The idea of sexual relationships between human beings and non-human beings is a persistent sub-theme through much of mythology. In the Old Testament it says, “And the gods found the daughters of man fair,” and the Persephone myth is a good example of this, where the platonic demiurgos of the underworld ensnared Persephone. Oh, and another example that should be mentioned are the incubi and succubi of medieval mythology. These were male and female spirits which were thought to come to people in the night and have intercourse with them, and it was very bad, very bad for health, and general wasting away diseases were often explained by invoking this phenomenon.

But what I want to talk about is something similar, but with a uniquely modern cast, which is: the flying saucer phenomenon has begun to take on this new character, this erotic dimension. There’s no hint of this kind of thing in the early literature of flying saucers, meaning from 1947 through 1960. But now it seems to be a rising theme, and I would like to talk about it. Because, though it is the darling of a screwball fringe when it’s in this form, I think that it represents an interesting developing folk wave that we can learn from. So what about it?

It’s only in the last sixty years, since the discovery of DNA and the discovery of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, that we began to get an idea of the true size of the universe that the notion of extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial intelligence could even be coherently framed. Before that time, man’s relationships with transhuman intelligences tended to be demonic or angelic, and fall into those categories of beings which occupied hierarchical levels above and below us in the structure of being, but all basically terrestrial, or in some sense terrestrial. But science, by explicating the non-uniqueness of biology and giving us an idea of what’s going on in the galaxy and beyond, has validated the notion that life is ubiquitous, and that intelligence is a property which accompanies life, and is also therefore probably very common in the universe. This legitimizes fantasy about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

So that what is happening in the last half of the twentieth century is that the mythological outlines of what the alien must be are being cast now. The expectations of people living now who have been given the rudimentary knowledge of biology and astronomy that allows the thing to be conceived, their expectations are casting the extraterrestrial archetype into a mold that it will hold until it is disconfirmed or confirmed by true extraterrestrial contact—whatever that means. In other words, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like. And I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual. And this is why I called the lecture Alien Love, because love is a unique expression of individualism [???] what the developing archetype of the other, if you will, the extraterrestrial—because for us the “away from the Earth” is the other. What the developing archetype of the other means, and our fascination with it, is that collectively, for the first time (or perhaps for the first time in a long time), we are beginning to yearn. That’s what it’s all about. And I think that what’s happening in religion on a very broad scale is that the previous concerns of salvation and redemption are shifting into the background for the great majority of people. And what is driving religious feeling is a wish for contact: a relationship to the other. And the alien then falls into place in that role. The alien fulfills it.

And I believe that if religion survives into the long centuries of the future, this is what will be its compelling concern: an attempt to define a collective relationship with the other that assuages our yearning and our feeling of being cast out, as Heidegger says, cast into matter alone in the universe. In other words, it’s as though, by passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence and becoming aware of the possibility of something like a sexual completion with an other, with a species which is not human, an idea which had previously been masked for us in our collective prepubescence, where we were self-absorbed. Freudians call it polymorphically perverse, meaning occupied in the exploration of the ego and the body.

And so this culture crisis—which I’ve talked about in many different ways, but never this way—has this dimension, too. It has this psychological erotic drive for a connection with the other. And to sum up what I’ve said about religion. It’s as though the Father/God notion were being replaced by the peer alien notion. And the peer alien is like the tetramorph: it is androgynous, hermaphroditic, transhuman. It is all these things which the unconscious chooses to project upon it until we have more information to define what it might actually be for itself, you see.

Eventually this contact will occur. And this is, you know, the—we are now in the pubescent stage of forming the yearning, forming an image of the thing desired. And this image of the thing desired will eventually cause that thing to come to be. In other words, man’s cultural direction is being touched by this notion of alien love. And it comes, I think, through the rebirth of the use of plant hallucinogens, because they seem to be the carriers of this pervasive entelechy which speaks, and which can present itself in this particular way. The appetite for this fusion is what is propelling the energy toward an apocalyptic transformation. It isn’t recognized as that in the culture yet, but it is this fascination with the Other which propels us forward. But it is not an inevitability. In other words, it’s like having the potential to fall in love, but then, you know, if there is no one to love, this potential can turn to rancor and disillusionment.

So what it is, is that we’ve embarked on the exploration of a unique historical moment, which is that, for the first time, the issue of the Other is being fully constellated and dealt with by the species. The question is being asked: are we alone? And though we now focus on that question, we need to think beyond that to: what if we are not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question? It is obviously the exploration of this relationship. And it has this erotic character because we will discover, as soon as communication is even remotely possible, that we are obsessed with it. Because it becomes very important to know whether or not we are alone. It becomes very important to open a dialogue if any dialogue is possible.

