Upload
babayaga
View
219
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
1/165
1
A Terence McKenna Audio Archive
Podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
Part 2
Transcribed by Dominator Culture
http://dominatorculture.com/
http://dominatorculture.com/http://dominatorculture.com/http://dominatorculture.com/
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
2/165
2
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
3/165
3
List of Talks:
Effects of Psychedelics on Society (Podcast 365) ……………………………………...…… 5
Suggested Reading List (Podcast 366) …………………………………..……………...….. 20
The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker (Podcast 367) …………………………………… 30
Psychedelics and the Feminine (Podcast 368) ………...…………………………………… 48
A Psychedelic Point of View (Podcast 378) ……………………………………………….. 61
A Stiff Does of Psychedelics (Podcast 381) ……………………………………………….. 74
The Psychedelic Option (Podcast 382) …………………...……………………………….. 87
Loose Ends Time (Podcast 386) …………………………………………………………. 106
Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis (Podcast 390) ………………………………………. 120
Nothing Lasts (Podcast 391) ……………………………………………………………... 136
Time Travel, Psychedelics, & Physics (Podcast 400) ………………..…………………….. 151
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
4/165
4
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
5/165
5
Effects of Psychedelics on Society
What I sort of want to talk about this morning and I can be lead away from it if you have
other considerations. It’s pretty clear from how this group is relating and coming on thateverybody has come to some resolution about this in their own lives. What’s become more
and more interesting to me as I’ve talked to more people and also if you stay in a field like
this, you eventually get to meet everybody. You get to meet Albert Hoffman and Sasha
Shulgin and Leary and Lily and all these people and you begin to have a view of how all
these people viewed it. So what I wanted to talk about this morning and lead it toward your
concern with the alien intelligence is, I wanted to talk about the effect that psychedelics are
having and I believe will have on society in general, and at deeper levels simply than drug
laws and government campaigns of abstinence but more on the level of how it’s impacting in
philosophy and science and the social sciences. I think we are winning. The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate but psychedelic drugs are not. That’s the
odd paradox of it.
This has a lot to do with the history of science over the past hundred years. What we call
modern science or what you could almost call super-science, not the notebook jottings of
naturalists and the collated accounts of travelers, but big science where millions, hundreds of
millions of dollars are spent on instruments and coordinated teams of people to attack
problems. This style of science that has grown up in the 20th century has had a very
interesting consequence because it is spread out over more than a generation; we all have
grown up with it and haven’t really realized what an unusual situation we are living in. We
are living in a state of constant scientific revolution.
There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen, let’s pick a
number, a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the worldview of one hundred years
ago. One hundred years ago, atoms were billiard balls, the basic building block of the
universe – indivisible. One hundred years ago, the position of biology was that Darwinian
mechanics had just been enunciated in the 1850s and was making its way against an
orthodoxy, which held that the Earth had been created in 4004 BC. Less than one hundred
years ago, when the cave painting of Lascaux and Altamira in Southern France and Spain were first discovered and experts came from Paris to view them, after looking the caves over
the experts announced that these paintings were obviously done by soldiers in the army of
Napoleon who had overwintered there in 1816 and 17. Continental drift was
unknown. The fact that the continent of Africa had an edge that fit exactly against the edge
of the continent of South America was mentioned in textbooks as an example of God’s
sense of humor. It was not seen to signal anything.
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
6/165
6
I can’t think of an area in science where we have retained the vision that we had then. The
Earth was thought to be ultimately stable, pretty much as it had been on the day of creation
even by the British geologists who were reacting against the story of biblical creation. But
there’s one area where surprisingly little has happened and it is strangely enough, the area of
the human mind. Strides were made in the early part of the 20th
century by describing theunconscious but it’s important to remember that some of the hottest therapies that passed
through a place like Esalen, which would be things like hypnotherapy, mesmerism –
mesmerism had its great heyday in the 1890s of the last century – colonic therapy brought to
a peak in Germany in the 1870s. Reflexology, a 19th century theory. Homeopathy, a theory
developed in late 19th, early 20th century. So we’ve not had in place really new models of the
mind. The body, because of Wilhelm Reich and the many, many schools he spawned as
either his progeny or in reaction to his thought, have given us new handles on the
relationship of psychology to the body. But in the area of the mind, it’s been pretty much
left alone. Well now to go back to the previous example of these other areas where scientific
revolutions were made – they were true revolutions. They were not fine tunings or little
additions of details but complete overthrow of old paradigms and the establishment of new
ones.
The Earth went from being a solid body with continents pretty much in the same place since
creation to a complex system of convection flows where continents are brought together and
broken apart. Man instead of being seen as the highest product of creation, a descent
slightly beneath the angels is instead seen as a primate, a specialized monkey of a certain
sort. The hard atoms, the indivisible atoms of 19th century physics give way to fields first of
all – fields which are characterized by action at a distance which had always been excludedpreviously. Reason dictated that action at a distance was a kind of superstition. Then James
Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that these fields really exist. So in each of these areas, a total
revolution took place. Now the reason that psychology was immune to this I think was
because we did not have the tools to advance it. They came to us out of ethnography and
anthropology, out of the work of Wasson and Hoffman and earlier, Havelock Ellis and Weir
Mitchell, Henri Michaux – all the people who worked with psychedelics. At first it was
worked with by artists, by literary people, by people who were interested in expanding their
own sensation but slowly it came to be realized that it was an insight into the mind, not into
the nature of it so much, which I think still remains a mystery but simply into its size. Thatthe mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
We have somehow the idea that the mind is in the head. It’s made by the brain and
therefore it must be a smaller and less inclusive domain than the domain in which it is
embedded. But I brought along an example here – this is a box and this box has in it a box
that is exactly the same size as it is. This demonstrates how even in three-dimensional
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
7/165
7
reality, expectation can be confounded. This ‘which is inside the box’ is itself a box
indistinguishable from this one and then that one goes in there like that and can be closed
into this. Now that’s what we’re here to talk about. It’s just how to do that. How to take a
world with a world in it and put it into the world in it and put the world in it outside of it.
What we’re talking about and what history is, I think, is an effort to exteriorize the soul and
interiorize the body. To make the fields of the lord that we all sense inside of us, meadows
that we can actually throw our clothes off and wander into. I think really what unites
psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. Science, when it examines
the psychedelics as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution I believe that will put all
the previous revolutions in perspective and will show that they were merely anticipations of
finding out this final unimaginable fact about nature. This weekend is called In The Light of
Nature . Nature, whenever you scratch its surface, has aspects that are unanticipated so when
they looked at the shape of the continents, they discovered continental drift. When Wallace
and Darwin looked at the distribution of butterflies over the Indonesian Islands, theysuddenly had a vision of the origin of species and how that worked. The psychedelics are
this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature and when we scratch it, when we
bring that tool to apply, we are not going to recognize ourselves. We talked a little bit last
night about LSD. A kind of funny thing about LSD was that it was the right drug for the
right time in that it fulfilled the psychological theories of the world into which it came. Now
this may have something to do with the fact that it was psychologists who were keen to
promote it. We’ll never know. The thing seems to be inextricably wedded together. But
LSD made possible the recovery of traumatic material, lucid communication, re-visioning of
self-image and the energy to break out of habit patterns and this sort of thing. What wasabsent in LSD was any reference back into the natural world.
