucinogens. The people who make this charge hardly dare face the
degree to which hallucinogens are escapist. Escape. Escape from the planet, from death, from
habit, and from the problem, if possible, of the Unspeakable.

If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience as it unfolded in Europe
and America, and examines the phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its
ramifications - Neoplatonic, Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, one finds repeatedly the
idea that there is a light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life
and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate. One part loses its
*raison d'etre* and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops. The other part goes we know not
where. Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does not exist; but then one has the problem of
trying to explain life. And, though science makes great claims and has done well at explaining
simple atomic systems, the idea that science can make *any* statement about what life is or
where it comes from is currently preposterous.

Science has nothing to say about how one can decide to close one's hand into a fist, and yet it
happens. This is utterly outside the realm of scientific explanation because what we see in that
phenomenon is mind as a first cause. It is a example of telekinesis: matter is caused by mind to
move. So we need not fear the sneers of science in the matter of the fate or origin of the soul.
My probe into this area has always been the psychedelic experience, but recently I have been
investigating dreams, because dreams are a much more generalized form of experience of the
hyperdimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded.

Looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes to the
realization that for these people dream reality is experientially a parallel continuum. The
shaman accesses this continuum with hallucinogens as well as with other techniques, but most
effectively with hallucinogens. Everyone else accesses it through dreams. Freud's idea about
26

dreams was that they were what he called "day-residues", and that one could trace the content
of a dream down to a distortion of something that happened during waking time.

I suggest that it is much more useful to try to make a geometric model of consciousness, to take
seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and to say that the mind and the body are embedded
in the dream and the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep, one is released into
the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense.
There is a plenum - recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this up - a holographic
plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternity - an eternity that does not have a
temporal existence about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal
duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind
of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are
hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our
physical organism.

At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form
breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against
entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that
ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the
shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and
the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become
familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment
of passing from life. The metaphor of a vehicle - an after-death vehicle, an astral body - is used
by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly
that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of
dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will
know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a
problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it
through ignorance.

Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth - the metaphor is
trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poetmystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from
the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment - a crisis of passage - and
27

the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to
strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is
the traditional position.

I want to include an abyss in this model - one less familiar to rationalists, but familiar to us all
one level deeper in the psyche as inheritors of the Judeo-Christian culture. That is the idea that
the world will end, that there will be a final time, that there is not only the crisis of the death of
the individual but also the crisis of death in the history of the species.

What this seems to be about is that from the time of the awareness until the resolution of the
apocalyptic potential, there are roughly one hundred thousand years. In biological time, this is
only a moment, yet it is ten times the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in
the balance, because it is a mad rush from hominid to starflight. In the leap across those one
hundred thousand years, energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies
evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all of these concerns that control power with
greater and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear. Ever present is the possibility of
aborting the species' transformation into a hyperspatial entelechy.

We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final historical seconds of that crisis - a crisis that
involves the end of history, our departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the
release of the individual from the body. We are, in fact, closing distance with the most
profound event a planetary ecology can encounter - the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of
matter. The old metaphor of psyche as the caterpillar transformed by metamorphosis is a
specieswide analogy. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of
the historical forces already set in motion.

Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an unevolving species. Some time in the last fifty
thousand years, with the invention of culture, the biological evolution of humans ceased and
evolution became an epigenetic, cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies
began to evolve, but the human somatotype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very
much like people of a long time ago. But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity,
correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological
material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental
28

filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral
animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making
implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in
three-dimensional space. The body can become an internalized holographic object embedded
in a solid-state, hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through a true
Elysium.

This is a kind of Islamic paradise in which one is free to experience all the pleasures of the flesh
provided one realizes that one is a projection of a holographic solid-state matrix that is
microminiaturized, superconducting, and nowhere to be found: it is part of the plenum. All
technological history is about producing prototypes of this situation with greater and greater
closure toward the ideal, so that airplanes, automobiles, space shuttles, space colonies,
starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type are, as MirceaEliade said, "self-transforming
images of flight that speak volumes about man's aspiration to self-transcendence."

Our wish, our salvation, and our only hope is to end the historical crisis by becoming the alien,
by ending alienation, by recognizing the alien as the Self, in fact - recognizing the alien as an
Overmind that holds all the physical laws of the planet intact in the same way that one holds an
idea intact in one's thoughts. The givens that are thought to be writ in adamantine are actually
merely the moods of the Goddess, whose reflection we happen to be. The whole meaning of
human history lies in recovering this piece of lost information so that man may be dirigible or,
to paraphrase James Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* on Moicane, the red light district of Dublin:
"Here in Moicane we flop on the seamy side, but up n'ent, prospector, you sprout all your
worth and you woof your wings, so if you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked." It is that
simple, you see, but it takes courage to be parked when the Grim Reaper draws near. "A
blessing in disguise", Joyce calls him.

What psychedelics encourage, and where I hope attention will focus once hallucinogens are
culturally integrated to the point where large groups of people can plan research programs
without fear of persecution, is the modeling of the after-death state. Psychedelics may do more
than model this state; they may reveal the nature of it. Psychedelics will show us that the
modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within
the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experiences of the Other. There is no
dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed through light-years of three29

dimensional universe, and the interior mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same
thing.

We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the code we
customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has built-in dualisms. This is a
problem of language. All codes have relative code qualities, except the Logos. The Logos is
perfect and, therefore, partakes of no quality other than itself. I am here using the word
*Logos* in the sense in which Philo Judaeus uses it - that of the Divine Reason that embraces
the archetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As long as one
maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems of code quality. The dualism
built into our language makes the death of the species and the death of the individual appear to
be opposed things. Likewise, the scenarios that biology has created through examining the
physical universe versus the angel- and demon-haunted worlds that depth psychology is
reporting is also a dichotomy. The psychedelic experience acts to resolve this dichotomy. All
that is needed to go beyond an academic understanding of the plant hallucinogens is the
experience of the tryptamine- induced ecstasy. The dimethyltryptamine (DMT) molecule has
the unique property of releasing the structured ego into the Overself. Each person who has that
experience undergoes a mini-apocalypse, a mini-entry and mapping into hyperspace. For
society to focus in this direction, nothing is necessary except for this experience to become an
object of general concern.

This is not to suggest that everyone should experiment with mushrooms or other naturally
occurring sources of psychoactive tryptamines. We should try to assimilate and integrate the
psychedelic experience since it is a plane of experience that is directly accessible to each of us.
The role that we play in relationship determines how we will present ourselves in that final,
intimated transformation. In other words, in this notion there is a kind of teleological bias;
there is a belief that there is a hyperobject called the Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow
into time. History is our group experience of this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the
source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is
happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.

One way of thinking of this is to suppose that the waking world and the world of the dream
have begun to merge so that in a certain sense the school of UFO criticism that has said flying
sources are hallucinations was correct in that the laws that operate in the dream, the laws that
operate in hyperspace, can at times operate in three-dimensional space when the barrier
30

between the two modes becomes weak. Then one gets these curious experiences, sometimes
called psychotic breaks, that always have a tremendous impact on the experiment because
there seems to be an exterior component that could not possibly be subjective. At such times
coincidences begin to build and build until one must finally admit that one does not know what
is going on. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to claim that this is a psychological phenomenon,
because there are accompanying changes in the external world. Jung called this "synchronicity"
and made a psychological model of it, but it is really an alternative physics beginning to impinge
on local reality.

The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no
antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of
relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to
imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never
mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. There is an
experience of time zero. So if one imagines for a moment oneself to be made of light, or in
possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light, one can traverse from any point in
the universe to any other with a subjective experience of time zero. This means that one
crosses to Alpha Centauri in time zero, but the amount of time that has passed in the relativistic
universe is four and a half years. But if one moves very great distances, if one crosses two
hundred and fifty thousand light-years to Andromeda, one would still have a subjective
experience of time zero.

The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time that is created by one's
own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian universe there is no time
whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become eternal, the universe is aging at a
staggering rae all around one in this situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into the
eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of
eternity.

I believe that this is what technology pushes toward. There is no contradiction between
ecological balance and space migration, between hypertechnology and radical ecology. These
issues are red herrings; the real historical entity that is becoming imminent is the human soul.
The monkey body has served to carry us to this moment of release, and it will always serve as a
focus of self-image, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human
31

imagination. This is what is meant by the return to the Father, the transcendence of *physis*,
the rising out of the Gnostic universal prison of iron that traps the light: nothing less than the
transformation of our species.

Very shortly an acceleration of this phenomenon will take place in the form of space
exploration and space colonies. The coral-reef-like animal called Man that has extruded
technology over the surface of the earth will be freed from the constraints of anything but the
imagination and the limitations of materials. It has been suggested that the earliest space
colonies include efforts to duplicate the idyllic ecosystem of Hawaii as an ideal. These exercises
in ecological understanding will prove we know what we are doing. However, as soon as this
understanding is under control we will be released into the realm of art. This is what we have
always striven for. We will make our world - all of our worlds - and the world we came from will
be maintained as a garden. What Eliade discussed as metaphors of self-transforming flight will
be realized shortly in the technology of space colonization.

The transition from earth to space will be a staggeringly tight genetic filter, a much tighter filter
than any previous frontier has ever been, including the genetic and demographic filter
represented by the colonization of the New World. It has been said that the vitality of the
Americas is due to the fact that only the dreamers and the pioneers and the fanatics made the
trip across. This will be even more true of the transition to space. The technological conquest of
space will set the stage; then, for the internalization of that metaphor, it will bring the conquest
of inner space and the collapse of the state vectors associated with this technology deployed in
Newtonian space. Then the human species will have become more than dirigible.

A technology that would internalize the body and exteriorize the soul will develop parallel to
the move to space. *The Invisible Landscape*, a book by my brother and myself, made an effort
to short-circuit that chronology and, in a certain sense, to force the issue. It is the story, or
rather it is the intellectual underpinnings of the story, of an expedition to the Amazon by my
brother and myself and several other people in 1971. During that expedition, my brother
formulated an idea that involved using harmine and harmaline, compounds that occur in
*Banisteriopsiscaapi*, the woody vine that is the basis for *ayahuasca*. We undertook an
effort to use harmine in conjunction with the human voice in what we called "the experiment at
La Chorrera". It was an effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of harmine
molecules metabolizing in the body in such a way that they would bind preferentially and
permanently with endogenous molecular structures.
32

Our candidate at the time was neural DNA, though Frank Barr, a researcher into the properties
of brain melanin, has made a convincing case that there is as great a likelihood that harmine
acts by binding with melanin bodies. In either case, the pharmacology involves binding with a
molecular site where information is stored, and this information is then broadcast in such a way
that one begins to get a mental readout on the structure of the soul. Our experiment was an
effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the cat, if you will, to hang a
superconducting, telemetric device on the Overmind so that there would be a continuous
readout of information from that dimension. The success or failure of this attempt may be
judged for oneself.

The first half of the book describes the theoretical underpinnings of the experiment. The
second half describes the theory of the structure of time that derived from the bizarre mental
states that followed the experiment. I do not claim that we succeeded, only that our theory of
what happened is better than any theory proposed by critics. Whether we succeeded or not,
this style of thinking points the way. For example, when I speak of the technology of building a
starship, I imagine it will be done with voltages far below the voltage of a common flashlight
battery. This is, after all, where the most interesting phenomena go on in nature. Thought is
that kind of phenomenon; metabolism is that kind of phenomenon.

A new science that places the psychedelic experience at the center of its program of
investigation should move toward a practical realization of this goal - the goal of eliminating the
barrier between the ego and the Overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of
the Overself. Then the anxiety of facing a tremendous biological crisis in the form of the
ecocrises, and the crisis of limitation in physical space forced upon us by our planet- bound
situation, can be obviated by cultivating the soul and by practicing a new shamanism using
tryptamine-containing plants.

Psilocybin is the most commonly available and experientially accessible of these compounds.
Therefore my plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may read these words is
this: look again at psilocybin, do not confuse it with the other psychedelics, and realize that it is
a phenomenon unto itself with an enormous potential for transforming human beings - not
simply transforming the people who take it, but transforming society in the way that an art
movement, a mathematical understanding, or a scientific breakthrough transforms society. It
holds the possibility of transforming the entire species simply by virtue of the information that
33

comes through it. Psilocybin is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in
the Western mind for at least a thousand years.

When the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, they
immediately set about stamping out the mushroom religion. The Indians called it
*teonanacatl*, "the flesh of the gods". The Catholic church had a monopoly on theophagia and
was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on. Now, four hundred years
after that initial contact, I suggest that Eros, which retreated from Europe with the rise of
Christianity, retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca. Finally, pushed into seclusion
there, it now reemerges in Western consciousness.

Our institutions, our epistemologies are bankrupt and exhausted; we must start anew and hope
that with the help of shamanically inspired personalities, we can cultivate this ancient mystery
once again. The Logos can be unleashed, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and
Heraclitus can speak again in the minds of modern people. When it does, the alienation will be
ended because we will have become the alien. This is the promise that is held out; it may seem
to some a nightmare vision, but all historical changes of immense magnitude have a charged
emotional quality. They propel people into a completely new world.

I believe that this work must be done using hallucinogens. Traditionally it has been thought that
there were many paths to spiritual advancement. In this matter I must fall back on personal
experience. I have not had good results with any other techniques. I spent time in India,
practiced yoga, visited among the various rishis, roshis, geysheys, and gurus that Asia had to
offer, and I believe they must be talking about something so pale and removed from closure
with the full tryptamine ecstasy that i don't really know what to make of them and their wan
hierophanies.

Tantra claims to be another approach. Tantra means "the short-cut path", and certainly it might
be on the right track. Sexuality, orgasm, these things do have tryptaminelike qualities to them,
but the difference between psilocybin and all other hallucinogens is information - immense
amounts of information.

34

LSD seemed somehow to be largely related to the structure of the personality. Often it seemed
to me the visions were merely geometric patterns unless synergized by another compound. The
classic psychedelic experience that was written about by Aldous Huxley was two hundred
micrograms of LSD and thirty milligrams of mescaline. That combination delivers a visionary
experience rather than an experience of hallucinations. In my opinion the unique quality of
psilocybin is that it reveals not colored lights and moving grids, but places - jungles, cities,
machines, books, architectonic forms of incredible complexity. There is no possibility that this
could be construed as neurological noise of any sort. It is, in fact the most highly ordered visual
information that one can experience, much more highly ordered than the normal waking vision.

That's why it's very hard with psychedelic compounds to bring back information. These things
are hard to English because it is like trying to make a three-dimensional rendering of a fourthdimensional object. Only through the medium of sight can the true modality of this Logos be
perceived. That is why it is so interesting that psilocybin and *ayahuasca* - the aboriginal
tryptamine-containing brew - both produce a telepathic experience and a shared state of mind.
The unfolding group hallucination is shared in complete silence. It's hard to prove this to a
scientist, but if several people share such an experience, one person can describe it and then
cease the monologue and another person may then take it up. Everyone is seeing the same
thing! It is the quality of being complex visual information that makes the Logos a vision of a
truth that cannot be told.

The information thus imparted is not, however, merely restricted to the mode of seeing. The
Logos is capable of going from a thing heard to a thing seen, without ever crossing through a
discernible transition point. This seems a logical impossibility; yet when one actually has the
experience, one sees - aha! - it is as though thought that is heard does become something seen.
The thought that is heard becomes more and more intense until, finally, its intensity is such
that, with no transition, one is now beholding it in three- dimensional, visual space. One
commands it. This is very typical of psilocybin.

Naturally, whenever a compound is introduced into the body, one must exercise caution and be
well informed with regard to possible side effects. Professional psychedelic investigators are
aware of these factors and freely acknowledge that the obligation to be well informed is of
primary importance. Speaking for myself, let me say that I am not an abuser. It takes me a long
time to assimilate each visionary experience. I have never lost my respect for these dimensions.
Dread is one of the emotions that I feel as I approach the experience. Psychedelic work is like
35

sailing out onto a dark ocean in a little skiff. One may view the moon rising serenely over the
calm black water, or something the size of a freight train may roar right through the scene and
leave one clinging at an oar.

The dialogue with the other is what makes repetition of these experiences seem worthwhile.
The mushroom speaks to you when you speak to it. In the introduction to the book that my
brother and I wrote (under pseudonyms) called *Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide*,
there is a mushroom monologue that begins: "I am old, fifty times older than thought in your
species, and I came from the stars." Sometimes it's very human. My approach to it is Hasidic. I
rave at it; it raves at me. We argue about what it is going to cough up and what it isn't. I say,
"Well, look, I'm the propagator, you can't hold back on me," and it says, "But if I showed you
the flying saucer for five minutes, you would figure out how it works", and I say, "Well, come
through." It has many manifestations. Sometimes it's like Dorothy of Oz; sometimes it's like a
very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker. I asked it once, "What are you doing on Earth?" It said,
"Listen, if you're a mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I'm telling you, this was a very nice
neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control."

"Monkeys out of control": that is the mushroom voice's view of history. To us, history is
something very different. History is the shock wave of eschatology. In other words, we are living
in a very unique moment, ten or twenty thousand years long, where an immense transition is
happening. The object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into eternal
tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO. It is that mystery that casts its shadow
back through time. All religion, all philosophy, all wars, pogroms, and persecutions happen
because people do not get the message right. There is both the forward-flowing casuistry of
being, causal determinism, and the interference pattern that is formed against that by the
backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyperobject throwing its shadow across the
temporal landscape. We exist, yet there is a great deal of noise. This situation called history is
totally unique; it will last only a moment, it began a moment ago. In that moment there is a
tremendous burst of static as the monkey goes to godhood, as the final eschatological object
mitigates and transforms the forward flow of entropic circumstance.

Life is central to the career of organization in matter. I reject the idea that we have been
shunted onto a siding called organic existence and that our actual place is in eternity. This mode
of existence is an important part of the cycle. It is filter. There is the possibility of extinction, the
possibility of falling into *physis* forever, and so in that sense the metaphor of the fall is valid.
36

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple
as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward
being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study
superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking
clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much
information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a
good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.

We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as

such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness.
Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the
way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure selfengineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came
from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.

Time is the notion that gives ideas such as these their power, for they imply a new conception
of time. During the experiment at La Chorrera, the Logos demonstrated that time is not simply
a homogeneous medium where things occur, but a fluctuating density of probability. Though
science can sometimes tell us what can happen and what cannot happen, we have no theory
that explains why, out of everything that could happen, certain things undergo what Whitehead
called "the formality of actually occurring." This was what the Logos sought to explain, why out
of all the myriad things that could happen, certain things undergo the formality of occurring. It
is because there is a modular hierarchy of waves of temporal conditioning, or temporal density.
A certain event, rated highly improbable, is more probable at some moments than at others.

Taking that simple perception and being led by the Logos, I was able to construct a fractal
model of time that can be programmed on a computer and that gives a map of the ingression of
what I call "novelty" - the ingression of novelty into time. As a general rule, novelty is obviously
increasing. It has been since the very beginning of the universe. Immediately following the Big
Bang there was only the possibility of nuclear interaction, and then, as temperatures fell below
the bond strength of the nucleus, atomic systems could be formed. Still later, as temperatures
fell further, molecular systems appeared. Then much later, life became possible; then vrey
complex life forms evolved, thought became possible, culture was invented. The invention of
printing and electronic information transfer occurred.
37

What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called
"concrescence", a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis", the
alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws
of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum,
the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into *physis*
as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my
view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict
that concrescence will occur soon - around 2012 A.D. It will be the entry of our species into
hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the
mind into the imagination.

All these images - the starship, the space colony, the lapis - are precursory images. They follow
naturally from the idea that history is the shock wave of eschatology. As closes distance with
the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing
itself. In the final moment the Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more reflections of
the Mystery. The Mystery in all its nakedness is seen, and nothing else exists. But what it is,
decency can safely scarcely hint; nevertheless, it is the crowning joy of futurism to seek
anticipation of it.

This lecture was originally presented to the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley,
CA some time during November of 1982.

In 1989 it was published in Magical Blend magazine and Archaic Revival.

38

From the Grasslands to the Starship - Excerpt from Food of the Gods by Terence
McKenna

Human history has been a fifteen-thousand-year dash from the equilibrium of the African
cradle to the twentieth-century apotheosis of delusion, devaluation, and mass death. Now we
stand of the brink of star flight, virtual reality technologies, and a revivified shamanism that
heralds the abandonment of the monkey body and tribal group that has always been our
context. The age of imagination is dawning. The shamanic plants and the worlds that they
reveal are the worlds from which we imagine that we came long ago, worlds of light and power
and beauty that in some form or another lie behind the eschatological visions of all of the
worlds great religions. We can claim this prodigal legacy only as quickly as we can remake our
language and ourselves.

Remaking our language means rejecting the image of ourselves inherited from dominator
culturethat of a creature guilty of sin and hence deserving of exclusion from paradise.
Paradise is our birthright and can be claimed by any one of us. Nature is not our enemy, to be
raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has
always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that
the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching
entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty
and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.

We Await Ourselves within the Vision

We can now move toward a new vision of ourselves and our role in nature. We are the omniadaptable species, we are the thinkers, the makers, and the solvers of problems. These great
gifts that are ours alone and which come out of the evolutionary matrix of the planet are not
for usour convenience, our satisfaction, our greater glory. They are for life; they are the
special qualities that we can contribute to the great community of organic being, if we are to
become the care giver, the gardener, and the mother of our mother, which is the living earth.

39

Here there is great mystery. In the middle of the slow-moving desert of unreflecting nature we
come upon ourselves and perhaps see ourselves for the first time. We are colorful,
cantankerous, and alive with hopes and dreams that, so far as we know, are unique in the
universe. We have been too long asleep and shackled by the power we have ceded to the least
noble parts of ourselves and the least noble among us. It is time that we stood up and faced the
fact that we must and can change our minds.

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. Now the air is hushed and
the east is streaked with the rosy blush of dawn. Yet in the world we have always known
evening grows deeper and the shadows lengthen toward a night that will know no end. One
way or another the story of the foolish monkey is nearly forever over. Our destiny is to turn
without regret from what has been, to face ourselves, our parents, lovers, and children, to
gather our tool kits, our animals, and the old, old dreams, so that we may move out across the
visionary landscape of ever-deeper understanding. Hopefully there, where we have always
been most comfortable, most ourselves, we will find glory and triumph in the search for
meaning in the endless life of the imagination, at play at last in the fields of an Eden refound.

Terence McKenna by Robert Venosa

40

The Great Timestream Bifurcation by Terence McKenna

"This is not necessarily the truth, this is what Wittgenstein would have called an exercise in
searching for that which is true enough."

"Because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where
we're going in the universe."

Here is a true enough myth of our world. It begins with the notion of a soliton of
improbability. Let us imagine that these are events which only happen once, and since they
only happen once they are not legitimate objects for scientific inquiry because objects of
scientific inquiry must happen at least twice. But this is a phenomenon which happens only
once and we can visualize it as a kind of particle. These solitons of the utterly improbable
crisscross the universe occasionally colliding with an existing event system. When they collide
with an existing event system, that event system bifurcates into two event systems in order to
preserve a kind of parity of probability - a term I invented that need not be taken seriously. But
in the pursuit of the preservation of the parity of probability, the soliton creates a temporal
bifurcation.

OK, we have reached the top of the steep learning curve in this concept system. Now here's
the good news: the soliton of improbability which interacted with our world occurred two
thousand years ago in the phenomenon of the Immaculate Conception. An event that I think
you and I can agree is highly improbable! But let us take it at face value and see if we can work
with it. When the Immaculate Conception occurred through the collision of the soliton of
improbability with this Galilean village girl called Marian or Mary, in one world she became
impregnated with a figure destined for a great religious and political future: our world. The
world in which Christ was born, became a young man, taught his message, and went to his
execution around 27 AD. Another world sprang into existence at the moment of the
Immaculate Conception and in that world nothing whatsoever happened to this young Galilean
girl. She continued to live with Joseph. He continued to make fine furniture. Eventually they
were able to move to the better side of Nazareth. And that was their story.