And I think that, at this stage in what’s happening, the facts are secondary to the description of what’s going on. In other words, this could slip away from us. It is a potential which has swum near to the historical continuum. And if it is invoked by enough people, it will become a fact. But it could also slip away. We could harden. There are fascist, hyper-techno futures that we could sail toward and realize that would eliminate this possibility of opening to the Other.

And I’m always trying to define for myself what the historical importance of psychedelics is, because we know, of course, that shaman have used these things for millennia, and have plumbed these depths as individuals. But still, I always had this intuition that there was a historical impact of some sort. And I think this is it; that actually we are positioned to attempt something which has never been attempted before, which is to open a dialogue as a collectivity with the Other, and to use that synergy to bootstrap ourselves to some kind of new cultural level. And I think in the blurb which preceded this talk, in the folio, I mentioned that this potential was hidden now in the psyche. There isn’t a great deal of talk about it. It only arises at this totally screwball, folkloric level. None of the managerial or analytical elements in the society are looking at this at the moment, but I think it is forming and crystallizing.

And I think that the peculiar animate quality of psilocybin that I’ve discussed in other talks is probably a major synergy for this. I mentioned on the radio today that contact with extraterrestrials, and voices in the head, and lógos-like phenomena is not part of the general mythology of LSD. I mean, certain exceedingly intense individuals on a combination of heroin, methadone, and LSD may have achieved this intermittently, but it is not something which is attached to the notion of what LSD does to you. With psilocybin, on the other hand, it definitely is. I mean, our survey showed that, as people’s doses increased, their susceptibility to this phenomenon increased markedly. And so I think the issue of contact with the extraterrestrial for large numbers of people has been broached by that phenomenon.

And it’s very puzzling to people, because our expectations are always that we are cells in a vast societal animal, and that the news of anything truly important will be conveyed electronically to us. And that if flying saucers land, the President and the Secretary General of the United Nations and somebody will convey the word to us. But the challenge of the psychedelics is to realize that the potential for the hypercollectivity, the the alchemical wedding with the alien, though it is a collective phenomenon, it’s inherently tribal. And it will happen as an experience for individuals at the individual level.

And this is what’s happening. People are in the confines of their own apartments becoming Magellans of the interior world, and reaching out to this alien thing, and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the fifteenth century. I mean, cities of gold, insect gods, spaceships, vast wisdom, tremendous wealth, endless wastelands—we’re just beginning to map this area. And many times I’ve spoken of it as a landscape, and many times I’ve spoken of it as a confidant, a kind of girl Friday who tells you things.

But another facet of it is this erotic element. And there’s no other word for it, because it inspires this feeling of opening and merging; that that is in our cultural conditioning what we associated with. To distinguish it from ordinary love, I always think of it as “luv.” It’s the kind of love that you get with the alien.

And what it means is that the relationship to the alien can be thought of as modeled on the micro-relationships to the Other that each of us form through relating to other people. In other words, if you’re familiar with the Jungian notion of the coniunctio, this is where two people get together and try to function as alchemical mirrors for each other. And tantra and Taoist sexual practices—all these things have to do with fusing into dyads.

And what is happening in that situation is that each party to the fact is taking on the quality of the other. In a non-erotic context, that’s called becoming what you behold. And we are uniquely susceptible to becoming what we behold. This is why we have always been led into the future by the nose, by our imaginations. Because we dream and then we realize the dreams. This fact about our monkeyhood, when put in combination with a relationship with an alien mind, means that we will become what we behold.

And this is, in fact, I think, what is happening. The curious intimations of the deepening contact with the Other make it seem probable to me that we are in love, but we’re just slowly realizing it because we’ve never been in love before. So that articulating this kind of stuff—one person saying it to another and discussing it—is actually an attempt to conjure this into being, to call it forth, to make this supposition become fact. Because all facts are the suppositions of very large numbers of people.

And this archetype now hangs in the balance. There is much tension about the flying saucer aside from the erotic connotation, because the flying saucer represents a tremendous challenge to science, perhaps the ultimate challenge to it. It may be as confounding to science as the resurrection of Christ was to Greek empiricism and Roman imperialism. In other words, the flying saucer is definitely an agent of cultural change. On the level of the machine, it bids distress for our most cherished explanatory schema. But on the level of the alien as flesh, it presents a much more basic and fundamental challenge, because the erotic complex is being redefined by this phenomenon.