The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to
help it along. Maybe Gary Snyder said something about it once in a seminar but it was not
heard by most people because what was being stressed about LSD was its utter newness. I
remember people saying that it had been created to save us from the brink of atomic
catastrophe. It had come into the world at the exact proper time to be there when we
needed it. There was not a sense of history, you see. There was not a sense of
twenty/thirty/fifty thousand years of involvement with the psychedelic state. A society, adominant culture, always assumes that it is the most sophisticated of a long line of
precursors but as a matter of fact, the childishness and the sort of fragile un-informedness
that the hip people saw in the straight people in the 60s was a phenomenon that everyone
shared. Everyone was naïve. Everyone was more simplistic than they should have been and
that’s why I think the first psychedelic revolution got into trouble because there was no
sense of history. There was no sense of: have societies ever integrated something like this
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
8/165
8
and what then did they become? What kind of societies can live in the light of the
psychedelic experience?
There was no real discussion of that. Now this dimension of earth crisis has been added in
the intervening years. This was another aspect that was missing from the hippy thing to
some degree. Yes? No?
[Audience] - I’m sorry I don’t think it was. Because I recall the tremendous involvement with the Hippy’s in
the 60’s at Millbrook. There was a lot of attention paid to organic growing of food and of not abusing the
fruits of this Earth. There was tremendous involvement and it came out of the psychedelic and the LSD
culture.
[Audience] - It was the beginning of the back to the Earth movement.
But don’t you agree Nina that if you were to walk down Haight Street on a hot day in
August of 1967, ecological sensitivity would not be highly visible on the surface?
[Audience] – That’s true. That’s why Timothy Leary said get out of the city. Everybody should grow their
own food. That consciousness was there.
Well that was really the beginning of it. That it was the end of the Summer of Love when
they realized that they’d just been media’d to death and political things…they’d been
overrun. Then they moved into the countryside. Communal living in the country, which is
the tribalism. Which McLuhan was talking about in the 60s, not from the point of drugs but
of electronics. I think that was the beginning of the permission for Earth day, ecological
sensitivity. Now the great philosopher of the psychedelic community, to my mind, is RupertSheldrake. Rupert is a botanist, a natural scientist, a man in the tradition of Darwin and
Wallace.
We’re trying to say what is being realized, I think, is that the psychedelics ha ve always been
exerting a pressure on human beings. That we, from about 1600, something like that, pick a
date, from 1600 to 1960 - lost sight of that because we lived entirely in an industrial,
mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist, capitalist kind of society. But all other societies have
had some awareness, at least of nature if not of psychedelics, of nature forming the
aesthetic. Now we’re returning to this. There is an awareness that understanding man’s
place in nature is going to require psychedelics…integration of the psychedelic
experience. When we go into nature, and this gets to your question, when we look hard at
these tryptamine psychedelics and the plants they come from and the content of the
information. It seems to be very hard for people to bring it across, even having had ten or
fifteen thousand years to do so. Well then the awareness begins to grow that there is a
presence on this planet that we have previously missed that we have been so busy about the
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
9/165
9
anthill business of building human culture that we have paid lip service to the power of
nature, to Gaia, to the Goddess. But I don’t think anybody has realized how real it is.
If you wanted to talk about Gaia, most people would place you in the category of spiritual or
religious. But I think talking about Gaia belongs in the category natural science and natural
history. Gaia is a regulating set of grids that are laid over this planet that keep it going in theright direction that stabilize certain kind of processes and damp others. The expression of
Gaia outside of culture is the botanical world, the world of plants. Man, woman, animal,
plants – the plants were the first ones to have a feminine approach, if you want to put it that
way. They invented the feminine approach before there was even femininity, if you want to
put it that way. In other words, nurturing, staying in one place, cooperation, integration and
regulation rather than dominance, conquest, mobility, these sorts of things that are then the
animal solution to the same problem. An orthodox evolutionary biologist tends to sneer at
plants because we all have the built in assumption that the mind is in the brain and if you
don’t have a brain, you don’t have a mind. Or if you do have a mind, it’s so low grade thatit’s just kind of a shimmer of perceptual awareness.
If you examine this proposition that the mind is in the brain, it doesn’t hold water at all. All
the miles and miles of electroencepolographic tracings that have been done, nobody has ever
correlated a thought with an electrical discharge in the brain. The closest they’ve gotten is to
correlate a kind state of state of focused awareness with a blip in the electrical activity of the
brain. When you’re told, prepare yourself for a question – then there is a measureable bit of
activity in the brain as if you reorient: ‘I’m about to get a question.’
[Audience] – How could they put together so incredibly complex? They’re measuring billions of neurons
operating at once.
You mean why this correlation hasn’t been?
Yes – true. But they’ve had fifty years to make good on their promise that they were going
to show us thought in the brain. Sherrington and those people, what was the famous
Spanish neuro-physiologist – Roman Y Cajal. Sherrington and all those people announced
this in the early 1920s, since then we’ve had super computers, super imaging systems,
microprobes, vast advances in the technologies they said they needed in order to make this
point. They have not made good. It’s interesting. There are a couple of areas. In 1952,
DNA, the structure of DNA was elicited. Well the scientific literature was full of predictions
of the cure of all diseases within fifteen years; certainly the elimination of all genetic
defects. A full understanding of what life is. Well then as they began to elucidate the
mechanisms of DNA – they turned out to be simply that – mechanisms, no more interesting
than a water faucet or a torsion belt or a weighted governor. The life that molecular biology
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
10/165
10
seems to be able to describe is a life of chains and pulleys, falling weights and tightening
chains. There has not been a single step towards elucidating what it actually is. Its
mechanisms are better understood but not what it is. To the mind even more so, to the
point now where the people in the field, to each other, will admit that there’s a problem,
there’s a crisis. This past week there was a conference here called the Holonomicsconference. Karl Pribram’s theory of brain functioning, which is certainly state of the art
and out there, but it just recently had to be restructured and renamed - changed from the
holographic theory to the holonomic theory because the experimental data was not
supporting the model that they had.
This happens over and over again. So I think we’re too patient with science. Nobody
should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together. If somebody claims…think
about it – we think of the 20th century as the most rapidly evolving century that there has
ever been. A few years ago, Kat and I took the children to Mexico to wander around
looking at the Mayan ruins. We were in San Cristobal de las Casas. Some of you may know,it’s high up in the mountains of Chiapas and there’s an immense cathedral there. It was built
in 1511! Columbus discovered America in 1492 – so that’s nineteen years after Columbus
had discovered America, in a world relying on galleons and horseflesh, the complete
conquest of a culture was totally fait accompli and building six hundred feet long with three
hundred foot ceilings were being put up all over Mexico. We went to the moon nineteen
years ago. Today we couldn’t put a lawn chair on the moon. You would think that by now
we would have buildings six hundred feet long with three hundred foot ceilings; have the
Indians all working for us and be looting the place of minerals. See there is…we tolerate too
much foot dragging and these scientists have been pontificating.
A real sore point for me in the claims of quantum physics. My God, how many conferences
are there going to be on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness before
somebody comes up with something better than a rap. The new position of the particle
physics community is: just give us six and a half billion dollars and a machine nineteen
kilometers in diameter and we will show you something. But five years ago we gave you
four billion dollars and you built the machine four and a half kilometers in diameter and
what you concluded out of that is that you need a bigger one. We’re living in a world where
people are starving, where people are dying of AIDS. I’m not saying that you have to justgive the money away to the poor, certainly nothing as radical as that – but if you want a
scientific frontier that has positive feedback into the human experience, then let’s take the
six and a half billion dollars and have a full assault on the mechanism of viruses in the
human cell so that we come out of it with an AIDS cure, of course, but we come out of it
also with a much deeper understanding of the mechanics of life. I think it’s time to begin to
call in the chips on these various disciplines which have been promising great things to us
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
11/165
11
for the past thirty years. Where would psychedelic research be if it had been going on at full
funding since 1960 and hundreds of thousands of people well and healthy had taken it and
the plants of the world had been fully surveyed? The cultures of the world, databases have
been built of their folklore and this sort of thing. So we, and even though we represent a
fairly deconditioned subgroup, are still enthralled to the promises of a science, whosepromises begin to sound more and more hollow.
