00:00

McKenna

That’s right. Yeah. We had samples that were five years old that were absolutely terrifying to take. Yeah, well, I don’t know…. I got into trouble. It was one of those situations. I had a curandero friend on Fidel Mosambite in Pucallpa, and he had given me this bottle of ayahuasca as a going away present, and I had kept it for like five years. So in five years you forget what the details are. And I got it out to turn myself and these two other people on, and I couldn’t remember whether he said “always shake the bottle” or “never shake the bottle.” And there was about an inch and a half of sediment in the bottom of this thing, so I said, “Well, reasoning pharmacologically, it’s better to shake it than not to shake it.” So I shook it furiously. And then—I can’t remember what it was. I think I had taken it the week before; a different batch. So I thought maybe I’d picked up a little tolerance. So I said: well, maybe I picked up a little tolerance. Let’s just go, instead of the normal hundred-milliliters, let’s go for one twenty. And so then I instructed these people that it would come on in about an hour and twenty minutes and so forth. Well, fifteen minutes into it, they were both unable to speak. And it went from there. I mean, I felt like I was strapped on a gurney being rushed through the Egyptian afterworld. Huge collonnaded pillars were streaking past me and… oh god! Headed for the scales!

01:55

McKenna

I don’t know, man. I don’t know. That one felt—that was a lit buzz thing, one. I felt that that was coming close to overdose. It went on for a long, long time. And finally, four hours into it or something, we turned on some lights, and there were those fan-shaped little shmiggies. Well, I hadn’t seen those since I gave up LSD ten years ago. You know, those little things that, with the lights on, are on the walls going, “nyeem-yee-nyeem, nyeem-yee-nyeem,” that bit? So it was pretty intense, I think. The great thing is, you know: you always come out of it in great shape. Ken’s right. You feel better the day after than if you hadn’t done it. Which is—what drug can you say that of, you know? That the end result is an energy plus?

02:54

McKenna

Well, see, I think that we’re on the edge of ayahuasca, and that what they say—if you really get down with them—is that the diet is everything, and that you’re a tourist, and you’re here for a few weeks, and yes, we’ll give you ayahuasca. But what this is really about is controlling diet over a period of months, even years, and taking a regular regimen of this stuff, and transforming yourself into some kind of other person. And Ken’s very right: these people have some kind of authenticity that you can absolutely feel. It’s in the voice. I met many ayahuasceros, and the good ones all had this voice thing going on; that they could cast their voice way back in their throat, and they kind of purr. And they just are very realized beings. And they have nothing, you know? I mean, you talk about marginal. But there’s real authenticity there.

I would like to go back and work with this diet and try to understand this, because I think—see, this all does tie in with what we talked about this morning, about the partnership society in Africa and that whole bit. Because I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. I mean, as Ken says, three times a week. And it’s really changing how they look at the world. And they are, you know, in empathy, at equilibrium, aware of the ebb and flow of appropriate energy in the situation.

So it’s interesting to me, you know, that in the new world a human group could have reestablished this partnership paradise in a situation, an environment, which quite closely parallels the African situation of 20,000 years ago. In other words, it’s a continent covered by forests. And in this extremely floristically rich environment these people have gotten together the fix: the fix so that humanness feels good. And isn’t it interesting that the fix turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism. As though, you know, we’re just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There’s an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego. And then this creates a spectrum of cultural effects that drives us all nuts. And so they have a kind of psycholytic therapy to correct that.

06:11

McKenna

Oh yeah. They claim to know all about it. I mean, you go way up some river, and these people say, “Where are you from?” You say, “I’m from San Francisco, California.” They say, “Oh, I know there. I go there on ayahuasca. Hills, two bridges… that place?” You say, “That’s the place.” They say, “Listen, I know it.” But they make bigger claims, you know? I mean, they go to the center of the Milky Way. That was the original claim that had me hotfooting down there to see what was going on. And they have a hidden topology, a shamanic world, that is real. They’re mapping this same dimension that we’re punching through to on DMT. I mean, if that seems strange to you—that half the world could be out of sight, as it were—you have to remember that this October we celebrated the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America—or rather, we will in 1992. It means: as recently as five hundred years ago, this half of the planet was unknown to anybody. Well, is there any reason that precludes that we could be as ignorant of what’s going on? I don’t think so. It’s just that this new world is a new world in the mind.