I was talking to someone, and we came up with the idea that—we were talking about how many people take LSD, and how it is very difficult to get precise numbers on this matter because people don’t talk about it—but that, in the last fifteen years, sexual researchers have had a field day because people are very, very willing to discuss their bizarre sexual peculiarities, and to just pour out their hearts to people with clipboards. And we know now a great deal about human sexuality. And we were suggesting that the taboo is moving. The taboo is moving, so that as we become more sexually polymorphic and open with each other, and less identifying our ego with our sexuality, we become very private and constrained and secretive and religious and all these things about our psychic experiences; the drug experiences particularly. And he was suggesting this to me as an explanation for why it is so hard to get people to describe their drug experiences, why the literature is so barren of any richness of description, when the experience is the culmination of richness and intricacy and beauty. And though I don’t take this idea as gospel, I think it’s very interesting. We are much more open with each other sexually, and in our process of examining our libidinal consciences in the confines of our own minds. But the taboo now has moved to this interior world where we have this adolescent sensitivity about this developing relationship to the Other.

Now, all these things are elements which are going together to make the emerging human future. And it is a human future that is proceeding exponentially. It is not a mere linear propagation of the present, because these peculiar factors are impinging on it—things like psychedelic drugs, the ability to erect large structures in deep space, the presence of the alien lógos in the mind of the collectivity, the presence of the cybernetic network that is developing. All these things are going toward a release of man into his imagination. And so far, the cultural engineers have not stressed enough that the erotic element be included in the engineering of the human future.

Erich Jantsch was a good friend of mine, and many of you may know his books. He and I used to argue about space colonies and whether this was a viable way to go. And he sensed this problem by saying to me, “But Terence, where will they get nature spirits? How will they induce nature spirits to inhabit the space colonies?” Well, another way of saying it—a way that brings it much more close to home—is: how can Eros be invoked in space and carried with us and expanded? I tried to do my part to help this process along by spreading the rumor that the Soviet Lady Cosmonaut sustained five 40-minute orgasms in weightlessness, and that they were sitting on this information because they didn’t want to panic. But maybe it’s true. I’ll say it’s true. It’s true. When the monkeys find out what sex in zero gravity is like, I won’t have to make hard pitches like this one.

Anywho. So let me sum this up by saying that there’s an emerging zeitgeist of hyperspace, which has to do—and I call it a zeitgeist of hyperspace because, as man leaves the Earth, another dimension is added. And that crude metaphor will reverberate at every cultural level, because we will begin to live in a hyper-dimensional collectivity not only of Earth and space, but of information, of past and future, of conscious and unconscious, by navigating between these places on psychedelic drugs. And eventually the technological culmination of this is the projection of human consciousness into whatever form it seeks to take. And the zeitgeist of hyperspace which is emerging, which is heavily freighted with technology and cybernetics and all these things, requires that it be consciously tuned to an erotic ideal. And, as I said before, it’s important to articulate the presence of this erotic ideal of the Other early in order that this process not go sour. or slip away from us and leave us with one of the barren futures that some kind of very flat behaviorist or Marxist analysis of history could leave us with.

This is a chance, an opportunity. A chance to fall in love with the Other and get married and go off to the stars, but it’s only an opportunity, and it is not evolutionarily necessary. In other words, if we only live with the ideal of the Other and never find and fuse with the Other, we will still evolve along whatever pathways lie ahead of us. But if the opportunity is seized—if we take seriously the experience of the last ten millennia, and complete the modern program of realizing the ideals of the archaic, recognizing that what the twentieth century really is about is an effort to establish and perfect the ideals of late Paleolithic shamanism—then we will have integrity in relating to this opportunity, and we will have a very peculiar historical adventure which I cheer for.

Thank you very much—and I’ll answer questions, if anybody dares to ask a question. Yes?

28:28

McKenna

Well, yes. I mean, I think you’re right. But if you do your best, you can only convey a mere shadow of what’s going on. But I don’t see people doing their best, I see them doing very little at all. That’s the problem. The other thing is: once we were to set to ourselves the task of describing the psychedelic experience, it would become more accessible. Because if we each gave our best metaphor, and then we all used that metaphor and used it to produce a better metaphor, we would eventually retool our language so that we were able to handle these modalities. And this will happen historically. The psychedelic experience is a new object for Western languages. It will be very interesting to see what English, the language of Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, will be able to do with the psychedelic experience. I mean, my God, in William Blake you get the feeling that English could do staggering things with the psychedelic experience. Places in Andrew Marvel. But all this remains to be done.

There are certain—the relationship of the psychedelic experience to literature is a whole field unto itself. I mean, there are certain moments where great literature has passed near it. I don’t know how many of you read Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, but that touches very—I mean, he got it. He got it very, very succinctly. J. K. Huysmans’ Against the Grain—it’s an amazing novel about an esthete des essence, a man who is so sensitized to perception that he can’t leave his apartments. He has his walls covered in felt and he keeps the lights very low. He collects Redon when nobody had ever heard of Redon. He buys turtles and has jewels affixed to their backs, and then he sits in a half-lit room and smokes hashish and watches the turtles crawl around on his Persian rugs. And let’s all go home and do this! It’s called Against the Grain by J. K. Huysmans. Oh, if you’ve never read Huysmans—sometimes it’s called Against Nature. There are several translations, yeah.