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is - is reclaiming your own
experience. We expect Karl Sagan to explain it to us or the evening news. We don’t realize
all these people are just like we are. All of these people are utterly, utterly, utterly ordinary –
totally ordinary. I can’t impress upon you enough how ordinary everyone is. We drift in the
assumption that great men and women are at the helm and that deep thinkers are publishing
all of these books. It’s just not so. It’s a groping, it’s a feeling toward it and any one of us is
competent.
This whole cult of professionalism is just a shell game. The thing to do is to reclaim direct
experience and then insist for other people that that be dealt with. I’ve tried to do that by
talking about the part of the psychedelic experience which nobody seemed to want to talk
about – which is it seems to me that it’s not an exploration of our psychology, of our
conscious or unconscious mind. It’s a place. There’s real estate in there. It is as profound a
dimension as the new world for Columbus. We’re going to live in the world that the
psychedelic experience is revealing to us because we primarily define ourselves culturally
through language and the psychedelic experience will be found to be a revisioning of
language. Literally castles in the air await us in our global future. We are journeying deeperand deeper into the imagination. This conference that just finished this past week was
called Living in the Imagination and its focus was not strictly or at all particularly psychedelic. It
was artists, writers, film people, performers, talking about living in the imagination. I think
you could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination. The
imagination is a sense like seeing, feeling, touching – it is more than simply an anticipation of
the future. It’s an anticipation of those things, which lie outside the forward thrust of the
momentum of probability.
The possession of the imagination is what characterizes us and distinguishes us from other
creatures. You can talk all you want about porpoises and dolphins and all of these things butyou know, they may have rich interior lives but there is no trace of epigenetic coding. In
other words, they don’t write books, paint paintings or build cathedrals. These are the things
that we do which have built up a tremendously rich environment for each succeeding
generation so that we do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our
children into the world of culture and culture is some kind of collective engineering process
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
12/165
12
that up to this point has been largely unconscious, entirely unconscious. People just thought
what they thought and let the chips fall where they may and every once in a while a Christ,
or a Mohammad or a Buddha would come along and would reshuffle the deck and then the
game would play on.
We are coming to the place, a great turning place I would think, a cusp almost in theevolution of human psychology. It’s the self -reflection cusp. We are beginning to become
sophisticated enough with our language and our awareness to stand outside of
ourselves. What is the human enterprise? What is happening on this planet? What the hell
is going on here? This planet has supported an endless succession of animal forms. They
can be traced back into the gunflint cherts of South Africa three and a half billion years. In
the last million years, phenomena never before seen on this planet have begun to
emerge. Not all of them having to do with the human species. For instance, glaciers.
I believe and subscribe to the school in geology, which says there were not glaciers a billionyears ago or a hundred million years ago. Glaciers are a recent phenomenon having to do
with the accumulation of instability in the planetary orbit. Ice moving southward, miles high
from poles on a cycle of twenty to fifty thousand years is something entirely unique for the
biology for this planet to encounter. That process, which islands and then island’s
populations of primates and other animals and then recedes so that these intensified island
genomes then flow back into a general gene pool and then islands them again. This is like
kneading the bread of evolutionary adaptation and it’s in that world of ice moving south and
moving north that the human story begins to pickup because the human story is a story that
everyone who studies the matter believes began in Africa. It was the forming and the un-forming of the glaciers that created the cycle of wetness and dryness in Africa that placed
pressure on the evolving primates in the primary rainforest of the African tropics to begin to
develop a dry grassland or limited resource adaptation in the background of the arboreal
adaptation. Well then as the ratios of selective intensity shifted in favor of the dry land
situation, the previous mutation, which had been there all along but had not been prominent
because it was not conferring an adaptive advantage suddenly came into the fore. You get
binocular vision, bipedalism, pact signaling – all of these things which are the beginning of
the repertoire of our heritage.
Now up to this point in that story, almost all evolutionary biologists and primatologistsagree. What I’ve recently been trying to say and hope to write a book about is, I think that it
was the presence of psychedelic plants in that environment that provided the spark to begin
to call forth conscious self reflection out of this primate species. The case goes something
like this. The primates evolved; they abandoned their vegetarian lifestyle as the great forests
were reduced to grasslands. They adopted a more omnivorous lifestyle, which you see in
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
13/165
13
most of the higher primates today. They began to hunt the large ungulate mammals that
were simultaneously evolving as the grasslands became a more dominant ecology. In the
manure of these ungulate mammals, cattle, mushrooms find their idealized
environment. Well if you’ve ever watched a baboon, the strategy of baboons for hunting
food is they go along and they pick stuff up and they smell and taste and they’re alwaysturning things over looking for bugs. Well carrion beetles and stuff like that always
congregate under cow pies.
Isn’t it wonderful that the evolution of the grandeur of the human mind begins with what’s
going on with doodlebugs under cow pies? It keeps your humility. Searching for insect
protein, the mushroom is a very conspicuous part of that kind of environment. A child of
three will run to it in the meadow because it’s neither fish nor fowl. It is quite an anomalous
and striking object. Psilocybin its been shown increases visual acuity in small doses. This is
very solid research done by Roland Fischer in the 50s and 60s, some of the last research
done with psychedelics. He showed that very small amounts of psilocybin increase visualacuity before there is any other effect. You don’t feel stoned or anything like that. The way
they proved this, they built an apparatus where there were two parallel metal bars and
someone unseen by the subject, by turning a crank could impart torsion to one of the metal
bars so that the two parallel bars would slowly…one would twist and they would cease to be
parallel. So you would get graduate students, the favorite experimental animal of
psychology, and you give them light doses of psilocybin and you sit them down in front of
this apparatus and tell them to push the buzzer when the two bars are no longer
parallel. Very consistently, the people who had been dosed with psilocybin scored higher on
this test than the people who had not.
Fischer, wishing to be facetious, said to me, ‘you see, this is a case where we’ve
experimentally proven that drugs give you a truer picture of reality than being straight.’ For
him, it was a joke. It was just this cute thing that you say to your academic colleagues but I
was quite touched and struck by…this is true what this man is saying. This is a simple
experiment and it proves that sometimes it’s better to be stoned than not stoned and your
life could be depending on it. Because hunting is an activity where visual activity is 95% of
the game and it doesn’t hurt to also have a CNS stimulant that can give you a running burst
if you need it. So since psilocybin provides both of these things, it turns you into a realkilling machine!
Fischer never considered the impacts of his findings in what this would mean in the natural
environment. But I wanted to think about it and it seemed to me that meant that those
primates including the psilocybin in their food chain would automatically have a leg up over
those that did not. They would be able to move quicker in the hunting situation and more
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
14/165
14
accurately. Well you have to have studied evolution for ten minutes to know that that means
then that these forms are going to preserved and selected in favor of over those individuals
that do not have this in their food.
[Audience] – At the same time it could have made them a little more vulnerable.
In what way?
[Audience] – Well you eat a bunch of mushrooms and suddenly you’re just sitting there watching all these
patterns. You’re more vulnerable to predators.
Yes, well that’s what I wanted to get to. I don’t mean full trips. I mean that in the process
of eating bugs and roots and stuff, if they ate these mushrooms without even knowing they
were psychoactive, they would have this visual acuity. Now somebody at some point at a lot
of them and they discovered that they were no good for hunting or bursts of speed or
anything – they just wanted to lie on the ground and be with it. At that point, I think thisbecomes a mystery for the first human beings. The cow is the source of food, fuel, body
covering, milk and an image of nurturing that’s very important because the birthing of the
cow – it probably was the birthing of cattle and the observation of cattle probably taught
people more about sex than their own sexuality did. The husbanding of animals is how farm
children learn about life. I don’t know.