I mean, you have to bear in mind when you think about all this that nobody knows what mind is. None of these fancy-pants academics or reductionists—no one can explain, for example, how you can look at your open hand, form the notion of closing it into a fist, and have it happen. This is a philosophical miracle from the point of view of modern science. Modern science says that mind cannot influence matter. And yet, it’s clearly trivial to open and close your fist on decision. Yes, it’s trivial, but we have no notion of how this is possible; how will can initiate activity that is transduced down into the mechanical motion of moving bodies around. We don’t even know at this late date in the study of the brain whether thought originates in the brain. It’s equally plausible to suppose that the brain is some kind of antenna; that it no more contains the contents of the mind than that a television set contains the contents of the three major networks. It may not work like that. It may be that, you know, mind is some kind of generalized phenomenon that all life attempts to take part in. So that the idea of “my mind” and “your mind” may be a basement of language. There may simply be a mind, which we evolve toward an awareness of, and then you get to use part of it the way a user uses a computer network. But it is no more the sum-total of the network is in the brain.

And psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area—the area of thought and cognition. I mean, we don’t really have good models for what this is, but now we have an excellent tool for deconstructing mind, for watching it go through all kinds of formative flip-flops. I mean, I’ve seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning. For instance, I’ve had experiences where—you know how, in Times Square, there’s the flasher that moves along the building that has the latest news? Well, I’ve seen English text moving along before my eyes, and then it will begin to informationally degrade—like, every twentieth letter will be transposed or replaced, and then every tenth letter, and then every fifth letter, until finally I’m just watching gibberish flow by. Well, is this a hallucination or is this an insight into the mechanics of meaning itself? What is this kind of stuff, and can we take it seriously?

The problem with studying hallucinogens is: only the physiological parameters have been deemed worthy of interest. You know, what does it do to blood pressure, what does it do to your response to these five standardized questions? They don’t want to correlate the mass of data represented by individual tales. But when you get a group of people like this together, you know, there is fair confirmation of a pretty outlandish dataset. I mean, how many people here have encountered non-human entities or what appear to be non-human entities on a psychedelic? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven—you know, half of us. Well, what do the other half of you think about that? I mean—well, something that at first, second, and third glance does not appear to be at all like Aunt Minnie. In other words, if it’s smaller than a breadbox or not made of matter and it’s talking to you, it’s a safe bet it’s a non-human entity of some sort, right?

So those of you who haven’t had this experience—see, the thing to put across is: there’s so much loose-headedness in the world. And this is really a stumbling block for psychedelicos. Because we have people claiming to channel 11,000-year-old central Asian herders who have a message for mankind, and we have people who are in contact with all kinds of entities with weird names. And so then the people who don’t do psychedelics say: well, this is something like channeling or all this other stuff. No, it isn’t. Because we are not like those people. I mean, I maintain this rigorously: that our bit is intellectual rigor, not airheadedness. We’re willing to put as much pressure on the ideas as you want, we just believe in fairness. So that it’s not ipso facto that there’s no such thing as elves, it’s that if you think there are elves, prove it to me!

Well, then the problem is that the skeptic, the critic, says: well, the notion that there are elves is just… you know, you’re sadly deluded. You’re living in your own private Idaho. But then you say: well, the proof of the pudding is a fifteen-minute DMT trip. Are you willing to carry on this criticism after having made the experiment, sir? I mean, we’re not like UFO enthusiasts. We’re not telling you to stand in cornfields in the dead of night and pray. No, no. This will work. This will work on you! You, the reductionist. You, the doubter. You, the constipated egomaniacal father dominator. It’ll work. And they say at that point: you are a menace, is what you are! Because there’s no place else to go with that game. You have to say: you and your ideas are illegal, or they say: well, I guess I’ll have to just try it.