41

So you see I'm suggesting that at the time of Christ, a parallel world came into existence that
knew nothing of Christ. And consequently the forces which shattered Roman civilization never
came into existence in that parallel world. Instead, Greek science and mathematics continued
to enrich Roman engineering, government, and theories of civil polity. Roman civilization
continued to develop. The wonderful female mathematical genius Hypathia was able to
complete her career. She was stoned to death by Christians in our world, yet in the parallel
world she lived to old age and was able to elaborate the calculus some thousand years before
Newton. This meant that by the sixth century or so this Greco-Roman world had ship building
and navigational techniques that were possessed in our world only by Elizabethan times.
Roman navigators inspired by the perfection of their science set sail to explore the world, and
in that parallel continuum they discovered the Maya just as they were reaching their classic
climax in the jungles of Central America. Approximately nine hundred years after the
bifurcation into the two time streams, a Greco-Roman-Mayan civilization came into being in the
parallel continuum. The great influence on the Greco-Roman psychology from this cultural
adventure was the sophisticated use of psychedelic drugs for the purposes of religion and selfexploration. In the vision in which this idea was shown to me by the powers of the other side, I
actually saw a Roman imperial administrator and his retinue arriving at Tikal for the coronation
of Three-Flint-Knife in the ninth century; a great confluence of imperial majesty as the greatest
king of the Mayan cultural climax received his European counterpart, and documents, codices,
mathematicians, instruments of navigation, and pharmacy were traded.

Well to make a long story short, the parallel world continued to develop, and with its
sophisticated psychology based on psychedelic drugs they soon became aware by studying the
dreams of psychotics in their world, they slowly became aware I should say, of our existence.
They figured out what we do not know, which is there was a world bifurcation and that there is
a parallel time stream with a different situation evolving in it. They further, by extension of
their more advanced understanding of atomic and particle physics, came by around the year
1900 in our continuum to the hypothesis that major releases of hard radiation would penetrate
across the energy barrier of the two time streams. They conducted an experiment to test this
hypothesis. They decided to set off a small atomic device in their continuum, and to monitor
the dreams of sensitive people in our continuum to see if there was evidence of an awareness
of this explosion. The experiment was actually carried out in 1906 by our time reckoning. This is
what we call the Tunguska blast that occurred in Siberia. After the blast in the parallel
continuum those who had conducted the test were able to monitor the dreams of Siberian
Shamans and they saw hundreds of square miles of trees smashed flat by a mighty explosion.
Hence they realized that their theoretical assumption that explosions in one continuum would
affect life in the other were in fact true. Then they became quite alarmed because as they
42

continued to monitor the dreams of human beings in the parallel continuum, they came to
slowly understand that primitive though we may be in our world we were coming to a grasp of
atomic chemistry and thermonuclear fission and fusion.

Fearing for the destruction of their own world they began, and have in fact carried out
through this century, a massive scientific research project to attempt to reach us to
communicate to us the true situation, and to depotentiate our nuclear arsenals in order to save
their own world, which is now in fact the administrative center of some sixteen integrated star
systems in this part of the galaxy. In other words, they are some twelve hundred years in
advance of us technologically and in the use of psychedelic substances because they never
experienced the history-freezing eschatology that the rise of Christianity created in our world.
The last part of the myth relates to the Mayan calendrical date and UFOs are aspects of this
technological effort to reach us. In other words they are experimental vehicles attempting to
penetrate the time barrier..to reach us with this news. I believe that in 2012 this technology will
be perfected and they will no longer need to send unmanned probes or experimental devices,
rather they will actually be able to open a domain perhaps as much as several thousand
kilometers in diameter, which will be coexistent both in our time stream and in their time
stream.

People from this be-knighted time stream will be able to reach the more advanced and
perfected culture of the alternative time stream. It's not unlike the situation with East Germany
and East Berlin. All that we're saying is that this advanced civilization is about to pull down the
wall and invite us to leave the be-knighted world bequeathed to us by rampant monotheism
and participate in the higher life of the great stellar civilization created by the Greco-RomanMayanists, who avoided the rather tawdry ideological path of development that we were victim
of.

Psychedelic compounds amplify the very slight leakage of information from this other
dimension. In the same way that they found us, we can find them by taking psychedelic
mushrooms and opening ourselves to the information pouring through from the alternative
time stream.

Originally published in Psychedelic Illuminations #6

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True Conversations with Terence Mckenna - Kona - September 1999

Sooner or later, anyone who examines the outward-bound edges of net-based culture is bound
to encounter the unique consciousness of Terence Mckenna. Ethnobotanist, explorer, inventor
of Novelty Theory, and discoverer of machine elves, Terence has authored several books,
including Food of the Gods, True Hallucinations, and The Archaic Revival. He is noted in Peter
Staffords, Psychedelics Encyclopedia, for "a landmark examination of the role of plants in
human history".

Terence: "Our zeitgeist may be creative dreaming in the presence of technology, a place
haunted by genies which wrap us in the blanket of their mysterium and lead us forward.
Alchemy by another name"

Avowing the positive value of psychedelic plants for decades, it was thus something of a shock
for the psychedelic community, whove only just lost Timothy Leary, to learn that Terence had
been diagnosed with a brain tumor on May 22, and that his prognosis was; "six to nine months
more of life"

I include myself as one of those dismayed by Terences condition, but living in Cape Town,
South Africa, it isnt easy to get hold of him, because when its noon here, its midnight there.
Its the end of August by the time we speak. During our conversation I learn that hes feeling;
"mostly OK", and that hes going ahead with the AllChemicals Arts Conference on Big Island in
Hawaii on September 12-16, a five day conference of artists, film makers, performers, writers,
musicians and creative people whove all been inspired by hallucinogens. He exhorts me to try
to attend, and even though the conference is taking place in less than two weeks, and I have no
passport, visa, ticket, or even a travel budget, I promise to try make it. From that moment
onwards my life is hot-wired by synchronicity. Its difficult to believe that magic doesnt exist,
because sometime later I find myself jet lagged and staggering into the AllChemicals Art
Conference on the far-side of the planet.

Id met Terence when he visited South Africa some years ago. Thats another story, but its as
well wed met before, because life is complicated enough without having to deal with terminal
44

illness and a conference simultaneously. Nevertheless, he manages to be as charming and

patient as I remember him. Extruding an aura of calm, hes accompanied by Christy, his
beautiful girlfriend, whom I come to like and respect during my stay for her hospitality, open
smile, and caring nature. Theyre obviously very much in love, and come up to my room where
we have a chance to speak without an audience. Terence says about the conference; "I knew
this conference was going to be complicated for me, because these days everything is
complicated. But this psychedelic community carries a very special charge, and I said to Christy
months ago when I got into this medical mess; "If love could cure, I would live forever". There is
no doubt about this in my mind"

I understand what hes saying, and get an invitation to; "Come up to my place on Saturday,
after the conference"

Its only Tuesday, but the rest of the week speeds by, accompanied by more than a hundred
people, some of them famous, whore gathered at the luxurious Royal Kona Hotel for what
might be his last appearance. Sometime later in the week he speaks out on how he feels about
his life-threatening situation, but if hes scared, he sure doesnt show it.

Terence: "Everything is a blessing, and everything comes as a gift. And I dont regret anything
about the situation I find myself in. If psychedelics dont ready you for the great beyond, then I
dont know what really does. And were all under sentence of moving up at some point in our
lives. I have an absolute faith that the universe prefers joy and distills us with joy and this what
religion is trying to download to us, and this is what every moment of life is trying to do - if we
can open to it. And we psychedelic people, if we could secure that death has no sting, we would
have done the greatest service to suffering intelligence that can be done. And I feel that its
close, and I feel strong. I feel strong because of this (psychedelic) community and these people
and the plants that it rests on, and the ancient practices that it rests on, and I am full of hope,
not only for my own small problems, but for humanity in general"

He doesnt speak like a condemned man, rather he seems somewhat elated. Later, he gives his
views on what he considers psychedelic literature to be.

45

Terence: "I think psychedelic literature should make your hair stand on end. It should be read
standing up. Its consciousness expansion before drugs. I remember when I was a child; I could
con my mother into reading The Oz Books to my brother and myself for up to eight hours a day.
She was also an Oz Book junkie, so we spent a great deal of time in Oz. And it seems to me that
in the same way that a childhood is shaped by that kind of involvement in fantastic literature,
that civilisation, or a series of civilisations, is shaped that way. So when I sat down to think
about this, I realised the psychedelic literature that I hold dear begins with the invocation of the
goddess. In other words, the first lines of The Homeric Corpus, which enunciates the actual
differentiation of human consciousness out of the primal mind"

Question: What do you think your contribution to fantastic literature has been?

Terence: "I see my contribution to this Corpus Hermetica, that body of literature based around
natural magic, and the heretical message opposed to Christianity. That man is the measure of
all things, and not some fallen creature, but that man is somehow a CO-creator of reality, some
kind of Pythagorean God that works through numbers and mathematics and color and musical
form"

On Friday the three of us have breakfast together and exchange a promise to connect later by
phone. The conference closes with a sonic healing session by Constance Demby and her whale
sale instrument, and at 7.00 PM I get the weirdest directions from Terence on how to get to his
place.

Terence: "Its about an hours drive South from you. At the marked stone, head up towards the
mountain. Dont loose faith. Its the third driveway on the left"

Its just as well Ive hired this 4X4, also that I dont loose faith. I should add that I didnt really
see the marked stone, and in the end felt hugely lucky to find his place, which is hidden behind
a steep rocky climb in low gear. Riders on the Storm played on radio on the way up. It
wouldve been impossible in a normal vehicle. Surrounded by lush tropical forest, Terences
house is built on three levels, complete with telescope dome and satellite dish. Under the small
dome, a large upstairs room is surrounded by bookshelves. Three computers facing the forest
46

run in the background, while weird jungle artifacts are haphazardly placed in front of some of
the books. Terence sits crossed legged on a carpet surrounded by a dozen people, whod also
been invited up. Its really hot, so after a while we move outside to the large patio to
philosophise with the view, and do battle with the mosquitos. Everything thats said seems to
have additional information attached. We agree that a near-death experience paves the way to
understanding death, but I tell Terence Im not that keen to half-kill myself to find out. He
laughs. We talk of the live volcano on Kona. He expects a big eruption "soon". We also discuss
the "splitting of body and soul". Knowing when to surrender, and when to fight back. He says
hes "fighting back". All too soon it starts getting dark. We exchange a good-bye hug, and the
customary; "See you downstream". I wonder if Ill see him again.

Terence underwent a successful craniotomy at the Moffitt/Long Hospital on Monday 11th

October. Hes also one of a handful of people undergoing gene therapy for brain cancer,
medicines experimental magic bullet, and probably the only person alive who can come out of
major brain surgery to make a room full of people laugh. He'll beat the odds yet! Check here for
updates on his condition. We wish him a complete and speedy recovery, but whatever happens
in the future, his last words on mortality were as courageous as his intelligence has always
been;

Terence: "I think we stand on the brink of a golden age to be built out of the kind of love that
the psychedelic community embodies. So Ill try to be at Palenque in February, whenever it is.
Ill try to be around and about. But if Im not, then you know that Im behind your eyelids, and
Ill meet you there" - Kona - September 1999

Terence McKenna's Obituary in LA Times

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Art Bell interviews Terence McKenna on Coast to Coast AM

Interview #1 - Timewave Zero - May 22nd 1997

Art Bell: You have a theory about time. Time is one of my favorite all time topics, so before we
launch into what you think about time, tell me what you think time is. In other words, is time
our invention, or is time a real thing... I realize we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of
things, is there really time?

Terence McKenna: Yeah, you give me a perfect entree to launch into this thing. See, in the west
we have inherited from Newton what is called the idea of pure duration, which is simply that
time is sort of a place where things are placed so that they don't all happen at once; in other
words, it's used as quality-less, it's an abstraction. In fact, I think when we carry out a complete
analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of
elemental, discrete types. All matter, organic and inorganic matter, is composed of 104, 108
elements... there's some argument. Time, on the other hand, is thought to be this featureless,
quality-less medium, but as we experience it, as living feeling creatures, time has qualities.
There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go
wrong.

Art Bell: That's absolutely true. I've wondered about that all my life. There are time when, in
effect, you can do no wrong, and there are other periods of time when you can do no right, no
matter what you do.

Terence McKenna: Well, so in looking at this, I created a vocabulary. Actually, I borrowed it

from Alfred North Whitehead, but I think I'm on to something which science has missed. And
it's this; it's that the universe, or human life, or an empire, or an ecosystem, any large scale or
small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call
habit and novelty. And I think they're pretty self explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of
established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system,
and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never before seen.

48

And these two qualities, habit and novelty, are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle. But
the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning, and this is the point
that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked. If you look back
through the history of the human race, or life on this planet, or of the solar system and the
galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic. So turning that on
its head, we can say that as you come towards the present things become more novel, more
complex.

So I've taken this as a universal law, affecting historical processes, biological processes and
astrophysical processes. Nature produces and conserves novelty, and what I mean by that, as
the universe cools the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems form, as it
further cools molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA
containing life, later complex life, multi-cellular life, and this is a principle that reaches right up
to our dear selves. And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being. This is something that
is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a
chemical system. Nature conserves, prefers novelty. And the interesting thing about an idea like
this is that it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head... you know, what
modern, atheistic existentialism says is that we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here,
and any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring. I say, no... by looking
deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and
conserves, and if that represents a universal value system, then the human world that we find
today with our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far
achieved, and suddenly you have a basis for an ethic... That which advances novelty is good,
that which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.

Interview #2 - The Psychedelic Experience - March 19th 1998

Art Bell: Now comes Terence McKenna from the Hawaiian Islands, and he comes in a very
interesting way. Uh, Terence, welcome to the program.

Terence McKenna It's a pleasure to talk to you again Art. .. how are you?

49

Art Bell: Uh, I am fine. Um, now Terrence, let us begin. Uh, where are you in the islands? I mean
not exactly, but sort of roughly?

Terence McKenna: I'm on the Big island of Hawaii on the Kona side. I'm in south Kona on the Big
Island.

Art Bell: Um you are coming to us actually from your home. Last time we did an interview you
had to, like, go to somebody's house or something to do the interview... leave your own home,
because you're so remote that all you've got is a cell phone, and that's how you did the show
last time, right?

Terence McKenna: That's right.

Art Bell: Alright, this time, we're using a different setup. It has a tiny little glitch in it every now
and again, and so tell people how it is that you're reaching us. I mean that's an interesting story
all by itself.

Terence McKenna: Um, I'm reaching you on a spread spectrum radio circuit that's a I megabyte
wireless connection 30 miles to the town of Kailua Kona, and my telephone circuit is simply
piggy-backing on this one megabyte internet connection. There's a company out here called
Computer Time, this character John Breeden has an amazing technology. I think I talked to you
last year about my struggles for connectivity when I was piddling around trying to get 128 ...
now I have eight times faster than that, and it's... he's building a backbone for these islands,
and anyone with line of sight to the server can have up to 6 megabytes if they can afford it.

Art Bell: Well, uh, at your location, at your very remote location, what's it like? Do you have
power there, do you have... well, you obviously have to have power, I guess...

Terence McKenna: Well, I'm running on solar power with a generator augment. There's no
phone lines or power lines up here, uh, we catch our own rainwater and pump it uphill for
50

gravity flow... I didn't start out to be a survivalist, but somehow in the course of building this
Hawaiian place I managed to get all my systems off-grid and redundant, and this wonderful
internet connection is what makes my life possible because otherwise I would be locked out of
the cultural adventure. As it is, I feel like I am right in the middle of things.

Art Bell: Boy, I'll tell ya, you're ahead of most of us on the mainland who suffer with
horrendously slow 28.8 connections in many areas including mine at best, and here you are ...
it's so neat that you're able to do that these days, really excellent, so you're um... describe your
surroundings... I mean, do you have neighbors? Uh...

Terence McKenna: Um, I live up on the slopes of the world's largest volcano, which is Mauna
Loa... I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small
house on. My neighbors are scattered over this mountainside... days go by and I don't see
anybody, but if the pump breaks down or we need to get together there's a kind of community,
but it's pretty spread thin, and it's a day... a trip into town is once or twice a week event.

Art Bell: Do you find yourself fighting madness, Terence?

Terence McKenna: Well, that was always a problem, in my case.

Art Bell: But don't uh, you don't have to resort uh either to uh chemicals or into uh... I
remember reading, uh, you know, prisoners who'd be by themselves for years at a time, uh, in
North Vietnam or during the second world war, and they would devise methods of going into
their own mind and uh fantasizing and doing all kinds of things that kept them sane.

Terence McKenna: Well, I've got 3000 books here with me, and this internet connection, and I
get about a hundred email messages a day, so... And then every once in a while I pack up, and
go off, and give lectures, and travel in airliners, and go to parties, and about fourteen weeks out
of the year that's what I'm doing. But my natural inclination is to be a hermit, and I don't think I
mentioned it but this forest that surrounds me is a climax subtropical Polynesian rain forest
that's just radiant and beautiful, so uh, it's wonderful. I don't think I could live out here without
51

the connection, that's why I spent so much effort to put it together. With the connection I think
this is a model for the future, I think as people in management positions, not that I am, but
people in management positions will realize that they can live anywhere in the world with these
high speed connections, and they don't have to drive to the office in a skyscraper downtown...
that's very retro I think.

Art Bell: Um, listen, um, we're supposed to do this at the beginning of the interview, and it
might be that there's a person or two out there that doesn't know who Terence McKenna is, so
if you would give me a short version of your own bio, your life, what you've done, who you are,
what would you say?

Terence McKenna: I'm a child of the 60's, born in 1946, went to Berkeley as a freshman in 1965,
uh, did the India circuit, did the LSD circuit, went to South America... I've written a number of
books about shamanism and hallucinogens and uh psychoactive plants, and I've sort of evolved
a unique career as a cultural commentator and I guess some kind of gadfly philosopher, and I've
done a lot of stuff with young people, rave recordings, and CD's, and appearance, and that sort
of thing, and I comment on the culture. I'm studying the culture, and as you know Art, when I
share an idea which we both perceive as inevitable truth, but not everybody does, and not
everybody does, which is that the world is moving at an ever-greater acceleration toward some
kind of compete redefining of all aspects reality, and I've written a lot about that, and I have a
mathematical model of it, and basically I get to be in a very enviable position. Which is here at
the end of a millennium I get to be a cultural commentator and gadfly.

Interview #3 - April Fool's Y2K - April 1st 1999

Art Bell: Look, there's a whole new audience. I probably have added a hundred affiliates since
the last time I talked to you, so maybe we ought to take a second, and you should tell
everybody who Terence McKenna is.

Terence McKenna: Who Terence McKenna is.

52

Art Bell: That's right.If you were to have to answer that, which you do now.

Terence McKenna: Well, I guess my bio says writer and explorer. Explorer, means explorer of
hallucinogenic plants, strange usages of exotic plants by exotic people and then coming back
and talking about these things and advocating them.

Alteration of consciousness leads to all the big philosophical issues: What is culture? What is
history? Where are we going? How are we gonna get there and what's gonna be so great about
it when we get there?

So, I'm an itinerant philosopher at the end of the Twentieth Century.

Art Bell: Well, the average Joe out there, maybe drivin' a truck across Indiana somewhere,
probably is saying to himself right now, "Well, why should I listen to anything emanating from
this drug-scorched brain?"

But of course that's the only problem with you, Terence. Your brain doesn't appear to be drugscorched, and it should be. If what the establishment tells us about drugs is even partly true,
you should be a basket case!

Terence McKenna: Well, maybe I am!

Art Bell: No, you're not!

Terence McKenna: But I think the guy driving his semi across Indiana, he may be a little
scorched, himself.

53

Art Bell: He's scorched in a different way, tryin' to keep his eyes open, you know, and get the
load delivered.

Terence McKenna: The stereotype of the cannabis enthusiast: Can't think straight, can't
remember where they put the keys. I've never felt that way about these things. I think cultures
choose the drugs they want to stigmatize, and then they glorify others, and it differs from
culture to culture. The social consequences differ according to the choices made. But alteration
of consciousness by human beings is as old as human beings themselves.

Art Bell: That's quite true. Do you think that it would be fair to suggest, it would be something
that would get us in a lot of trouble, that there some hallucinogenic drugs that do in fact give
people legitimate, insights that they would otherwise perhaps not realize?

Terence McKenna Oh, absolutely. You give me a lead-in to talk about one of the things I'm
doing at the moment, which is, after a conference in Mexico on hallucinogenic botany this year,
a couple of friends of mine and I decided to organize a conference on the theme you just
stated, a conference on the creative process and hallucinogenic substances because there's a
huge amount of the art, design, and fashion world that has for years been using these things to
fuel the engines of creativity, and it's all been in the closet.

Art Bell: The old myth is this: If you think your creativity is heightened when you're on some
sort of hallucinogenic drug, then make notes. Write a story. Paint a painting. Conduct some
music. Play some music. Sing. And see if, when you're down it was really as good as when you
were up. That's kind of what we're talking about here, in a way, isn't it, Terence?

Terence McKenna: Yeah, well, most of it probably would come in on the low end of that scale,
although there are some spectacular counter examples. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla
Khan stoned on opium. The insight to the structure of the benzene molecule came to someone
after a cognac inspired dream.

54

The character of the of creative breakthrough is like a revelation, the "Aha!" experience.
Sometimes it's a bump on the head, and sometimes it's a hallucinogenic experience, but it
always has the character of sort of arising in a completed form, you know what I mean?

AB: Yes. Why are there so many striking counter examples. That's the question you never hear
dealt with in public. In fact you never hear about it at all. They suppress that information. Why,
sometimes, is a drug a key to creativity that you would not have otherwise?

Terence McKenna: Well, I think it's because of the larger effects of these drugs, which is that
they dissolve boundaries. And many of the boundaries which enclose us are boundaries of
habit, convention. Under the influence of the drug we see beyond those boundaries. The job of
artists has always been to sort of be an antenna into the future, and bohemians have always
been associated with drug taking to some degree. So I think it's a very understandable process,
it's simply that we're now beginning to understand it. And we have to because the number of
substances available and being discovered all the time is beyond the power of the courts and
the scientific establishment to really manage.

Art Bell: Well, I don't know. If you go to a doctor, you will notice, these days, I don't know if you
ever go to doctors, the doctor will say, "You know what, I know you're in a terrible amount of
pain, and I really wish that I could prescribe more to keep you out of pain," because that's the
way a doctor feels, you know. They're trying to ease your suffering, but the doctor will tell you
frankly that "the DEA is lookin' right behind my shoulder, and a number of my colleges have lost
their licenses, and so, frankly, I can't really give you what you need."

Terence McKenna: Oh, well, this is a part of the drug problem. The hysteria on drugs has made
so many different people and institutions crazy in so many different ways. On the general,
larger question of hard drugs I'm quite despairing. So many people in institutions make money
off the present mess, you know. The prison builders, the rehab people, the criminal syndicates,
the bought-off cops, the paid-off judges. Everybody is making money on this racket that they
pretend to wring their hands over.

55

Art Bell: That's absolutely correct. Heaven knows what the police would do if they couldn't
chase narcotics people. They would literally have about ten percent or at most twenty percent
of their jobs left, and I think our prisons would be more or less about sixty or seventy percent
empty, just compared to their present content.

Terence McKenna: The courts would unclog, and lawyers would have to find honest work.

Art Bell: So, in other words, it's never gonna happen.

Terence McKenna: You got it, Art.