Are there any other questions? Surely. Surely you’re challenged by this. Yes?

32:18

McKenna

Well, I think, yes. I think dreaming and states of psychedelic intoxication—possibly the after-death state, possibly the post-apocalypse state for the collectivity—all these things are related to each other. And certainly dreaming is the natural access point, because it’s a part of your experience every day. But these places are what’s called state-bounded. It’s very hard to bring back information. You have to have a natural inclination, or a technique, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using drugs or yoga or dream manipulation. But yes, it’s just a matter of exploring the mind by whatever means work.

But I’ve seen studies which show that in the deepest part of sleep is the high point of the production of endogenous hallucinogens in the human brain, like DMT and that sort of thing. And nevertheless, it’s only in the wildest dreams, which are necessarily the most difficult to recover, that you pass into places which are like these DMT and psilocybin intoxications. Yoga makes the claim that it can deliver you to these spaces. I spent some time looking into that; not a lot of time. But people have different proclivities for these altered states of consciousness. I don’t have—it’s very hard to move me off the baseline of consciousness. I’m very stolid and set in the here and now, and so drugs work better than anything for me. I scoured India and I could not convince myself there wasn’t a shell game of some sort, or that it was as real as the states manipulated by the various schools of New Age psychotherapy and that sort of thing.

But in the Amazon, and in other places where the use of plant hallucinogens is understood and used, you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different from ordinary reality, and extremely vivid. The vividness of them cannot be stressed enough. I mean, they are more real than real. And that’s something which you sense intuitively. They establish an ontological priority. They are more real than real. And once you get that under your belt and let it rattle around in your mind, then the compasses of your life begin to spin, and realize that you’re not looking in on it, it’s looking in on you. And this is a tremendous challenge to the intellectual structures that have carried us so far the last thousand years. I mean, we can do tricks with atoms, there’s no question about that—except that these tricks immolate us. But higher-order structure, molecules, and leave alone organelles and that kind of thing, are just intellectual terra incognito to us. We have no notion of how these things work and what is going on. And yet, it is from those levels that the constituent modalities of reality are being laid down.

Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that, you know, you can understand all this fine nuclear chemistry about the atom, and where does it put you if the story you tell yourself about how the world works can’t explain to you how forming the wish to close your open hand into a fist makes it happen? And this is the true status of present science. They cannot offer so much as a clue how that happens. They know how muscles contract, and ATP, all that. They know. It’s the initiating phenomenon. What is it that decides I will close my hand, and it happens? They know as much about that, perhaps less, than Western philosophy knew in the twelfth century.

And it is at that level, at the level of the body experienced and the mind experienced, that we operate. I mean, you can live in the social and religious system of Hellenistic Greece and offer sacrifice to Demeter, or you can live in twentieth-century America and watch the evening news, but you should have no faith that you’re getting the true story on reality. These are just historical contexts that can only be transcended by the acquisition of gnosis: of knowledge that is experienced as true.

And it’s hard for people to even realize what I might be talking about, because they believe that something like logical consistency or ability to be reduced to mathematical formalism is how you judge the efficacy of an idea. But actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state. It’s that we haven’t demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works. And the psychedelic drugs, by focusing attention on the mind–body–brain interaction, are reframing these questions. And not a moment too soon, because the cybernetic and technical capabilities of the society demand that this all be looked at very clearly, or we’re just going to sail right off the moral edge of things into the abyss.

Well, that wanders from the alien love theme. But, as I said, all these factors are going to make up for the adumbration of the present that will become and be the future. Yeah?

39:25

McKenna

Well, certainly—I mean, we have all kinds of things going on. When people are having sexual intercourse, the physiological state is very hyped up. There’s production of pheromones, all this sort of thing. How far into this can one go? It’s interesting. Well, this far. One thing I’ve noticed on psilocybin is that skin contact, there is, like, a disappearance of the normal resistance across the membrane, especially if there is perspiration. So that two people with large amounts of skin in contact, when both people are loaded on psilocybin, the flow of ions—or, you know, the electrophoretic transfer of salts, or whatever the proper incantation is—you become one thing. And, and I’m convinced enough of this that I would suggest to Masters and Johnson, or whoever has licensed to do these kind of things, that this be tried—that if you’re serious about validating telepathy, here is a very simple experiment. And I think that you’d be amazed.

