Because, see, an interesting thing about ayahuasca is: it is in fact a technological artifact. It’s a pharmaceutical, basically. In other words, it isn’t like peyote or the mushroom or the morning glory seed, where, having obtained the natural source, you need only pulverize and ingest it. Ayahuasca is a preparation made of at least two plants that are put together in a proportion that is a matter of human decision and human attention. So there isn’t “the” ayahuasca experience. There’s a whole spectrum of experiences orchestrated by human personalities that are making the decision as to whether or not to add brugmansia, brunfelsia, tryptamine, how much, and in what proportion, so forth and so on. So that makes it a much more complicated dimension to explore ayahuasca than, say, peyote or mushrooms—in terms of the territory you have to cover, because it’s as different as the people and the regions in which it’s made.
Audience
Isn’t the personality, the shaman himself or herself, that their energy, and if they’re directing the ayahuasca journey, then they bring so much of themselves with their music or their songs?
McKenna
Oh yeah. No, it’s—
Audience
—ceremony, it’s hard to say. Well, was it the ayahuasca, the mix, which was it?
McKenna
That’s right. And their professional cachet is on the line in these groups, because they’re drinking often with people who have been doing it for thirty or forty years—near relatives, cousins, married in-laws, and all that, and people feel quite free to critique these brews. So there’s a lot of pride in how fuerte (how strong) it is, you know? And always stories of stronger brews in other times and places before modernity.
Audience
What do you see as the role between the physical pharmacology and the spirit [???] that is so important in bringing it on to the experience? What do you see as a relationship for…
McKenna
You mean how does it happen that a drug can give you access to a spiritual dimension?
Audience
Is it just a pharmacological effect, or is it part of the pharmacology and part of the spirit? [???]
McKenna
Well, I think, you know, I mean, it’s not just a pharmacological effect. Somehow, what all these psychedelics really secure, I think, pretty incontrovertibly is: the formative juncture between mind and matter is somehow in the quantum chemistry of the organism. In other words, thinking—which is the glory of our species—must be, or must have on some level at least, a pharmacological component. And the materialists believe that it’s entirely electrochemistry in the brain; thinking. I think that will fail. That’s not a sufficient explanation. But even if you believe that there is a non-physical dimension that is not rooted in matter, nevertheless, somehow thinking and inner vision and ecstasy—which are neurological and neurophysiological phenomena—are somehow the operational means for accessing it when you’re in a human body.
So, I don’t know. I think what’s going to have to happen is that, to account for the world of phenomena as we experience it, rather than some kind of abstract model like the atomic or molecular model—but to actually create a mature science true to experience—you’re going to have to bring back (after 500, 700 years of banishment) the idea of some kind of notion of spirit. And when the shaman says spirit,” we think we understand. But really, shamanism uses a technical language as complicated as particle physics. And spirit is as complex a concept as spin or charm is to a quantum physicist. And I think it’s a huge transformation for science to admit an invisible, non-physical, but causally efficacious aura around things, events, objects.
But really, the revolution has already begun in the nineteenth century with the discovery of the electromagnetic field. And the electromagnetic field—which makes possible television and FM radio and all of this stuff—was confounding to nineteenth-century science, when James Clerk Maxwell began to write the equations for these fields. And they said, “How can it be? How can it act over a distance without physicality?” And then they invented the ether theory to carry it through a physical medium But then this was shown to be fallacious and that there actually are invisible, self-sustaining electromagnetic fields vibrating at millions of Hertz per second, and somehow permeating all matter, and motion pictures, information, text everywhere. I mean, this is totally a cult magic to the nineteenth-century materialists.
And as science—you know, the great frontier of science is biology (and the higher processes of biology culminating in thought) trying to model these things, understanding them through physical models, through dynamical system modeling. It drives the pulse of research mathematics. Nature has been rediscovered as an inspiration in certain branches of science just in the last twenty years. I mean, who would have thought that research mathematics, the most most pristinely abstract of all the theoretical sciences, would generate a notion like fractals and chaos dynamics, which would then describe, you know, population explosions, river deltas, bird migrations, the patterns on butterfly wings, and so forth and so on? And, you know, a lot of this work is done very frankly by psychedelic personalities and psychedelic imaginations.
Some of you may have seen the issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly about a year ago, which had this article about the psychedelic community taking the weird tack that, if we suppress psychedelics, we will lose our cultural edge in the world design and technological implementation game—because this is the only edge we have over the Japanese; is our fiendish creativity created by our boiling genetic melting pot of a culture. And that, if we lose that, you know, we will end up sweeping up at McDonald’s. So I must digress. Why am I raving about this? Yes?
Audience
Kind of similar to your question. Sometimes I think that if you had ayahuasca and comparing taking it, you know, at home in a dark room versus taking it with a curandero, and listening to icaros, sometimes I think you get in the same space and learn the same things. And sometimes I think that ayahuasca is like the hardware, but really that’s not the interesting part. It’s really the spiritual and the icaros, and how the shaman moves it. What does the shaman bring to the party?
McKenna
Well, in a way, it’s both. I mean, in other words, taking ayahuasca at home in your room is titanically profound. You know, it’s a full-blown hallucinogenic meltdown just like high-dose psilocybin. And, you know, the real core of it can’t be told. It takes you apart so completely. On the other hand, you know, somehow you take a day off, but then return to your desk and, you know, horse-whipping your employees and doing whatever you have to do in daily life. If you go into—what they know in the Amazon I don’t think can be told. It’s below the horizon of intellectual apprehension. If you actually gave yourself to this stuff, anything is possible.