This all relates to the theme of light in nature because there is a great mystery on this
planet. We are only one side of the coin of that mystery. Our existence here should be the
clue to us that something really weird is going on. I don’t think most planets are like this
planet. I can stretch out to the idea that there are many planets with life but I think the level
of complexity, the presence of a historical civilization which is just going to exist for a
geological microsecond, we are very, very close to the people we came out of 50,000 years
ago. Yet, look at how we have changed the world. Who is whispering to us in our
dreams? Whose hand is it that we feel guiding our destiny into the future? We’re so
accustomed to be rational and reductionist – the ‘there ain’t nothing really going on here at
all’ school of thought that we’re just deadened to the mysteriousness of our own
presence. If we’re here, who knows what else could be here in the mountains, jungles and
deserts of this planet. We have not yet even carried out a complete cataloguing of
nature. We don’t really know what kind of a foundation we’re standing on and then when
you take the psychedelics, which come out of the natural world, the message that they’re
bearing in the broadest sweep is that our historically created, symbolic model of reality is
almost worthless.
I mean it’s OK for dealing bread and trading donkeys but once y ou get into anything deeper
than that, it’s just a story we tell ourselves; a magic charm that we rattle against the
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
15/165
15
darkness. The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us except when we
put our mind into the socket of nature and then we connect up to something so bizarre that
we can barely recognize it. Something lying so far outside our previous symbolic structures
that we don’t know whether it’s an alien invasion, the eminence of Christ’s immediate return,
the rise of Atlantis or just what it is. It is confounding, that’s the main thing aboutpsychedelics. That’s why it seems to me, it divides people. It’s for people who like the
bizarre, the weird, the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the peculiar, the edge of meaning,
beauty at its most Baroque and the world of Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel the
Elder and some people don’t like that. They like to be reassured. They like closure. They
love being ensconced in concentric circles of expectation and tradition and solidity – that
sort of thing. This just gives them the heebeegeebees, this kind of stuff. Because we’re
saying the intellectual world has an edge and if you go over that edge, you will find the
unanticipated tremendum.
[Audience] - Maybe it doesn’t matter if plants are te achers and people are teachers too. How it gotthere? It’s a great question but I see it more as a way into a doorway somewhere that’s real and that’s the
point.
Well maybe there’s a planetary regulating system and people are simply cells in a larger
organism and when it comes time for something to happen, which maybe means all life
leaves the planet or something, then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the
environment to initiate this morphogenetic re-scripting of what is going on. Suddenly
animals, which were perfectly happy, hunting on the veldts of Africa, begin making art,
watching the stars and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet.
I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological
phenomenon under the control of the environment. It isn’t something that is going against
the environment. Now the objection to that is that it looks so bad, it looks cancerous. But
the obvious counter to that is birth – I mean birth – there’s a lot of bloodshed, people make
sounds as though they were in great pain, they are in great pain, it has all the attributes that
we associate with violent, violent termination of the organism and yet it is the precise
opposite. It is the birthing of the new generation and it is unavoidable and it is perfectly
natural.
Well as a woman grows pregnant and she loses her self like form and becomes heavier and
all these things, the changes that go on in pregnancy – maybe something that has happened
to the Earth over the past 20,000 years. The Earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps
much else and obviously you just look at the Earth and humanity and these two can’t stay
together much longer. They’re becoming a problem. The mother can’t function, the child is
in danger and like the birth situation, if the child is not eventually birthed, toxemia will set in
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
16/165
16
then everything goes haywire. Then both parties are in danger and there has to be
emergency intervention and so forth. I don’t think we’ve really reached that point yet but I
think we’ve come to term.
As you know concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of where it all
comes together and it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on foreverand then it ends. Then the baby is born and everything is seen to be all right. Well I think
the 20th century; it’s not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity. It’s
actually happening and it’s ripping our society and our planet to pieces. What will come out
of it is the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny. And I
hope we’re going to be privileged to be midwives of this process, to be there on the that
great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process; the
wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing and say, now I
understand what all that was about.
That’s I think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics – being in on
that process. Because if you’re in on that process, anxiety will leave you. You will not define
yourself as a victim; you will define yourself as a privileged spectator.
[Audience] - Have you thought about this outside and inside dichotomy?
But I wonder Clive. Thinking about the question – is it inside or outside? It seems to me
more that what you have is a loosely coupled hierarchy where there are elements of freedom
and self will at every level of the hierarchy but always constrained by deterministic factors
that are also at every level. So sort of the new model, which I think is coming, is that theEarth is an organism. Yes that’s well established but human history is a part of that
organism. It’s as different from the rest of it as the brain is from the liver but that human
history is not somehow against the planet or unexpected or unwelcome – that it’s actually
part of the control system. Yet it is controlled and this is where I think we need to revision
what drugs are.
All of human history is the sculpting of human populations by their relationships to
plants. Think of the effect that sugar had on the rise of mercantilism and empire building, or
opium policy on the Far East, or the spread of rye, the replacing of wheat by rye in the
Middle East - as you move north and how that made certain types of populations and
migrations possible. You could write a book about human history in which you analyze the
entire phenomenon as movement toward equilibrium in response to states of disequilibrium
introduced by plants, by foods, by spices, by drugs, by psychedelics, by addicting drugs. So
that’s how in our own bodies, a given system is regulated – through the release of hormones
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
17/165
17
which turn on certain genes and turn off certain other genes and turn on certain secretions
and turn off others.
I think we assume that human history has just been something dreamed up by egomaniacal
males, each one building on the accomplishments of the other. But it may be that it’s
actually always been regulated as a process by the planetary control system by regulatingdiet. The diet of every species and in particularly this one, determines its energy levels, its
intellectual preoccupations, its migratory patterns, its distribution of work and labor and this
sort of thing. Maybe this is over answering your question, but it’s not a dualism. It’s not
one or the other, whether you see the control and the information from the drug coming
from within you or without you is really a matter of perspective where you choose to
describe it from. Intrinsically it doesn’t seem to be possible to know that. We’re like cells
moving at the will of a larger system.
Somebody once said, ‘electrons blindly run’ and Alfred North Whitehead said, ‘yes but insidethe body they blindly run according to the body’s plan.’ I think that’s what you might say
about people. People blindly run but without realizing it, they run according to Gaia’s plan.
[Audience] - I personally have experimented with a whole number of psychedelics and I must say that I never
found that one psychedelic gives you a certain kind of vision and another gives another. I’ve always found it
has to do with where I was at; a lot of other things. The key to me, all psychedelics are really keys. They
open up that reducing belt that Huxley talks about and once that’s open – whatever comes in, comes in. For
me it has nothing to do with the psychedelic itself.
[Audience 2] – I keep hearing this word, like expire – I felt like I might die. Possibly one of you would liketo address the relative non-toxicity of mushrooms.
Well you see it’s a funny thing. Now we’re talking about life and death and when we need
reassurance in that realm, we immediately turn to science and talk about the LD50. For
those of you who don’t know, lethal dose 50 - so pharmacologists are asking of a given drug,
what is its LD50? That means how much of it had to be given to a hundred rats for fifty of
them to die. LD50s are considered a relative measure of the safety of a drug. The LD50 for
psilocybin is huge. Something like 200 mg per kg of body weight. So that means to kill
yourself with mushrooms, you would have to eat four and a half dried pounds or something
like that.
[Audience] – That’s what I wanted to emphasis. One of the basic fears that one may experience at a
threshold dose….
Discorporation?