Art Bell: What are you doing in terms of researching this interesting creative truth? How are
you going to do that?

Terence McKenna: Well, I don't know if I've ever talked to you about this, but I'm interested of
course in what these substances do to me and other individuals. But then there's a whole other
area, which is: What has been the impact of substances and drugs been on large populations
over long periods of time?

I'm willing to argue that the evolution of human language and complex cultural forms
themselves were cause by disruptions in the ordinary mental functioning of perfectly happy
primates about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. In other words, the evolution of
complex human culture based on language is actually an effect of brain perturbation and
unusual states of consciousness that were eventually assimilated and became part of the
behavioral toolkit of early human beings.

Art Bell: So you're saying it's actually a part of and a continuing part of evolution itself.

56

Terence McKenna: That's right, and the important thing for modern people is, "a continuing
part of." So, when you talk about drugs, you know, today, we're focusing on the drug of the
day, whatever it is, heroin or methedrine, but in fact, over the past thousand years it's been
drugs that have built the empires that created western civilization. Sugar, tobacco, alcohol,
opium, tea, chocolate, these are the drugs that shaped civilization.

Art Bell: Coffee.

Terence McKenna: Coffee, another big one. And of course we don't think of these as drugs. We
call them foods or whatever we call them, because "A drug is a bad thing, a food is a good
thing." But eventually people are going to wise up to this racket. And they need to because we
need to educate our children about this complex area of human behavior. There are dangerous
drugs. There are drugs that, if used carefully, can be a tremendous enhancement of life. But you
have to know what you're doing. It's not something you just blunder into. And all
generalizations will have exceptions.

57

Surfing on Finnegan's Wake by Terence McKenna

Transcribed from the Mystic Fire Audio Cassette Dated October of 1995

Finnegans Wake is the last and most ambitious and most internal puzzling work of the Irish
writer James Joyce who of course wrote Dubliners and Ulysses. And if Ulysses is the algebra of
literature, then FW is the partial differential equation. Most of us break down at algebra, few of
us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential equation. In some ways I think it can arguably
be said that this is the quintessential work of art or at least work of literature of the 20th
century. And Joyce intended it that way. Joseph Campbell called it A staggering allegory of the
fall and redemption of mankind. Equally respected critics have called it a surrender to the
crossword puzzle portion of the human mind. So, the main thing about it is that its linguistically
dense, its dense on every level. It has over 63,000 individual words in it. Thats more words
than most fictional manuscripts have words period. It has over 5,000 characters in it.

Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce thought of it as his Day Book. It follows the
peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner (this is Ulysses) through the vicissitudes of his day, his
struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast, his chance meeting with his wifes lover, and
so forth and so on. Fairly straight forward exposition of the techniques of literature that have
been perfected in the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life.
FW was designed to be the Night Book to that Day Book, so it was conceived of as a dream,
and one of the questions that undergraduates are asked to shed ink over is, whose dream is it?
And what is this book about? I mean, when you first pick it up, its absolutely daunting. There
doesnt seem to be a way into it. It seems to be barely in English.

The notion that one could, by spending time with this, tease out characters, plot, literary
tension, resolution, this sort of thing, seems fairly unlikely. Actually, its one of the few things
that really repays pouring effort into it. The first 25 pages are incredibly dense, and most
people are eliminated somewhere in those first 25 pages, and so never really - its a language.
And you have to gain a facility with it, and you have to cheat, thats the other thing, and theres
lots of help cheating, because it has spawned a great exegetical literature, all kinds of pale
scholars eager to give you the Celtic word lists of FW, or a discussion of the doctrine of the

58

transubstantiation in FW, or so forth, hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp Lit
have been ground out over the decades.

The reason Im interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because its two things, clearly. FW
is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic / eschatological. What I mean by psychedelic, is there is no
stable point of view, there is no character per se, you never know who is speaking, you have to
read into each speech to discover, is this King Mark, Anna LiviaPlurabelle, Humphrey
ChimpdenEarwicker, Shem the pen man, Shawn, who is it? And identities are not fixed. Those
of you whove followed my rap over the years, Im always raving about how psychedelics
dissolve boundaries. Well, FW is as if youd taken the entirety of the last thousand years of
human history, and dissolved all the boundaries, so Queen Maude becomes Mae West, all the
personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish Legend, Irish internecine politics
are all swirling, changing, merging. Time is not linear, you will find yourself at a recent political
rally, and then return to the court of this or that Abyssinian Emperor or Pharoah. Its like a trip.
And the great technique of the 20th Century is collage or pastiche, it was originally developed
by the Dadaists in Zurich in 1919, right now its having a huge resurgence in the form of
sampling in pop music, and Joyce was the supreme sampler, I mean he draws his material from
technical catalogues, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, mythologies, dreams, doctor-patient
conversations, everything is grist for this enormous distillery.

And yet, what comes out of it, once you learn the codes, and once you learn to play the game,
is a Joycean story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize. What Joyce was about was an
incredible sympathy with common people, and an awareness of the dilemma of being a Jew in
Irish Ireland, being a devotee of scholasticism in the 20th century, of dislocation, and
disorientation, of being the cuckolded husband, of being the failed divinity student, all of these
characters and themes are familiar. Its quite an amazing accomplishment, theres nothing else
like it in literature. It had very little anticipation. The only real anticipator of Joyce in English, I
think, is Thomas Nash, who most people have never even heard of.

Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote a famous, I dont know what that
means in such a context, but a novel called The Wayfaring Traveler. Anyway, Nash had this
megalomaniac richness of language, this attitude that its better to put it in than take it out, and
thats certainly what you get with Joyce. I mean, Joyce is so dense, with technical terms, brand
names, pop references, localisms. The way to conceive of FW is as a midden, a garbage dump,
and there is in fact a garbage dump in the Wake which figures very prominently, and what you
59

have to do as the reader is essentially go in there with nut pick and tooth brush, and essentially
remove one level after another level after another level, and sink down and down.

And the theme is always the same, the delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the word,
and the redemption of the word at every level, in all times and places. The reason, Ive now
gone some distance towards explaining the reason I think of it as psychedelic, the reason I think
of it as eschatological and apocalyptic, is because, well, its hard to tell, we dont have James
Joyce around to ask how much of it he took seriously, and how much was grist for his literary
mill. But he was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic. The entire book is
based on La ScienzaNuova by GiambattistaVico who was a Renaissance sociologist and a
systems theorist. And Joyce once in a famous interview, said, that if the whole universe were to
be destroyed, and only FW survived, that the goal would be that the entire Universe would be
reconstructed out of this. Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea,
that somehow a book is the primary reality. You know, the idea in Hassidism is that all of the
future is already contained in the Torah, and then when you ask them, well if its contained
there then isnt it predestined, and the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled, and
only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and
arranges the letters.

This is Joyce thinking for sure. Its very close to a central theme in Joyce, and a central theme in
the western religious tradition, which is, the coming into being, the manifestation of the word,
the declension of the word into matter. In a sense, what Joyce was trying to do, was, he was in
that great tradition of literary alchemy, whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert
Flood, Athanasius Kircher, Paracelcis, these are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of
alchemy, when the birth of modern science, the rosy glow could already be seen, the alchemist
turned towards literary allegory in the 16th and 17th Century. Joyce is essentially in that
tradition, I mean, this is an effort to condense the entirety of experience, all, as Joyce says in
the Wake, all space-time in a knotshell, is what were searching for here, a kind of
philosophers stone of literary associations from which the entire universe can be made to
blossom forth. And the way its done is through pun, and tricks of language, and double and
triple and quadruple entendre. No word is opaque. Every word is transparent, and you see
through it to older meanings, stranger associations, and as your mind tries to follow these
associative trees of connection, you get the feeling which is the unique feeling that the Wake
gives you, which is about as close to LSD on the page as you can get, because you are
simultaneously many points of view, simultaneously many dramatis locci, many places in the
plot, and the whole thing is riddled with resonance. A man doing a task on one level is on
60

another level a Greek god completing a task, and on another level some other figure of some
more obscure mythology. So really one thing about FW is its like a dip-stick for your own
intelligence. What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out.

If you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with, or if you have armed yourself with
such simple things as a Fodors guide to Ireland or a good map of Ireland or a good work of Irish
mythology, then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you, and its so rich that its easy
to make original discoveries. Its easy to see and understand things which probably have not
been seen or understood since James Joyce put it there, because he had this kind of allinclusive intelligence.

Maybe I didnt make clear enough why that, to my mind, is an eschatological phenomena, this
production of the philosophers stone, its because its about the union of spirit and matter,
thats what the Philosophers Stone is about. And writing a book which aspires to be the seed
for a living world is about the union of spirit and matter as well, and the christian scenario of
redemption at the end of profane history is another scenario of transubstantiate union, union
of spirit and matter. This seems to be in fact the over arching theme of FW and of the 20th
Century. In terms of the temporal context for this book, it was finished a few months before
1939 and Joyce died early in 1939. In a sense he died in one of the most science fiction
moments of the 20th Century, because the Third Reich was going strong, it had not yet been
pegged down a notch, schemes of eugenics and thousand-year, racially-purified supercivilizations, all of that crazy early 40s stuff was happening, and the book is surprisingly modern.
Television appears, psychedelic drugs appear, all of these things appear, presciently, he was
some kind of a prophet. And also, he understood the 20th Century sufficiently that the part he
hadnt yet lived through was as transparent to him as the part he had, he could see what was
coming.

Well, thats by way of my introduction. I want to read you what some other people have said
about this, because I dont think I can say enough on my own. This is the indispensable book if
youre serious about this; A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. It takes the view that we dont
know what this thing is so we have to go through it literally line by line. And he tells you the
entire story in the one-page version, in the 10 page version, and in the 200 page version, and
even in the 200 page version, there are sections where Campbell simply reports, the next 5
pages are extremely obscure. Mark it! This is just a short section, and one of the things about
working with the Wake is you become, at first this language which is so impenetrable and
61

bizarre, it ends up infecting you, and you become unable to write or talk any other way. So, Ill
read you some of Campbells introduction, and I think you will see its like the Wake itself
except in baby steps.

Running riddle and fluid answer, FW is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind.
It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare - a monstrous enigma
beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep. Its mechanics resemble those of a
dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has
enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development,
into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle and end.

In a gigantic wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons, and are
replaced by other images, vague but half-consciously familiar. On this revolving stage,
mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the same spatial and temporal
planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously;
Tristram and the Duke of Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single
precept. Multiple meanings are present in every line; interlocking allusions to key words and
phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern of the work. FW is a prodigious,
multifaceted monomyth, not only the cauchemar of a Dublin citizen but the dreamlike saga of
guilt-stained, evolving humanity.

The vast scope and intricate structure of FW give the book a forbidding aspect of
impenetrability. It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with
wanton perversities of form and language. Clearly, such a book is not meant to be idly fingered.
It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with it. Yet
some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up a few compass
clues and gets his bearings. Then the enormous map of FW begins slowly to unfold, characters
and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable, and Joyces vocabulary falls more and more
familiarly on the accustomed ear. Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily at
one sitting; [or in 50 I might add] indeed, it may never come. Nevertheless the ultimate state of
the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment. Rather, it is admiration for the unifying
insight, economy of means, and more-than-Rabelaisian humor which have miraculously
quickened the stupendous mass of material. One acknowledges at last that James Joyces
overwhelming macro-microcosm could not have been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less
black, less heavy, less murky than this, his incredible book. He had to smelt the modern
62

dictionary back to protean plasma and re-enact the genesis and mutation of language in
order to deliver his message. But the final wonder is that such a message could have been
delivered at all!

Every book has to be about something. I mean, so what is this book about? Well, as far as
anybody can tell, it appears to be about someone named, well, they have 100s of names,
actually, but for economys sake, someone named Humphrey ChimpdenEarwicker, or
abbreviated, HCE. And Humphrey Earwicker runs a pub in Chapelizod which is a suburb of
London *sic, Dublin+. And he has as it says an liddlephifie who is Anna LiviaPlurabel, and these
two people, this barkeep and his wife, and their two children, Jerry and Kevin, or Shem and
Shaun, and they also have hundreds of names, because they occur on hundreds and hundreds
of levels. Every brother struggle of history is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin. They are
Shem the pen man, and Shawn the other one, and they dichotomize certain parts of the
process, so here is in one paragraph, this is the Cliffs Notes version of what FW is all about. If
you commit this to memory you will never be caught wanting at a New York cocktail party.

As the tale unfolds, we discover that this H.C. Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin, a stuttering
tavernkeeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck. He emerges as a well-defined and
sympathetic character, the sorely harrowed victim of a relentless fate, which is stronger than,
yet identical with, himself. Joyce refers to him under various names, such as Here Comes
Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere - indications of his universality and his role as the
great progenitor. The hero has wandered vastly, leaving families, (that is, deposits of
civilization) at every pause along the way: from Troy to Asia Minor (he is frequently called the
Turk) up through the turbulent lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen, and overseas to
the green isles of Britain and Eire. His chief Germanic manifestations are Woden and Thor; his
chief Celtic, ManannaanMacLir. Again, he is St. Patrick carrying the new faith; again, Strongbow,
leading the Anglo-Norman conquest; again, Cromwell, conquering with a bloody hand. Most
specifically, he is our Anglican tavernkeeper, HCE, in the Dublin suburb, Chapelizod.

Like Ulysses, the ground zero here is the utterly mundane, you know, middle class, tormented
Irish people, embedded in the detritus of the 20th Century. But there is an effort to never lose
the cosmic perspective, never lose the sense that we are not individuals lost in time, but the
front ends of gene streams that reach back to Africa, that we somehow have all these ancestors
and conflicts swarming and storming within us. Its a glorious psychedelic, heartful, Irish view
of what it is to be embedded in the mystery of existence.
63

Well, OK, enough arm waving, now lets cut the cake here.

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodiusvicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violerdamores, frover the short sea, had passencorerearrived from North
Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war:
nor had topsawyers rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens Countys
gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire
bellowsedmishemishe to tauftaufthuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscadbuttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though alls fair in vanessy, were sosiesesthers
wroth with twonenathandjoe. Rot a peck of pas malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and
rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

The fall
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawnto
ohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstraitoldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life
down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice
the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humselfprumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their
upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust
upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.

So now granted that the first pages are dense, and it isnt all this dense, because, even though
the concept of fractals lay years in the future, the effort here is to tell the whole damn thing in
the first word, to tell it again in the next two words, to tell it again in the next three words, and
so on. So here, in these first roughly three paragraphs, a huge amount of information is being
passed along. First of all, were given a location, if were smart enough to know it.

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodiusvicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
64

Well, now, if you know the geography of Dublin, you know thats where you are. And notice
that Howeth Castle and Environs is HCE. These initials recur thousands of times in this book,
always bringing you back to remind you that this has something to do with Humphrey
Earwicker. What this first sentence says, riverrun and its the river Liffey, which we will meet
in a thousand reincarnations, because Anna LiviaPlurabell is the personification of the goddess
river. The river runs past Eve and Adams and there is a church there on shore named Adam
and Eve in Dublin. From swerve of shore to bend of bay, and then this strange phrase, brings
us by commodiusvicus of recirculation. This announces the great architectonic plan of the
Wake, that it is in fact going to be based on the sociological ruminations of GiambattistaVicos
La ScienzaNuova. The vicus mode of recirculation, because, as Im sure you all know, Vicos
theory of the fall and redemption of mankind, was that there were four ages, I cant remember,
gold, silver, iron, clay, I think [actually bronze, not clay], and so this idea of the recirculation, of
the connectedness, of the cyclicity, of the, as he says, same again, again and again. Finnegan,
sin-again, the same again. And this is one of his great, great themes, is the recourso, everything
comes again, nothing is unannounced, every dynastic intrigue, every minor political disgrace,
and a minor political disgrace figures very prominently in this book, because, as the carrier of
Adams sin, the great dilemma for Humphrey Earwicker, is that hes running for a minor political
post (alderman) but apparently one night, rather juiced, he relieved himself, well, there are
many versions and you hear them all, and they are all given in dreams, and mock trials in an
accusatory fantasy. Either, he innocently took a leak in the park, or, he fondled himself in some
way in the presence of Maggie and her sister, in such a way that his reputation is now at great
risk, and it all depends on the testimony of a cad, a soldier, or perhaps three soldiers, its never
clear, its constantly shifting, and this question of what happened when Maggies seen all with
sister in shawl at the magazine wall haunts the book, because on it turns the question of
whether HCE is a stalwart pillar of the community, or in fact a backsliding masturbator and a
monster and so forth and so on, as one always is if one is trapped inside a James Joyce novel.

Then this puzzling list in the second paragraph is simply a list of things which havent happened
yet.

Sir Tristram, *lover of music+ violerdamores, frover the short sea, had passencore *not yet+
rearrived from North Armorica [from the coast of Brittany] on this side the scraggy isthmus of
Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: *Now this word penisulate is typical Joyce
punning, peninsulate war obviously is the thing launched from Brittany, penisulate war,
65

because Sir Tristram is the great archetype of the lover, so his war is penisulate. OK, so thats
the first thing that has not yet happened, its telling you, Sir Tristram has not yet come to
Ireland.]

nor had topsawyers rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens Countys
gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: [Now, this is further obscurity,
there is a stream in Georgia, and topsawyer is a reference to Tom Sawyer, because Tom
Sawyer was Huck Finns friend, and Huck Finn is Finn in America. there is a huge amount of
Mark Twain that has been poured into these books because of the Huckleberry Finn
connection, Finn in the New World. And topsawyers rocks is a reference possibly to testicles,
and so forth and so on, every single word, I mean, you can just take a word and go into this
until you exhaust yourself. And then the next thing that has not yet happened:]

noravoice from afire bellowsedmishemishe to tauftaufthuartpeatrick: *tauftauf is Celtic for

thou art baptized, so St. Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland+

not yet, though venissoon after, *and venissoon is a pun on venison and very soon+

had a kidscadbuttended a bland old isaac: *its a reference to the IssacIssau tale in the Bible,
its also a reference to Issac Butt, who was a figure in the politics of the Irish rebellion+

not yet, though alls fair in vanessy, were sosiesesthers wroth with twonenathandjoe. *Thats
at this point a very obscure reference, but theres a great incest and sister theme in FW, and
the mistresses of Jonathan Swift, become carriers of a huge amount of energy here, as do the
mistresses of Thomas Stern, because its better to be Swift than Stern, or something like that.
And then the last of these things which hasnt happened yet+

Rot a peck of pas malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow
was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

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That seems pretty obscure to me, according to Joseph Campbell its simply a reference to the
presence of God moving over the waters in the first lines of Genesis, ringsome on the
aquaface Then this phrase The Fall, and the multi-syllabic word, these are the Viconian
thunders, and they announce the beginning of each Viconian age, and when the thunder
speaks, you know then youre into a transition.

Then it actually launches in, in the last paragraph, into a fairly straightforward evocation of at
least the mythological Finnegan. As you all probably know there is a great Irish drinking ballad
of great antiquity called The Ballad of Tim Finnegan or The Ballad of Finnegans Wake, and
it tells the story of Tim Finnegan, who was a hod carrier, a bricklayers assistant, and he was
given to hitting the poteen rather hard, and he fell from his ladder. Its the Humpty Dumpty
story, he fell from his ladder, and he broke his back, and his friends waked him in the grand Irish
fashion, and at the height of the wake, they became so carried away and intoxicated that they
upended a bucket of Guinness over his head, and he revived, and joined the dance.

(Irish musical interlude about Tim Finnegan and lots of fun at Finnegans Wake)

This is the resurrection, I mean Tim Finnegan is very clearly for Joyce a christ figure, and here is
then the first evocation of Tim Finnegan.

The fall, *and then the Viconian thunder+ of a once wallstraitoldparr *which is just an old
person] is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great
fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan [now this word
pftjschute is Norwegian, Im informed, and it refers to the act of falling and the act of falling
from a hill] of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humselfprumptly sends an
unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointand
place is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since
devlinsfirst loved livvy.

This is fairly transparent if youre Irish or a citizen of Dublin because what its talking about is,
Dublin is imagined to be situated, basically in the belly of an enormous giant person, who is
Finnegan. Finnegan lies, like a giant reclining figure, along the Liffey, there, husband and wife,
67

river and mountain. And this is actually then, the focus has changed, and now were talking
about the geography. He was a solid man erse solid man, but then, somehow he turned into
something where the humptyhillhead of humselfprumptly sends an unquiring one well to the
west in quest of his tumptytumtoes. And if you have a map of Dublin laid out you can actually
see this enormous man in the landscape, and there are many enormous men and women in the
landscape of this planet. And Joyce maps the Dublin geography over all of them. Some of you
may know Izztaccihuatl, the magical mountain in Mexico. Izztaccihuatl means the sleeping
woman in Toltec [NB actually Aztec]. And many mountains are meant to be sleeping people.

So here he introduces this theme, and this is one paragraph, this is the invocation of Finnegan
as hod carrier:

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemens maurer, lived in the broadest way
imarginable in his rushlittoofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers
or Helviticus committed deuteronomy (one yeastyday he sternelystruxk his tete in a tub for to
watsch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly took it out again, by the might of moses, the
very water was eviparated and all the guenneses had met their exodus so that ought to show
you what a pentschanjeuchy chap he was!) and during mighty odd years this man of hod,
cement and edifices *HCE, hod, cement and edifices+ in Topers Thorp piled buildung supra
buildungpon the banks for the livers by the Soangso. He addle liddlephifie Annie ugged the little
craythur. Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher. Oftwhilebalbulous, mithre ahead, with
a goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularlyfondseed, like
HarounChildericEggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude
until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin twas born, his roundhead staple of other
days to rise in undress maisonryupstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most
eyeful hoythentowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all,
hierachitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with
larronsotoolersclittering up and tomblesabucketsclottering down.

Now, what this paragraph says is he was a great builder, and I think if you think back through
your impression of hearing it read, you knew that. These words that are associated, words like
a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoythentowerly, these are skyscraper words,
wallworth, skyscrape, entowerly, Howth, and so forth and so on. And he can do this, he can
build up a pastiche of surfaces, of impressions. Now, you might say, why is there is no
economy? Well, there is no economy because economy is an aesthetic criterion for
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shoemakers, not for artists. Economy is the curse of the Bauhaus babblers from hell, which
Joyce was very concerned to refute all of that.

If you have to place this in a context, its in the context of the most hallucinatory of the
Baroque, this is Archimboldo land. This is a work that would have been welcome at the
Rudolpho court in Prague. Its a work of magical complexity, and enfolded self-reference.

Now weve just been through these first four paragraphs, now Ill read you what Joseph
Campbell has to say on it, by no means all he has to say on it.

The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one
about to begin. The are in effect an overture, resonant with all the themes of Finnegans Wake.
The dominant motif is the polylingual thunderclap of paragraph
3(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) which is the voice of God made audible
through the noise of Finnegans fall.

Narrative movement begins with the life, fall, and wake of hod carrier Finnegan (pp. 4-7). The
wake scene fades into the landscape of Dublin and environs. *Weve just heard how he fell from
the ladder, now we move into a description of the wake, and theres a certain voice that
appears at certain times. Its where there are a lot of words ending in -ation. Continuation of
the celebration until the examination of the extermination, OK, these are the 12 judges. Each
character when they appear, has a certain tempo to their character, so when that tempo enters
the text, you know that character is present, even though there may be no trace. For example,
Anna LiviaPlurabellstempo, is the tempo of the hen; here-a-little, there-a-little, see-a-little, goa-little, do-a-little, the hen is scratching, this is this nervous, bird-like thats Anna Livias
signature.