I mean, I’ve said this for years about psilocybin: that most of spiritual questing is a frantic, full-on, full-forward scramble to attain a spark of progress. Once you get into psychedelics, you find you ride the brakes a lot more. You know now that you’ve got a horse you can ride. So now it’s all about, you know: well, do I really want this? And how much of it do I want? And if you go to the Amazon, or if you go up on cold mountain with a pound of mushrooms, and you can transform yourself beyond our ability to put up with you, you know? I mean, it will just be said of you, “Oh yes, some woodcutters saw him two years ago up in the slopes, completely naked, surrounded by his elven attendance and leaping over the rocks in the snowfield.” You say, “Great!” You know, is that what your mother raised you for? I don’t know.
Audience
McKenna
I mean, I think the bodhisattva imperative offers a great out for those of us who are chicken shit. And you can just say, “Oh no, I’m not ready to walk through the violet doorway yet. I must yet labor here on the other side for a few moments more.” And the same thing in the Amazon. I mean, they say, you know: la selva es como sueño—“the forest is like a dream.” The forest is like a dream. You realize that you—the ingénue, the questing fool, the child of God—have somehow gotten your dominoes arranged this time so that it’s actually going to work. And then you descend one of these rivers into a Venusian world of iridescent blue butterflies the size of pie plates, and scheming shamen, and just, you know…. And somehow the boundaries are held in place. I think it’s something about how, when we aggregate socially, there’s something like a collective cultural vision that we’re living in, breathing in, dressing in all the time, and that it keeps us from flipping out, basically, into the undigested pre-linguistic chaos of the who-knows-what right around the corner.
Well, so then, if you go into wilderness—this is the classic thing—and then you perturb your categories with hallucinogens and see the syntactical machinery melt down, and understand the relativity of language and all this stuff, then there’s just an incredibly bewildering swarm of possibilities which rush in to fill this newly created intellectual vacuum. And most of it is magical and referential and symbolical, and runs on the dynamic of magic rather than the dynamic of the causuistry of European positivism. And you think you’re losing your marbles—and, by our standards, you are losing your marbles. And then the question is, you know: this truth that is beginning to poke through—how much of it can be integrated? And how controllable is it? And what is its ultimate implication? I mean, it gets very peculiar. Whatever else it is, these psychedelics are certainly a tool for unlocking the labyrinthine peculiarities of the imagination.
Audience
Do you think at all—you were talking about Maxwell’s equations and how that magic turned into technology. Do people do that with psychedelics? In twenty years we’ll have a really kind of—there’ll be some equations, and some understanding of, not of the chemistry, but of the…
McKenna
Well, I would be the last person to sell short the imagination of the human species at the close of the second millennium. I mean, I think we’re poised for some kind of leap. It’s not clear what it is. I mean, everybody has their dog and pony show, you know: the nanotechnologists, the space colony people, the superdrug people—my millennial meltdown theory is in there, sharp-elbowed and…. Because there’s a sense—well, I didn’t intend to talk about this, but it’s sort of maybe worth talking about as we approach the ethnopharmacological thing embedded in the larger context of biology and nature.
One of the things that I’ve learned from psychedelics that just seems self-evident to me now is this thing about how the universe is an engine for the conservation of complexity or novelty. That, from the very first moment of the Big Bang, processes have become the foundations for yet more complex and integrated processes which built on these more primitive processes. So that, you know, the universe is born in an enormously hot plasma where it’s just a soup of free electrons, basically. There aren’t even atomic systems, let alone molecules or anything like that. And as the universe cools, basically, more and more complex forms of order appear—freezing out, as it were; crystallizing—out of this mix.
Well, not only is this happening, but it’s also happening in such a way that each phase comes more quickly than the phase that preceded it. So, you know, you have the era in the life of the universe when it was all physics, and stars were cooking out heavy elements and stuff like that, and supernovas were churning, and galaxies were condensing. But then, once some of these heavy elements are cooked out, including carbon, you get a whole new kind of chemistry based on the four valent properties of carbon. And so you get polymerization (long chain molecules): the possibility now of something like DNA. And you get molecular aggregates: proto-proteins and these sorts of things. Well then, out of these simple building blocks, membranes and transfer systems and decoupling systems and all these things arise. And from them proceeds more complex forms of life. And out of that—thinking of like prokaryotes and like that—then you get forms of largely asexual reproduction. And then sexuality is invented as an obvious ploy to speed up the shuffling of the genetic deck.
Well, if you carry this analysis of natural dynamics far enough, what you discover, then, is that human civilization is not some viral bad trip off on the periphery of things, but it actually begins to look like it’s building on all these other levels of complexity. It’s somehow purposeful. It has a télos that is imparted to it from nature. And yet, it’s also like a trigger phenomenon because it’s so brief. Upon the condensation of the planet and the circulation of the continents is established the slow evolution of species, but upon that comes this ephemeral iridescence of culture that, generously, is 25,000 years old in any recognizable form other than sitting around chipping flint, you know. 25,000 years in biology doesn’t even—you blink and you missed it.
And yet, in that moment, information—and that was my point: that, in this process of the conservation of novelty, novelty seems to be like the physical expression of information existing in some kind of symbolic space. It doesn’t mean a hyperspace, it just means a syntactical space: a dimension of meaning congruent to ordinary experience. Well—
Audience
[???]
McKenna
Something like that.
Audience
The change might be the derivative, or—
McKenna
Well, technology is like the visible condensation of language. And so what this process of neurological activity driven by psilocybin (or driven by whatever) seems to be about is the excretion of ideas. Most animal forms lay an egg, spin a web, dig a hole. We have put in place some kind of omni-adaptable design process, where they had a single gene for behavior—or a set of genes. And so, then, what we do is: we make ideas. And this process has become more and more accelerated over time, because one idea synergizes another. And we’ve essentially migrated inside a realm of ideas, much in the same way that the social insects migrated into a pheromonal social structure. And we’re living now inside these ideas. I mean, some of them are physical ideas (like automobiles and subways), but most of them are ideological constructs like filial obligation, monogamy, capitalism, shamanism. There’s no moral judgment on this, this is just what we do.