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
18/165
18
[Audience] – That is, if you can grasp the fact that you’re must worse off drinking a couple of cups of coffee
generally, that can alleviate some of that particular fear. You might sa y, it’s not going to poison me; I just
need to keep breathing.
Well a funny thing about this thinking your going to die. If you tell a straight person this,
they say ‘well psychedelic drugs, isn’t that the bit? You take it and you think you’re going to
die and you don’t and you’re so damn glad you didn’t, your ecstatic.’
[Audience] – I’ve never taken ayahuasca and am wondering, since what I understand, DMT is the effective
compound? When you’ve taken that do you find that its characteristic is similar to pure DMT or is it very
different than that?
No it’s a lot like DMT in the center of the flash but DMT unfolds over a minute or two and
lasts three or four minutes. Ayahuasca is more like mushrooms, it comes on about the hour
and twenty-minute mark and it comes in waves. But when you really get it and you’re
looking at it, you say yes – this looks just exactly like DMT. I suppose we should explain for
people who aren’t familiar with it. DMT, if you were to eat it, would be destroyed in your
gut by monoamine oxidase. So the strategy in the Amazon is to take a plant with DMT in it
and a plant with monoamine oxidase inhibitors in it and combine the two into a beverage
that can then be drunk and then the DMT passes through to the brain. One of the great
mysteries of ethnopharmacology in the Amazon is how they ever figured this out. We’re
talking about hundreds of thousands of species of plants and in this case it’s the leaves of
one boiled with the pulpy main body of another – placed together in a certain proportion
and then the thing works. When you ask them how is this done they say, the plants have
told us. This seems like a more likely explanation than anything anybody has been able to
come up with.
Some of you may know this book called Rio Tigre and Beyond , where this guy who had learned
to make ayahuasca when he was kidnapped as a child by a deep forest tribe. When he then
in later life becomes a rosewood and curare collector, he meets people in the jungle who are
extremely – what do I want to say – living in the natural state. Uncontacted people. But
when he takes their ayahuasca, he realizes that it’s garbage. They don’t know how to make
it. Then he makes it for them and shows them how to make it and they’re just knocked off
their feet and hail him as a cultural reformer. So it’s not always simply a matter of theuncontacted, so called primitive people have the skinny. It’s a technology.
Something I want to say before we leave this. If you think about natural drug complexes
around the world, the interesting thing to notice about ayahuasca is unlike peyote or
mushrooms or the Iboga cults of Africa or the morning glory cults of central Mexico or
cannabis. Different from all of these is the fact that it’s a combinatory preparation and in
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
19/165
19
practical terms, what that suddenly means is a person is involved. The person who makes
it. For the first time we’re getting a chemist into the picture – an alchemist, a teacher if you
want – because ayahuasca unlike mushrooms and all these other things, is only as good as
the person who made it. Where mushrooms, you don’t have to worry about that in quite the
same way. A mushroom is ready to go when it comes out of the ground. The ayahuasca is acombinatory drug and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more
central position.
This is something to bear in mind if you’re thinking of going to the Amazon to take
ayahuasca. You’re going to have a people experience because the only way to it is through
people. You could have a mushroom experience in Mexico by simply finding the
mushroom, you know?
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
20/165
20
Suggested Reading List
At each of these weekends we usually update people on books on the subject that are
available. One of the things that people don’t do enough of when they do psychedelic workis spend time in the library. There’s a great deal of published literature on these things -
historical, chemical, so forth and so on. It’s good to be informed. I know that I often use
reference books; I use Schultes’ The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens for those
aspects. Peter Stafford’s Psychedelic Encyclopedia is good for a sort of social history
overview. Marlene De Rios has a book called Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural
Perspectives . Probably one of the books that I recommend most to people is Michael Harner’s
anthology Shamanism and Hallucinogens , where he gathered a bunch of very good articles
together there. Hoffer and Osmond’s old classic The Hallucinogens, even though it was last
updated in 1968 is still, on the major hallucinogens, the best source. And in addition tothose, which I just mentioned but don’t have here to show you, I want to show you some of
the newer or more interesting stuff in the field.
This is a book that has not been widely distributed at all. This fellow might be a candidate
for teaching at Esalen, I don’t know. It’s The Science and Romance of Selected Herbs Used in
Medicine and Religious Ceremony by Anthony Andoh. Andoh has his own institute in San
Francisco; he runs a nursery on Taraval. Judging by this book, he’s an extremely
knowledgeable person with a worldwide education in herbs and a special stress on folk
usage. So there are for instance, here’s an Egyptian illustration of Sennefer, the royal garden
and his gardener and his sister Merit. There’s a lot of plant lore in here that you just don’t
get anywhere else and another book like that is William Emboden’s book Narcotic
Plants . Terrible title but a tremendous amount of information that doesn’t seem to appear
anywhere else. Macmillan is the publisher. So he’s a Bay area resource that we certainly were
not aware of until very recently and maybe some of the rest of you were not aware of him
either. This guy is one of us. He should be part of the party.
Then in terms of publications, the publications on psychedelics that you may be familiar
with, such as High Times and High Frontiers are sort of addressing this, trying to restart the
youth rebellion. Anyway, it’s not a full spectrum or deep look at psychedelics.
This magazine, which was previously called Psychozoic Press and has been renamed Psychedelic
Monographs and Essays . Are you a psychedelic monograph, Eric? Oh you’re an essay?
[Audience Laughter]
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
21/165
21
It’s published out of Florida and it’s very, very lively. It has a huge letter section. Everybody
you know seems to write one letter per issue in and for instance, this issue has articles on
psychedelics, a woman’s rite of passage and earmarks of psychedelic spiritual experiences,
also by a woman. Psychedelics and lucid dreaming, door ways in the mind, also by a woman,
and Thomas Riedlinger who some of you may know from Chicago, an article by him onpsychedelic schooling. This is simply printed but it’s from the heart, it’s scholarly; the tone I
think is very good. I would actually urge you to support these people by subscribing. We
have nothing personally to do with it; it’s just that they’re on a good trip. I’ll hand this
around and you can get addresses off of them if you want.
This is Rupert’s new book. Rupert is Rupert Sheldrake. It’s just begun to be
distributed. He is going to make a revolution in thinking about resonance and form and it
has an aspect in it that is very kind to our concerns. The psychedelics are much more
centrally important to understanding in a morphic resonance theory of nature. So Rupert is
just a brilliant writer, even more brilliant than he is a talker and this is a delicious book to justread ten or fifteen pages at night before you go to bed.
This is a reference book that in terms of getting a lot of information between the covers of
one book with a massive amount of color illustration - this is Richard Evan Schultes, the
leading light of Ethnobotany. He spent over fifteen years in the Amazon and has lead
hundreds of graduate students into careers into Ethnobotany and really has put the field on
the map and his co-author is Albert Hoffman who invented LSD. In terms of one book
about psychoactive plants that is in print and readily available, I would go with this one I
think.
[Audience] – Alfred Van Der Mark?
Van Der Mark did this edition. It was originally done by Macmillan. This is Riane Eisler’s
book, The Chalice and the Blade . It may not immediately appear to have anything to do with
psychedelics but it has to do with re-visioning society by looking at ancient models of how
men and women arranged social structure in the past. Like Rupert, this is a book with a
secret agenda. This book is a tracking horse for a new respectability for psychedelics
because when you begin asking the question, why was there a partnership society for so long
and why did it give way to a dominator culture, the answer lies, I think, in changing patternsof plant utilization in a changing relationship to the psychedelic experience. This is a
wonderful book; maybe the most important book for archeological scholarship in the last
ten years or so. Riane lives in Carmel Valley. She is a local person and a great resource and
I’m sure that you’ll be seeing more of her in the Esalen catalogue and around. She speaks
very well if you have a chance to hear her speak, I would urge you to do it.