And that’s the point where we’ve come to, is: to slowly try and create a consensus. One of the things that Ken said, quoting the teacher, that is very profound is: that words are alive, and that they multiply. And at every recent workshop I’ve given I’ve talked about the notion of memes. And those of you who’ve heard it, it’s okay to hear it again, because this is the political baggage of this trip. It’s that—first of all, d’you all know what a meme is? A meme is to information as a gene is to genetic information. So the way to think of a meme is: it’s the smallest unit that an idea can be broken down into without losing its coherency. Ideas are made of memes. And memes, like genes, compete in an environment very much like the environment in which Darwinian natural selection goes on.

So a new idea is a meme. And it immediately begins to compete with other memes in the ideological environment. And the psychedelic meme is such a meme. Now, one profound way in which memes are like genes is: genes can be copied. They can be replicated. They can be passed around. So can memes. When I tell you something which you remember, I have taken a meme—and if fifteen of you remembered it—I have propagated the meme to fifteen new individuals. Each one of them is capable of now passing this meme along, provided they replicate it with sufficient fidelity. And this is a problem of information degradation—that if the meme is not reinforced, it peters out. And someone says: well, what did so-and-so say? And then you get a version that, you know, is unrecognizable. I have this experience all the time, because people come up to me and say, “You know, I thought it was wonderful where you said that….” And then they break out with something not only that I’ve never said, but that I never could’ve conceived of and probably don’t agree with.

So keeping the meme straight is very important. And the psychedelic meme is competitive with the “just say no” meme, for example. And I believe that, on a level playing field, the most open-ended memes will prevail. That what is a good meme? A good meme is a meme that doesn’t foreclose its options. Because as soon as you have a closed cycle of explanation—whether it’s Egyptian theology or Marxist Leninism—there’s no way out, you know? It’s like Gödel’s incommensurability theorem: no formal system can generate all possible formal statements within the system. In order to keep that option open you have to preserve a lack of closure.

And this is one of the things about the dominator ego that makes it a little like being stupid to be under the influence of the dominator ego: it always searches for closure, it always wants to bring things around, and close off the explanatory cycle. Because it interprets open-endedness as a kind of threat; a feminine upwelling or a boundary-dissolving influence. So it’s very concerned to generate some kind of closure. That’s why we always hear about the unified field theory and the end of history, and this and that—these dominator models seek finality.

The trick is to live in the presence of the mystery—not as an unsolved problem, but as a force for personal transformation: by knowing that the mystery exists we are empowered to relate to it and to nurture the mystery within ourselves. In other words, you don’t kill being. The theory kills. The letter kills. The real facts of the stuff of being are locked in the primacy of immediate experience. This is why the psychedelics are so powerful, because this is what they address. It’s not an idea, it’s not an ideology, it’s a transformation of the felt presence of immediate experience. The other two things which do that are birth and death—and then romantic overwhelmement has another part to play. But this is the biggie: the transformation of the felt experience of the self. And by reclaiming that we dissolve hierarchical structure and we actually emerge into our full expression as human beings. I don’t see how this can be done without psychedelics.

It’s dinnertime, but we’ll take one question.

20:11

McKenna

The only progress I’ve made in that area is this glossolalia—which you heard me do this morning?—I used to only be able to hear it when I was stoned, and then I used to only be able to do it when I was stoned, and now it’s some kind of creode in me. But it doesn’t—when I do it for you—it doesn’t feel like it feels when I do it on five grams of psilocybin. Generally, I resist the idea that there’s some other way to do it. I think it’s just a waste of time. If there is some other way to do it, you may be sure it takes a long time and is excruciating.

And I would be alarmed if psychedelic phenomena began to intrude into my normal waking existence. Because it isn’t a state of enlightenment or at-onement or clarity. Those are lower levels of it. But the full on thing is so intense that it’s very reassuring to know that a substance is doing this, and that when the substance goes away the phenomenon will go away.