And somehow, these powerful hallucinogens—I mean, I think the essence of shamanism in a sense is that, wherever you start from in that process, you find your way through the use of extraordinary physical techniques, or ordeals, or hallucinogens, behind the appearances of things. That the cultural machinery of language—you know, you make the Wizard of Oz discovery, you know? You say, “It’s just a little man pulling levers back here!” And this gives the shaman power to re-weave the structure of reality where it has become damaged. And disease (in that cosmology) is something like that. It’s an unraveling in the weaving of the reality, and can therefore be fixed by song and magic. Because language and song and magic are what are holding the world in place.
A friend of mine once—upon smoking DMT, and being interviewed after coming down—said that in every angle of the room he had seen a tiny demon doing calisthenics. And he said he believed that these demons were keeping the world from folding up into a line; that just they hold open every ninety-degree angle. They’re the demon of the angles, and without them the whole thing would just become terribly humdrum.
Audience
Is that what you mean by magic? Or what, when you use the term “magic,” what is it?
McKenna
I mean some kind of—Jung called it psychoid. I’m not sure why, exactly. But an entry into a dimension where two possibilities are happening. Either the level of synchronicity is so high that the fiction of statistical probability breaks down completely. I mean where, you know, just what’s going on is so improbable that it can’t simply be called improbable. It’s miraculous. And then the other dimension to the magic is the migration of spirit into matter, and the co-fusion of the opposites. I mean, what magic is about is somehow overcoming the dualism of the phonetic language heritage of Greece. Overcoming that, and having the subject–object dualism drop away, and actually seeing how things are composed of their complete antecedents. This is what alchemy is all about. They call it the coincidencia oppositorum: the union of opposites. And it’s a completely legitimate intellectual move.
In quantum physics now, you have to use what’s called a Boolean algebra. And the vision of the quantum realm now is a realm of ordinary logic out of which protrude these areas which are called isles of Boole. And there are places where you get to change the rule, and you get to use a both–and logic instead of an either–or logic. And that’s what Boolean algebra is. It’s the working out the consequences of a both–and logic.
So if it’s legitimate at the quantum-mechanical level, we started out this discussion by saying what psychedelics secure is somehow the union of mind and matter at that level. So I don’t understand how this works, this magical domain. When the rational mind is present, it doesn’t work. But it turns out the rational mind is just a psychoid object in your personality, and you can trick it into non-existence, either by overwhelming it with a psychedelic—but even when you’re like on a psychedelic and waiting expectantly for it to manifest, until your “attention” wanders, it won’t show. It’s because this thing which we call our attention is this thing which is holding the laws of Newtonian physics and causuistry somehow in place. I mean I don’t pretend to understand all this. Clearly, if one did understand all this, you could untie the knot, and to somehow you would be a real shaman. I mean, you would be able to pass in and out of ordinary states of existence and move through these dimensions. They’re there, but for most of us they seem to be accessible only in the imagination.
And then the imagination invites close inspection and attention. What is the imagination? Essentially, the psychedelics are imagination catalysts. That’s the human faculty which they work on—especially the visual imagination. Well, again, we have so imbibed the assumptions of positivism that probably most people think the imagination is like the mind idling, and they think of the mind as the electrochemical activity of the brain. But, you know, the phenomenon of memory poses certain problems for that model of how it all works, because it’s said that we change all of our physical material except our neurons every five to ten years. Well how, then, can a seventy-year-old person remember the smell of their grandmother’s parlor when they were age six? You know, ten times in the course of life all matter has been replaced. Well then, where are the memories? And how can a memory of a spring day seventy years in the past be just present? This is a great mystery that the materialists prefer not really to look at.
And what it implies is that mind is not something in the brain; that the brain is like a quantum-mechanical transducer of some sort. It’s a receiver, not a generator of mind, and that mind is like the co-presence of everything in a higher-dimensional space—which, if there were a kind of hyperspace lying behind nature, then everything would be co-present there. I mean, it’s just a mathematical fact of the matter. No mumbo jumbo about it. That’s what that means, you know: all points co-tangent on the next level up.
So I think the reason I’m so stoked on psychedelics is because, in spite of the fact that they’re archaic and that people have been doing this for 100,000 years, still I think it’s always been the cutting edge. That really, what shamanism means is: in some languages the word means “go-between.” The shamans go between ordinary reality and something else; a kind of platonic super-space where the future and the past and other declensions of possibility are all visible. And it’s a mystery of neurophysiology and psychochemistry and brain architecture and mathematical complexity and chaos dynamics. But it’s not, in principle, beyond rational apprehension. It can be understood, and it can be made the basis of—who knows what. I mean, it’s a technology of the imagination, of building in a world where human freedom could exfoliate itself in ways that are inconceivable or destructive if you’re trying to live in three- space on the surface of a very fragile planet with a whole bunch of other folks also trying to hang on.
Yeah?
Audience
Where do the ancestors fit into all this? If we’re at the culmination point and we’re getting a lot of pressure from the ancestors, and a lot of people calling white people wouldn’t be aware of this because it hasn’t been a cultural imperative to talk about this. [???] seem to think that this is a pretty important thing.
McKenna
Well, if you believe that there’s no getting off the track—you know, that nothing has gone wrong—then it must be that, somehow, this certain group of tribes in northern Europe (the Indo-Europeans, the wheel-makers, the horse-breakers, these people) were like the prodigal sons, and somehow fell out of archaic existence and were led on a long strange trip into history, basically; into monotheism, into the Greek ideal of nature. I mean, when you think about a torso from the classic Greek period, a human torso, and the other forms of art being created in the world at that time, everyone else were symbolists of some sort. You know, they carved, they distorted. Only the Greeks broke through to what it is: this amazing understanding of realism. And from that led to this peculiar form of engagement with nature called science.