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
22/165
22
This is just to remind you of our little book on cultivating mushrooms. If you have the time
and the focus, this is really the way to do it shamanically - to get out of the ‘dealing’ cycle
and the ‘not knowing what you’ve got’ cycle. Also, as I’ve said earlier, this trains you to
punctuality, cleanliness, attention to detail - all of these qualities which I used to say to
people once you’ve grown the mushroom, you know you’re ready to take it because it hasimbued in you the qualities you need to take it through the act of growing it. Don’t be
fooled, it isn’t easy and it isn’t that the process is difficult. It’s that you have bad habits that
will get in the way of the process. Habits like leaving your apartment occasionally. You
can’t do that any more if you do this….
It’s definitely much more than a grower’s guide. It contains a lot of, as Kat mentioned, a
chronology and a lot of discussion about what the mushroom is. It also is the first place
where these images from the African Plateau, the Tassili Plateau in Algeria, has been
reproduced from and they are strong evidence for the use of mushrooms in Neolithic
Africa. This is evidence, which Wasson did not include in his books; new evidence and bothof the major rock paintings that argue for this point of view are in here. The next issue of
revision will have a drawing by Kat on the cover and an article by me about mushrooms and
the goddess. It will be a psychedelic issue. Everything in it will be psychedelic so you might
watch for that.
Then last and just sort of as a fun thing, in case you’re not aware of this book, some people
aren’t. It’s called the Codex Seraphinianus and it is written in an unknown language. It
contains hundreds and hundreds of color drawings and since it’s written in an unknown
language, it’s impossible to figure out what it’s about because the drawings are all of objectsthat don’t exist in this world. So it’s great fun, it’s stimulation for the imagination. It shows
I think one person’s response to the psychedelic experience. This book was originally
published at $75.00. It’s obviously a labor of love. It could not have been conceived of as a
money making proposition. Consequently now it’s being remained in most places. You can
pick one of these up for $19 bucks, at least at Moe’s in Berkeley and probably any other large
volume bookstore like that. You can spend hours with this thing. It’s more than you can
take in at one go.
Well, I thought this morning because we don’t have too much time and I have had several
people ask me to talk about our personal visions and some people specifically, the Time Wave and all that. I’ll sort of work my way into it. I did want to take a count of the fact that
today is Easter. There are workshops that would have fallen upon the coincidence of Easter
with themselves as an excuse for an orgy of oval ceremonialism but somehow it slipped past
here. It’s an excellent excuse for me to talk about what seems to me one of the most
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
23/165
23
mysterious of all passages in the New Testament. I’m not a New Testament scholar but I’ve
puzzled over this passage for years and years and I think it relates to what we’re doing.
I’m not sure, I believe it’s in Matthew when the woman come to the tomb on Easter
morning looking for Christ – now I think it’s Mary Magdalene who comes first and she’s
alone I believe – and Christ is there, she sees him. It is the two Margarets who comelater. She starts toward Christ because she thought he was dead and she sees him standing
by the tomb. She starts towards him and he stops her and he says ‘touch me not, for I am
not yet completely of the nature of the Father.’ I’ve always thought that this was just a
fascinating passage because what is being said here? What’s going on here? Christ seems to
be indicating that though he is now alive, he has resurrected, he has come through the
crucifixion, nevertheless in some sense he is not yet completely transubstantiate and it
suggests a process, a physical change in the body that requires time to complete itself.
So this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about time and insights into it that havecome to me out of psychedelics. What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging
was to bring back something. I always felt and still feel that that is the attitude with which
you should go into these things – to bring something back. I mean it could be something –
a personal insight into a personal dilemma or a more generalized idea. Because I really think
that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas and that ideas which change the world come
first from that place. I’m always a little reluctant to get into this because when I speak about
my own ideas, I feel much more of how much I’m asking from you as an audience. In other
words, it’s like an ego trip because it’s my ideas and why spend an hour on my idea instead
of talking about all these facts, careers and established concerns? But you asked for it so…
In 1971, when we went to the Amazon to look into DMT and all of these things, we really
had no clear conception of what we were after. We just knew that we wanted to get more
time in that dimension, more hands on experience. Well if any of you have read the Invisible
Landscape , you know that my brother conceived of a certain kind of project where he thought
that the psychedelic molecules could actually be bonded in to the physical body, into the
DNA using sound and that they could be made briefly superconducting and it’s interesting
that that was a word that no one knew what it meant back then. He predicted room
temperature superconductors in 1971 at La Chorrera. Well now room temperature
superconductors are a huge concern of a vast part of the scientific research establishment. A whole new technology is promised by this stuff.
He has this notion that you could bond psychedelic molecules into the DNA and that then
the trip would sustain itself indefinitely and could be analyzed as a kind of waveform
signature of the totality of the organism. In other words, he felt the ordinary psychedelic
trip is a fleeting photograph, an almost X-ray you could say that comes into the mind when
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
24/165
24
the psychedelic molecules occupy these bond sites and then flash to the higher cortical
processing area of the brain, a kind of gestalt of the state of the organism. And he felt that if
you could stabilize and permanentize this that it would be worth doing. I mean, it wasn’t
clear if he thought he would become a Taoist sage or turn into a flying saucer or what it
was. It was a shifting image of totality that he was projecting. Well I was very skeptical of this because it seems unreasonable and basically I’m a reasonable
person. But on the other hand, going to the center of the Amazon basin had been our
purpose and here we were now somebody seemed to be coming up with something very
interesting so we let the experiment run since it seemed to me it would either work as he said
it would work or it would fail utterly. Because what was proposed was that you saturate your
body with psychedelic molecules then sing in a certain range and in a certain way. I thought
either nothing will happen, 99 chances out of a 100, or since he’s so impassionedly
convinced something will happen, the thing he is convinced will happen, will happen. So we
performed this experiment and if you’ve listened toTrue Hallucinations , you know what a riotit was and what chaos it set off. I won’t really review that except for those who didn’t
read True Hallucinations : what he said would happen didn’t happen but my expectation that
nothing would happen was completely frustrated and instead he seemed to initiate what at
first brush looked like a psychotic break. He became unaware of the people around
him. He would talk right through other people’s talking as though he couldn’t hear
them. He began to make less and less sense. He lost motor control and everyone assumed
that he was slipping into some kind of psychosis.
What complicated this was I, who had been cast in the role of skeptic and the witness, hadnoticed that the moment he had forged the joint (as he called it), something began to happen
for me. Something very unusual. What it was, was the teaching voice familiar from
psilocybin experiences but with none of the ambiguity and difficulty of connection that I had
associated with the psilocybin experiences. Instead it just came on and appeared to be
locked in place and he was saying, that’s it, we’ve succeeded. This is what it is. I wasn’t even
on mushrooms. He had taken ayahuasca. There were no hallucinations. There was no
feeling of being stimulated or depressed – there was nothing but this voice and it was talking
at such a speed that I would walk these jungle trails like this: uh-huh, uh-huh, yes, yes,
yes! At that speed, not for minutes but for months, you know? What it was concerned to convey is what I now call the Time Wave and I will attempt,
without blackboards or mathematics or being boring I hope, to explain what this is. That is a
formidable problem because this is an idea as rigid as the kind of ideas that run subway
trains and send submarines back to their bases. It’s a formal, tight idea. But the way it was
taught to me was in a steady process of self-amplifying parables or teachings you could
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
25/165
25
almost say. So how it began was it said to me: have you noticed that everyday is like every
other day, somewhat? I said, y es I’ve noticed that. It said, ‘have you noticed that every week
is like more or less, like every other week. Yes, I said. It said: ‘well did you know’ – and this
is a typical mushroom construction – ‘did you know, I’ll bet you did know’ (and then the
w hammy) ‘that every day has a relationship to four other days. They are not the four dayspreceding it, they are scattered back through time. One of them may be six months in the
past, one of them may be thousands of years in the past but each day is actually an
interference pattern caused by the coming together of the resonances of other times. ‘
So it never occurred to me. It never occurred to me that that was a possibility. So then it
said, ‘go get your I-Ching’ and I went and got my I-Ching and it said ‘we’re going to look at
the first order of difference.’ I said, ‘what’s the first order of difference?’ It said, ‘oh, you
don’t know that the first order of difference is? The first order of difference is how many
lines change as you go from one hexagram to another.’
Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with I-Ching but I assume most
somewhat. The I-Ching is composed of structures, which have six levels called
hexagrams. They are either broken or unbroken lines. The first one, called the creative, is
all solid lines. The second one, called the receptive, is all broken lines. Who can tell me the
first order of difference between the first and second hexagram? Here’s a clue, it’s the
number of lines that break.
[Audience Silence]
It’s six. I don’t know why you’re not leaping forward with this. It makes me wonder howfar we can go. Anyway, to try and shorten this story, what this teaching voice was concerned
with was structure in the I-Ching, a previously hidden structure. So it said, ‘we can’t go
forward with this conversation until you get some graph paper because this is going to be
not only conversation. This is going to be diagram.’ So I got graph paper and it said, ‘draw
the hexagrams in a descending line in the King Wen sequence and then make a graph of the
first order of difference – the number of lines that change as you go from hexagram to
hexagram.’ I did this and got a wavy line obviously.
You can tell that the values will lie between one and six. In some cases six will change, in
some cases only one. Never zero because each hexagram is different. I was puzzled as to
why an Amazonian mushroom wanted to talk about the archeology of ancient China. And
so what? This resonance calendar existed but then it said, ‘no, no, you don’t
understand. We are now in the atrium of what it is I want to reveal to you. I want you to go
back and look at the first order of difference wave and I want you to understand that!’ I
already knew this but I hadn’t done much with it. The reason the I-Ching is based on 64 is
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
26/165
26
because 64 are the number of codons that DNA runs on. The I-Ching is not an arbitrary
construction. It is something that comes out of the deep, formal inspection of what the
human organism is. The human organism is a molecular machine that runs on an iterative
program of 64. The proteins that compose our bodies are like this, so forth and so on.
I said, ‘well, I understand about DNA, I understand how the I-Ching mirrors that but I
don’t understand how then it’s also a calendar’ and the voice said, ‘well don’t you see –
perception can be only organized out of the matter which composes it. Time appears to you
in your psychological perception of it in the way that it does because time is a property of
matter that is being amplified by biology into the theater of awareness.’ So in other words
and this is now me speaking, not it. My interpretation of what it was saying was, life is a
phenomenon of quantum mechanical amplification and because we’re organized on the
blueprint of this quantum mechanical pattern that is very deep at the sub molecular level of
matter, then all our institutions, languages, religions, love affairs – everything has this pattern
as the base embedded in it, almost like these fractals which give rise to endless amounts of acertain kind of beauty but if you were to see the equation which generates the fractal, it has
six terms. It can be written in fifteen seconds.
So then years passed and a great leap had to be made because I was non-functional. Because
I worked with this wave, I felt I had the signature of the universe, that a great gift of truth
had been given to me but when I tried to tell people, they just backed to the wall and said,
‘you know, get help now!’ ‘Now get help!’
Here’s where we separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the wheat
from the chafe. The conclusion that I reached was that this universal wave, which has been
operating for several billion years, will reach its maximum concrescent state of enfoldment at
dawn on the 22nd of December 2012 AD. This immediately puts me in the nut
category. This is what’s called messianic delusion. Millenarian grandeur, so forth and so
on. Nevertheless it’s a persistent intuition of most religious ontologies. Perhaps not the
Buddhist, but the Hindus, the Jews, the Muslims, the Christians, all appoint an end to their
world. I’m a little shy about this because it’s so personally mine. Nobody has ever made a
contribution to this idea that was substantial. It’s seems to be mine alone and welcome to it
and yet, I want you and historians, paleontologists and primatologists, and people who are
experts on time in different sizes to look at this wave. It’s working ladies and gentlemen. Itdoes in fact describe the ebb and flow of this thing called novelty.
Now when I questioned the mushroom about this, it almost makes it trivial. For it, it’s an
‘of course.’ Of course you are made of DNA, DNA is made out of matter, matter has to
have time as a precondition of its existence. The signature of time embedded in the atomic
structure is amplified to the molecular structure, then is amplified to the organismic structure
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
27/165
27
– and that’s called a human life well lived, then it’s amplified to the societal structure – that’s
called the birth, growth and senescence of empire. Then it’s magnified to the global
structure and that’s called the coming of the hyperspacial object at the end of time. It’s also
a theory of resonance. It’s saying that large scales of time have their themes and concerns
condensed and revivified in the smaller components. Now this is somewhat hard tounderstand but rich enough to pursue. It’s this idea.
Now I’m going to use James Joyce’s classic example. Joyce wrote a book
calledUlysses . Ulysses is a book about a man who rises on a morning, a bright morning day in
June in 1905 or 1906; he wants to fry some kidneys for breakfast so he gets his wallet and
heads out into Dublin to score some kidneys to bring back and he has all these
adventures. Joyce understood that this man on this day was also Ulysses with his brave
component of men journeying to the end of the Mediterranean laying siege to Troy for nine
years, winning the Trojan War and returning their homelands. In other words, he
understood that in each of us, we are acting out larger and larger scales of time that givecolor and precision and depth and interest to our being. So if you find yourself on a
Saturday night in a place in San Francisco called Hadrian’s Hamburger Joint, it has
something to do with the emperor Hadrian and his conquest of Britain and his effort to hold
back the barbarians. Life carefully examined is actually a form of allegorical literature with a
very tight constructional grid laid over it.
This is a rich idea and as I’ve said, I’ll be giving a five day workshop on this only because this
is the only psychedelic idea I’ve ever brought back other than idiotic realizations such as –
‘everyone’s little finger precisely fits their nostril.’ You know – there’s no market forthat. But this, this would actually create a re-visioning of time and had we more time this
morning, I would tell you how it could be turned into a calendar of the Goddess. How by
living with a solar year, that always puts Christmas with the same slant of sunshine coming
in, that we have locked ourselves into a paternalistic, masculine dominated structure.
What the universe is, is flux. Nothing lasts. Nothing abides. Everything moves
on. Women know this. Men don’t and we’re living under a solar masculine calendar. The
reason that our ideas and by our ideas I’m now speaking of the entirety of the new age and
all of this stuff – the reason our ideas meet resistance is because the framing around the
entire discussion of the spirit and feminism and transformation, the frame is always themasculine solar time frame. As long as we operate under that calendar, we will have a very
difficult time advancing ideas. The Chinese understood this. This was why when great
reforming emperors arose, the first thing they did was change the calendar. If you want
food for thought, look at hexagram 49. It’s revolution. You open it up expecting sage
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
28/165
28
political advice; it talks only about the calendar and it talks about the magician as a calendar
maker. In fact it says the magician is a calendar maker.
So I think that what this teaching that came out of this experience in the Amazon was all
about was, it was a totality symbol. Dennis had thought that the flying saucer would emerge
out of his body as a spinning violent disk of translinguistic matter that would become ashowerhead, pizza or Mercedes, depending on what you needed at the moment. He thought
it would become matter in the act of appropriate activity. Instead what emerged was a
totality symbol. Jung talks about how any individuation process, you always hope that the
patient or the client will generate a totality symbol but he usually means a kind of individual
and wavering totality symbol like a mandala or a cohesive structure or something. I think we
got, and I try to say this without hubris because I felt like I was nothing more than the vessel
into which this thing was being poured – what we got was the totality symbol in a complete
version, certainly not a totality version because I don’t think the human mind can encompass
the total version, but we got a skeletal blueprint of what totality is in the world.