It’s so radically different from ordinary reality. I mean, you know, I marvel that we sit in rooms like this and talk about this. I mean, just close your eyes for a moment and imagine what it’s like to be smashed. And it’s so different from this. And yet, we’re operating here at a pretty high level of efficiency. Everybody’s focused. Half of us at least are awake. But it’s completely different. And I don’t know if you can understand being stoned by talking about it. You can create a communal empowerment that is permission. But Plotinus called the mystical experience the flight of the alone to the alone. And there’s something to that.

22:16

McKenna

Well, I think we bring back maps of the foothills (and that’s very useful), but the private Mount Everests and Jungfraus that we scale, there’s no words for it. I mean, there are no words for it. Every single person who has delved into these regions has gazed upon vistas that no human being had ever seen before or will ever see again. I mean, the universe is that huge, that that’s possible.

22:52

McKenna

Okay, well I’ll just start while we get this thing up and running, and I’ll try to make it succinct if I can. The notion here, how this relates to the rest of the workshop, has to do with my belief that the really important thing that can be done with psychedelics in a generalized sense is that they are inspiration for ideas, and that when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you’re sailing out onto an ocean of ideas. And you can lower your nets—and there are many minnows and few whales—but the goal is to bring up something middle-sized that is both astonishing but non-lethal that you can wrestle into your intellectual life.

And so over the years, especially since 1971, I have been sort of the victim of an obsessive idea that I have developed to great lengths. And the inspiration for this idea is all this time spent in the psychedelic dimension. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have to say that. I could just claim to be a kind of incipient or idiot savant who had dreamed up this thing. But I tell you: it springs from an attempt to understand the psychedelic vision.

Generally, the idea is this: it hypothesizes a quality to reality that science has never recognized or discussed. And the quality is called novelty. And novelty is something which knits the world together and creates new emergent properties out of the densification of previous states of existence. Novelty is the force which caused stars to condense out of a primal cloud of energy, caused planets (or this planet) to evolve life, caused life to leave the oceans, caused humanity to emerge out of animal organization, high culture out of previous culture, so forth and so on. And it’s a morally neutral force. It isn’t good, it isn’t bad, it just is a tendency in the universe to conserve complexity and to build ever more complex phenomena by incorporating lower levels of complexity into higher levels of organization. And this is how biology works, and it is how the physical sciences work.

And I noticed that if you think about the career of novelty as the life of the universe, and you see the primal explosion, its condensation into the primitive galaxies—at lower and lower temperatures, what is happening is: more and more complex phenomena become possible. Because at very high temperatures atomic particles can’t even settle into stable orbits around the nucleus and form atoms. Then, eventually, atomic chemistry does become possible. At still lower temperatures the molecular bond can form and life can emerge. And then within the regime of temperatures and pressures that life operates, complexity proliferates very rapidly and always conserving itself, always building on the previous levels.

So I thought that this was very interesting, and that it could be mathematically modeled. I noticed that each threshold into deeper novelty takes place ever more rapidly, so that the career of novelty in the world can be said to be speeding up. And this—I take twentieth-century culture, then, to be not epiphenomenal, but proof of this theorem—that the world is getting spun at a higher and higher rate; that novel phenomena, novel effects are proliferating ever more rapidly. Okay, well, so that’s the general notion.

27:59

McKenna

Well, you know, a fantasy about how can we imagine any way to save the world—and just without regard to the rules of reason particularly—an obvious solution is: why not make everybody an inch and a half high? And this apparently utterly ludicrous idea can be pursued slightly further, because the creatures in the DMT place are small. That’s one of the main features about them. They’re small. And when we talked about them we said it would be parsimonious to suppose that they might be from the future. Well, is it possible that the destiny of the human race is to become an extremely diminutive species that lives in a solid state matrix inside hills, and that this is where we’re going? We’re just going into the mountains, sinking away from the surface into the kind of solid state crystalline matrix that we know the Earth to be.