Heres just a paragraph from the wake scene which builds and has a certain amount of humor
associated with it:

69

Shize? I should shee! Macool, Macool, orrawhyi deed ye diie? Of a trying

thirstaymournin?Sobs they sighdid at Fillagainschrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the
nation, prostrated in their consternation, and their duodisimallyprofusive plethora of ululation.
There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too. And the
all gianed in with the shoutmostshoviality.Agog and magog and the round of them agrog. To
the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhunigans extermination! Some in
kinkincorass, more, kankan keening, Belling him up and filling him down. Hes stiff but hes
steady is PriamOlim! Twas he was the dacentgaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap
up his bier! Eerawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? With their
deepbrowfundigs and the dusty fidelios. They laid him brawdawnalanglast bed. With a
bockalips of finiskyfore his feet.And a barrowload of guenesis hoer his head. Tee the tootal of
the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O!

Well, its a drunken Irish Wake, that seems clear, but there are a lot of things going on.
Eerawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? And, Hes stiff but hes steady is
PriamOlim! All this Dionysian and sexual imagery is fully explicit. In some ways, more realized
as a character, or more lovable if thats the word, is Anna LiviaPlurabell. I mean, Anna
LiviaPlurabell is Molly Bloom on acid, basically. Molly Bloom, we dont lose her outlines, we
understand Molly. And because Molly doesnt offer us that much of her own mind, she stands
for the eternal feminine. But only in the final soliloquy of Ulysses, do we really contact her.
Anna Livia, its her book, it may in fact be her dream, and the whole thing is permeated with her
tensions and her cares. As it says, Grampupus is fallen down, meaning the great father god is
at wake, but grinnysprids the boord. Meaning Anna Livia is always there, shes always there.

And in the wake, you could almost say that Molly Blooms soliloquy has been expanded to 300
or 400 pages. And the whole thing is a meditation on the river. The river is the feminine, and
the first image and the last image of the book is the river. The river dissolves everything and
carries it out to sea.

Let me read this description of Anna LiviaPlurabell, and then well go back to the synopsis.

How bootifull, and how truetowife of her, when strenglyforebidden, to steal our historic
presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses
70

of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. She is livving in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for
us (her birth is uncontrollable) with a naperon for her mask and her sabboeskickin arias (so sair!
so solly!) if you ask me and I saack you. Hou! Hou! Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall *+ she is
mercenary. Though the length of the land lies under liquidation (floote!) and theres nare a
hairbrow nor an eyebush on this glaubrousphace of HerrschuftWhatarwelter shell loan a vesta
and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat and shell do all a turfwoman can
to piff the business on. Paff.To puff the blaziness on.Poffpoff. And even if Humpty shell fall
frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers
therell be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care. So true is it that
therewheres a turnover the tay is wet too and when you think you ketch sight of a hind make
sure but youre cocked by a hin.

Well Nora felt that Jimmy would have been much better as a singer. She so stated that she had
great hopes for his voice. She was a very practical woman, Nora Barnacle, there wasnt a
literary bone in her body, and I think thats what Joyce loved about her, was that she was the
real thing. And all these women, Anna Livia, Molly, they are all Nora Joyce for sure.

He died just after it was published, although it had been known in manuscript for over 10 years
to the literati of his circle. It was called Work in Progress, and people didnt even know if he
was serious or not. And it was very hard to find a publisher. It was a typographical nightmare.
Joyce was going blind. And so, trying to keep track of spellingtheres hardly a standard spelling
in there, theres hardly a word that is not somehow fiddled with, and somehow changed
around.

If you pay attention to what youre calling life as it is, you will discover that its not a simple
thing at all, that its like this. I used to say, when youre vacuuming your apartment, Rome falls
nine times and hour, and your job is to notice. And you always do notice, but you never tell
yourself that youre noticing. In the course of the day, I live, and you live, to some degree, the
entirety of global civilization. I mean, Rome falls, algebra is discovered, the Turks are beaten at
the gates of Vienna, and it isnt even 11am yet!

So there is this sense of the co-presence of history. Were imprisoned inside the linear
assumption that Im a person in a place in a time, Im alive, most people arent, but in fact when
71

you deconstruct all that, that is fiction, and the truth is more this on-rushing magma of literary
association, and you know in _Ulysses_, you get an enormous amount of half-baked science.
Leopold Bloom is always looking at things and explaining to himself how they work using very
crack-potted notions of hydraulics and electricity and this sort of thing.

I think, people say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to
remember, but harder to remember than any of those, is simply ordinary experience. I mean,
you lie in the bath, and you close your eyes for thirty seconds, and empires fall, dynastic
families unfold themselves, power changes hands, princes are beheaded, a pope disgraced, and
then somebody drops something and you wake up and 15 seconds have passed. Thats the
reality of life, but we suppress this chaoticHail Eris!, irrational side.

The genius of Joyce, and to some degree, although in a more controlled form, Proust, and then
there were other practitioners, Faulkner, certainly, was, what they called stream of
consciousness. But what it was was an ability to actually listen to the associating mind, without
trimming, pruning, judging, denying. One of the puzzles to me is the great antagonism between
Jung and Joyce, because you would have thought they would have been comrades in arms, but
Joyce loathed psychoanalysis. He thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined
pathologies, was a very uncreative use of it, and that it should all be fabricated into literature.

Its very hard to surpass, you know. Thomas Pynchon, William Gadys, these people, everybody
genuflects to Joyce, but very few people plough in the way he did.

Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult hallucinatory writer, and there isnt 20 pages in
Gravitys Rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen page here. I can understand the impulse to
want to get the universe into a book, because it hints at some of the things weve talked about
in these circles, which is that the character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that
youre supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is
probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet, the felt datum of experience is much more literary
than that, I mean, we fall in love, we make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland, we
lose everything, we get terrible diseases, were cured of them, or we die of them, but it all has
this stromundrang aspect to it which physics is not supposed to have, but which literature
always has.
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And I dont know if its true, but I think what Joyce believed, and what Im willing to entertain in
some depth, is the idea that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing comprehension. That
salvation is an actual act of apprehension, of understanding, and that this act of apprehension
involves everything. This is why before James Joyce and this kind of literature, the only place
where you got these kinds of constructs was alchemy, and magic, the idea that through an act
of magic the universe could be condensed to yield a fractal microcosm of itself. What Joyce was
saying was that the novel, which was unknown in the alchemical era, the novel comes later, I
mean, arguably, the real zest for the novel comes in the 19th century, the novel is the
alchemical re-tort into which these theories of how things work can be cast.

I think the great modern exponent of this, although now dead, and certainly one who owed an
enormous debt to Joyce, was Vladimir Nabakov, especially in Ada. Ada is his paean of praise to
FW, basically, and the idea tackled in there is the idea of causality, and ordinary casuistry.

What all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as
well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language, and that somehow, if were prisoners of
language, then the key which will set us loose, is somehow also made of language, what else
could fit the lock?

So somehow, an act of poetic leisure domain is necessary, and Joyce in FW, I mean, he didnt
live to argue the case or to work it out, he died shortly after, but this comes about as close as
anybody ever came to actually pushing the entire content of the universe down into about 14
cubic inches.

Joyce and Proust had one meeting and supposedly Joyce said to Proust, Im too young for you
to teach me anything. Are you all familiar with The Remembrance of things Past? Well, it could
hardly be a more different work of literature, I mean, it is stately, and cinematic, and you
always know where you areand the characters are defined, its an old style novel. But there
are places in it where he just takes flight and prefigures the kind of writing that Faulkner and
Joyce were able to do.

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As far as psychedelic influences, I dont know that there are arguable any. Joyce lived in Trieste
for a while and taught English. He may have been, as a habitu of Paris, he may have been
familiar with hashish, he probably had some familiarity with absinthe, but I doubt that it was a
life-style for him.

I think the whole of the 20th Century is informed by this hyper-dimensional understanding. And
that, Jung tapping into it in the 20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists, even earlier,
the ecole de pataphysiques, Lautreamont, Jarry, all of these people, its what its about, the
20th Century, is this, well, McLuhans phrase comes to mind, the Gutenberg Galaxy, the
spectrum of effects created by print. The classes, the conceits, the industries, the products, the
attitudes, the garments, all of the things created by print, and we are living in a terminal
civilization. I dont want to say dying, because civilizations arent animals, but we are living in an
age of great self-summation, when what we look back at, is basically since the fall of Rome,
there has been an unbroken working-out of certain themes, scholasticism, the Aristotelian
corpuses, christianity, always presented as somehow a rival to Science, in fact paved the way
for Science. There would have been no science if there had been no William of Okam, who was
a 14th century nominalist theologian.

Really, Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a
summation under way, and I certainly dont presume to judge it, how do you place a value on
an entire civilization? But in the same way that when a person dies, their entire life passes
before them in review, when a civilization dies, it hypnogogically cycles the detritus of centuries
and centuries of struggle to understand. And someone like Joyce, I think, just brings that to an
excruciating climax. Its all there, from the smile that tugs at the lips of the woman in the Arnold
Feeney wedding, to quantum physics, to what Molliere said to his niece in the 15th letter and
so on and so on, and the task is to hold it in your mind. I think it was William James who said, if
we dont read the books with which we carefully line our apartments, then were no better
than our dogs and cats. And too often this is lost sight of. And the point is not simply that we
are aesthetes, literatures, and that here in the twilight of the gods we should sit around reading
Joyce, thats not the point. The point is, that this is the distillation of our experience of what it is
to be human. And its out of these kinds of distilling processes that we can launch some kind of
new dispensation for the human enterprise because we have played it out, its now a set piece,
all of it. I mean when I listen to rock n roll now, its interesting to me that it has the
completedness of polyphony. Its a done deal somehow, were looking backward, and were
anticipating.

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The purpose of literature is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move
into the future. This book, by being at first so opaque, so challenging to aesthetic canons and
social values, eventually emerges as a very prescient insight into our circumstance.

The ballad of Finnegans Wake has hundreds of verses, and in an Irish pub, it can keep people
going all night long. Its a celebration of complexity and the human journey, and Joyce doesnt
judge, it says somewhere in FW, Here in Moycayn which is the red light district of Dublin, we
flop on the seamy side, but up near Yent prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your
wings. So if you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked. Thats that passage about death.
It was a very optimistic transformative, sort of vision. Somehow complexity is the ocean we
have to learn to surf. Thats the river, and thats the psychedelic side of it. I mean, imagine that
you can get 63,000 different words in here, tell a story, and have all the common articles and
modifiers operating normally anyway.

And then its very optimistic, I mean, Molly Blooms speech is probably the single most
optimistic outpouring in all of 20th century literature. Not that there was much competition.
The final affirmation.

Sam Beckett, Nobel Prize Winner, genius in his own right, but, secretary to James Joyce for
many many years, and passionately in love with Joyces tragically schizophrenic daughter. You
want an unhappy story, youll find out why Sam Beckett is not exactly laughing all the time. A
very complex relationship to Joyces schizophrenic child.

Joyces family life was not very happy. I think he had a very sensuous life with Nora, but I dont
know what it would be like to be the guy who wrote this book to live with a woman who
thought you would be better off as a saloon singer. Not exactly a saloon singer, but still.

Shall I try and find a passage?

Let us now, weather, health, dangers, public orders and other circumstances permitting, of
perfectly convenient, if you police, after you, policepolice, pardoning mein, ich beam so fresch,
75

bey? drop this jiggerypokery and talk straight turkey meet to mate, for while the ears, be we
mikealls or nicholists, may sometimes be inclined to believe others the eyes, whether browned
or nolensed, find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself.
Habesauresetnumvidebis? Habesoculos ac mannepalpabuat? Tip! Drawing nearer to take our
slant at it (since after all it has met with misfortune while all underground), let us see all there
may remain to be seen.

But I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleaceaveryburies and jully glad when
Christmas comes his once a year. You are a poorjoist, unctuous to polisenopebobbies and
tunnibellysoully when tis thime took oer home, gin. We cannot say aye to aye. We cannot
smile noes from noes. One cannot help noticing that rather more than half of the lines run
north-south in the Nemzes and Bukarahast directions while the others go west-east in search
from Maliziies with Bulgarad for tiny tot though it looks when schtschupnistling alongside other
incunabula it has its cardinal points for all that.

Tip. Now, this word tip which keeps occurring throughout the text, no one is clear what it
means, but Joe Campbells guess is, its a tree branch which is tapping against the window, and
whoever is dreaming this hallucinatory gizmo of a dream, every once in a while a tap of the
branch breaks through

James Joyce's Masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake

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"The Human Future" with Terence McKenna and Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following
transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge
and Discovery,with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.
"The Human Future" with Terence McKenna and Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we're going to
examine "The Human Future." As we approach the year 2000, what are some of the novel
features of our contemporary culture that are likely to become dominant in a future society?
With me is Terence McKenna, a specialist in shamanistic cultures and hallucinogenic plants and
drugs. Terence is the coauthor with his brother Dennis of The Invisible Landscape: Mind,
Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, also Psilocybin:The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. In
addition he is a founder of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization devoted to
preserving hallucinogenic plants as used by native peoples throughout the world, and he's also
the author of Timewave Zero, a computer software package. Welcome, Terence.
TERENCE MCKENNA: It's a pleasure to be here, Jeffrey.
MISHLOVE: You know, you're a specialist really in the past -- the ancient past, the prehistoric
past of shamanistic cultures;and of course ancient peoples, shamans and other ancient peoples,
have always attempted to look at the future. Today there are many, many scenarios about the
future, and the one thing that seems to be certain is that the future will contain surprises -- that
no matter how much we attempt to predict what the future will be, there will always be
unexpected things.I think you have a unique perspective on the future, since your studies take
you so deeply into the past. I wonder what some of the major features that you delineate in our
present and our past society are that may tend to surprise us, or surprise conventional theorists
about the future.
MCKENNA: Well, first let me say you make a valid point.My ordinary concern is shamanism,
which is usually thought of as an archaic or an historical phenomenon. However, in my looking
at the shamanistic phenomenon, I've discovered that shamans themselves, as you also
mentioned,have a deep concern with seeing into the future, with having a feeling for the
course of development of the society in which they are embedded.And strangely enough, my
own career somewhat paralleled that model, as I was a student of Erich Jantsch, who was one
of the great forecasters of the last ten years.
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MISHLOVE: Systems theorist, as I recall.

MCKENNA: Systems theorist, exactly. And he was very concerned to model the future with a
degree of realism that had previously not been possible, and he taught me that the way to do
this is to concentrate on the novel and the unexpected. As you point out, much of the future
will be in fact characterized by factors that are presently unpredictable. How then, by stretching
our own definition of what is currently at the cutting edge of society, can we anticipate these
future event systems? My own approach to this has been to try to concretize or locate areas of
influence that seem to me, while very seminal in the present situation, probably fated to grow
and flower over the next twenty-five years.
MISHLOVE: You know, I think it's interesting that you mention Erich Jantsch. He wrote a book, I
believe it was called Design for Evolution.
MCKENNA: Exactly.
MISHLOVE: In that book I was very interested in how a man of his scientific credentials as a
systems theorist took a close look at the new age movement, and things such as Kundalini yoga,
and examined how we might begin as a society to look at developing Kundalini to develop our
own evolution biologically and as a species.
MCKENNA: Yes, well, he was an extremely broad thinker,not only a fine scientist but music
critic, philosopher, what have you. A point that he was always very much concerned to make to
me about the future was that much of the future is in place in the present. A typical residential
street of today will look pretty much as it looks today thirty years from now, barring major
catastrophic changes in society. A curious thing about history is how much momentum it does
have. Nevertheless it is possible to isolate forces which are creating change. Four major forces
which I will enumerate and discuss for you, the four that I think are probably among the most
important, are first of all feminism. Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed
in the present context primarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yet
percolated throughout society that the advancement of women is a program vitally connected
to the survival of human beings as a species. The reason for this is simply that institutions take
on the character of the atoms which compose them, and what we are most menaced by -in the
twentieth century- are dehumanized institutions. If women played a major role in policy
formation and execution on the part of these institutions, I think they would have a far more
benign and ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism not as a kind of war
between the sexes or any of these stereotypic images, but as actually a kind of effort to shift
the ratios of our emphasis that is expressed through our institutions.
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MISHLOVE: In other words, you're not looking so much at whether women get more voting
rights, or whether they get more women placed in high positions in government, but rather
whether institutions have more of a nurturing quality.
MCKENNA: That's right. It isn't even really about women,it's about femininity -- injecting
femininity into our decision-making process and our social policy. Naturally the most obvious
way to do this is to bring women into the process, but that isn't necessarily how it should be
done.
MISHLOVE: Well, there's a catch phrase now that's going around a lot in business circles -"High tech, high touch." That seems to embody this notion of paying attention to human
feelings and to caring about people as we develop a more technologically oriented society.
MCKENNA: Yes, although I'm suspicious of that, having seen several American revolutions
turned into advertising slogans. I'm afraid this may be an effort to co-opt the really volcanic
energy that feminism could bring to the social restructuring effort. But feminism is only one of
these novel areas that are injecting change into our lives.
MISHLOVE: Why don't we list the others, and then perhaps we can look at how they interrelate
with each other?
MCKENNA: Well, for example cybernetics is certainly a major area where we could spend some
time. Space flight -- I don't think you would get a lot of argument from people that that is going
to have a major impact on our lives. Then perhaps in a more controversial vein,and along the
lines of my own special interests, I think hallucinogenic plants and the pushing back of the
frontiers of the mind, the cataloging of ever more exotic states of experience through the use
of hallucinogenic drugs, aerobic exercise, vitamin therapy, what have you, is going to be very,
very important. Seen as an amalgam, what these things seem to imply is that we are really
sweeping toward the climax of a thousand-year-old civilization -- a civilization that began, I
suppose you could say, with the rise of medieval scholasticism, which then transformed itself
into proto-modern science, which then became modern science, and then modern philosophy.
We are really sweeping toward the culmination of the western contribution to the story of
mankind, and what will that contribution be?It could well be a devastating speciesexterminating thermonuclear war.Or it could be the culmination and completion of the ideals
that we inherited from the Greeks. How we balance historical forces against the need to evolve
consciousness is going to decide how the tale is told, and if you look at the things that I named - feminism, cybernetics, consciousness expansion,space flight -- these are all different
approaches toward the notion of expanding our frontiers, organizationally, geographically,
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information-ally, consciously. The expansion of frontiers is the very essence of a continuing

human future, a humane human future.
MISHLOVE: You used the word balance a little earlier in a pivotal way, and the four elements
that you mentioned strike me as being rather balanced. Space flight and cybernetics seem to be
expanding the frontiers of science and technology, and yet when we look at the inner
exploration suggested by the rise of feminism and the return or revival or re-energizing of
hallucinogenic drugs and other features of the consciousness movement, that suggests an
expansion of the inner frontiers. It seems tome ultimately that if we are to survive the threats
that now stand poised above our planet, that balance has to be essential, that we can't go too
far either internally or externally without some balancing features.
MCKENNA: No, I think that's a very good point. In fact the entire lethal dimension to our
cultural dilemma can be laid at the feet of a burgeoning scientific capability that developed at
the expense of a concomitant ethical capacity. I think that we are not going to go to the stars as
Republicans and Democrats, communists and free marketeers;we are not going to go to the
stars as male chauvinists; nor are we going to go to the stars as uninformed clods. All of these
various characteristics and ways of being are dross that the historical experience of the
twentieth century is going to either burn away from us or burn us with. We have actually
created a self-limiting situation for ourselves. We are the ones who have boxed ourselves into
this dilemma, and we must now be the ones who have the cultural and intellectual wherewithal
to take command of the situation and to navigate out of this cul-de-sac without wrecking the
planet, without betraying our ethical heritage of some several thousand years. Balance is going
to be essential to this -- a sense of openness to possibility,a sense of the true strangeness of the
situation in which we find ourselves.
MISHLOVE: It strikes me that as we move into the future,as we move into the next millennium,
perhaps the really novel feature that might emerge is that as a culture, as a global culture, we
will be forced,I think, to take responsibility for ourselves on this planet in a way that we haven't
previously been forced to do because we've always had room to expand, room to exploit the
environment and ourselves. We're running out of room for that,so we must be responsible.
MCKENNA: Yes. Well, this is the century in which the chickens come home to roost. All the
profligate processes of metal extraction and subjugation of native populations and land clearing
in the tropics, that pot latch mentality must now give way to a more resource conserving state
of mind, or we will be quite simply doomed. And I'm very much up on humanity,but I'm very
concerned about the role that the United States is to play in this future. Certainly if resource
management is going to be an important factor in the future, then the Japanese are out in front
80

of all of us.Now, if not having committed resources to an obsolete infrastructure is going to

have an impact, then certainly the Chinese have a leg up on all of us. Did you know that there
are less than a thousand private automobiles in China? Can you conceive of the leap forward
that can be made if you could go from the wooden cart to the spaceship without committing
yourself to fifty years of highway building and gas stations and petroleum extraction and this
sort of thing?
MISHLOVE: You have a remarkable talent here for seeing the positive side of a nation of a
billion people living in what we would think of as destitute poverty. They don't have cars
because the per capita income in China is about two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars a year.
MCKENNA: Well, I think Marshall McLuhan pointed out that any technology put in place is
extremely difficult to dislodge, and that is our problem. We went for the automobile so
completely that it will now be a major effort at cultural restructuring to leave it behind. The
Chinese have no such problem. I think it was Freeman Dyson, or perhaps Gerrard O'Neill, who
said, "No technology should be put in place that has a foreseeable obsolescence." This was his
argument against nuclear power. And I think that's an excellent point. We should not commit
ourselves to any course of action whose end state can be foreseen. This is why we have to
commit ourselves to this kind of conscious, open-system, non-equilibrium future that futurists
like Jantsch, and West Churchman and others have so eloquently described in their work.
MISHLOVE: Let's talk for a bit about the role of hallucinogens in the future. I think most people
would agree that the marvelous decade of the 1960s, which seem to have awakened so many
people to possibilities,was inextricably linked with the use of LSD and other hallucinogens at
that period. It's interesting to me that today this is not talked about very much; you're one of
the few people who are willing to look at the role that hallucinogens may have played at that
time. How do you see hallucinogens? Do you imagine, for example, that a billion Chinese will
return to...
MCKENNA: Using LSD? No, it isn't quite like that. I think that whatever we may say about the
way hallucinogens were introduced into American society in the sixties, I think that that has
now become a dead horse, and that we are looking at a much different sort of problem. The
problem is that psychology is the science whose perfection we are most in need of, because our
whole problem is that we do not communicate with each other. We do not understand our own
motivations. We are waiting on psychology literally to save our necks, and governments are
repressing the major tools that promise major advances in psychology. I may represent only a
faction of opinion, but it is my opinion that the hallucinogenic plants and drugs are to
psychology what Galileo's telescope was to astronomy. The difference is that the church was
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unable to suppress the telescope, but the state has had immense success in suppressing
hallucinogens. I'm not speaking of keeping it out of the hands of high schoolers and college
students; I'm talking about keeping it out of the hands of research pharmacologists. Science
feels free to investigate any area that concerns it -- areas of our interpersonal relating, our
sexuality, the effects of automobile crashes on human bodies studied through using monkeys.
Nothing is sacred. However, when it comes to allowing scientists to study the effect of
hallucinogenic compounds on brain function and psychology, a great wall, a great barrier, is
raised, and I think it signifies the fear really, that the establishment has of unleashing the
creativity and vitality that it senses to be tied up in these things. The very decade that you
mentioned was the last decade, I think, when Americans had this feeling of an open-ended,
hopeful, transcendent future. Ever since the 1960s we've been given shortages, limited
resources, voluntary simplicity, and a host of other notions that boil down to repression.
MISHLOVE: So you're suggesting that the legal restrictions are perhaps a temporary aberration,
and that the exploration of the human mind through hallucinogens or other means might get us
in touch with avast resource within ourselves that we seem to have lost touch with a little bit as
a culture.
MCKENNA: Yes. Well, if you contrast the state of modern astrophysics with astronomy as it was
practiced in 1530, I think you can feel the kind of paradigm shift that I'm suggesting. We know
nothing about the mind. There are a few theories -- Freud, Jung, Reich, so forth and so on -- but
these are just guesses tossed into the unknown. And yet in principle the mind need not be a
mystery; it's simply that the more complex objects in nature yield their secrets last. We
understood falling lead balls long before we understood drops of water; we understood drops
of water long before plastic polymers. The brain will yield, but it will yield to a different set of
tools than the ones we have been applying.
MISHLOVE: As a philosopher, or at least a person who asks a lot of questions, I wonder if the
ultimate nature of the mind is really knowable, any more than the ultimate nature of matter. It
seems as if in some sense, as physicists today probe the ultimate nature of matter, they begin
asking questions that sound more and more theological. And we get that way too with people
who look at the mind, particularly people who explore hallucinogens.
MCKENNA: I think we can do a great deal, though, without having ultimate knowledge of
something. As you yourself said, we have no ultimate knowledge of what matter is, or
electricity, and yet we light our cities with electricity; we transform matter any way we wish. So
I agree with you; the mind is inherently mysterious. If nothing else, Goedel's theorem will
protect it from being understood -- that mind cannot understand mind. But I think brain, which
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is the receiver of mind, the stage upon which mind acts, the magic marionette, if you will,
there's much to be learned there. That is in fact the great frontier of materialism, strangely
enough.
MISHLOVE: As you look at the future, Terence, with your special lenses that really are unique to
yourself, where do you see the realm of religion evolving?
MCKENNA: Well, I think we are rapidly growing into what I call a religion of the imagination,
where we transcend individual archetypes and begin instead to realize that the mystery can
take any form, and that a higher religion is a religion then which dispenses with the symbolic
forms, the presentational modes of the mystery, and concentrates on the mystery itself as a
kind of ineffable center of being that constellates everything around it to have meaning.
MISHLOVE: This would require obviously a dropping away,then, of dogma.
MCKENNA: Yes, well, I think dogma has served us ill. How ill is hard to say, but I think, for
instance, the case could be made that it got us to this point. I think it was H.G. Wells who said,
"History is a race between education and disaster," and I think we are in the homestretch, we
are neck and neck, it is too close to call, and we must not take our eye off the ball. It is going to
take the best effort of all of us to bring to birth the kind of transcendental human future that
we all sense so pregnantly near the surface of things. It is not far away. It is here, it is now, if we
could but invoke it, if we could but find the means to communicate to the deeper parts of
ourselves and to each other, to bring that kind of perfected future into being. It's fallen out of
fashion recently in a lot of existential whining and carping, but I think this is only a fad of the
times. The future is endlessly bright and full of transcendental promise for those who are not
afraid of it.
MISHLOVE: The future that you described was a fourfold future, in effect -- feminism, space
flight, cybernetics, and hallucinogens.It reminds me of Jung's image of the mandala, the
fourfold mandala, that we move into.
MCKENNA: Yes, well, these things could be imagined as the four quarters of a mandala that
taken together create the totality of a free and caring world -- well fed, well governed, well
intentioned,and pointed toward the exploration of the mystery of being, which is, I think, really
the higher calling of human beings. We are naturally called to the mystery, we are naturally its
acolytes, and in all other roles we perform rather badly, I think.