Taoist sexual practices lay a lot of stress on the generation of unusual substances in the genitals or in the perspiration, which is a theme absent from Indian yoga, but a theme picked up in Amazonian shamanism, where there is a lot of stuff about magical forms of perspiration, magical objects that are generated out of the body or put into the body of other people. It’s interesting. It’s not clear to what degree the—in the matter of Taoist alchemy, it appears that there was an erotic control language, so that much of what appears to be prescriptions for sexual practices are actually recipes for plant combinations. Because words which were used with sexual connotations were also code words for plants and fungi. The association in the Taoist mind between fungi and feminine genitalia and all the stuff, it’s just, it all runs together. The words and the concepts are the same. And this is a prevailing motif of the so-called esoteric schools of Chinese eroticism, meaning the schools where nothing actually appears to be going on, but the presence of certain plants and certain objects in a composition indicate that it actually is an erotic cryptogram of some sort. Yeah?

43:04

McKenna

Yes. Well, at this conference in Washington I spoke about extraterrestrial contact and the relationship to the psilocybe mushrooms. I’ve mentioned before that psilocyn—which is what psilocybin quickly becomes as it enters your metabolism—psilocyn is 4-hydroxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. It is the only four-substituted indole to occur in all of the organic nature. Now, let this rattle around in your mind for a moment. It is the only four-substituted indole known to exist on Earth. And it happens to be this psychedelic drug which occurs in about 81 species of fungi, most of which are native to the New World.

What I was suggesting to that group of people was that its uniqueness is a chemical signature saying, you know: I am artificial, I have come from outside. And I was suggesting that it was a gene, an artificial gene, carried perhaps by a space-borne virus or something which had been brought artificially to this planet, and that this gene had insinuated itself into the genome of these mushrooms. It’s an unresolved problem in botany why there is such a tremendous concentration of plant hallucinogens in the New World, in North and South America. Africa, which is the continent where man is generally thought to have arisen and gone through his formative cultural development, is the poorest of all continents in hallucinogens. The New World is very, very rich, and this is why shamanism is so narcotic, as it’s called. Hallucinogenic shamanism is so highly developed in the New World.

So yes, it seems to me that the fact that the gene, or that the psilocybin compound, is chemically unique, the fact that it induces this lógos-like experience, makes me at least entertain the possibility that this is an extraterrestrial contact. That extraterrestrial contact as we have previously conceived it—which is that someone from far away would come and ships and get in touch with us—it doesn’t work like that. What it is, is that, as human history goes forward, we develop the linguistic discrimination to be able to recognize the extraterrestrials that are already insinuated into the planetary environment around us, some of which may have been here millions and millions of years. In other words, space is not an impermeable barrier to life, but there is slow seepage, there is genetic material that is transferred across space and time over vast distances.

And I operationally deal with the mushroom that way. It may well be an adumbration or some slice of the human collectivity. But since it presents itself as the Other, I treat it as the Other, and I treat with it as the Other. And sometimes, as I said, it’s my colleague, and sometimes it’s my Jewish godfather, and sometimes it is my (what Jung called) the Soror Mystica, or what my brother Dennis called the Soror Mistress. It has this erotic connotation to it. But this is all part of the picture, and it all has to do with changing our preconceptions of things, so that an idea such as that a mushroom could be an intelligent extraterrestrial, which is preposterous by one point of view, can be seen to move from possible to highly probable by simply shifting your language around. And the evidence has been left untouched. The evidence is equally friendly to either point of view, because the evidence is so personal. Science is totally impersonal. The empirical evidence that the mushroom is an extraterrestrial is zilch. But the subjective experience of those who have formed a relationship with it is overwhelmingly scientific in the other direction.

And this is—you know, here we have, then, ideas in competition. The evolution of points of view through time. And that’s why I say the opportunity should not be missed to open a cultural dialogue about this phenomenon with ourselves, among ourselves, and with the thing itself. It’s a unique opportunity. Yes?

48:37

McKenna

I never speculate.

49:34

McKenna

Well, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a critical five percent or something like that. I mean, political revolutions, they say, are made by ten percent. I think the change, what I put it down to, is the emanation of these psilocybe mushrooms throughout society. That in the last eight years we have undergone a second neolithic revolution. The first neolithic revolution was the invention of agriculture. The second neolithic revolution was the invention of home fungus cultivation. And suddenly, twenty or thirty species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, which were previously rarely-met forest endemics or the coprophilic kinds of mushrooms, the ones which grew on the dung of cattle, all of which had restricted endemic zones of occupation, had become ubiquitous. Stropharia cubensis, the most ubiquitous in the natural state, was (before the invention of human cultivation) a rare tropical mushroom. Now it grows from Nome to Tierra del Fuego in every attic, basement, and garage around. And the strategy by which the mushroom conquers society is exactly the same strategy by which the Mycelium spreads across a Petri dish: it just moves out in all directions.