I mean, I don’t have a lot attached to this. It’s sort of charming, sort of bananas. But the weird feeling of recognition and wonderment that you have in the presence of these DMT creatures may mean that they are a future state of humanity. And this peculiar aura that goes with the experience where you can tell that you’re underground—you’re way, way underground—it’s a gnome, a gnomic, existence. And these jeweled machines and toys which they offer you—the mythology of gnomes is that they are master tinkerers. You know, they build wonderful objects.

So, you know, maybe when the world really becomes alarmed, all kinds of possibilities can be found for a sane human future. This is maybe a good thing to leave you with, or to talk about in the final meeting. You know, we generally pretty much strive for agreement, but there are certain key points where I haven’t seen how you can have it both ways. And one is this whole issue of artificiality versus the natural world. How can we imagine a future that both honors the human world and the natural world when there are so many of us? I mean, turning everybody into the size of a fruit fly is one possibility, but we haven’t been making a lot of progress along this line of research recently, so it doesn’t look like it’s a near-term thing. Well then, the more sophisticated version of that is: can the human entelechy be downloaded into circuitry? Can we somehow have an existence (that we would recognize as an existence) without a body? And do we want that, and what is that like, and what does it say about our souls if we choose that? You know, these are pretty strange questions. What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?

You know, a very interesting fantasy that you can undertake as a lifetime project—I do this all the time—is to imagine what you would make the world be like if it could be any way you wanted. And, you know, in the first half hour of exercising that fantasy you realize that all our imaginings are conditioned by the constraints of matter. So you start out and you say, “Well, if I could have anything… oh, I don’t know, I guess I’d live in the Frank Lloyd Wright Waterfall House and have my Testarossa parked outside.” And then you realize that this is a stupid fantasy, and that you could live in the Leningrad library if you wanted and have your space shuttle parked outside. And then you realize that’s a stupid fantasy. And then you realize that there are no limits—that if mind were not constrained by the rules of physics, we don’t know what we are. We don’t know the castles that we would build in the air.

One of the interesting things about virtual reality is the idea that we’re going to be able to wander among the three-dimensional constructions of the imagination with no concern whatsoever for cost-effective use of materials, because materials are electrons and light and computer commands. It costs no more to have a gothic cathedral than to have a stucco duplex. So, you know, it’s…

33:27

McKenna

Well, I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination; that somehow the imagination is a place, it’s a world, it’s a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we have to somehow marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it’s the only safe haven there is. What we are can not be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet. I mean, we’ve only possessed serious technology for a hundred years. You know, before that, nobody had nothin’! It was a big chore to melt metal and stuff like that. The big guns of being able to push matter and energy around on any significant scale have only been in our hands since 1945. And look: the planet is a complete mess.

So if we envision an existence of hundreds of years in any kind of future for ourselves, we’re going to have to make some major choices. Are we the stewards of the Earth, to become kind of toga-d gardeners of a world reborn? Or is it our Viking plunder genes? Do we want to build starships the size of Rhode Island and set out for Alpha Centauri with plans to strike deeper into the nearby galaxy? What is it going to be? Or are these fantasies based on driving the future car using only the rear-view mirror? Are there sideways options? What about these elf-fairy other dimensions? How seriously can we take that? What about getting into the imagination through a kind of perfection of yoga? Can all these things that have always been reserved for beady-eyed holy people be democratized so they have impact in everybody’s everyday life? Is that a possibility?

You know, what has to happen is an abandonment of the idea that only certain classes of solutions will be considered. Like, currently in the world, the only class of solutions that can be considered for any problem are solutions which make a buck. That’s the main idea. And I already hear that the defense-industrial complex is going to transform itself into the industrial detoxification complex, and they will just take those huge military budgets and use all that money now to clean up the mess they made creating the weapons that now have to be destroyed in order to make a sane world. Is this nutty or what? I mean, it’s like putting Nazis in charge of a Jewish resettlement problem. You can’t understand the thinking at all, you know?