And so if you believe that everything is on track, then probably there was some reason for the descent into history. In the same way that you can see history as like a psychedelic trip of some sort, it’s also like a shamanic journey. It’s a journey past many, many concentric circles guarded by demons. I mean, first the Roman Empire, then the Dark Ages, then the High Gothic, then the Baroque, then the Industrial Reformation. And so weirder and weirder and weirder. And apparently the Holy Grail—it’s hard to say what it is. Is it the ability to release an incredible amount of energy in a short time? In which case we’ve arrived in the parking pattern, because we now can blow the planet to bits like a stick of dynamite and a rotten apple, basically. So if that was what it was about, we’re there.
Maybe it was something else—the complete sequencing of the human genome and the ability to completely manipulate the palette of genetic material in order to redesign ourselves out of history? This is possible. This is now within reach. I mean, we could conceive of a future where, somehow, we did something with ourselves that left us unrecognizable to ourselves. I spoke yesterday of how the mushroom was like a designed organism. Well, how far could you go with that, you know? Could we create a planet where every eye that looked out at that world was a conscious eye with a thinking, judging mind behind it, from sea slug to squirrel monkey, somebody you once knew? Or, you know, some more exotic virtual reality–nanotechnology hybrid kind of thing where everybody gets downloaded into a supercooled cube of gold ytterbium alloy buried at the bottom of Copernicus and goes off into virtual heaven, or something like that? I mean, believe me, Fujitsu is trying to bring it to you! There are folks working on all these frontiers.
Audience
Wouldn’t some sort of ultimate thing have to be trans-planet? Off of our particular neighborhood and solar system?
McKenna
Well, this was hot a while ago. It seems ultimately you would think so. But also it seems that we’ve hit sort of a technological problem here. I mean, the problem to go to Jupiter compared to the problem to go to Alpha Centauri is like the difference between hollowing out a tree trunk to make a canoe and building the Queen Mary or something.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
Well, yes. But again, hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. If there is a parallel continuum, then shamans should probably—you know, the shamans in the Amazon say they go to the Milky Way. I mean, they say many, many things. They seem to access a stratified cosmos; a cosmos of levels. And, you know, I think if you’re a true lover of the weird, you will be able to find a doorway out. It may not take you to the third star in the Zubenelgenubi system, but it’ll take you far enough that you’ll end up begging for mercy, probably.
Audience
There’s a technical imperative sort of going on in his technology today to create sort of a Noah’s Ark kind of a spaceship with genetic information on it that’s going to shoot this thing out into space like a big seed. It’s one of the things that’s going on. And I think this is like one of our cultural imperatives that’s coming from a great history of pioneering, or whatever that is.
McKenna
Well, sort of. I mean, I think—you know, this metaphor I mentioned earlier about the novelty, and how each epic follows more quickly upon the other. I think an idea like an archival ship like that, or a flying saucer, or—what these things are, are, like: ahead of us this technology process has a foreseeable end. You can imagine the tool. You know, the final tool: a union of human intentionality and spirit as matter. Something like (but a little less menacing than) the material the Terminator was made out of. In other words: alchemical gold. And if you are hungry, you eat it. And if you need to go somewhere, you stretch it out and sit on it and it flies. And if you need to know something, you ask it.
And what it really is, and what technology is the process of doing, I think, is: it’s the human soul, externalized. Somehow, what history is about is turning ourselves inside-out. And these technological excrescences that are our hallmark are an effort to condense the mind that we sense within ourselves before ourselves as a kind of obedient, reflective, ectoplasmic slave of some sort that is the perfection of life in three-dimensional space. Why we have this idea is not clear, but this is what lies behind—we talked about this some last week—these magical phlegms in the Amazon, which these ayahuascaeros vomit out. These ultraviolet plasmic fluids that, when you spread them out on the ground and look into them, there are stars in there. And what it is, is: it’s a hyper-dimensional membrane, or something on the border between metaphor and reality, that is activated in the psychedelic state by these totally apeshit ayahuascaeros, to then objectify their power and their ability to melt through the dimensions and make big magic.
Yeah?
Audience
Where does the heart play in all this?
McKenna
Well, it plays the role that it’s always playing. It’s going to be playing itself to pieces. In other words, it’s going to look like the end of the world. More and more it is looking like the end of the world. But the metaphor that seems to have the heart-thing in it, and to put it across to people, is to say that it’s like a birth. If you had never seen someone give birth, and you came around a corner and were confronted with this phenomenon, it reeks of medical emergency. There’s moaning and groaning, and blood is being shed, and people are thrashing around. So then you would conclude there was a problem. It would take a real leap of faith to embrace this as a wonderful occasion and a great natural step forward. And that’s the planetary situation that we’re in. I mean, we’re in the birth canal of a new ontological order for mankind, and the cheerful amniotic oceans of a planetary past with an endless frontier and endless exploitable resources and mineral wealth and all that, that’s all gone now. Now the walls are closing in. We’re suffocating, we’re strangling, and we’re being massaged toward—we don’t know what. The end of the world is all anybody can think. Well, imagine a fetus trying to anticipate his future career as stockbroker or Indian chief from the point of view of the birth canal. It just means that this phase of the career of intelligence on this planet is closing. Why shouldn’t it be brief? It has been so brief all along. Processes have been happening faster and faster. Why should we have supposed that we would be exempt from this rule of accelerating process? So we’re being carried into—something is summoning us into its presence, and sculpting us as we approach it into what it wants us to be. And it’s weird.
Audience
Isn’t it in the birth process that the brain is flooded with DMT? Do I recall that correctly?
McKenna
Somebody else asked about this, and then we got into a discussion about how could anybody have ever found that out. I don’t think so. Well, I just don’t think you could ever do that kind of human research and get away with it. So I think it’s probably apocryphal. But I urge you to repeat it!
Audience
Terence, how to explain the decline of the hallucinogenic societies like the one we saw in the slides last night [???]? Why, in your opinion, weren’t they able to persist like our technological society has, and be a dominant factor in today’s reality?