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MISHLOVE: So there's a sense in which if we look at the future, we might ask ourselves, why
have a future at all? What is the meaning,what is the purpose of being here? And you seem to
be saying to study, to appreciate the mystery of it all.
MCKENNA: Well, I think that history is a kind of message from the ineffable -- that in the rise of
dynastic families and the fall of empires and the migrations of peoples there is a vast tale being
told; that we are caged within art, and that the great satisfaction of contemplating this
spectacle is to know where in the tale you are.
MISHLOVE: Terence McKenna, thank you very much for being with me. It's been such a
pleasure.
MCKENNA: It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

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Spacetime Tsunami

Since I don't work for any academic institution or feed at any government or corporate trough,
I'm free to think anything I want about reality. And I think the phenomenon which most people
can agree is happening is that time appears to be speeding up in human history, for example, or
in the twentieth century, or in the last 25 months. So rather than see this as just something
trivial or an artifact of the act of perceiving it, I would like to think that it's real, that time is in
fact speeding up. When you look back at the history of the universe, you see that this has been
going on for a long long time. Things have been happening faster and faster and faster.

For instance, immediately after the birth of the universe, there was a long period of time where
the only thing that was happening was that it was cooling. The amount of energy was so high
that you couldn't get molecules, you couldn't get stable structures, you couldn't even get
atomic systems. The universe was very simple and very hot. As it cooled, it became more
complex. Each drop in temperature allowed new things to happen which built on previous new
things which had happened. So, for example, first you get electrons settling into orbits around
nuclei, then you get atomic chemistry for the first time. The universe cools, and time passes,
and you get molecular chemistry - bonds of lower strength that can form only at the lower
temperatures coming into existence. That allows complex polymers to form.

This process of complexification is going on in nature. When you look at it you realize that it
happened faster and faster. It took a long time for there to be life, or just for planets to form,
and stars to settle down. Then once you get life, you get a very rapid proliferation of form, and
by rapid I mean in scales of hundreds of millions of years, and then you get higher animals.
After that you get animals like ourselves, and you get language, and culture, and writing, and
electronic media. Each of these steps occurs more and more quickly, leading to the conclusion
that human history and the presence of tool making, poetry making, and thinking creatures on
this planet have something to do with being caught, or you might otherwise say, fortunately
positioned very close to a kind of anomaly that is haunting space and time. You can think of it
as a collision with a hyperdimensional black hole.

85

We and our universe and everything in it are being sucked closer and closer into the presence
of something which seems to be made out of pure idea. It's very hard to English, but it explains
basically what's going on on this planet - why it is that 50,000 years ago, shit-hurling monkeys
decided to set off on the long march toward the space shuttle, and an integrated global
economy, and toxic pollution, and the whole ball of wax? A process of some sort unique in
nature was unleashed 25-50,000 years ago. From that point on there was a tremendous push
into symbolic expression and the cultural consequence of symbolic expression which is
technology. And now, we've run the nut right off the end of the bolt, and the planet's finite
limits are being reached. But the process shows no sign of slowing down. So rather than see it
as some apocalypse or some terrible flaw of human fate run amok, I see it as a natural
phenomenon. Human history is not our fault.

The world is getting weirder and weirder by leaps and bounds. It's moving faster and faster. It's
very science fiction. You have potentially human life-extinguishing epidemic diseases, at the
same time that you have whispers of cold fusion and journeys to the stars. Meanwhile people
are meeting little rubbery beings in their bedrooms in the middle of the night, and having rectal
examinations. All this crazy shit is going on which is called the melt-down of Western civilization
at the end of the second millennium. Then if you toss psychedelic drugs into the mix, shamanic
plants and this sort of thing, and make journeys out into the architectonic superspace of the
culture, you quickly realize the cosmic egg is cracking.

Weirdness, when you analyze it, means unusual connections. Connections between things
which would ordinarily not be connected. This was the perception of surrealism. Another way
of thinking, what time speeding up means, is that all boundaries are beginning to dissolve boundaries of space and time - and everything is beginning to coalesce into some kind of
organometallic-human-machine-cultural-spiritual-material interphasing amoeboid something
that is spreading like a coral reef around the planet. In order to not freak out and see it as the
end of everything, you have to think of it as under control, first of all. So then the question is, of
what? I think it is controlled by something like the Gaian mind.

The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had 5- or 6billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain, forests
and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two
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less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the
dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling
towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why
its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance.

The culture is melting down. It's happening, and nobody knows where it leads. They're doing
computer modeling, some of which indicates that it's too late, that if men of good-will and
women of good-will came forward everywhere and took control, it would be too fucking late. I
don't think so. I think that there's some very large plan in all this that doesn't come from God
Almighty or anything like that. It comes from biology. It's the architecture of evolutionary
breakthrough that is etched into every molecule of DNA on the planet. It's going to happen the egg shell is breaking. The womb is ruptured, and there is no way out now but some kind of
journey down the very frightening birth-canal of experience. The next 30 years will stand your
hair on end, guaranteed, because it's barely begun. Right now, we are living in the golden
twilight of Western Civilization. The long afternoon of Cartesian rationalism.Ahead lies
agricultural failure, atmospheric disruption, ethnic warfare, sexually transmitted diseases,
propoganda, superdrugs, AND a whole bunch of good stuff. But it's going to be a whiteknuckled ride to break through at the end of time, because there is so much to be unleashed.
What's happening is we're turning into something else.

We're now in the process of answering your original question which was why did I say we
would be unrecognizable by the year 2012? Because we cannot continue to be recognizable
and survive. We monkeys love a good fight, so now the pressure is coming on. The kissing has
to stop, and the struggle will be wild and wooly, but we're intelligent. We're survivors.

And finally, what does this faster and faster mean? What it means is that time will eventually go
so fast that the rest of the future - all of it - will happen in a few seconds. This is similar to the
bubble-like expansion of space and time at the birth of the universe. There will be a contraction
of space and time at the end that will be similar to the bursting of a bubble.

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Maybe what is happening is that culture is somehow going to bootstrap itself into a kind of
intellectual hyperspace. And then the question is, where is that? Is it enfolded within the
eyelash of a fruit-fly? Can we become as viriuses and just drift in the stratocumulus clouds? I
don't know, but it's not my business at this point to know that. I think we have a lot to go
through. I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything
you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know
is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And
there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really
understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine
hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?'
'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of
what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable
and nobody knows what's out there.

This article was originally published in Sex Candy for Happy Mutants! bOINGbOING #10, as an
interview of Terence McKenna by Carla Sinclair, Spacetime Tsunami.

Sex Candy for Happy Mutants! bOINGbOING #10

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Evolution and Freedom

Chapter 14 of 'The Invisible Landscape,' by Terence McKenna
Like every major theory, the contemporary theory of evolution and genetics is an intricate
combination of fact, hypothesis, and deduction. In the category of established fact belongs
evolution as such: that species do change, have emerged in series of changes from ancestral
forms, and in their entirety form a branching family system of common descent in which the
simple precedes the complex, and transitions are gradual. Also an ascertained fact is the
occurrence of mutations; but not their nature or cause. Natural selection is a logical deduction
from the two premises of competition and of differences in competitors, which themselves are
facts. The chance character of mutations is a hypothesis: the inducement of some of them by
external forces, such as radiation, is a fact of laboratory experience, but the claim that these are
representative of all of them and for their underlying dynamics is a mere trial with Occam's
Razor, and the sufficiency of this kind of variability for the emergence of the major plans of
organization is, so far, more a metaphysical contention than a scientific hypothesis, if
hypothesis implies construction of at least a mentally workable model. We have already shown
the application of the waveform to short term astronomical movements and the precession of
the equinoxes. It seems, therefore, not unreasonable to assume that it is applicable to other
phenomena of longer duration. In the light of the above, we have examined the history of the
fossil record to determine if major evolutionary events are reflected in the quantifications of
the modular wave hierarchy on the 1.3 billion year scale, for if the wave hierarchy controls the
emergent evolutionary properties of life in a given moment, it must do so through the control
of mutation. Agreement between the quantified temporal graph and fossil record, if
substantially proven, would erode orthodox evolutionary theory, which leans on the hypothesis
of chance mutation.

In the following quotation from L. L. Whyte we infer that low temperature quantum mechanical
systems refers to the temperatures where organism and metabolism are met: tendency
towards the formation of more complex unified patterns does not imply any obscure vitalistic
factor, since in appropriate circumstances it can be the direct result of the tendency towards
arrangements of minimal potential energy. Thus the potential energy principle can, in complex
low temperature quantum mechanical systems, produce a structuring or formative tendency
which, under certain conditions, will shape the genetic system towards novel, stable, unified
arrangements. Arbitrary changes in the genetic system may thus be reformed into favorable
mutations satisfying the Coordinative Conditions. We have already indicated our belief that the
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modular wave hierarchy we have elaborated may be the system that can supply mathematical
rigor to the idea of the Coordinative Conditions. If, as Jonas says, for an evolutionary doctrine to
be a scientific one it is essential that the dynamics involved do not contain any element of
teleology, or preformative disposition, or aspiration toward the higher forms to come but that
they 'evolve' those higher forms without their being in any way 'involved' on the initial stage,
then this theory, positing as it does preformation and a temporality of life at its own subjective
substratum, seeks to reintroduce teleology to contemporary thought at the expense of the
satisfying, but logically unfounded, reliance upon the idea of temporal invariance, which is the
foundation of science and scientific notions of proof. Organism is a state wherein matter
appears to function, in part, with teleological characteristics associated with the self experience
of mind and banned from the assumptions of causal materialism. Mind, whose self expectation
is satisfied by freedom, discovers itself in experience, functioning in a situation, in part causal.
Thus, the teleological completion of mind, when in inter phase with matter, creates the still
unresolved philosophical paradox that organic life represents. Having an interior horizon of
transcendence and the causal encumbrances of physical extension no different from that
possessed by nonliving matter, the body is a paradoxical union of opposites. However, the self
experienced teleology inherent in mind suggests that the teleological perspective may be a
primary intuition of emerging concrescence. Perhaps it is not the mechanistic fiat of random
mutation and adaptive selection that imparts apparent teleology to organic nature, but rather
the hierarchical structure of time expressing its structure goal as the shock-wave of being in
time. The teleological pattern operates in each organism and is recapitulated in the general
character of the evolutionary enterprise. This pattern represents and gives direction to the
seeking of itself, which is equivalent to withdrawal from effects in the res extensa, and which,
as process, the process called life, actually does impart a preformative teleology to an
otherwise mechanistic, causal, and entropy seeking system, the res extensa. If the mechanics of
mutation were shown to be non random and ordered according to this wave hierarchy, then
the primary role of time in imparting teleology to life, via the modulation of the density of the
coincident events that cause mutation, would be clearly indicated. To gain perspective on the
ideas presented in this work and to reduce them to a series of propositions that can be
examined independently of each other, we present a tentative minimal description of our
experiment and its premises:

1. The tryptamines, primarily 5HT, and the beta-carbolines, primarily harmine, offer an
informational readout through molecular intercalation into, neural nucleic acids and molecular
broadcast of the ESR waveform of information hypothetically stored in the neural nucleus. In
the case of 5HT, this ESR signal represents the electrochemical basis for consciousness as it is
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typically experienced. The case of harmine is different. The ESR signal seems to carry more
information than does the 5HT ESR of normal serotonin metabolism. The refinement of
information output and recall quality that attends the shift of normal 5HT levels in favor of
harmine and related compounds marks, we suggest, an adaptive advance of considerable
significance. The levels of 5HT and beta-carbolines in human neural tissue may be undergoing a
steady shift in the direction of increased beta-carboline secretion and increased inhibition of
5HT. This shift is responsible for the advance of consciousness, consciousness being the self
perceived phenomenon attendant upon the improving ESR resolution of the informational
hologram of species' experience stored in DNA. The artificially induced inhibition of MAO and
the simultaneous rise in beta-carboline levels in the brain that accompany ingestion of
Banisteriopsis infusions are thus a means of briefly inducing a state that may anticipate future
adaptations of human consciousness, adaptations refined through evolutionary selection
working among the various ESR transmitters that intercalate into DNA and RNA. The experience
attendant upon harmine intercalation differs from normal consciousness but is experienced
superimposed over it. The harmine induced ESR modulation registers as a higher cortical
experience, intellectually understood as a continuously self defining totality symbol,
represented through time on any of an infinite number of possible symbolic levels.

2. This phenomenon can be entirely stabilized. Stability is achieved through permanently

bonding the harmine resonance unit into DNA and is directly maintained through endogenous
synthesis. Stability is achieved through techniques using audibly induced ESR harmonic
canceling.

3. During the application of these techniques, the owner of the DNA so treated will
spontaneously produce ever more complete analogical descriptions of the configuration and
interrelations of the energy patterns stored in the structure of DNA, patterns that imbue life
with its characteristically preformative, actually a temporal, teleology. The subject feels these
ideas to be arising from a source outside the ego, but within her or himself. The subject
experiences the imminent presence of an agency, impersonal and without limitation, that
produces these ideas. He or she not only feels this agency to be the more than cybernetic
matrix of the DNA but also the non ego information source assures the subject that this is the
case.

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Further, it offers ever more elaborate models of itself, which are not only descriptions of a
static goal that will represent complete concrescence but also, and inherently, these models act
predicatively relative to when this completion will be achieved. They offer a description of the
shifting boundary conditions that will necessarily modify all the temporal moments that
separate the present from this completion. These necessary boundary conditions may be
mapped through a series of mathematical operations performed on the / Ching: the time graph,
its quantification, and the quantified modular hierarchy of which it is the basic unit. We have
assumed for some time a predictable moment of concrescence. This idea poses no difficulties
for a view seeking to preserve the self evident phenomenon of free will. The idea of purpose is
everywhere in a nature reductionist methods have shown to be non redundant, and it is a
matter of common experience that one may make choices and pursue good or bad influences.
Humans, subject to the conditions and conditioning of their environment and nature, neither of
which nor both together represent an absolute determinism, are free. Human beings are free
as to how they are fulfilled; they freely choose from the possibilities inhering within the
imposed boundary conditions of the situations in which they find themselves, and they realize
their choices. That each entity in the universe of a given concrescence can, so far as its own
nature is concerned, be implicated in that concrescence in one or other of many modes; but in
fact it is implicated only in one mode: that the particular mode of implication is only rendered
fully determinate by that concrescence, though it is conditioned by the correlate universe. This
indetermination, rendered determinate in the real concrescence, is the meaning of potentiality.
It is a conditioned indetermination, and is therefore called a real potentiality. Humankind is not,
however, free to choose the when of its completion. The actual moment of concrescence is a
property of the most inclusive epoch. In the modular hierarchy of time, it is an imposed fact.
Time must be well used; this is a basis for a possible theory of ethics. But even time well used
still hurries us and all beings to its own conclusion. To preserve this perception and the idea of a
matter and history conditioning a temporal inter species bio electronic hologram with a
temporally expressed and mathematically describable unfolding, it is necessary to take the
following view of human kinds freedom to act and the immutability of the order and rate of
novel ingressions. Such ingressions only define boundary conditions. In the unfolding of novel
ingressions, there are moments of maximum propitiousness. As the probability of a time of
renewal intensifies, who can doubt the possibility that humanity, through an act of free will,
may anticipate the new epoch? All philosophy springs from the idea that the human mind is the
measure and leading edge of all things. And it is with poetry and philosophy that we must take
that measure.

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May it not be that the Tao leaves creation unfinished, and humans, who appear according to
the will of Tao, are given further levels of creation to weave the mode of the completion of
each level more and more a matter of human decision, of the decisions of visionary humanity?
Now the time of rebirth has come upon the world again, and though these years open wide
their solstices and eclipses and windows to the ideas, yet, finally, the manner in which we
present ourselves in that cumulatively intense final moment may well be a personal decision.
Time grows ever more short; in the cosmic year day of history, dawn is already breaking over
Jerusalem.

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Alien Dreamtime by Space Time Continuum feat. Terence McKenna

Alien Dreamtime was a multimedia event recorded live on February 27th 1993

All right. Tonight for your edification and amusement, three raves, two interregnums. Visions by
Rose-X. Didgeridoo: Steven Kent, and sound by Spacetime. Words and ideas by Terence
McKenna.

Rap 1, The Archaic Revival.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley,
and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every
time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane
moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa
15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history,
before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets
and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the
secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century
is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing,
abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century
mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa
where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the
tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this
matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward
escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of
history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the
community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to
streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need
is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the
ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience
the ego is suppressed and the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the
materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the
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importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and
nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of
immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of
the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover
through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of
beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of
going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever
having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body
and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism,
ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three
enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the
run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all
reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and
self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind,
and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the
living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of
bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the
idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic
dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, Intelligence. This is what we have to have
to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Rap 2, Alien Love

Hello... So that was like an introduction, now for some preaching to the choir on the subject of
how come it is that the further in you go the bigger it gets. I remember the very, very first time
that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark you might say, and I remember that this friend
of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which
looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Hoffman's I figured there were
no surprises. So the only question I asked is, 'How long does it last?' and he said, 'About five
minutes.' So I did it and... there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange
and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind
and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind,
it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully
soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls,
what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, what I call self-transforming
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machine elves. Sort of like jeweled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd
had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that
they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I
watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what
they were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them into
existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing them- selves with
Mandian alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality
put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these
little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could
bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I
wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be
holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting
my own, and then I thought a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value and
realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over
the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find
out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt..and then I can't remember what it felt like
because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, 'Don't think about it. Don't
think about who you are. Think about doing what we're doing. Do it. Do it now. Do It!!'

Rap 3, Speaking in Tongues

And what they meant was use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble
kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of my chest;
they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, 'Do it.' And I felt language rise up in me that
was unhooked from English, and I began to speak..like this, 'Eyocademaflagwasipipieng... or
words to that effect. And I wondered then what it all meant and why it felt so good if it didn't
mean anything. And I thought about it, a few years actually, and I decided that meaning and
language are two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience
wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic is that the world
is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it
whatever you wish. And one of the things that I learned about DMT was that if you've ever had
it, even just once, then you can have a dream, and in this dream somebody will pull out a little
glass pipe, and then it will happen! It will happen just like the real thing. Because there's a
button somewhere inside each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side.
And that's the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to sail. Good luck...
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Rap 4, Timewave Zero

Hello... alright. Have you ever noticed how there's this quality to reality which comes and goes,
and kind of ebbs and flows and nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it except some
people call it a 'bad hair day' or some people say 'Things are really weird recently.' And I think
we never notice it and we never talk about it because we're embedded in a culture that expects
us to believe that all times are the same, and that your bank account doesn't fluctuate except
according to the vicissitudes of your own existence. In other words, every moment is expected
to be the same and yet this isn't what we experience. And so what I noticed was that running
through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty. And some days, and some years, and some
centuries are very novel indeed, and some ain't. And they come and go on all scales differently,
interweaving, resonating. And this is what time seems to be. And Science has overlooked this,
this most salient of facts about nature: that nature is a novelty conserving engine. And that
from the very first moments of that most improbable big bang, novelty has been conserved
because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe.
There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields; there was only an
ocean of free electrons. And then time passed and the universe cooled and novel structures
crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms; atoms of hydrogen and helium aggregating into stars.
And at the center of those stars the temperature and the pressure created something which
had never been seen before which was fusion. And fusion cooking in the hearts of stars brought
forth more novelty: heavy elements - iron, carbon, four-valet carbon. And as time passed there
were not only then elementary systems but because of the presence of carbon and the lower
temperatures in the universe, molecular structures. And out of molecules come simple subsets
of organism. The genetic machinery for transcripting information, aggregating into membranes,
always binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon
complexity, and always faster and faster and faster. And then we come to ourselves. And where
do WE fit into all of this. Five million years ago we were an animal of some sort. Where will we
be five million years from tonight? What we represent is not a sideshow, or an
epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something-or-other on the edge of nowhere. What WE
represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together,
complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far
as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neo
cortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. We are the
cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on
for a while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I
mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not genetic information, not
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genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity: writing, theater, poetry, dance,
art, tattooing, body piercing and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression
into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds temples,
builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth, into space, into
the micro-physical domain, into the micro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago
were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necessary upon the cities of our enemies the very
energy which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is
calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And the confrontation with this
something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything
actually means. It means that the de-no-ma of human history is about to occur and is about to
be revealed as a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to
become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.