What it is, is knowing how things happen. Knowing that all processes, the firing of a nerve,
the culmination of a love affair, the fall of an empire – has a pattern. And if you know the
pattern, you will be at ease with any process in all or any of its stages. Because you say, ‘ah
this is the time of resistance. It will soon be followed by the time of foreword motion. That
will be followed by the time of re-enfoldment.’ What this does is – it eliminates anxiety
ultimately. That’s the bottom line. Our anxiety about death and our anxiety about the
future and our relationships and money – all this stuff can be boiled down to anxiety about
the unknowable aspects of the future. If we could assimilate a model like this we would be Taoists. The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably
unfolds. They are always right and with it in each moment.
So I think that we’ve always talked about the I-Ching and Taoism as short for the
culmination of mysticism but to make it a living faith in our own lives, there should be
nothing mystical about it. I maintain to you, there is nothing mystical about it. It’s simply
that we are at such a primitive stag e of culture that we haven’t yet understood what time
is. A hundred years ago we were at such a primitive stage at culture that we didn’t
understand what time was. Einstein had to come along and say, time is not an abstraction
necessary to have a place to put objects that you want to examine. Time itself is anobject. It is curved in the vicinity of massive gravitational fields. It has a topology. It has a
surface. I think what we need to understand out of this idea, ultimately what the psychedelic
experience is teaching, ultimately what Taoism is trying to say – is time is a topological
manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land and like water flowing
over land, when the land is flat; the water becomes reflective and moves slowly. When the
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
29/165
29
landscape becomes disrupted, the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear and new
kinds of activity emerge and out of that new activity, there comes the new states that define
the future.
Well, I’m going to stop there. I haven’t shown you a graph or written a number or drawn a
hexagram and I think that’s remarkable. This is the feeling the feeling tone; this is the goodstuff that you get if you go through those graphs, numbers and time on at the
computer. But this is the totality symbol that I was able to get out of living a psychedelic life
and I believe that there are as many of these kinds of totality symbols as there are people
willing to trip. Each one of them is different. We create them for each other, they complete
our lives, they assuage anxiety and they give us a tremendous appetite then for the adventure
of being rather than the ordeal of being. They arise out of using psychedelics to amplify and
inspect the quantum mechanical and subconscious and superconscious portions of the
human mind. This is why the psychedelic experience and psychedelics are so important. It’s
because they are tools for understanding and re-visioning the reality in which we alllive. The personal growth is a wonderful thing and will naturally follow along but it’s more
important than that. It’s a way to make a new world that is Taoistic, feminine, free of
anxiety and in great anticipation of further stages of completion laying into the
future. That’s where the mystery, the transcendental object, the pot of gold at the end of
rainbow is waiting and I think that’s the job of each of us – to show our best toys and our
best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this
bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans
together is endlessly bright.
Keep the faith! Recognize each other and maybe I should close with a little line from Gary
Snyder if I can remember it. He said, ‘learn the flowers, travel light and stay together.’
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
30/165
30
The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker
The way I got into all of this and it seems to me it’s worth talking about because psychedelic,
the word has in a sense been too narrow. It’s a kind of secret faith having to do withperception of the world I think. I feel that I was psychedelic long before I knew anything
about psychedelics because what I was interested in as a child was nature and complexity but
not simply nature and complexity but a certain visual suggestiveness of mystery. So I was a
beetle collector and a butterfly collector and it was this pursuit of iridescence was actually
what it was. Then years later when I studied psychology and the brain, I
read Sherrington’s definition of consciousness as an iridescence upon matter, meaning an effect
that when you shift the point of regarding slightly the iridescence disappears. It’s hard to
even explain to myself let alone to a room full of people how much I cared about this sort of
thing. How is it possible for a nine-year child to hold the image of one insect continuouslyin their mind for months as in almost a mystical epiphany because of how it looks;
something about how it looks?
Then as I broadened my interest as a pre-adolescent child I got into science fiction. As I
look back on it now, I see it was simply that it broke down barriers - conceptual barriers
about what was possible and it was setting me up for this position vis-à-vis the input of the
world, which was that I would entertain any idea but believe in nothing. We’re actually
trying to talk about a psychedelic canon; this is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude
toward the world. To entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief; belief always
being seen as a kind of trap because if you believe something, you’re forever precluded from
believing its opposite. So you have run a line down the center of the cognitive universe and
divide things into the believable and the unbelievable. You know how a child lives in fantasy
and how fantasy then gives way and gave way in my case to science fiction. This is a kind of
pre-psychedelic mindset that many, many people of my generation were experiencing as they
came up through the Eisenhower years, which were spiritually a complete desert, but in this
pulp magazines beneath the surface of consciousness.
Notice throughout this month, how much of what is important to what we’re talking about
goes on in the non-sanctioned corners of the culture. Pulp Literature, cults, un-sanctionedgatherings of friends, Rock & Roll - all of these areas where the emotional content of the
culture is allowed to come to rest are somewhat off limits. Into adolescence, this cognition
breaking iridescence-pursuing thing came directly up against Eros, which was a complete
new dimension for the goggle-eyed terror of the science fairs to be plunged into, which was
myself. Women, sexuality, social signaling, intense emotion; all of this and everyone
experiences this. In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very
8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)
31/165
31
few people manage to evade because we may like to think we are rational animals but for
purposes of biology, a whole set a completely irrational programs have been built in that just
can take a professor Indo-European grammar and turn him into a haunted figure pursuing
chorus girls or any of the other 50,000 variations on that theme. So Eros is an ego
overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human lifethat is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. I don’t really understand how all this works at all but
when you get very deep in, especially on some of these tryptamines, you brush up against
some kind of – it’s hard to even put words to it – but it’s erotic. It’s a potential within the
concept of Eros that is almost too much to bear and almost seems to imply that what we call
erotic sensibility is a kind of lower dimensional slice of some higher dimensional reality that
our feelings are trying to carry us into.
This is sort of an aside on that but one of the interesting things about psychedelics and I
now speak of the compounds themselves, especially the plants, they have a certain
fascination with where the genes go and will pair people across great lines ofimprobability. In other words, it’s almost as thoug h the biological control, which is exerted
on this mammalian species by the mushroom is actually at the materialistic level a control of
who has children by whom, which means the control of the evolution of gene lines. I
maintain this is why the place most people feel magic in their own lives, even the most
humdrum people feel magic in their lives, is in the matter of mate selection. I was just down
in the baths and heard a story this morning where a man said he had a happy marriage for
seven years. It was perfect and he ran some kind of a company and one day he got a
telephone call. Someone wanted to sell him a new line of nails and he knew when he heard
the voice on the other end that his marriage was ruined and that he would follow this voiceand possess this woman and so forth and so on. Which he had done for better or for
worse. Well, this kind of thing where the most staid lives can be skewed off in other
directions is – in the old style of talking about it – it’s an eruption of the
unconscious. Where psychedelics are involved, it seems to be more of a winnowing of the
genes. So sex obviously has this deep, complex multi-meaning kind of feel about it that
pretty much the rest of reality for most people doesn’t.
The next step in my own evolution and I feel like I’m simply the fortunate beneficiary of a
series of random events, which were very fortuitous from my own point of view. In other words, without having a whole lot of sense and with very little foresight, I very fortunately
found myself in a lot of right places in a lot of right times. The place I went after
ado