McKenna
You mean the Maya and…? Well, it’s a big question. I mean, we’re all enthusiasts of hallucinogens, so we prefer to assume that the Mayan religion was built on this, and so forth and so on. The evidence is highly controversial for exactly what was going on. They may well have. Certainly, if you look at the funerary vases that Francis Robicsek published in that book of his called the Maya Book of the Dead: A Reconstruction of a Ceramic Codex, the weirdness of these encounters between these members of the royal line and these entities coming up out of these plumes of columns of smoke certainly look like a DMT cult. But I think probably the Mayan civilization—as the decipherment now makes more and more clear—was a very, very highly stratified society with a very steep social pyramid, and the poetry recitations and the cultivation of exaggerated social forms and all that make it seem sort of like Nakamura Japan, which was a similar kind of society and very war-like and very ritualized and very stylized. And I think probably, as the decipherment proceeds of the various theories of the Mayan collapse that will have been advanced over the years, probably the notion of what’s called the slave revolt theory—that finally the lower classes just weren’t having it, and began a generational period of social upheaval that began at Copan and radiated outward and ended the massive building phase and the erection of long count stela.
Audience
So the underclasses were denied the use of hallucinogens?
McKenna
I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have been, because I imagine these things were the province of this poetically inclined nobility. There’s no evidence either way. I just don’t feel that—
Audience
Just confused how hierarchy and territoriality, war-likeness fits into the equation, when you said in an earlier discussion that these hallucinogens break through those boundaries—
McKenna
No, I understand the question. The problem is: we have no idea how shaped by hallucinogens the Mayan society was. For instance, it might have been the province of a shamanic lodge like the Masons or something. Well then, most people would have known nothing about it. In many societies, hallucinogens are institutionalized as secret societies—like at Eleusis. And ayahuasca men’s groups in the Amazon and so forth or our own culture.
Yeah?
Audience
One aspect is the heart connection that is a part of my dream. If the success is in the externalization of the soul and you have this magic carpet or whatever, I would just suggest that the word “slave,” I would replace it with “lover.”
McKenna
Yeah, that’s better. Or “self,” even. It is yourself. I mean, it’s like you’ve given birth to the eternal portion of yourself.
Audience
It seems to me that when I take psychedelics that what it does for me is it intensifies my compassion and my insight and handshakes the imagination. I mean, the imagination is incredible, but it’s even intensified with a surge and activation of compassion and insight. Do you find that part of the experience, is that a point of view?
McKenna
You mean that you feel connected up to everybody and compassionate?
Audience
Yes, and there’s more of an honoring of differences without conflict, which in normal reality conflict becomes the issue. So for me, it’s my lesson of honoring differences without conflict, and enhanced with compassion and insight.
McKenna
Yeah, well, it certainly is a dose of difference. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it’s tremendously humbling, and that the complexity and the—it’s so rich. It’s the richest thing there is. And to discover it inside yourself is so surprising and affirming. I mean, life would be fifty percent less interesting if there were no psychedelics. Imagine if as low did you as you could get in this world was three gin tonics or something. That would be something. No, I think that it’s where you see the mystery, whatever it is. And it can’t be said what it is, because it’s a true mystery. You know, it’s the surface of the lógos. It’s the—I don’t know—the ontological authenticity that lies behind being visibly beheld. I mean, it’s amazing.
Yeah?
Audience
There are peoples in the world who live in places where they do not have hallucinogens or entheogens. And I find it kind of comforting, actually, that people can live all sorts of different ways and come to surprisingly the same conclusions, and are able to live fine. I just kind of like to keep that perspective.
McKenna
Yeah, it’s interesting. I wonder what they do, how they get off. Well, or there could be, you know, genetic lines where there’s a restlessness that is not present in other peoples. I mean, some people are very happy where they are. The mushroom, in fact, said to me one time—I memorized it. I’ve never yet understood it. It said, “The pygmies will be singing in the rainforests when the Celts storm Arcturus.” Thank you…?
What?
Audience
My view of the Mayan experience was that the Mayan people, there wasn’t any separation between them and their environment at all. They were living a story, they were a live story. And that the mushroom was used as a discovery for linear thinking, which was in part how they built their greatness, which was kind of evident by the way in 1850, or whenever it was, when the Mayan people in Yucatan were on the verge of victory and they were rebelling on the day to plant corn, and they were on the calendar, all the warriors walked on the plant the corn.
McKenna
That’s right. They walked away from certain victory in this war they’d fought for years in order to plant the corn.
Audience
So perhaps the mushroom was used by the Mayans as a discovery of [???]
McKenna
It could be. If you’re interested—I mean, this is a fascinating question. There’s a great book called The Dynamics of Apocalypse: Computer Modeling the Classic Maya Collapse, and it goes over the many, many theories and tries to reach some conclusions—which it really doesn’t, but it’s a fascinating thing. Something very good or something very bad happened because they moved for over a thousand years in a certain direction, and built up an urban civilization in the rainforest that nobody accepted—Angkor Wat in Cambodia had done that—and at the apex of this cultural efflorescence packed it in fairly quickly. And the Mayan language group is the largest language group in the Americas. 15 million people speak a dialect of Maya. There are 15 living dialects of it. So it’s not a question of where did they go? They didn’t go anywhere. They just backed out on the whole civilization, and they became instead small tropical farmers, as they had been 1500 years previously. Very peculiar, very interesting.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
I don’t think they were particularly big. No.
Audience
Because when we went to Palenque [???] I got my set of exercises, but I can’t believe they did this.
McKenna
Well, they just had to—I mean, you have to realize that it’s clear they had a different sense of architecture, because here you build this enormous temple—like the temple of the inscriptions at Palenque—and then what happens is, twelve guys can stand around on top of it somewhat uncomfortably. And that’s the skyscraper. Because they had no interiors, really. Every 52 years they would re-cover the temples with more stone and build them progressively higher and higher—which was a great break for Mayan archaeology, because you can just peel these things like an onion and go back and back and back.