So, you know, the bad news for people who like to just roll a bomber and put their feet up—which I certainly number myself among them—is that there’s political shit to be shoveled. Because—and it’s mostly informational. It’s mostly public relations. This is why, in a way, there’s hope. Because, you know, you may be the general of the grand army, you may have your finger on the thermonuclear button, but you can’t get respect at the breakfast table. This is a universal phenomenon. I mean, I’m sure Stalin had to hear terrible things at the breakfast table from his children, you know? And every other dominator is in this position. There’s no peace because, you know, you have to have women around to bear you children, and then half of these children are women, and there’s just no escape from it. So…

37:58

McKenna

Well, I think this is the great principle which makes change possible: that information travels everywhere, and the best ideas will win. If we can level the ideological playing field, as the stakes are raised higher and higher, more and more desperate options will be considered. And eventually they will even come to such mad fringeys as ourselves and say, “Well, everything else has failed. What do you people have in mind?”

Yeah?

38:52

McKenna

A switchover. Yes, well, one of the most interesting things that I think is going on in the world—with all this stuff in Eastern Europe and China and so forth and so on—that’s not been commented upon very much (and you can see why when I comment on it): all of these changes are driven by huge crowds. Massive crowds. Never in history have rulers had to face crowds of a million people standing in the center square of the city screaming, “Resign! Resign!” Erich Honecker, when the notes came out of the East German politburo meeting, he was all for turning the army loose on these people. And Krenz and the people around him said, “Erich, you can’t beat up 400,000 people! There’s no way to do it!” And somebody said you need 100,000 people to wag the tail of the Bolshevik dog, you need half a million people to kick the Bolshevik dog out of the house. And there are more than Bolshevik dogs needing to be moved around.

I think that this Perestroika thing is totally unwelcome in the Western democracies because we’re running a skin game. I mean, we could use free elections! Free elections are when you don’t have federal subsidies for parties which have to have millions of members to qualify. We could use a renunciation of the leading role of the Reblico-Democratiste party which has ruled this country for two hundred years with an iron hand. I mean, all of this openness needs to come here. Our premises—we just live in an illusion. I mean, my hope for the Soviet Union is that it will become so free—because, you know, there’s nothing like a convert to really get obsessive about the pure stuff—that they will get so free that they will shame this country. I mean, this country—you know, when you think about what’s happening with reproductve freedom, and the notion that we’re considering turning half the population into second-class citizens who could be forced by law to face a life-threatening experience that they’re not interested in—I mean, this kind of thinking is very bizarre.

Thinking about the future and what the challenges will be and where people like ourselves are going to have to stand in all this, I think—based on the time wave and based on reading the newspaper—that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane global agenda is religious fundamentalism. And all three of the monotheistic religions are just guilty, guilty, guilty of this malarkey. I mean, Islamic fundamentalism is going to make enormous gains in the next little while. I see the resonance to the gains of Islam that we looked at last night coming in the fact that, if you combine Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan into one country, it will be the world’s largest Muslim country. It’s almost twice the size of Iran. This is coming. As the Soviet Union twists apart, Islam is going to be—the major real estate windfall is going to go in their direction.

Zionist fundamentalism in the Middle East is making it impossible to get a solution there in a situation where four million people are arrayed against five hundred million people. From a historical perspective, this is not… it’s a potential earthquake in the historical continuum. And Christian fundamentalism has completely distorted the social agenda in this country, not only on the issue of womens’ rights and that sort of thing, but I believe this whole drug thing is a reworking of the themes of the Garden of Eden story, and that they are just so appalled at the notion—because somewhere in that movement there must be thinkers, and they see this for exactly what it is: it’s Paganism. It’s secular humanism. It’s reconnecting to the Earth by driving around the entire dominator metaphor.

I mean, the peculiar thing about the god of the Old Testament is that, of all religious ontologies on Earth, this is the most male dominated. No mother, no sister, no lover, no female offspring. I mean, yes, minor traditions, if you happen to be a scholar. But the basic thing is so male. And I think the attraction of monotheism is its philosophical parsimony: one god. Makes sense. Has appeal. Especially if you’re into closure. But the problem is that we image in our personalities the kind of religion that we practice. And imaging ourselves as this omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, centrally controlled entity has given a stamp of cultural approval to the ego that has left us in a very difficult position vis-à-vis the feminine, intuition, the Earth, and any kind of ability to feel our situation. I mean, this kind of cultural collapse, if allowed to run to true armageddon, is death by anesthesia. We cannot feel what is going on. I mean, the tube brings these horrendous images of pogrom and oppression and lies and toxification and wheedling an weazelness, and we can’t grip the emotional levers to become alarmed. And, I don’t know, maybe this is good. Maybe alarm and panic have no place; that we now have to get very steely-eyed and cold as we move into the real clinches of this thing.