And my brother and I wrote the book Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide in 1975. It sold a hundred thousand copies. We had stiff competition from Bob Harris. He wrote a book called, Growing Magic Mushrooms, or something. Jonathan Ott wrote a book. Gary Menser, Stephen Pollock. Spore companies sprang up. It’s very hard to imagine how many people are doing this. For the delight of my mycological crowd last weekend I posed the question: if the mycelium spreads through society the way it spreads through bulk substrate or a petri dish, then what phenomenon can we expect in society when the mushroom fruits? Meaning: when it goes through the ontological transformation where it ceases to manifest its homogenous hypho-network form, and instead manifests its form which is devoted to sunbathing and sex thrills, which is the mushroom which emerges above the ground?

So I’m very bullish on psilocybin. I think that the word “drug” is inappropriate, that the model of hallucinogenic drugs that we have inherited from our experience with LSD is completely inadequate, that the fact that LSD is our model of hallucinogen for doctors and researchers and that kind of thing is only an historical accident. The fact that it was discovered first or characterized first in the laboratory, and then millions and millions and millions of people took it, because of course it’s active in the 100-gamma range, where psilocybin is active at the 15 milligram range. So millions and millions of people were able to be touched by LSD. I don’t think that mass drug,taking is a good idea, but I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water, and show them off to the rest of us, and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.

I like the plant hallucinogens. I think that a true symbiosis is happening there. You see, LSD was a creature of the laboratory. It was not a creature of the laboratory. It was a thing of the laboratory. Psilocybin is a creature of the forests and fields. When man propagates it, when we spread it, when it stones us, there is this reciprocal relationship, transfer of energy, and information. This is a true symbiosis. Both parties are gaining. Nobody is giving up anything. And we have domesticated many plants and animals. That’s not big news. But this is not a bean or an apple. It isn’t even a cat or a dog. It may be smarter than we are. And so the implications of this relationship have to be couched in at least human terms. And that’s why the erotic metaphor is not inappropriate.

55:31

McKenna

From me? Well, I guess I would have you plant some seeds and read some history. And when you had read the history and grown the seeds—and I don’t know what they would be. They would be morning glories or the spores of mushrooms or something. When you had assimilated the history, and cared for the plant, and brought it to its fullest self-expression of fruitful production of alkaloids, why, then you would be at the threshold of your career, and I would adjourn the class.

But, not to be facetious, or to follow up that point: history is very important to doing well in the psychedelic experience—at least psilocybin—because it shows you movies of history. It sees us as historical creatures. It has this “above everything” kind of point of view where it isn’t dealing with you in the slice of the moment, it’s dealing with the phenomenon of the monkeys over the last millennium. And that’s how it sees us. You can assimilate some of its viewpoint by having a real feeling for the ancestors, all the people who are dead, the people who went before. I mean, it’s really a long, strange trip it’s been, you know? I mean, from the cave paintings of Altamira to the doorway of the starship. And now we stand on that threshold, hand in hand with this strange new partner. Not expected in the nature of historical change comes the unexpected. And this is what we have on our hands. The problem of the Other, the need for the Other, the presence of the Other, the nature of the Other. These are the questions and the concerns that will drive the next order of human becoming.

58:10

McKenna

No, I don’t. In fact, I said at the beginning that the nature of the archetype is being set now in the light of scientific knowledge about how it’s possible that there is other intelligence in the universe. And it’s a combination of our need for connection, and science giving its blessing to this form of expressing that need that is creating the phenomenon of the potential for alien love. But, you see, we don’t know what the self is. I mean, if you take seriously Buddhism—which says that everything is Bodhi mind—well, then that means that there could be extraterrestrials, and if it’s true that everything is Bodhi mind, they are an aspect of the self.

The word “self” is as great a mystery as the word “other.” There’s just a polarity between two mysteries, and then the thin, thin myths that are spun to hold you there without freaking out the myths of science, and religion, and the horoscopes, and the shamanizing, and all these things. But a polarity between the mystery of the self and the mystery of the other. And a mystery is not to be confused with an unsolved problem. A mystery is by its nature mysterious. It will not collapse into solution. And we’re unfamiliar with that kind of thing. We think that if there’s a mystery, well, you just hire a bunch of people, whatever it is, and they get it straightened out and issue a report, and that’s that. But this only works for trivia. And what’s important—our hearts, our souls, our hopes, our expectations—are completely mysterious to us. And so how must they appear, then, to the Other if it truly is other?

So we need to cultivate a sense of mystery. The mystery is not only in the other, it is in us. And this reverberates, again, with what I said about how we become what we behold. History is turning suddenly mysterious here, in the post-quantum physics, postmodern phase. This was not expected. The nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, they didn’t realize this is what they were pointed into. Although some people—the 'Pataphysicians, the surrealists—they saw what was coming. But here we are. Yeah?