Audience
They did go up and down the steps.
Audience
I think they did [???] the size of the steps may have had more to do with the number of steps that they went fitting into a particular space and it gives you the size of people [???]
Audience
Yeah, but, I mean, if the Earth is still around enough, who knows how long somebody might find a Frank Lloyd Wright building too and figure out how did these people go up and down these stairs?
Audience
I’d like to go back to Robert’s question. It seems very difficult to believe that if anybody, any large group of people in the Mayan culture, were using the psychedelics on a regular basis, it would be that kind of hierarchy and oppression of large, large-type people. I just find that—I don’t know if there’s any explanation. I just find it hard to believe. It don’t fit.
McKenna
Well, we don’t know if either was the case. In other words, we don’t know—no Mayan depiction of mushroom use or morning glory use survives. What we gather of the mushroom stones, although there was an elaborate paper published by somebody at Harvard saying these mushroom stones are not mushroom stones at all, and demonstrated that you could take a piece of wild rubber and sit with this stone between your knees and pound it out in a certain way and make cuts on it in a certain way and could make a perfect rubber ball. And so it said, you know, these are essentially lasts. Isn’t that what they’re called that you hammer something on? These are lasts for making balls, and you’re just crazy to think that. So there’s that theory.
There’s no—you know, that smoking god that some people have on their t-shirts here at Palenque is the only depiction in stone of the use of tobacco ever found. Tobacco was important. Clearly it’s depicted in the Vos paintings. Francis Robicsek did a book called Tobacco: The Smoking Gods that’s all about the Maya, but it’s impossible really to know how Mayan society worked at this point.
Audience
But you could look at that particular part [???] the person who’s not smoking, they’re playing a flute and the scrolls are really the physical embodiment of music. I’ve looked at it that way too, because I mean, you know, we can’t just go ask the guy, hey, is that guy smoking or is he…?
McKenna
Right.
Audience
But the thing is, is that the way it’s called, everyone called it to the shame and [???]
McKenna
Well, if you look at Robicsek’s book, I think you can satisfy yourself that it probably is smoking, because he shows enough of these counter-examples off these other ceramics that it looks like a style. They have these horrific depictions of these dragon-like creatures vomiting other entities that rise up out of these what look like incense pots or something. Some of us might like to believe that they’re heaving DMT resin onto hot coals and breathing it in, something like that. But we don’t know enough about hallucinogen use. And the mushroom complex, of course, is in the Sierra Mazateca. That doesn’t involve Maya. That’s Mixtec and Mazatec Indians, the people whose ancestors built Monte Albán. If you should go to Oaxaca, there’s an immense city there, 3,500 years of continuous occupation on these two flattened mountaintops called Monte Albán, that’s one of the most amazing sites in the Americas. It’s not Mayan at all. It’s Mixtec, Mazatec, and like that. And that’s where the mushroom thing, we assume, held sway for a long time, because that’s where it was found intact in the fifties.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
I don’t know how much is known about the Monte Albán people. I’m not sure that they had writing. I’m not sure about that. Later there were Mixtec codices. For instance, the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I that Jonathan showed slides of last night that shows people—remember?—it showed the people holding mushrooms, and it showed the glyph for the psychedelic experience with the guy diving down through. That is a Mixtec codex; Vindobonensis I. It’s not a Mayan codex. So conclusions about mushroom use in the Mayan area can’t really be drawn from that.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
I think it was a very stone society at the talk. This question about how can you have a hierarchical society and a psychedelic—we forget the all-pervasive impact of modern media. For instance, the answer to that question is: you have it in the form of a secret society or a mystery cult.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
Oh, well, no, the stropharia cubensis mushroom entered the new world with the Spanish. But I was what I was going to talk about, or what it made me think of, is the soma cult of the Indo-Europeans. The great mystery here, you see, is: you get these endlessly verbose poems, the Rigvedas singing the praises of soma. Well then, number one: what is it? And number two: if it was so wonderful, how could it have ever died out? And that’s an interesting question. How can a plant or a drug be found and lost? And how often does that happen culturally? And how can it happen if it inspires 135,000 lines of ecstatic poetry chiseled on stone or something? Then how can it ever be lost?
Well, the only scenario that I can concoct is that it must belong to an elite. And they initiate people into it. And if you’re not in the club, you don’t know about it. And then what happens is: the lower classes—the classes that are supporting this social pyramid—get pissed off, and they kill the elite. And in the process of exterminating a priestly class or a ruling class, a sacrament of a secret men’s society could easily be completely trampled underfoot and forgotten.
Audience
For soma it started in kind of above [???] now, where some of them might have grown, and then they migrated south into India with a very different climate, and then they couldn’t grow the plant.
McKenna
Well, in my book Food of the Gods I spend a fair bit of time on this, because it’s an interesting question and a lot of people have tried to figure it out. I think that, first of all, it was a process which took a long time. We’re talking several millennia of time for these things to happen. What happened was: north of Lake Van in the grasslands on the Caspian Sea, these Indo-European tribes discovered the wheel. And at this time they were domesticating the horse for the first time, and they created a new kind of social invention, which was not the nomadism of the pedestrian nomad following his herds, but a nomadism based on mounted horsemen and plunder and rape and the extension of social boundaries by force over vast areas. So these were the Indo-Europeans, the people who may have taken amanita muscaria, who practiced a rite of sacrifice, and so forth and so on. They came down around 6500 BC. They entered Asia Minor, the Anatolian plain of Turkey, and destroyed Çatalhöyük, which was this other kind of civilization—a mother goddess, matriarchal, psychedelic, cattle-based, horned goddess civilization—that had built the most advanced city in the world at that time, was there on the Anatolian plain. Had gone through several cultural efflorescences and retrenchments, and then was destroyed in 6500 BC by these people, the Indo-Europeans. And I think they, over time, accepted the mushroom of these pastoral valley people that they conquered as they swept across Anatolia, and then ran into India. And it took a thousand or more years for this process to happen. And the Vedas were written during this period of time.