But it’s in our lifetime. And there’s very little talk about this. In capitalism no planning extends beyond four, five years. In American democracy no planning extends beyond four years. Everybody has their nose right up against it, and yet they’re sailing along at a thousand miles an hour toward a brick wall that’s just ahead. So planning—not necessarily centralized control, but planning—which is what shamanism has always been. I mean, the shaman told the people where the reindeer had moved. He told the people where the game was going to be. He told the people how they should move. He was a futurist, a forecaster, a planner. And this is what we need: this kind of intuition with integrity that isn’t depending on statistical models—which are always wrong. I mean, you must’ve noticed. Everybody here who reads Time magazine or The New York Times or the London Times, you must’ve noticed this weird paradox which is: you know more than most of the experts. You’re better at predicting the price of gold, the movement of the stock market, the political situation in Argentina, than the experts. And have you noticed on NPR, when they pull together three of these guys—So-and-so, Georgetown University, Sovietologist—and they’re all saying: well, these guys, they’re alright. They seem tolerable. Well, they’ve given their lives to understanding this stuff, and what do you care? And you’re a fully empowered player when you sit down with them. In many cases you know more than they do. It’s because their intuition is totally dead. They can’t make sense out of the situation because their way of analyzing it is flawed.

Well, somehow the grassroots good sense, the common sense of ordinary people, needs to be reflected. And what that means is an abandonment of ideology. Ideology is something imposed from above, and it’s a filter. Then only certain solutions are allowed through. And I don’t have a political agenda. I praise chaos, because I think the main thing working to recreate a new world is the impossibility of controlling the old world. I love it when they say it’s moving too fast. I love it because I know it means that they cannot get a hold on it. I mean, can you imagine trying to be the CIA and trying to control the situation in East Germany? I mean, you just throw up your hands and walk away—which is what we want you to do—and then, lo and behold, it flowers according to its own dynamics. Right now the world is moving faster than the meddlers can meddle, and that’s why it has this wonderfully fecund and optimistic aura to it. And I’m amazed at the naysayers and the people who say, “Well, the instability is increasing daily in Eastern Europe.” Nonsense! It’s not increasing daily. I mean, there have been some tight necks, but I think fundamental decisions have been made to let it unravel.

Yeah?

49:42

McKenna

Well, you’re right about the East. I mean, my god, the appetite for mysticism of these Russians is amazing. And Perestroikista that I am, I recoiled when he embraced the Pope. I thought: K-Mart, it’s okay. But the Pope? My god! Where does it end? Which I suppose shows that I’m politically constipated, you know? But… well, I just saw a newspaper this morning, so I’ve cheated on you. He who has seen the most recent newspaper will win! Apparently, Shevardnadze has said it’s a mess and they’ll just chop off all arms shipments to everybody, and everybody else should do the same, and that this is the problem: that all these governments are armed to the teeth, and enough. So I don’t know. Shevardnadze, the foreign minister.

Yeah?

50:45

McKenna

Well, see, this is another thing that’s interesting about virtual reality. You know, it costs now in California basically 200,000 dollars to live in the kind of home that, when I was young, you bought for 25,000 dollars. But in virtual reality building costs drop to zero. What if we could wean people away from matter? I mean, what if the tackiest thing you could possibly be into would be a physical object? A physical object? And so people would live in white-walled apartments, and no paintings would hang on these walls, and no nick-nacks and 6,000-dollar quartz crystals ripped out of Brazil, and all of that stuff. And yet, everybody could be as hedonic and as stuff-oriented as they wanted, but none of it would be real!