1:01:08

McKenna

Yeah. I should have mentioned that theory, because it’s the best support I have for the idea I was putting forth. What’s being mentioned is a theory, the panspermia theory, which was formulated by [???] and Crick, who was the discoverer with James Watson, Francis Crick, of DNA. And they are proposing a much more radical theory than what I put forth, at least in terms of relative to biology. They’re saying that pre-biotic molecules arise in the greatest numbers in deep space, not on the surfaces of planets. That planets are only secondarily, and at a late stage in the development of complex polymers and pre-biotic compounds do the surfaces of planets become where the action is. I am not saying that.

What I’m harking back to is: I’m sure you all know the old adage that we each are made of stars. That the atoms in your body were once cooked in the hearts of stars. This is true. But an unremarked accompanying necessity of that fact would be that there must therefore be some atoms in your body which were not cooked in the hearts of stars, but which were part of the planets which circled around those stars before they exploded. My point being that not all of this material that is circulated in the galaxy has been through something as violent as nuclear burning at the heart of a star. When stars go nova, their planets are blown to pieces, and biotic material that has evolved on those planets is injected into the general cosmic soup of circulating material. That is more my idea of what the spore strategy may have originally been about. It was forms of life which evolved in very harsh environments, where a spore could survive, but seeds, for instance, couldn’t.

And we were talking at this mushroom conference this weekend about how, if you have some mushroom spores and you want to preserve them, the way you do it is: you create an atmosphere as much like that of deep space as possible. Ideal is total vacuum at minus sixty degrees centigrade, and then they’ll last virtually forever. At any lower temperature they will slowly degrade. So I envision mushrooms, or spore-bearing life forms antecedent to mushrooms, evolving in very harsh environments where then, actually, space was a medium through which they could migrate. And of course this happens over very long periods of time. But if you think that the galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years from edge to edge: if something were moving only one one hundredth the speed of light—which, now, that’s not a tremendous speed that presents problems to any advanced technology—if something were moving one one hundredth the speed of light, it could cross the galaxy in ten million years. Well, there’s life on this planet a billion point eight years old. That’s eighteen hundred times longer than ten million years.

So, looking at the galaxy on those times scales, you see that the percolation of spores between the stars is a perfectly viable strategy for biology. And we know that the casing of spores is a very electron-dense material; that it’s as electron dance as many metals. Global currents form, generating sub-superconducting or superconducting states on the surface that makes them even more resistant to radiation. And we know that spores are light enough that Brownian motion and convection and this sort of thing, definitely they percolate even into the high stratosphere—and there, highly energetic events are going on at a fairly regular pace, sufficient that we can calculate that a certain number of these (small for each spore shedding, but large in the total context of fungi on the planet) spores percolate right out of the gravitational field, and then are subject to larger forces. So it’s radical to suggest this, but it’s only because the empirical evidence is thin. The logic of the case is well founded.

What is on much shakier ground, of course, is the idea that the mushroom is an intelligent life form. And that’s my special obsession and province, and most people say I’m welcome to it. But it’s very interesting. In a book called Perspectives on Scientific Communication with Extraterrestrials, or something like that—anyway, a book by [???], there’s an article by R. N. Bracewell, who’s an astrophysicist, talking about the logic of searches for intelligent life. And he concludes that no matter what kind of life form you are, no matter what kind of technology you have, if you are seriously going to search space by physically sending probes from one star to another, then the only strategy which would work would be what’s called a von Neumann machine—meaning a machine which can reproduce itself. So that the machine leaves its parent star, and then—or four of these machines are sent out in four opposed directions from a parent star. At a certain distance from the parent star, each machine replicates. Then you have eight machines. And at double that distance they replicate again, and you have sixteen machines, and so on. The notion being that only by this process of replication can you cover all bets. And that probably, then, what you do is: you send a message which says “We are searching the galaxy by an exhaustive means, and if you read this message, please call the following toll-free number, and we will then initiate contact.” And only by this means could you hope to have contact with all the worlds in the galaxy.

And this makes it very important to understand what the message is that the mushroom conveys. The Mandaeans, who are an obscure religious cult of Gnostics in the Middle East of very long survivability, have this very interesting idea. They believe that at the end of time what they call the secret Adam will come to Earth. And the secret Adam is a Messiah-like figure, but what he does is: he builds a machine which then transmits all the souls back to their hidden source in the all-father outside of the machinery of cosmic fate.

This notion of the Messiah building a machine is very interesting. It’s conceivable that, if there is an extraterrestrial message in our environment, it is a message to build some kind of device, so that a less tenuous form of communication can be opened up. And Bracewell makes this case. To him this is just inherent in the logic of the situation. And I suppose it would be an interesting branch of logic: the logic and the protocols of extraterrestrial contact. What can we define about contact that is so basic that, whatever form of life and intelligence you were, you would have to flow along those creodes? This is probably an undeveloped field at this point, but it certainly could be done. It’s like alternative physics. We need alternative theories of social contact and social contract-making in the event that we meet an extraterrestrial. This is a fertile theme in science fiction: the logic of contact. How to make it without giving away too much, and yet not get anything out of it? It’s poker, but the stakes are very high. We’re talking about survivability, viability, and evolutionary fates of species, if not the entire planet.