It’s very hard (if you think soma is amanita muscaria, to explain the cattle imagery, because cattle have nothing whatsoever to do with amanita muscaria. Also, amanita muscaria is a hard to obtain, high-altitude endemic at that latitude, and the Rigveda speaks of daily pressings of soma to serve hundreds of initiates. So where would you have gotten these amounts of amanita muscaria? So I think probably it was psilocybin, and then later psilocybin mushroom probably combined with Peganum harmala.
You see, parallel to the development of the Vedas in that area was the development of the Zoroastrian religion, and it had a literature called the Avesta, and they spoke in extravagant terms about a magical sacrament called haoma. Well, haoma and soma are the same word. And the haoma of Zoroastrianism has always been known to be Peganum harmala. If any of you are experimenting with Peganum harmala and you want to know the history of this plant, you should get this book, a wonderful book called, Haoma and Harmaline by Flattery and Schwartz. It’s a publication of the Near Eastern Studies Department of the University of California at Berkeley, and one of the things you learn there that’s amazing is that this Zoroastrian, or what was called Zurvanism, the religion of Iran that preceded Zoroastrianism, that he in fact reformed—Zurvanism, which was the worship of eternity—the only method they recognized for the attaining of spiritual information was pharmacological. They had this notion of a realm, I can’t remember what it was called. Among Mendians it’s called musunia kashta, but they said, you know, the only way you can find out about musunia kashta is to take haoma. No other way. Good works, prayer, lives of ascetic rectitude—forget it. Only haoma can show you musunia kashta.
Audience
Who were these people?
McKenna
Pre-zoroastrian practitioners of Zurvanism on the plain of Iran and Iraq.
Audience
Was the haoma mixed with something, or is this just plain…?
McKenna
It was… no, it seems like it was probably—see, this is an interesting point. It’s good you brought this up. I think in our circle we tend to dismiss harmaline, because we’re familiar with harmine from Banisteriopsis caapi, and harmine is an efficient MAO inhibitor, but not an efficient hallucinogen until you get close to toxic doses. Harmaline, on the other hand, has a somewhat different pharmacological profile, and it’s possible that harmaline alone, in doses of like 200 milligrams, is sufficiently hallucinogenic that you could actually lay the basis for some kind of ritual use with that alone. I mean, it’s also possible—and this is a great area for scholarship and long, loaded arguments—that there are DMT sources in the ancient Middle East and India that could have been added into the soma.
The one that interests me the most, because I think it’s very suggestive and you could actually probably squeeze a book out of this subject, is: there’s a plant called Arundo donax—some of you may know about it—that is the giant river reed of the Middle East. To this day, this plant is the source of reeds for wind instruments, fine woodwind instruments. Well, the roots contain DMT. And when you look back at the ancient stratum of Hellenic religion, there is this phenomenon called Orphism, or the myth of Orpheus. And Orpheus was a flute player, and he descends into the underworld to try and, through the roots of a tree, to try and rescue his lover. And Orphic religion was the parallel mystery religion to the Eleusinian cults and the cult of Delphi. And it was very old and very secret. So it’s possible that Arundo donax and Peganum harmala would yield an interesting—
Audience
Can you say what that again? Can you spell it?
McKenna
A-R-U-N-D-O. Donax: D-O-N-A-X. It’s a plant that in the Central Valley of California is such a problem, it clogs the canals, and they go through with big machines and heave up great dripping masses of it beside these canals, and one could presumably go there and to scrape to your heart’s content.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
My understanding is it’s the root bark, but I’m not sure. It’s again those cheesy chemists, Brattergie [?], Ghoshal [?], and Ranji [?], a paper in 1972 in Loydia, Arundo donax.
Audience
Dude, have you experimented with harmaline?
McKenna
By itself? No, that would be very interesting to do. Have you done that? Yeah, I think probably it may be underrated. In any case, this book by Flattery and Schwartz, Haoma and Harmaline, is just a wealth of information, and attacks this Wasson theory about Amanita muscaria, which I think is weaker than people suppose and long overdue.
Audience
[???] has a counter-attack to it.
McKenna
Oh, no. Well, Jonathan is a great defender of Wasson, and Wasson has many defenders, but I think that theory requires revision. See, what I brought to the argument that was new was the whole notion that Africa and African species could have played a role in this, and that far from the Indo-Europeans carrying Amanita muscaria cults into a mushroomless Anatolia, that what they found there were cultures with roots in Africa that had been mycophilic for millennia. And people just underestimated the potential role of the Saharan ecosystem in this whole equation, but obviously that’s where the ungulate animals were. And so that’s where the mushrooms evolved that were particular to the ungulates. And where the cattle went, the mushroom went. And where the cattle went, a certain cultural style went, that now can be seen to be this prototypic archaic style.
And then my interpretation of like hallucinogenic drug cults in the New World was that people adapting to these kinds of complex environments found their way back to an archaic style in the same way that we did. I mean, the object—oh, here’s an interpretation on the Mayan use of mushrooms. They did use mushrooms, and so they pulled the plug on the civilization. In other words, the mushroom-using may have come at the late phase, and then people just said, “Enough of calculating these long count dates and chiseling the Manta limestone, this is nuts! We should go make whoopie in the forest and brew palm beer!”
Audience
The question is: soma, I think, is really interesting. It seems to me that psychedelics and all these access like an archaic, paolithic state of mind like you say. But maybe soma wasn’t an access to an archaic state of mind [???] some sort that brought people out of archaic states of mind [???]