You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can
feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are
unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of
the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you
that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of
how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's the signal that some enormous protean
form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of
the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some
kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to
us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The
language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to
shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we
can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name
it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the
disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain
forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that
the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of
collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely
unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what
we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we
look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And
a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't
worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your
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place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution
means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history. A return
to the archaic mode.A rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000
years ago. A techno-escape forward into a future that looks more like the past than the future
because materialism, consumerism, product-fetishism, all of these things will be eliminated and
technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence. If we have
the dream, if we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimitable
to the human condition. That's what we're talking about here: psychedelics as a catalyst to the
human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language; because what cannot be said,
cannot be created by the community. So what we need then is the forced evolution of
language. And the way to do that is to go back to the agents that created language in the very
first place. And that means the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious,
beckoning, extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up in to the Chakras of the
hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the total other that created us and
brought us forth out of animal organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny.
How well we do determines how well the experiment of life on Earth does, because we have
become the cutting edge of that experiment, we define it, and we hold in our hands the power
to make or to break it.

This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millennium. This is the real
thing folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that
there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calender as a club. We can make the
millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the
dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not
based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony. We.. All these things are possible if we can
understand the overarching metaphor which holds it together which is the celebration of mind
as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they
have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they
understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't
be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be
re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if
we are able to make this point then we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend.
Nine times in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles pushing human
populations ahead of it and those people didn't fuck up. Why should we then? We are all
survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. And now with
the engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually
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exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO and open the
violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world
beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millennium
that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. This is the moment. A
planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime, and we are ready, and we
are poised. And as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own.

It's there. Go for it, and thank you.

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Terence McKenna and Fraser Clark - Is There Any Reason to Hope?

Fraser Clark: He's probably the most adventurous mind on the planet today. I would just like to
say one little thing about the man himself, if I'm going to talk about him. Where I like to refer to
him, that he's not just a philosopher, he's not just an intellectual. The man is a revolutionary, an
iconoclast. And he's doing lots of things besides this talk and ideas. So that's it: Terence
McKenna!
Terence is going to talk for about one hour, and then we'll do questions and answers. What I'd
like you to do is, if you have a question, write it on a piece of paper and at the end of the hour
and bring it up here. I'll be sitting at the back of the stage. That way it works a little more
efficiently.
Terence McKenna: All right. I don't knowdo you sit? Do you stand? What do you do? Is the
sound good? Is the light good? So, are you happy to be here? Good. So am I.
Well, before I get into the bulk of the lecture tonight, I thought I would just give you some news
from the frontier of pharmacology, which is that, for the second time in the 20th Century, a
mega hallucinogen has been discovered that is active in microgram quantities.
What this is, is an incredible opportunity for the community, because this compound that is
active at 300 micrograms when smoked is not illegal anywhere in the worldto grow, to
manufacture, to possess, to transport.
So here is the story. For 45 years it's been a commonplace of the botanical literature that there
was a Mexican plant called salvia divinorum. But it was always said that it was either impossible
to confirm its hallucinogenic activity, or whatever it was, it was so unstable that it would only
persist in the plant for a few hours after it was picked.
About five years ago, an American anthropologist, one of our own, Brett Blosser, went to the
Oaxacanmountains and spent some time time with the Indians down there, and they showed
him how to get off on the plant, the leaf. He described to me and a number of other people
quite extraordinary states of consciousness that were coming from this particular shamanic
plant.
That's where it rested until about 10 months ago, when an underground chemist in an
earthquake-prone city, who prefers to remain anonymous, set out to actually isolate the
constituent of salvia divinorum. In short order he overcame the conventional wisdom and
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produced a crystalline material, active at the microgram range. To check what it was, he
purchased a chromatographic standard of a compound called salvinorin-alpha, that had been
extracted from this plant 15 years ago. And he smoked that, and the experience was identical.
So we now know that there is a new chemical compound in the isoquinoline family that is
active in the microgram range that occurs in a plant that looks like Joe Plant. It's a house plant.
It's a window box plant. It's a relative of the coleus. It grows from Nome to the equator, and it's
legal. For the first time since the psychedelic issue has been before the community, we have an
opportunity to create a psychedelic community that is entirely within the law. No laws need to
be change, and no laws are broken if we avail ourselves of this stuff. To manufacture it, to
transport it, to use it, to explore it for psychotherapy, to do it on stage (as I am about to do).
I'm kidding. I'm kidding! Steady!!!
To serve, by way of example, in fact that there are probably many such plants still to be
discovered. The interesting thing about salvia divinorum is that it's not related to any substance
currently illegal. Therefore, the argument that it is a structural relative to something illegal is
also fallacious. At least in the case of the American government, they will have to present
medical and scientific evidence that there is a problem with this compound before it will be
possible to make it illegal.
This just one more example, along with ibogaine, phalaris, ayahuasca, so forth and so on, of the
way in which the earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There
are too many doorways in Nature that lead to heaven. There are too many paths to the Mystery
for any institution, or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to
evolve.
This is part of what this end-of-millenium cultural transformation is about. A rediscovery of the
richness of the gifts of nature.
I mentioned ibogaine. Ibogaine is another hallucinogen, a West African plant that induces
intense visionary experiences, and is now being looked at by the National Institute for Drug
Abuse in the United States as, possibly, a strong contender for being a pharmacological
intervention on cocaine and heroin addiction.
Imagine how the social understanding of the concept altered state and psychoactive
substance would be changed if we discovered that the solution to many of our drug problems
are drugs, you see. I maintain that they were the solution to many of our problems thousands
and thousands of years ago, and it was the creation of societies so constipated, so ego-bound,
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so hierarchically-stratified, that it couldn't tolerate the presence of an ecstatic shamanism as a

social phenomenon.
It's the rise of those kinds of societies that have led us to the brink of planetary catastrophe. So
that sort of brings me to what may be the major theme for the evening, or what I wanted to
explore with you.
I'm interested in the question, Is there any reason why smart people should hope? Is there any
reason why people of analytical intelligence, who are connected up to the facts of the matter
about the state of the world, should hope? The conventional wisdom is basically no. The
smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has
turned into a slow apocalypse. Spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified
agriculture, so forth and so on.
I don't believe the establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the
management of panic, which is hardly a forward-moving approach to the adventure of human
civilization. In order to find permission to hope, to believe in something, the first thing you have
to do is reconstruct your intellectual model of the universe from the very, very ground up. As
long as you are trying to make sense of reality inside the boundaries of the old paradigm,
there's no hope. There's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism,
egoism, money worship. No way out. No way. No, way, out.
So what that means is we have to return to first principles. We have to re-understand who we
are in the universe. What we are in the universe. And what we mean to it. And in order to do
that, I'd almost use the word attack, but let's be academic, and instead provide the critique of
science, because this is the world that science built with the henchmen of capitalism and
Christianity. A critique of science that brings it to a new model of reality is the way to open a
door to hope.
Here's the deal. Science has overlooked two immensely salient facts about reality that are not
abstruse, to be deduced from analyzing the contents of cyclotrons or the reflectivity data on
the moons of Pluto. Science has missed two immensely obvious facts about reality.
Here's what they are. The first one is not such a stretch. The first fact is that across all levels of
phenomenon, atomic, ordinary organic chemistry, biological systems, cultural systems, your
life, across all levels of phenomena, the way nature works is that she conserves novelty. What I
mean by this is that the universe produces novelty, then it struggles to maintain it. The universe
is a novelty-producing engine of some sort, and the further you move from the birth of the
universe, the more novel the universe becomes, until you arrived here tonight.
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This is the most novel moment to date in the history of the universe. It is not only a world of
astrophysical forces, or a world of astrophysical forces plus organic chemistry, or astrophysical
forces, organic chemistry, plus biology. This is a world that has all the levels of novelty that have
accumulated throughout the career of the evolving universe, each level built on the level which
proceeded it.
One thing that I want to point out about this, if you agree with this, then the first payoff is that
suddenly, human importance is taken back from the scientific view that we are the chancely
evolved witnesses of a meaningless process in an ordinary corner of the universe too vast to
conceive or imagine. That incredibly disempowering picture of who we are in the cosmos is
misled. The actual facts of the matter are, that in our bodies, in our brains, in the culture that
we have assembled, all the novelty that preceded us has been exploited, and is expressed, and
is honored.
We begin to look like partners in the project of the production of novelty, and more novelty,
and yet greater novelty. That is the first fact that science overlooked. The conservation of
novelty.
The second fact that science overlooked is more of a stretch in terms of the break with the past
style of thinking that it requires. The second fact which science overlooked is the fact that each
advance into novelty, each new level of novelty occurs faster than the level which preceded it.
This is incredibly important, because what it means is that the culmination of the noveltyproducing process could be far closer to us in kind than we might ordinarily suppose using
scientific assumptions about reality.

Those of you who have heard me before have heard me say, History is the shock wave of
eschatology. What that means is the presence of our selves on this planet, using culture, using
language, transferring information electronically around the world. Our presence on the planet
means that the universal process of novelty-production has entered one of its very short cycles.
What it means is that asymptotic acceleration of change is built into the structure of space-time
itself in this region of the cosmos.
History is ending. Time is literally running out on this planet. It isn't about political mistakes or
anything where we should blame ourselves. It's in the structure of the fabric of space-time
itself. The proof of this is ourselves. Because the emergence of conscious human beings out of
advanced primates occurred with such explosive suddenness, that it, like history, argues that
we are in the presence of a process that is quickly beginning to accelerate and cross boundary
level after boundary level, as it bursts through greater and greater degrees of freedom.
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I believe that we are actually preparing to decamp from ordinary history. I don't know exactly
what that means, but the continuation of history for decades, centuries, millennia, is
inconceivable. That is the hallucination of the establishment, because it cannot imagine the
actual truth of the situation, which is the cascade of forces set off by Greek science, by the
phonetic alphabet, by monotheism, this cascade of social forces is now propelling the entire
global social structure into another dimension. Literally, another dimension.
I mentioned the conservation of novelty. Now I want to go back over it from a sightly different
point of view. If we analyze the way in which novelty has made its way into being, you see that
it has consisted of a kind of conquest of dimensionality. The earliest life forms were probably
long chained polymers, or viral particles. They were essentially points in the universe. They had
no sensorium, no sense of direction, no sexuality, no sense of time. The were basically a pointlike toe hold in matter by this thing we call organic existence.
Over time these life forms developed motility, meaning the ability to move. And literally
fumbled their way through a universe that they could not see, dealing with each moment
sequentially. But this sequential exploration of space-time represents the first conquest of
dimensionality, out of the point-space. Later, organisms sequestered light-sensitive chemistry
on their surfaces and became aware of the gradient of light, which gives the concept here
and there, and the possibility of moving towards the light. This is a further conquest of
dimensionality.
The rest of the whole history of life, up until very recently then, is the story of producing better
organs of locomotionbetter fins, better wings, better feet and arms, as higher and higher
animals arose, ultimately with coordinated, binocular vision. And then at that point, rather than
the conquest of dimensionality being halted, one particular organism makes an auto-genetic
leap to the phenomenon of language.
Language is a biological strategy for binding time. Specifically, it is a way of remembering what
happened, and anticipating what might happen. It explodes the animal consciousness away
from the now, and creates the incredibly complex web of syntactic and semiotic structures that
we know as language.
This process is very quickly, compared to previous developments, followed by a second
development, the discovery of writing. Now, it's not simply a matter of handing on the oral
traditions from generation to generation. Suddenly now the freezing of time is an utterly
realistic undertaking. Discourse flows into to signs, signification in clay and stone, and time is
frozen. And, the triangulation of the future proceeds through the evolution of the kind of
mathematics that we see at Stonehenge, and so forth. This unique strategy that the advanced
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primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call
civilization has been all about.
Now, with electronic media, enormous databases, the ability to use Telnet and Usenet, and
move around the planet from library to library with a few keystrokes, essentially we are
completing the program of downloading all of the past into virtual accessibility. As we do this,
we are essentially propelling ourselves into this much ballyhooed domain called cyberspace.
Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super-space where we, as a collectivity,
become optionally a single point of view.
What this all means then, is that human history and biological evolution, and in fact, the entire
unfolding of the universe, is not something pushed from behind, like the falling of a row of
dominoes. In other words, the scientific assumption of causal necessity is only part of the story.
The universe is under the spell of what I call a transcendental object, or what chaos theory calls
an attractor.
There is actually a teleological arrow to process. It is being drawn through, ever into ever more
novel domains, and it also spends less time in each domain of novelty until it moves on into the
next one. This is what Whitehead called concrescence. It's what it means that in a hundred
years we've gone from a world where most people didn't possess telephones to a world where
most people where most people can call anywhere in the planet as long as they can afford it.
Concrescence, the knitting together, the dissolving of boundaries. This is the key to novelty.
Novelty is achieved of the flowing together of domains that were previously separate. They
may be the half-life portions of a chromosome, rich people and poor people, or ravers and
travelers, or Marxists and democrats. The point is, ideas become constipated when they're
sealed away from other idea systems.
The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries
that historical civilization put in place. I mean, what has the last 1,000 years been about, except
building class differences, race differences, sexual differences. We've had religious wars, we
have factionalism. It's how we relate to the world, with the final culmination of the dog-eat-dog
vision of nature that we inherit from British natural science in the 19th Century.
The new metaphor is fusion, union, cross-fertilization of boundaries, melding into an enormous
stew of virtual and interactive creativity. What this is all leading to, I believe, is what I call the
big bang. I'm sorrythe big surprise. And as I describe it to you, the reason I said big bang
is because I want you to remember as I describe this cosmogony to you, what is stored
somehow in the DNA.
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You remember there are vast segments of the DNA that do not appear dedicated to genetic
transcription of proteins. These have always been dismissed by science as so called silent
sequences. But silent sequences may not be designed to be read by a ribosome to produce a
protein. The silent sequences of DNA may be, in fact, encoded information of the sort of
information you and I have been focusing on.
When the drug molecule fits in there, it broadcasts an expanded electron spin resonance signal
off the molecule, and this is the psychedelic experience. It's being conducted into the Akashic
memory banks where all this DNA-coded information is happening. The fact is that's pure
speculation, and there are many molecular biologists who would just sneer at it. But they are
not on as secure ground as they suppose.
If there is one issue in the past 40 years that science has failed utterly to make any progress on,
it's the question of memory. No one understands how it works, and the best models to date are
completely inadequate to the data. So I believe the brain is not in on this. And it would make a
certain amount of sense, wouldn't it? The psychedelic experience is sort of like experiencing a
vast blast of memory data.
Those of you who have done it, have you noticed the now I'm an infant again aura that
sometimes attends it? I mean, when I do DMT I actually feel my body proportions become
infantile. I feel my head get bigger and my legs shrink. It's only a part of the experience; you
have to notice it.
It seems to me that it's very suggestive that we're actually entering hyperspace. You are
experiencing yourself, not just now, but your whole life, back, back, back. There's a lot of work
to be done.
Fraser Clark: Does the intensity of the DMT experience diminish when you take it with MAO
inhibitors?
Terence McKenna: Does the DMT experience diminish when you take it with MAO inhibitors?
I would think that you might lock it in at a fairly high level of intensity.
Fraser Clark: [inaudible]
Terence McKenna: Yes it does, it does. Be sure you're prepared before you try that stuff.
Fraser Clark: Other people I know that have tried DMT and had ordinary tripping
experiencesET, aliens, and doors opening. No one has had these vast experiences you
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describe. It's all due to the mind. You see these things because you have a wide, scientific,
academic background in your head already.
Terence McKenna: Well, the thing about DMT is that it does make a certain demand of
courage. And the leather-lung smokers among us are in a superior position. The difference
between one toke and two is enormous. The difference between two tokes and threes is
staggering. So, you have to push it.
I believe that it is quite safe. People say, Is it dangerous? And you know my answer: Only if
you fear death by astonishment. But that's not a joke! Death by astonishment doesn't seem
like such an unlikely proposition when you're out there. A friend of mine once said, Every time
I do it, I try to stand more.
And that's what it's like, because ultimately it is going to overwhelm your intellectual
machinery. If it doesn't blow it out in the first 30 seconds, it will blow it out later. Ultimately the
mind fails. The descriptive apparatus melts. The measuring instruments are vaporized. And the
thing is just what it is. So you want to proceed carefully, with courage. If your friends tell you
you're getting nutty, you should listen to them. Because it does have the tendency to magnify
inflationary images in the psyche. In other words, if you're not flawlessly solid, it will act like an
x-ray of just where the fault-lines lie in your particular world view.
His question is, Do you believe that it is necessary to be in a certain mind-space before
entering a trip to give maximum effect?
Well it's very simple. It's six hours without food, and silent darkness. Telephones unplugged.
Comfortable, reassuring environment. That's all.
It's not about tanks. It's not about social situations like thisthey're dense, full of pheromones
and social signaling. It would would rip you apart in a really deep trip. Let's not underrate
cannabis, for crying out loud! Cannabis should be the glue of the community. It's really
important to go botanical, to be a botanical psychedelic compound.
[Cheers...]
You see, the very best of the white powder drugs are still impossible to verify as to purity and
source. It's just a fool's game. The plants will not play you false. So I think that is very important.
Fraser Clark: Do you think the industrial-political system will be able to manipulate
consciousness through technology, bio [inaudible] by plants, implants, and prevent our minds
from evolving and accessing the transcendental object?
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Terence McKenna: Well, this thing about fearing technology in any form. What you've got to
understand is that when you go into these places like Autodesk, and Silicon Graphics, and like
that, you have the suits above the 20th floor. But everybody below the 20th floor has hair down
to their asses, heavily tattooed, pierced, they're rocking. So, we OWN this technology; they do
not understand it.
You know, it was a miracle that Richard Nixon could erase eighteen and a half minutes on a
tape recorder and get it right. They have to pay us to run their technology. They can't write
code. They can't run the nets. It belongs to us.
I see this trend accelerating. The technical community is by no means a part of the opposition.
The technical community is going to be there when we reach the barricades.
Fraser Clark: What kind of music or sound, if any, would you use with DMT? Also, what does
DMT sound like?
Terence McKenna: What kind of music would I use with DMT? Well, I've done DMT with music,
but I've regretted it nearly every time. I've done it with Locatelli's Violin Concerto #11. That was
a long time ago. The reason these aren't contemporary deals is because I haven't done it with
music for 30 years because it alarmed me. I did it with withKarlheinz Stockhausen, and that
really alarmed me.
As far as what DMT sounds like, it sounds, well, somewhat like this: [vocalizes something like
the sound of wind or radio static]. And of course, there's this sucking, pulling thing that happens
as you tumble down these bi-systolic organismic hallways that are pulling and tugging you
forward. And then you get into what, for me and for some other people, what I call the elf
hive. It hits people differently.
I saw a woman not long ago, have the most amazing orgasm. It was very interesting. And I've
seen a lot of people do DMT, and this just left everybody's jaw hanging. This woman was a very
nondescript sort of person, but she certainly got off. She was saying during it, Don't send me
back. I can't leave you. I can't leave you!
What happens to me in reference to the sound thing, is language. I see elves, sort of, dribbling
self-jeweled basketballs. But the main activity at the higher doses is these autonomous machine
elf soul creatures make objects with language. Somehow language in the DMT-space is
transduced through the eyes. You see syntax, and you are, in fact, impelled to join with them in
these long, spontaneous bursts of language-like activity, that sounds sort of like this:

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Yeevbajingnyeewoobzyaubh dah yoh boo deedzingideeyoowap pop

yoahhhbrrrjeeewoopgrr....
[Applause, then Terence continues with several more seconds of glossolalia.+
Fraser Clark: So what holds those together? Or do you just let go? Will we become insane in the
conventional meaning?
Terence McKenna: No. We'll redefine sanity. We carry the destination with us. This is what's
insanethe city outside, the governments and institutions. We won't become insane. We are
awakening. This is what's happening. The long nightmare of human history that James Joyce
talked about.
We are awakening, and the truth you think you see, the truth of your own intuition, is the truth.
You don't need somebody handing this stuff down from on high. You simply have to open your
eyes. If it looks like horse shit, if it talks like horse shit, if it walks like horse shit, it probably IS
horse shit.
Fraser Clark: Do you think we will last the course of time and eventually create a common
awareness? Or do you think we will destroy ourselves [inaudible] the planet? Do we have
enough time to [inaudible]?
Terence McKenna: I am an absolute optimist. I am absolutely certain as I stand before you that
everything is on track. I mean, the mushroom has said, This is what it's like when a species
prepares to be part of the galactic center. This is what planets come into existence for. We are
about to part ourselves from the placenta of three dimensional space.
Information is rearing itself up, and preparing to take a step into another dimension. Everything
is changing. Everything always has been changing. But now it is changing so quickly that, within
the confines of an individual life, the entire cosmic drama can be encapsulated.
We are each fractal histories of the universe. It is within usas a community, and as
individuals. Nothing can stop this. This is not a political movement. This is as inevitable as
continental drift, or the sunspot cycle. It is now time to decamp from three dimensional space.
15,000 years ago it was time for the descent from the garden into history, to take hold of the
tools that will allow us to free our minds, our bodies, our planet, our identity, and our destiny.
This is what it has all been about.

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Fraser Clark: What [inaudible] do you think the zippies do to America as to inspire American
youth culture?
Terence McKenna: Well, we're fighting a meme war here, aren't we? We have to use the media
to prosecute our agenda. The other side has all the guns, all the money. The only problem is, if
they win, everybody dies. So, our friend is the information transfer network, the media. We
have to set in motion memesmodels that will attract loyalty.
Remember last year when I quoted William Blake? I said, If the truth can be told so as to be
understood, it will be believed. It's as simple as that. The obligation on us is to communicate
the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.
I am all for this zippie thing. It's a high stakes game, because a stumble will delay the agenda.
But I've been coming to Britain now for five years, and each time I've seen this scene expand,
broaden, deepen, and I've seen its resolve coalesce. I think it's now time to take this thing on
the road.
I think America's undergoing the illusion of a liberal administration. I think we need to strike at
the Great Beast before [inaudible with cheers].
Fraser Clark: We're getting near the end. [extended inaudible]
Terence McKenna: [inaudible] Invisible Landscape is all around here, it's also out in America
now. But I don't know if anybody's imported it into Britain yet. It is out. It's great. I'm very
happy with it. I'm ready to retire at this point. My message is essentially done once that book is
available.
Fraser Clark: Your views seem to be typically Millenarianism, or Millenialism. How the year
2000 shapes consciousness. What do you think? I've often wondered, how many [inaudible]
does it take to get to the year 2000, nobody hears 2012. If we can't agree about the year
2000, what in the hell are we ever going to agree about?
Terence McKenna: If you look at the Time Wave you'll see that the year 2000 is lined up with
events in Christian history so hysterical that we might as well hand it over to them.

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A short excerpt of Chapter 6: Entities from Trialogues at the Edge of the West by
Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake

TERENCE: In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our
mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set
of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical
edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental
edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna
in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in
words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely
overwhelm our metaphors.

RUPERT: If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of
science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost,
with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers,
such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other
fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own selfsufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the
spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods,
demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric
universe.

TERENCE: Humans are said to be the measure of all things.

RUPERT: This is humanism. To adopt the alternative tradition of animism and to recognize the
living spirits and souls of all nature is profoundly repugnant to humanism, yet it is the common
ground of all human civilization, thought, and tradition. As in Goethe's Faust, the paradigmatic
scientist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power. The guiding
spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon, a fallen angel called
Mephistopheles.

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How seriously do we need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization is under
the possession of such a spirit, worshiped through money and power? Milton describes
Mammon in Paradise Lost:
Even in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beautific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their Mother Earth
For treasures better hid.

This is an accurate description of our whole civilization. How much are fallen angels actually
guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology? Is a great war between the
good and evil angels being acted out on Earth? We hardly know how to think or talk about such
possibilities since they are so alien to the official, standard models of Western history.