1:11:18

McKenna

Well, the distinction of inner and outer space is rooted in association of the self with the body. And I think as the self moves out into the ocean of electronic consciousness, and also as we explore the erotic dimensions with the Other that I’ve indicated tonight, this identification between self and body will become secondary in a way that identification between king and self has become rather secondary over the last 5,000 years. I mean, we don’t even have a king. We seem to manage without one. It’s conceivable we could manage without a body as well. These are just ways that loyalty is transferred toward the forms of cultural concrescence validated by local languages. Anything else? Yes.

1:12:42

McKenna

Well, I definitely think that there is a process that has been long underway that has been gaining momentum since its very beginning. It’s the process which formed the planet, which called life out of the ocean, which called higher animals out of lower animals, which called humanity out of the primates, and which called history out of tribal, sacral, timeless existence. And what it is leading toward is some kind of apocalyptic transformative flowing-together of everything that is beyond our language system. It’s the umbilicus of being. It’s where it’s all tied together, and therefore it’s very hard to describe it.

I think that all of our science and our religion and our history, these are patterns thrown across a limited set of dimensions by the hyper-dimensional fact of a certain object at the end of history toward which we are moving, to which we are being drawn. I think that most things about man are mysterious, and that what is happening to us is mysterious. The sudden explosive development of the neocortex is entirely out of context with what we know about the rates of evolution that go on in other species and previously went on in the primates.

Now, it’s been very fashionable in the past, I don’t know, fifty years or something, to think that it’s all very humdrum somehow. And yet, this is just everybody, every ideological system that has been granted the status of being the official view of reality has always proclaimed that it had everything nailed down but the last five percent, and their best people were working on that. But I think that we are, for all that we know, we know practically nothing. And that, though I am not in any sense of the—well, not in any sense, but in most senses I am not religious. I think that religious thinking about the transformation of the world is more on the right track than the notion that the laws of physics will always be what they are, the laws of biology will always be what they are, and we’re all just going to go along, and things are going to get worse and worse or better and better. But that there are no surprises. I think that we do not see what’s going on.

One of the reasons I like to make this argument about the mushroom and the extraterrestrial and all that is just to show people that maybe this isn’t true, but look how you can see things differently. If things can be seen that differently, how many ways can they be seen differently? And to try and get people to realize—to stop waiting for the president to enlighten you. In other words, stop waiting for history and the stream of historical events to make it clear to you. You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility. Because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your understanding. It doesn’t do you any good to know that, somewhere in some computer, there are tensor equations which perfectly model or perfectly don’t model something that’s going on. And we have all tended to give away ourselves to official ideologies, and to say, “Well, I may not understand, but someone understands.” But the fact of the matter is: only your own understanding is in good to you. I mean, because it’s you that you’re going to live with, and it’s you that you’re going to die with. And as the song says, you know: the last dance you do, you do alone. And you want to be in good company then. So it’s very, it’s very important to to cultivate this aspect of yourself and to be with it.

I don’t know what the transformation means; this rushing together of everything. But I think without knowing what it means, you can convince yourself that it’s there. It’s just nobody has chronicled it, or no official agency has pointed out that things are developing faster and faster. Things are growing together faster and faster. Connections are being formed faster and faster. The evolution of language, technology, understanding of the self—these things are just spinning into a tizzy. And it will not go away. It will go through, it will break through, to something else. And we may have to shed the present human guiding image, we may have to shed the monkey body. We have to be open, very open. What is happening on this planet, if you stand off by a nearby star and look at it, is: there is information loose on this planet. A gene swarm of replicating information which has become so complexified that it now generates swarms of epigenetic information—meaning: books, architectures, mythologies, all of these things. And information is liberating itself. And what is that? What does that mean?

You know, the Gnostics had the idea that God’s body had been scattered through the universe as light. And that the purpose, the salvational imperative, was to gather the light together, and get it out of this universe, and transmit it back to the modality of its essence. And that’s a good metaphor for what is going on. But no one understands it, I think. But we can understand aspects of it. We are lagging. There is enough visible that we should be saying more about what’s happening, and I don’t hear that being said. Maybe it’s being said privately, maybe it’s a taboo subject. Perhaps the attraction for some people of these lectures is that they somehow violate taboos, that impossible things are being said. Maybe, maybe not. But impossible things need to be said, because impossible things are happening, and you don’t want to miss it.

Thank you very much! It was a pleasure to talk to you about this. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.