McKenna
That’s an interesting suggestion. Heinrich Zimmer, who’s the great art historian commentator on Hindu culture and psychology, he says in the opening to his book The Art of Indian Asia something like: the Vedic religious breakthrough was that they overcame the sacrality of space. He said these people had no sacred rivers, no sacred waterfalls, no consecrated boulders. They would kindle a cosmic fire. And where that fire was kindled, there the center of their cosmos would come to rest. So they transcended the idea of geography, and where they built their fire of sacrifice, that was the axis mundi of their universe. It’s an extraordinary leap into abstraction. It was from fiddling around with wheels that they got into this, you see. It could well be. That’s an interesting speculation. The Vedic pantheon is not terribly attractive, I find.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
A golden liquid. Yes, and harmaline would certainly give you—if you, at an industrial level, were extracting harmaline from Peganum harmala, it would be a golden yellow liquid.
Audience
There’s a very interesting essay by Calvert Watkins, the Indo-European scholar. It’s called Let Us Now Praise Famous Grains—I think it appeared in a journal; The American Philosophical Society—where he traces etymological links between soma, haoma, and drinks that they mixed in the Odyssey and Homer, and the Kykeon from Eleusis, and shows that a number of the words have the same roots. In each case, they are mixtures. They seem to contain a grain, probably barley, but possibly something else, possibly honey. But the point that he really makes is that they were mixtures, all of these, and shows how they were used in similar ways at special occasions, and suspects that it was a very early, pre-dispersal Indo-European drink.
McKenna
Well, that’s very interesting. You know, the cereal grasses are monocots, and they’re among the most recently evolved plants, and are genetically highly variable, so that races of cereals come and go with fair regularity. They did an experiment in California a few years ago, where they went to one of the oldest missions in California, where they had used cereal straw as the binder in the adobe bricks. And they very carefully dissolved these bricks with strong acidic solutions, and they catalogued a number of cereal grains that are now extinct, including a form of rice with a kernel twice the size of any modern kernel of rice, so forth and so on.
The point I want to make with regard to soma is: it’s occurred to me that—and I’ve never heard this discussed by anybody—that when you’re told what not to eat when you’re on an MAO inhibitor, always close to the top of the list is lentils. Well, this Indo-European area is lentil land. It’s the land of dal. I mean, the first thing you hear in the morning when you get up in India is, “Dd-d-dal!” You know, you’re having dal. And there are many different races and kinds of dal. Well, is it possible that what we’re dealing with is a nutritional predisposition to a much stronger reaction to harmaline than, say, a white bread-eating North Hollywood population would display, or something like that? This is possible: that ancient diets were much more restricted than modern diets, and people could have had sensitivities and cultural habituations built in that gave them exotic blood chemistries and so forth that made them more responsive to these things.
Certainly, in the Amazon, when you go days eating nothing but yucca—you know, Manihot esculenta—and farina, and coca, and that’s it. And then you take ayahuasca or psilocybin or something. I mean, it can really get right at you, you know, because you’re not carrying a lot of preservatives and weird nutritional static. You’re honed to the bone. And you can imagine the people who are out there for years on those kinds of diets, what a sensitive assay system they’re running for these things.
Yeah?
Audience
What do you think about the model of the universe as a hologram; the holographic universe?
McKenna
Well, I sort of veered in that direction this morning when I talked about how the mind is a receiver, not a generator of the phenomenon of consciousness. Yeah, I think that somehow it’s hard for me to believe that the—well, it’s hard to build a material model of memory, and it’s sort of hard to build an immaterial model of memory. I mean, memories are so specific. It’s hard to see how you can code them out of into cold air. On the other hand, there are so many of them. And what you see when you take hallucinogens is just this Niagara of visual data. Well, where is this stuff coming from? Where is it stored? Is it being generated in real time, a millisecond before you behold it? Or is it like a film being played? So I think some kind of high-density information storage in some kind of super-space is implied.
You know, even the straight people in physics now require—the most popular model of cosmology at the moment—requires eleven dimensions of description. I mean, there are the three spatial dimensions, the temporal dimension, and then six other dimensions that are folded in at the microphysical level. And that’s physics, the bedrock of our worldview. I mean, these are—supposedly the most secure knowledge that we Westerners have is in the realm of physics. Well, then you start asking for a recitation of this secure knowledge, and you discover it reads like a fairy tale from hell, you know? I mean, virtual particles, and violations of physics, and exotic forms of logic, and action at a distance, and instantaneous transmission of infamy: all these paradoxes ricocheting around.
What has happened is that science has prosecuted its program for the explanation of nature to the point where the non-rational basis of nature is now there to behold. Which means, you know, you almost have to be pushed back to a mystical position. Tertullian said of Christianity, they asked him, you know: the resurrection, it’s ridiculous, it doesn’t make any sense. How can you believe this stuff? And he said, credo te absurdum—“I believe it because it’s absurd.” And this is sort of where quantum physics is now.
Yeah?
Audience
A little bit on this memory and storage. I’ve heard like bits and pieces, but I’m just wondering if you have any knowledge of these crystal skulls? And there’s all kinds of theories of communication and knowledge storage, and—
McKenna
Well, I’ve read a little bit about the crystal skulls. It is a very mysterious and finely wrought object. The rigidity of the categories of the people into whose clutches it fell might require revising and strengthening. The problem with so much occult thinking is that it’s just, they never encountered the notion of the rules of evidence. The rules of evidence. You know, in fact, the New Age generally suffers from this problem—not only the New Age, but a number of points of view. I mean, Marxism, Freudianism—every point of view, every philosophy, the tough question you should ask somebody if they say, “I’m a Scientologist” or “I’m an Ayn Randian,” the question to ask is: under what circumstances would you abandon your major premise? You know? And if you say this to a Marxist, they will never answer you. Neither will a Freudian. And usually neither will the devotees of the fall of Lemuria.
Audience
[???]
McKenna
Neither will the [???].
Audience
[???] since they had no explanation for anything, everything is possible. [???]
McKenna
It’s a rubbery language, so it permits these things, you know? If you learned it, you could probably jump thirty feet, too.