TERENCE: Returning to the subject of discarnate entities, I keep going back to this thing about
language. It's as though the field of language itself must be prepared for communication with
these beings. In the West, there has been a peculiar stiffening of language against the ability to
express this kind of communication, but it is beginning now to break down.

RALPH: It's true. We have to misuse our language even to talk about these things.

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TERENCE: Linearity in print and thought has made language unable to deal with the invisible
world in any meaningful way, except as pathology. Now this invisible world is returning to the
language through people like us with one foot in each world.

The human mind is haunted both by the many presences sensed within the self and by a
confused sense of self. Wherever we turn in the world of nature and the psyche, we encounter
life, animation, and a willingness to communicate that confounds the fragile pyramid of
boundary consciousness and human values that have emerged over historical time through the
suppression of our intuitions.

I've taken the position that these entities we encounter are nonphysical and somehow
autonomous. Ralph, as I understand him, accepts this view but anchors it into the Neo-platonic
trinity of body, soul, and spirit. From this point of view, these entities are inhabitants of the
spiritual domain of the logos. They are the logos become self-reflecting and articulate. Rupert
correctly points out that it's in the realm of dreams that we most commonly encounter entities,
and he further suggests that behind these entities is the controlling agency of the world soul.
His notion is that the world soul actually communicates to human beings through the
production of forms that we interpret as the denizens of an otherwise invisible and
mythological world.

Our collective conclusion seems to be that nature, both in whole and in many parts, is
magically self-reflecting and aware. Encountered in its most rarefied expression, the world
speaks to us, and we, as scientific rationalists are confounded. Nevertheless, it is for us to mold
our models and theories to the world as it presents itself in immediate experience, not as we
would have it in some grand and sterile abstraction. The elves and gnomes are there to remind
us that, in the matter of understanding the self, we have yet to leave the playpen in the nursery
of ontology.

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High Times Interviews Terence McKenna

Did hallucinogens play a crucial role in human evolution? Terence McKenna has devoted most
of his life to exploring this question. A specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon Basin,
McKenna along with his partner Kat Harrison McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions, a
nonprofit foundation devoted to rescuing Amazonian plants that have a history of shamanic
uses. They move the plants to a 19-acre site in Hawaii and preserve the details of the plant's
uses by storing the information in a computer database. In addition to preserving these
important plants, as a nonprofit organization, Botanical Dimensions solicits donations to publish
a newsletter and to aid in carrying out the preservation of the folk knowledge of the peoples
native to the Amazon area. The combination of McKenna's academic approach -- he has a BS
from the University of California at Berkeley with a distributed degree in ecology, resource
conservation and shamanism -- his vast travel experiences, and uniquely visionary perspective,
combine to make him a most sought-after speaker and author. His newest books include Food
of the Gods (Bantam) and The Archaic Revival (Harper/ San Francisco) -- in which an abridged
version of this interview appears. A slightly different version of this interview will also appear in
a soon-to-be-published book by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen called Voices of Vision.
Interviewed by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen - High Times Magazine, April 1992
HIGH TIMES: Tell us how you became interested in shamanism and the exploration of
consciousness.
Terence McKenna: I discovered shamanism through an interest in Tibetan folk religion. Bon,
the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, is a kind of shamanism. Ingoing from the particular to the
general with that concern, I studied shamanismas a general phenomenon. It all started out as
an art historical interest in the pre-Buddhist iconography of thangkas.
HT: This was how long ago?
TM: This was in '67, when I was just a sophomore in college. And the interest in altered states
of consciousness came simply from -- I don't know whether I was a precocious kid or what -but I was very early into the New York literary scene. Even though I lived in a small town in
Colorado, I subscribed to the Village Voice, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD,
mescaline, and all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in. Then I read The
Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and it just rolled from there.That was what really put
me over. I respected Huxley as a novelist, and I was slowly reading everything he'd ever written,
and when I got to The Doors of Perception I said to myself, 'There's something going on here for
sure.'

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HT: Recently you addressed close to 2,000 people at the John Anson Ford Theater in Los
Angeles. To what do you attribute your increasing popularity, and what role do you see yourself
playing in the social sphere?
TM: Well, without being cynical, the main thing I attribute to my increasing popularity is better
public relations. As far as what role I'll play, I don't know. I mean I assume that anyone who has
anything constructive to say about our relationship to chemical substances -- natural or
synthetic -- is going to have a social role to play, because this drug issue is just going to loom
larger and larger on the social agenda until we get some resolution of it. By resolution I don't
mean suppression or just saying no. I anticipate a new open-mindedness born of desperation
on the part of the Establishment. Drugs are part of the human experience, and we have got to
create a more sophisticated way of dealing with them.
HT: You have said that the term 'New Age' trivializes the significance of the next phase in
human evolution and have referred instead to the emergence of an archaic revival. How do you
differentiate between these two expressions?
TM: The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology '80s-style, with the addition of neoshamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more
global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late neolithic,
and reaches far back in the20th century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism -even to a phenomenon like National Socialism -- which is a negative force. But the stress on
ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor-consciousness --these are themes that have been
worked out throughout the entire 20th century,and the archaic revival is an expression of that.
HT: From your writings I have gleaned that you subscribe to the notion that psilocybin
mushrooms are a species of high intelligence -- that they arrived on this planet as spores that
migrated through outer space, and are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with
human beings. In a more holistic perspective, how do you see this notion fitting into the context
of Francis Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this planet and
its directed evolution has been seeded, or perhaps fertilized,by spores designed by a higher
intelligence?
TM: As I understand the Crick theory of panspermia, it's a theory of how life spread through the
universe. What I was suggesting -- and I don't believe it as strongly as you imply -- is that
intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here in this spore-bearing life form. This is
a more radical version of the panspermia theory of Crick and Ponampurama. In fact I think that
theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think
it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to
another by cosmic radiation pressure. As far as the role of the psilocybin mushroom, or its
relationship to us and to intelligence, this is something that we need to consider. It really isn't
important that I claim that it's an extraterrestrial, what we need is a body of people claiming
this, or a body of people denying it,because what we're talking about is the experience of the
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mushroom. Few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few
people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects
that are unleashed. One cannot find out whether or not there's an extraterrestrial intelligence
inside the mushroom unless one is willing to take the mushroom.
HT: You have a unique theory about the role that psilocybin mushrooms play in the process of
human evolution. Can you tell us about this?
TM: Whether the mushrooms came from outer space or not, the presence of psychedelic
substances in the diet of early human beings created a number of changes in our evolutionary
situation. When a person takes small amounts of psilocybin visual acuity improves. They can
actually see slightly better,and this means that animals allowing psilocybin into their food chain
would have increased hunting success, which means increased food supply, which means
increased reproductive success, which is the name of the game in evolution. It is the organism
that manages to propagate itself numerically that is successful. The presence of psilocybin in
the diet of early pack-hunting primates caused the individuals that were ingesting the
psilocybin to have increased visual acuity. At slightly higher doses of psilocybin there is sexual
arousal, erection, and everything that goes under the term arousal of the central nervous
system. Again, a factor which would increase reproductive success is reinforced.
HT: Isn't it true that psilocybin inhibits orgasm?
TM: Not at the doses I'm talking about. At a psychedelic dose it might, but at just slightly above
the 'you can feel it' dose, it acts as a stimulant. Sexual arousal means paying attention, it means
jumpiness, it indicates a certain energy level in the organism. And then, of course, at still higher
doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that
manifests as song and vision. It is as though it is an enzyme which stimulates eyesight, sexual
interest, and imagination. And the three of these going together produce language-using
primates. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic
organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary
enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
HT: There is a lot of current interest in the ancient art of sound technology.In a recent article
you said that in certain states of consciousness you're able to create a kind of visual resonance
and manipulate a 'topological manifold' using sound vibrations. Can you tell us more about this
technique,its ethnic origins, and potential applications?
TM: Yes, it has to do with shamanism that is based on the use of DMT in plants. DMT is a nearor pseudo-neurotransmitter, that when ingested and allowed to come to rest in the synapses of
the brain, allows one to see sound,so that one can use the voice to produce, not musical
compositions, but pictoral and visual compositions. This, to my mind, indicates that we're on
the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, we are going to
go from a language that is heard, to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior
processing. The language will still be made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of
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the visual impression. This is actually being done by shamans in the Amazon. The songs they
sing sound as they do in order to look a certain way. They are not musical compositions as
we're used to thinking of them. They are pictoral art created by audio signals.
HT: You're recognized by many as one of the great explorers of the 20thcentury. You've trekked
through the Amazonian jungles and soared through the uncharted regions of the brain, but
perhaps your ultimate voyages lie in the future, when humanity has mastered space technology
and time travel. What possibilities for travel in these two areas do you for see, and how do you
think these new technologies will affect the future evolution of the human species?
TM: I suppose most people believe space travel is right around the corner.I certainly hope so. I
think we should all learn Russian in anticipation of it, because apparently the US government is
incapable of sustaining a space program. The time travel question is more interesting. Possibly
the world is experiencing a compression of technological novelty that is going to lead to
developments that are very much like what we would imagine time travel to be. We may be
closing in on the ability to transmit information forward into the future, and to create an
informational domain of communication between various points in time. How this will be done
is difficult to imagine, but things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and
nanotechnology offer new and novel approaches to the realization of these old dreams. We
shouldn't assume time travel is impossible simply because it hasn't been done. There's plenty of
latitude in the laws of quantum physics to allow for moving information through time in various
ways. Apparently you can move information through time, as long as you don't move it through
time faster than light.
HT: Why is that?
TM: I haven't the faintest idea. What am I, Einstein?
HT: What do you think the ultimate goal of human evolution is?
TM: Oh, a good party....
HT: Have you ever had any experiences with lucid dreaming -- the process by which one can
become aware and conscious within a dream that one is dreaming --and if so, how do they
compare with your other shamanic experiences?
TM: I really haven't had experiences with lucid dreaming. It's one of those things that I'm very
interested in. I'm sort of skeptical of it. I hope it's true, because what a wonderful thing that
would be.
HT: You've never had one?
TM: I've had lucid dreams, but I have no technique for repeating them on demand. The dream
state is possibly anticipating this cultural frontier that we're moving toward. That we're moving
toward something very much like eternal dreaming, going into the imagination, and staying
there, and that would be like a lucid dream that knew no end, but what a tight, simple solution.
One of the things that interests me about dreams is this -- I have dreams in which I smoke DMT,
and it works. To me that's extremely interesting,because it seems to imply that one does not
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have to smoke DMT to have the experience. You only have to convince your brain that you have
done this,and it then delivers this staggering altered state.
HT: Wow.
TM: How many people who have had DMT dream occasionally of smoking it and have it
happen? Do people who have never had DMT ever have that kid of an experience in a dream? I
bet not. I bet you have to have done it in life,to have established the knowledge of its existence,
and the image of how it's possible, but then this thing can happen to you without any chemical
intervention. It is more powerful than any yoga, so taking control of the dream state would
certainly be an advantageous thing and carry us a great distance toward the kind of cultural
transformation that we're talking about.How exactly to do it, I'm not sure. The psychedelics, the
near death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries ... all of these things are
pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little
more sanely than we're living in these dimensions.
HT: Rupert Sheldrake has recently refined the theory of the morphogenetic field -- a non
material, organizing, collective-memory field which affects all biological systems. This field can
be envisioned as a hyper-spatial information reservoir which brims and spills over into a much
larger region of influence when critical mass is reached -- a point referred to as morphic
resonance. Do you think this morphic resonance could be regarded as a possible explanation
for the phenomena of spirits and other metaphysical entities, and can the method of evoking
beings from the spirit world be simply a case of cracking the morphic code?
TM: That sounds right. If what you're trying to get at is do I think morphogenetic fields are a
good thing, or do they exist, yes, I think some kind of theory like that is clearly becoming
necessary. And that the next great step to be taken in the intellectual conquest of nature, if you
will, is a theory about how out of the class of possible things, some things actually happen.
HT: How do you view the increasing waves of designer psychedelics and brain enhancement
machines in the context of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morpho-genetic fields?
TM: Well I'm hopeful, but somewhat suspicious. I think drugs should come from the natural
world, and be use-tested by shamanically-oriented cultures, then they have a very deep
morphogenetic field, because they've been used for thousands and thousands of years in
magical contexts. A drug produced in the laboratory, and suddenly distributed worldwide
simply amplifies the global noise present in the historical crisis. And then there's the very
practical consideration that one cannot predict the long term effects of a drug produced in a
laboratory. Something like peyote, or morning glories, or mushrooms have been used for vast
stretches of time without detrimental social consequences.We know that. As far as the
technological question is concerned -- brain machines and all -- I wish them luck. I'm willing to
test anything that somebody will send me, but I'm skeptical. I think it's somehow like the
speech-operated typewriter. It will recede ahead of us. The problems will be found to have
been far more complex than first supposed.
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HT: Don't you think it's true that the designer psychedelics and the brain machines don't have
any morphogenetic field, so in a sense one is carving a new morphogenetic field with their use.
Consequently, there would be more possibilities for new things to happen -- unlike the
psychoactive substances which you speak of that have ancient morphogenetic fields, and are
much more entrenched in predictability and pattern -- and therefore not as free for new types
of expression?
TM: Possibly, although I don't know how you grab the morphogenetic field of anew designer
drug. For instance, I'll speak of my own experience, which is ketamine. My impression of
ketamine was -- it's like a brand new skyscraper,all the walls, all the floors are carpeted in
white, all the drinking fountains work, the elevators run smoothly, the fluorescent lights recede
endlessly in all directions down the hallways. It's just that there's nobody there.There's no
office machinery, there's no hurrying secretaries, there's no telephones -- it's just this immense
empty structure waiting. Well I can't move into a 60-story office building. I have only enough
stuff to fill a few small rooms, so it gives me a slightly spooked-out feeling to enter into these
empty morphogenetic fields. If you take mushrooms, you know, you're climbing on board a
star-ship manned by every shaman who ever did it in front of you,and this is quite a crew, and
they've really pulled some stunts over the millennia, and it's all there, the tapes, to be played,
but the designer things should be very cautiously dealt with.
HT: It's interesting that John Lilly had very different experiences with ketamine. Do you think
that there's any relationship between the self-transforming machine elves that you've
encountered on your shamanic voyages and the solid-state entities that John Lilly has contacted
in his inter-dimensional travels?
TM: I don't think there is much congruence. The solid state entities that he contacted seem to
make him quite upset. The elf machine entities that I encounter are the embodiment of
merriment and humor, but I have had a thought about this recently which I will tell you. One of
the science fiction fantasies that haunts the collective unconscious is expressed in the phrase 'a
world run by machines.' In the 1950s this was first articulated in the notion, 'perhaps the future
will be a terrible place where the world is run by machines.' Well now, let's think about
machines for a moment. They are extremely impartial, very predictable, not subject to moral
suasion, value neutral, and very long-lived in their functioning. Now let's think about what
machines are made of, in the light of Sheldrake's morphogenetic field theory.Machines are
made of metal, glass, gold, silicon, plastic -- they are made of what the earth is made of. Now
wouldn't it be strange if biology is a way for the earth to alchemically transform itself into a
self-reflecting thing. In which case then, what we're headed for inevitably, what we are in fact
creating, is a world run by machines. And once these machines are in place,they can be
expected to manage our economies, languages, social aspirations,and so forth, in such a way
that we stop killing each other, stop starving each other, stop destroying land, and so forth.

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Actually, the fear of being ruled by machines is the male ego's fear of relinquishing control of
the planet to the maternal matrix of Gaia. Ha. That's it. Just a thought.
HT: The recent development of fractal images seems to imply that visions and hallucinations
can be broken down into a precise mathematical code. With this in mind, do you think the
abilities of the human imagination can be replicated in a super-computer?
TM: Yes. Saying that the components of hallucinations can be broken down and duplicated by
mathematical code isn't taking anything away from them. Reality can be taken apart and
reduplicated with this same mathematical code -- that's what makes the fractal ideal so
powerful. One can type in half a page of code,and on the screen get river systems, mountain
ranges, deserts, ferns, coral reefs, all being generated out of half a page of computer coding.
This seems to imply that we are finally discovering really powerful mathematical rules that
stand behind visual appearances. And yes, I think super-computers,computer graphics and
simulated environments, this is very promising stuff.When the world's being run by machines,
we'll be at the movies. Oh boy.
HT: Or making movies.
TM: Or being movies.
HT: I've thought at times that what you view as a symbiosis forming between humans and
psychoactive plants may in fact be the plants taking over control of our lives and commanding
us to do their bidding. Have you any thoughts on this?
TM: Well symbiosis is not parasitism, symbiosis is a situation of mutual benefit to both parties,
so we have to presume that the plants are getting as much out of this as we are. What we're
getting is information from another spiritual level, their point of view -- in other words -- is
what they're giving us. What we're giving them is care, and feeding, and propagation, and
survival, so they give us their elevated higher dimensional point of view. We in turn respond by
making the way easier for them in the physical world. And this seems a reasonable trade-off.
Obviously they have difficulty in the physical world, plants don't move around much. You talk
about Tao, a plant has the Tao. It doesn't even chop wood and carry water.
HT: Future predictions are often based upon the study of previous patterns and trends which
are then extended like the contours of a map to extrapolate the shape of things to come. The
future can also be seen as an ongoing dynamic and creative interaction between the past and
the present -- the current interpretation of past events actively serves to formulate these future
patterns and trends. Have you been able to reconcile these two perspectives so that humanity
is able to learn from its experiences without being bound by the habits of history?
TM: The two are antithetical. You must not be bound by the habits of history if you want to
learn from your experience. It was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the inventor of general systems
theory, who made the famous statement that 'people are not machines, but in all situations
where they are given the opportunity,they will act like machines,' so you have to keep
disturbing them, 'cause they always settle down into a routine. So, historical patterns are
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largely cyclical, but not entirely, there is ultimately a highest level of the pattern,which does not
repeat, and that's the part which is responsible for the advance into true novelty.
HT: The part that doesn't repeat. Hmm. The positive futurists tend to fall into two groups. Some
visualize the future as becoming progressively brighter every day and that global illumination
will occur as a result of this progression, others envision a period of actual devolution -- a dark
age through which human consciousness must pass, before more advanced stages are reached.
Which scenario do you see as being the most likely to emerge, and why do you hold this view?
TM: I guess I'm a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild Dark Age. I don't think it will be
anything like the Dark Ages which lasted a thousand years -- I think it will last more like five
years -- and will be a time of economic retraction, religious fundamentalism, retreat into closed
communities by certain segments of the society, feudal warfare among minor states, and this
sort of thing. I think it will give way in the late '90s to the actual global future that we're all
yearning for. Then there will be basically a 15-yearperiod where all these things are drawn
together with progressively greater and greater sophistication, much in the way that modern
science, and philosophy has grown with greater and greater sophistication in a single direction
since the Renaissance. Sometime around the end of 2012, all of this will be boiled down into a
kind of alchemical distillation of the historical experience that will be a doorway into the life of
the imagination.
HT: Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, Ralph Abraham's chaos theory, and your time wave
model all appear to contain complementary patterns which operate on similar underlying
principles -- that energy systems store information until a certain level is reached and the
information is then transduced into a larger frame of reference, like water in a tiered fountain.
Have you worked these theories into an all-encompassing meta-theory of how the universe
functions and operates?
TM: No, but we're working on it. Well it is true that the three of us, and I would add Frank Barr
in there, who is less well known, but has apiece of the puzzle as well. We're all complementary.
Rupert's theory is --at this point -- a hypothesis. There are no equations -- there's no predictive
machinery -- it's a way of speaking about experimental approaches. My time-wave thing is like
an extremely formal and specific example of what he's talking about in a general way. And then
what Ralph's doing is providing abridge from the kind of things Rupert and I are doing back into
the frontier branch of ordinary mathematics called dynamic modeling. Frank is an expert in the
repetition of fractal process. He can show you the same thing happening on many many levels,
in many many different expressions. So I have named us Compressionists, or Psychedelic
Compressionists. Compressionism holds that the world is growing more and more complex,
compressed, knitted together, and therefore holographically complete at every point, and
that's basically where the four of us stand, I think, but from different points of view.

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Psychedelic Culture an Interview with Terence McKenna by Bruce Eisner

Bruce Eisner: When I was first talking about this issue, I wanted you to do something about
psychedelics and culture. So the first question I have is, How do you think psychedelics should
be sensibly used in a culture or society?

Terence McKenna: Well, it depends upon whether youre talking about a very small, racially
coherent and homogeneous culture like a rain forest tribe, or a mega-culture like the
contemporary United States. The ways in which psychedelics are to be used are obviously very
different. In a small, aboriginal culture theres usually complete agreement on the basic myth
that the culture is using to manage its image of itself in the world. In a complex culture a
modern, high-tech industrial culture people tend to evolve themselves into tribal subsets
that are little images of the original aboriginal cultural situation.

Basically, the psychedelics induce boundary-dissolving experiences. And if everyone in the

culture values that experience, then the culture itself can build its values around about that
dissolution, around the idea of journeys to and from a spirit world or something like that. In the
high-tech industrial cultures, everyone is left to sort it out for themselves, and, of course, some
people conclude that psychedelics let you talk to the space people, and other people conclude
that the experience is neurological noise, and so forth and so on.

So in the case of our own culture, were really still figuring out how to do psychedelics. A lot of
people like to do low doses in complex social environments, like rave parties. Other people like
to be one-on-one with a friend or someone they trust, or even by themselves, and do classic, inthe-wilderness-alone-type journeying. I think probably its a matter of personality, what age
you are, and what kind of values are being discussed or promoted around you.

B: Well, lets take a look at the future. Do you think that our culture eventually will integrate
psychedelics in the same way that, say, one of these smaller tribal cultures ?

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T: It may. Because of the creativity of people like Sasha Shulgin and the entire pharmacological
community, there is going to be an endless number of new psychoactive and psychedelic drugs.
Also, the more we learn about the botany of this planet, the more psychedelic substances we
discover, and the more sources we find for the substances we already know.

The thing that seems to hold back the integration of psychedelics in our culture is the fact that
we obtain these experiences through ingesting substances. The access to these states of mind is
now at the edge of technology through virtual reality and the Internet and so forth people
are trying to produce altered states of consciousness that dont require that you swallow a pill
or drink a brew. This may mean that eventually we will have psychedelic experiences without
drugs. This could be through virtual reality or through electromagnetic induction some kind
of brain machine, something like that. In principle there is no reason why the experience has to
come through a substance. But, in fact, at least to this stage of our development, thats been
the most effective way that we have found.

B: Yeah. Just as a kind of aside, I remember talking with Leary and I suggested that perhaps the
most powerful psychoactive of the future would be a little nano-machine that would go in and
reprogram your brain the way that you wanted it to be reprogrammed. One of those little
nano-machines that

T: Nanosites. Well, there are all kinds of things for example, suppose that a drug company
were to embrace the idea of recreational drugs and then put out two or three million dollars to
produce a drug which did nothing more than let you remember your dreams. It wouldnt be
marketed as a psychedelic. It wouldnt even be called a psychedelic, but in fact that might be
the most psychedelic of all drugs. A lucid dreaming drug, or a remember-your-dreams-whileawake drug.

You see, over the past fifteen years or so the largest area where money is being spent in the
high-tech democracies has gone from military research and development to the entertainment
industry. I think thats a clear signal that psychedelic experiences by some means or another are
going to be delivered to the public. Because the public is extremely hungry for this. This is why
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brain machines, which so far have not been that stunning without drugs, have nonetheless
gotten a lot of venture capital interested in them. Because if you ever could make a brain
machine that was as good as a drug, the world would beat a path to your door, and the culture
would applaud you. You would not be run out on a rail. You would be hailed as an Edison or a
Ford.

B: You dont think they would apply the Analogs Act to it?

T: That would be a cat fight that I would pay to sit in the front row to watch.

You know, in a way TV is an electronic drug. They have studied how it affects people. Your eyes
glaze, your brain waves flatten, blood pools in your rear-end. It is the presentation of someone
who has taken some kind of a drug. But the culture is totally accepting of TV because it is
marketed as a home appliance, not a drug. This tells us something about the cultural biases and
the strategies that might lead to an acceptance of these things.

B: Youve made a major point of emphasizing the use of sacred plants over synthetic
psychedelics. Do you think that synthetics have any place at all in the psychedelic medicine
chest?

T: Oh yes, absolutely! My distinction between synthetics and naturally-occurring substances

isnt an ontological one. In other words, Im not saying that one side is good, the other bad. Its
simply that usually with a naturally-occurring substance you have a history of human usage, and
so, in a sense, you already have your human data which tells you that this substance doesnt
cause birth defects, blindness, impotence, Parkinsonism, whatever. Because psychedelics are
illegal we dont get that kind of information on new synthetics. Because no one is allowed to
give them to human beings in a proper clinical situation. So new drugs they may be
wonderful, they may be terrible but society is arranged in such a way that we just cant find
out.

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If all drugs were properly tested, and clinical trials were done and so forth, we might well
discover that out of the examples set by nature we might make new and improved drugs. LSD is
a perfect example of that. There are analogs of LSD active in the milligram range like
chanoclavine and iso-ergine and these sorts of things. LSD is definitely a better drug and we can
now see that LSD represents an engineering improvement on those things.

So I think there will be more and more of this. But we cant go forward with synthetic
psychedelic chemistry until we get the social attitudes and the legal situation straightened out
around these issues.

B: Yeah, I would like to talk about LSD next. I attended a book-signing of yours at the Capitola
Book Cafe, and I was sitting in the back and listening to you, and you mentioned that you first
tried LSD back in the early 70s. But that it never really triggered off a visual psychedelic
experience for you. Do you think that might have had something to do with the dosage you
took, or the quality or purity of the drug?

T: Well, I havent revisited it in a while, but my impression I started taking LSD in the summer
of 65. And it did all kinds of things, but I had in hand Havelock Ellis The Dance of Life, and
Aldous Huxleys The Doors of Perception, and it never did the specific things described there.
You know, the jeweled ruins dripping with alien life and all of that.
I did discover that I could smoke a lot of hash on LSD, and it pushed it much more in the
direction that I wanted to go. So I ended up always doing that, and even eating hash with acid.

I may have a sort of unique physiology. Even at 300 micrograms what happens for me in terms
of visuals hallucination on LSD is simply little things that look like disturbances in the
wallpaper. Little fan-like, scale-like scintillations. They look to me more like theyre something
in the visual cortex, rather than what I would call a true hallucination.
Finally when I got to psilocybin, it was like, Ah, this does what Ive been looking for! The LSD
was very psychoanalytic. It was hard on me physically. I spent a lot of time lying around the day

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after. And psilocybin seemed to deliver the hallucinations with very little wrack and ruin on the
body. And, of course, DMT is even more dramatic in that direction.
So that was when I got the idea that what I was interested in was the tryptamines.

B: That was actually going to be my next question, because you do emphasize that you prefer
tryptamines over phenethylamines and the indole alkaloids. I think you pretty much covered
that question, and possible, you know, that drugs are so idiosyncratic might possibly have
something to do with it. I know that, for instance, say a drug like Ketamine some people have
these amazing out-of-body experiences. For me, for instance, Ketamine is more of a body high,
and has very little visual component to it. It reminds me of a super-PCP or something, but
doesnt really deliver.
And other people, you know, think its the ultimate.

T: Well, a similar situation exists with 5-MEO-DMT, on which I barely hallucinate at all. Ive
talked to people who say its the most profound experience theyve ever had.

But, you know, what you have to bear in mind is this: drug receptors are as individual a thing as
height, hair color, eye color, and so forth. And it is simply true that we are born with affinities
for certain drugs, and a lack of affinity for others.

The Irish are supposed to be able to drink. I cant drink. If I have two beers, then Im worthless.

So I think that part of what growing into drug awareness means is not taking every drug and
every combination around, but actually learning what works for you. Another good example is
the tropanes. I would say that maybe 19 out of 20 people including myself should have
nothing to do with that stuff. But there do seem to be people who can handle it.
B: Tropaines are ?
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T: Oh, Daturas and things like that. Well, I just wouldnt go near that . Ive had them several
times in my life, and each time its been nearly disastrous.

B: Well, its because its more like a deliriant than a psychedelic, and theres very little recovery
of memory . . .

T: Thats right, but Ketamine is also considered a deliriant. The thing about Ketamine, though,
that has to be said that it has a vast range of presentational possibilities based on dose. Some
people who do it quite frequently do as little as 50 milliliters. That is obviously a very, very
different experience than 200 milliliters.

I did it about five or six times, and I always did quite high doses, and while it was happening it
was very interesting but I could bring almost nothing out of it. And to me thats a requirement
of a drug that you be able to talk about it afterwards.

A lot of people dont make that demand. Maybe theyre not verbal to start with. You know,
somebody will tell you that they took acid and then they took PCP and then they did something
else, and then you say, Well, how was it? And they say, Really weird!

Thats not really enough information to make me want to go there. I think one should spend at
least as much time describing any given drug experience as actually having it.

B: Yeah, and I would have to say that some people should probably never take them at all.

T: I think thats absolutely true. The way I look at it is that what these things do whether
youre for it or against it, what they do is dissolve boundaries, and most of us have our
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boundaries too high, too well defended. But some people can barely keep their boundaries in
place, and they are not candidates for psychedelics.

People who are seeing visions on the natch, or people who have very low self-esteem, or
people who are given to paranoia. These people should take themselves out of the game. In the
same way that I dont try out for the NBA since I know that I wouldnt be good at it. They should
just leave this to other people.

B: Exactly!
Ill give you one more drug question, and then well go to something else here.
Ive never tried ayahuasca. Can you explain what I would get out of an experience with
ayahuasca that say I wouldnt get with another major psychedelic?

T: Well, each one of these things is different. Even though ayahuasca is DMT made orally active
in the presence of a MAO-inhibitor, to me the amazing thing about ayahuasca one of the
amazing things, and this is unique to it its the only psychedelic I know where after a major
trip the next day you actually have more energy than you had going into it.

Its almost like a violation of the laws of physics. How can it be that we stayed up all night
singing and hallucinating and raving, and now its 9 oclock in the morning, and you feel great?
And you actually never have to pay that energy debt?

That is very interesting to me. The other thing about ayahuasca, which may happen on other
psychedelics but probably rarely, is that it seems to be the one that is most friendly towards
synethesia. In other words, you can see the songs you sing on ayahuasca, and thats a pretty
general phenomenon.

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So that makes ayahuasca an excellent vehicle for studying synethesia, and trying to understand
how it works. Those are the things that makes it unique.

And then, of course, the other thing that may be attractive or repellent to people is that it is the
most physical of psychedelics. In other words, if you get sick on LSD, there was something
wrong with the LSD. But if you get sick on ayahuasca, its working just fine.

Some people of a certain persuasion to feel that its very important to have that full body
involvement. Its not a head trip ayahuasca. Its a full body trip.

B: Yeah, well lets now change gears a little bit here.

Now you have predicted what you call an eschaton or end of time in the year 2012. Can
you give us a picture of what that would be like? In 20 words or less!?

T: Well, at this time its a little like asking somebody staring east at 2 am to describe the coming
dawn. Were looking in the right direction, true. But its still a little early to say just what it will
be.

I think theres a general feeling in society that stretches from the wackiest of quasi-suicidal UFO
cults right up into very sober, rational aspects of the technical community a general feeling
that human historical development, or technological development, is in some kind of
asymptotic acceleration. Nano technology, psychedelic chemistry, the Internet, the cloning of
mammals, and whatever the rest of the list is all of these things synergizing each other are
producing very, very rapidly a world almost incomprehensible to most people.
And there is no reason to suppose that this process is going to slow down. It has apparently
been accelerating for as long as you care to think about it.

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And so at this point its really moving fast. At any point there could be a breakthrough cold
fusion, real extraterrestrial contact, a nano-technological assembler, a telepathic drug, a
longevity drug that stops aging. It could come from any of so many directions that Im sure well
be surprised.

But what we can almost count on is enormous breakthroughs in unexpected directions. In fact
this is already happening and changing reality all around us.

I dont really know you all that well, but Im sure youre probably pretty inter-netted and
connected. So am I.

Three years ago, very few people even knew what the Internet was. And most people today
dont know what it is, or hear about it, but are busy with their lives. Well, this is only one of
many, many factors. If you seek the edge if you insist on taking the latest drugs, possessing
the latest technology and being informed of the latest nano-tech breakthroughs then you
are really living in a very different world than the people around you.

People are becoming frozen in time. I meet people who say they dont want to be connected.
Life is already too complicated. Well, thats their business but what they are essentially doing
is saying Send me to the showers. Get me out of the game. The game has become too
complicated for me to play or understand.

I dont want to be in that position. I think its very exciting whats happening. Human
experience is moving toward some kind of culmination. All the things that we have dreamed of
for the past thousand years a physical paradise, a world of healthy, balanced human beings,
a world of free access to information all of these things are pretty much on target and being
delivered.

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But one has to notice that this is going on. Of course, the psychedelic community is very aware
of this, because in a sense the business of the psychedelic community is to notice whats going
on. But the business of a lot of communities is to deny whats going on.

For example the political community. It doesnt lead us boldly into the future. It tries to deny
that there is anywhere to go, and we should simply worry about health care maintenance,
balanced budgets, and what is going on with Arafat and Netanyahu.

B: Right. When you think of the left-wing politics these days I saw Jerry Brown recently at the
Digital Be-In, and he was making a big point that because of the technology there is a gap
between the haves and the have-nots that is growing wider because the haves have access to
this technology and the have-nots dont. Hes concerned about that, and wanting to give it to
the other people as well, to make it available to everybody.
That was his main point, but he wasnt too well received because the group that he was in was,
you know, all the cutting-edge, high-tech computer people.

T: Well, I would actually take issue with him. Ive heard this argument before that the rise of
the Internet has created the most elite culture in history. But if the curve of the development of
the modern automobile had followed the same developmental curve as the computer,
automobiles would today cost $100 apiece, would go 50,000 miles an hour, and a tank of gas
would take you to the moon.
It is true that today the Internet is a technology of elites. But I think that well before 2012 by
2005 or so the computer that sits on my desk today will be a stud earring, and it could sell
for about two-hundred bucks.

This is an enormous empowering of third world and non-high-tech people.

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But let me make another point about left-wing politics. Part of the problem there is that leftwing politics is as afraid of the future as right-wing politics. What we are hearing from the left is
resource management, ecological catastrophe, necessary slow-down in the development of
technology, and so forth. But these are a) things that are not going to happen, and b) its no
vision for the future.

So I think that both the right and the left have, in a sense, been transcended. What the right
offers is consumer capitalism. A complete sell-out to the idea that you are what you own, and
thats all there is. What the left is offering is a kind of purist rejectionism that may let you sleep
at night but doesnt form the basis of any coherent political program to lead us into the future.

B: Yes. And I think youve probably made it clear already but well go over it one more time
that youve written about what you call the archaic revival. I was going to ask you how does
that fit in with technology and the idea of progress?

T: My notion of where this could all lead if everything was managed right is to a world that
looks very much to the exterior observer the way the world must have looked 15,000 years ago.

In other words, a very low level of visible technology, people living tribally in many kinds of
ecosystems and environments, but and the but is very important when you translate
your point of view from the outside of the situation into the inside, and look at the world
through the eyes of these future people, you discover menus hanging in space behind closed
eyelids. In other words, the entire material culture could be interiorized. It isnt necessary to
own large numbers of things, and build very large, complex physical cities.

What we need to do is to limit our population, and integrate ourselves into the natural
ecosystem.

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My political program for the future is pretty simple, and I dont know whether it would be
called right-wing, left-wing or what. But Ive noticed that if each human being would parent
only one child, the population of the planet would drop 50% in thirty years. In the next thirty
years, it would drop 50% again. And so on.

You do that for 100 years, and the major political debate that everybodys interested in is Are
there enough people in the world?

I think that is what we must do. Every man, every woman should parent only one child; this is
the greatest political act we can do for the human community and the planet.

You know the only place its been tried is in China, which is not where it is most likely to
succeed. We need to say to the women of the high-tech industrial democracies, If you will
parent one child, you will have increased leisure time, you will have greater earning power,
more expendable income and you will be a genuine hero. Not a false hero, a genuine hero.

We have to give people the idea that this is a good thing. I have heard all kinds of objections.

And Im very interested in talking to young people mostly about psychedelics. Most people my
own age Im 50 have either long ago embraced psychedelics or long ago decided it wasnt
for them. But there are numbers of kids people between 18 and 25 who are coming up in
an even more compromised and distorted situation than I grew up in, they need information
about psychedelics.

Im very excited, for instance, by things like Salvia divinorum. Because its legal, and because it
is not chemically similar to any presently scheduled compound, and because it has a history of
religious usage, and because it can be grown easily in most parts of the world.

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I think we need to endlessly promote and bring forth things like this. New sources of the
psychedelic experience.New chemical families.New botanical species.
And to make it clear to the establishment that there is no way this can be legislated out of
existence, or controlled, or propagandized to silence. We are here to stay.
The psychedelics represent the unbroken thread of gnosis, back to the original human world
before history. And I will promote that message as long as there is breath in my body. Because I
think people need to hear it.
You know, there are different things going on in the politics of drugs. A lot of people think that
the medical marijuana thing is a great thing. Well, on one level it is a great thing. But on the
other hand, I dont want to trade the cops and judges in for doctors and hospital
administrators. I dont want anybody making these decisions for me.

And then theres another group of people who want the concept of recreational drugs to be
accepted by society. Well, thats fine. But that implies that all drugs are is recreational. They are
not. I am not willing to be granted legalization because the establishment finally decided
what I was doing was trivial.

These things are not trivial. So talking about recreational drug use and legalizing drugs that can
be confined in that category thats not good enough either.

We have to actually confront that these things are trans-formative.

B: I wrote an essay called Why We Get High. I played on the word recreational, though I
used Peter Staffords term re-creational.

T: Much better!

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B: And the idea that the ultimate purpose of psychedelics might be considered re-creational in
the sense that we re-create ourselves. And that they allow us to play in the way that children
play, in the sense that they free us up from the stultified adult adult being the past
participle of the verb to grow.

I had a biology professor who said that humans should be better called Homo ludens than
Homo sapiens, because Homo ludens means playful man, and humans play longer than any
other species except maybe for dolphins because dolphins and humans learn from that
play. So re-creational and play are part of it.

But the term recreational is pejorative in the sense that people think of it in the same way as
you know, go to a bar on Saturday night.

T: Right. It trivializes it in the minds of most people.

But I agree with you. Adulthood seems to be a freezing of the reflex to play. And then one is
forever caught where one was standing at age 25 when one suddenly became intellectually and
esthetically constipated.

B: Right. And later a lot of the psychologists like Maslow and Jung said that the purpose of our
whole life is to keep growing with self-actualization and self-realization. You know, the earlier
stages of the Freudian is kind of a place where it all ends according to the conventional
psychology. But in the new psychology, we constantly grow.

T: Thats right. Human life that isnt growing is human life that is dying.

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B: Exactly!
One last question here. Aldous Huxley wrote Island about a third of a century ago. Ive been
working on a project the Island Foundation which one of its purposes is to link what you
could call the usual suspects. Also, we plan eventually to attempt to create a model
psychedelic culture, a meme somewhere in the southern hemisphere, where we can start
playing with some of these ideas a place free from the political constraints that we have here
in the good ol USA and the northern hemisphere.

What do you think about Island Foundations some of our plans?

T: As long as we are only a dissonant minority inside the belly of the beast, we basically
represent a critique of that beast, but nothing more. I think it would be a fantastic thing to
attempt on an island or somewhere remote to actually experiment with the lessons of
psychedelics, with the insights of psychedelics, and I also predict that this would be perceived
as a new level of threat by the establishment. Because, in a sense, thats what happened in the
Haight-Ashbury in the 60s. Not on an island, and that was part of the problem. But it certainly
was perceived as a threat by ordinary establishment organizations.

But this has to be done. We have to move beyond oligarchy, capitalism, consumerism and mass
media.

B: You know I was fairly close friends with Tim Leary, and he had a great deal of faith in these
multinational corporations. He felt that at a certain point there was a critical mass that had
turned on and that the psychedelics would touch everywhere, and transform even the
multinationals. But theres some skepticism on my part about all of that.

I think that there has to be some kind of alternative a new vision that replaces this idea of
transactions as the basis of human interaction, which even the most regressive seem to
cultivate.
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T: Well, its interesting that you mentioned this. I think that we are going through a transition
analogous to a transition that happened early in the 17th century. At the beginning of the 30
Years War, Europe was ruled by Popes and kings. At the end of the 30 Years War, it was ruled
by parliaments and peoples. And the Church was told by national governments: We will now
take over the reins of the money-making enterprise. You feed the poor and bury the dead and
provide spiritual counsel.

Now the corporations are saying to those same national entities: Now you feed the poor and
bury the dead and keep the roads repaired and clear the swamps. Meanwhile, we will take over
the money-making enterprise.

But there are certain things about the world corporate state, as I call it, that I think are to be at
least temporarily preferred over the old way of doing business. The first is that war is an
instrument of national policy. It is not an instrument of corporate policy. Corporations do not
like war because by and large it is bad for business.

Its not bad for the corporations building weapons, but most corporations dont build weapons.
What capitalism likes is well-fed, hard-working, well-paid populations that do a lot of television
watching and mall strolling.

The other thing is that corporations do not like are unregulated markets. This will work in favor
of drug legalization, if thats what we want. In other words, corporations do not have moral
agendas. Illegal drugs were almost a necessary part of the tool box of the nation state because
thats where it raised its black capital and did the back-channel business of funding its
intelligence agencies and that sort of thing. But unregulated markets are anathema to the
world corporate state, and so I think we will eventually see because of that the
legalization of all drugs.

Nevertheless, at the center of the world corporate state is a very bad policy or way of doing
business, and that is the idea of the sale of commodities. That somehow raw materials must be
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fashioned into objects of greater worth and then sold through a market economy. If this is
allowed to continue un-critiqued, every forest will be cut, all metals will be extracted, all
watersheds will be polluted.
So likely we are going to see a movement toward virtual products and virtual markets. In other
words, if what a corporation sells you is clip art, very few rain forests are cut down to support
that. If what they sell you are game environments again these are environmentally-friendly
things. But if capitalism continues to insist on dealing true things, then it will cut its own throat
and will be replaced by something else.

At this point, I cant quite see what the something else will be. I am encouraged by the fact
that though American capitalism is basically slash-and-burn capitalism, companies like Fujitsu
which, interestingly, has a big stake in virtual reality they have a 500 year plan for the
company.

You know, American corporations dont plan beyond the next quarter. So if capitalism can tame
its wilder tendency the slash-and-burn tendency then it may have a certain longevity as a
social system. If it cannot tame that tendency, then it will consume itself along with everything
else in the next 50 years.

B: I think that we have gotten near the end. Is there anything more that you want to say to our
readers? Or do you want to put a cap on it here?

T: I would just say that I want to make it explicitly clear that I am very optimistic about the
human future, about the role of psychedelic substances both plants and products of the
laboratory in the human future. I think we stand at the brink of the great, great adventure.

I went out last night and looked at the comet. Weve been having a lot of overcast here, so it
was the first time I had seen it, and it was so clear to me, looking at that thing, that above the
chatter of argument about 2012 and legalize this and that, and is Terence McKenna full of shit,
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and so forth and so on, all of these discussions, it is very clear to me that we have arrived at the
final act of the human drama on this planet.
It isnt the end of the human drama, but we have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and
now its time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at
home with our own heart.

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Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery - Aliens and

Archetypes - Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove and Terence McKenna

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

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

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

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

Mishlove: Or missionary activity.

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McKenna: -- or missionary activity, to the vicinity of our planet. This was a myth that sprang up
concomitant with the modern wave of sightings that began shortly after World War II. As time
has passed and the number of sightings has gone from hundreds to thousands to hundreds of
thousands of instances, as the myth has fleshed itself out with sub-themes -- the theme of
abduction, the theme of telepathic contact

-- it's become much more difficult to fit all the known facts into the simple model of spacefaring visitors from another world. So what we are left with, then, are a number of more exotic
competing theories in the so-called postmodern phase of thinking about the UFO. Probably the
best known of these alternative explanations was the one pioneered by the Swiss psychologist
Carl Jung, who in 1953 wrote a book called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the
Skies. Jung was at great pains, without passing judgment on the reality of the saucers, of the
things seen, to interpret them psychologically, to interpret them as one would interpret a
dream. He saw in their circular form, in their scintillating, shining, alchemical brilliance, a
symbol of human wholeness, and felt that they were a symbol of our collective yearning for a
kind of totality and individuation. Now, in a way this kind of explanation is very satisfying;
however, it is not satisfying to the person who has immediately undergone a very strange and a
very real seeming experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mishlove: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores.

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

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

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

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

McKenna: Yes, nature is a communicating system of some sort, and the problem that we have
is to transcend cultural languages, historically created languages with very limited applications,
and instead fall into phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around
us. One possible view of the flying saucer is that it is a kind of projection from the
consciousness of the planet -- that it is Gaia, that it is in fact a kind of alchemical object,
haunting human historical time with a symbol of totality, the kind of totality that our religions
and our mystical yearnings are so at pains to concretize for us. But unless we as egocentric
beings clarify our relationship to the unconscious, then I think the flying saucer is going to
remain quintessentially mysterious. This was Jung's view.
Mishlove: One of the things that Jung pointed out in his book is that we must pay attention to
the research that Dr. J.B. Rhine was doing at that time at Duke University in ESP and
psychokinesis, and that even if UFOs had a physical reality, could be photographed or could be
weighed and measured, that they still might in some manner be projections of the human
mind.

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

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

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

McKenna: Yes, this is the so-called postmodern approach -- to ask the question, not what is the
UFO, but what is it doing to us? Jacques Vallee pioneered this approach. And the answer is
fascinating. What the UFOs are doing to us, to global society, is they are eroding faith in science
by casting directly in the path of science a kind of gauntlet, a challenge: "Crack this" -- almost as
if the cosmic giggle had shown up at the bachelor party of science to spoil the bash, in the same
way that the resurrection of Christ posed a tremendous problem for the intellectuals of late
Roman antiquity, because they had no place in their world view for someone rising from the
dead. They were Greek materialists, atomists essentially. In that same way, the UFO challenges
the assumptions of science, and I think in that sense Jung was really onto something when he
saw it as coming from the unconscious. It is like an object coming from the unconscious with a
compensatory function -- to turn us away from the rational and toward the intuitive; to turn us
away from the paternalistic, Apollonian, solar, masculine view of things, and toward a kind of
watery, lunar, mysterious, intuitively felt feminine force -- almost as though the UFO is a
manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess. Science, as the proudest -- pardon the word -erection of the rational mind, then is challenged by something from an entirely other
dimension, an entirely other realm, that concretizes for us the culture crisis. And that's why I've
gotten into UFOs; I think they are important for a resolution of the culture crisis. They
concretize the struggle between the paternalistic-masculine and the lunar-feminine, between a
dominator society and the kind of partnership society that we require to survive.
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Mishlove: And yet it seems as if that challenge is not a direct confrontation. As Vallee points
out, the UFOs are operating almost at the mythological level of our culture. They're not landing
in the White House; they're not really challenging the military or NASA.

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

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

Mishlove: Along with Judaism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

McKenna: Yes, I agree.

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

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

Mishlove: Angels.

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

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

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

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