02:07

McKenna

It’s a pleasure to be with you.

02:35

McKenna

Well, I see a lot of disparate communities. Communities that didn’t really recognize a common agenda at the beginning of the eighties have now begun to make common cause. I think feminists, ecologists, cyberpunks, the psychedelic community, all of these disparate communities have begun to coalesce on an agenda more or less around the notion of reverencing the planet, and perhaps beginning to create methods for saving it. This is something that wasn’t going on in the early eighties.

03:22

McKenna

Well, H. G. Wells said history is a race between education and disaster. I think it’s probably happening because our problems are worse than they were ten years ago. So we live in a paradox: the paradox of a world where things are simultaneously getting better and worse. So events like Chernobyl, and the breakup of the Marxist states—all of these things have forced even the most intractable intellects to realize that we live in a world of vastly accelerating change and novelty. And if we don’t begin to take a grip on some of the problems which confront us, we may eventually pass fail-safe points, and these problems may then be much more difficult (if not impossible) to solve. So there’s a rising sense of alarm, and accompanying that, I think, a rising sense of the possibility of new solutions.

04:56

McKenna

Well, in a way, you’re right that we live in a hierarchically structured, rational, patriarchal, scientific society. But, on the other hand, the program of science has pushed so deeply into the heart of matter through quantum physics that a certain irrational element in nature itself has become visible in the last fifteen years to science. Physics—which was always held up as the paradigmatic rational enterprise—now deals with concepts so exotic and counterintuitive that the notion of reason itself has begun to be called into question inside the scientific establishment. And I think this crisis in science is probably being caused by the fact that our investigations now make it clear that we cannot exclude the notion of spirit from the scientific enterprise. People like Rupert Sheldrake, new disciplines such as chaos dynamics, fractal mathematics—these theories and approaches hint that reason is ultimately insufficient for a complete description of nature. And this is having vast repercussions in the higher echelons of our civilization.

06:33

McKenna

Yes, I think so. I think science has really exhausted itself, unless it begins to accept the notion—some notion—of spirit. I mean, this is a process that’s been going on for quite a while. For instance, we forget how exotic the discovery of the electromagnetic field in the middle of the last century was for science. I mean, up to that point, the notion of action at a distance was dismissed as pure superstition. The world was conceived of tiny billiard ball-like objects winging their way through empty space. And when Michael Faraday and Lorentz began to write the equations for the electromagnetic field, this was hailed as irrational magical thinking. Now we exist in an electronic information-dense society, a global planetary society, that is entirely knitted together by these same mysterious fields. And I think in our own time a similar but larger transition in scientific thinking is going to take place.

You see, what’s happened is: the previous approach of science—which was to isolate the smallest units in any system and then give a complete description of them—has given way to the realization that you can’t compute animals out of atoms, and you can’t compute the dynamics of societies by studying single individuals. The great science of the future is the science of complex systems and processes. And this is a revolutionary refocusing of the explanatory power of science. And it comes just in time, because the problems which really confront us are whole-systems problems: deteriorating atmospheres, epidemic diseases, spread of social unrest. These are complex, compound, whole-systems problems and we need a new science to deal with this kind of thing.

09:18

McKenna

Well, I think every society, when it gets into trouble, looks into the past for models to anchor itself. When the medieval church broke up under the influence of new technologies and new economic theories, classicism was invented by the Renaissance. That was essentially a reaching back to models 1,500 years in the past, to then create a revivified legal system, economic theory, new aesthetic canons, and so forth. What I see happening in the twentieth century is a much more radical reaching back into the past. I call it the archaic revival. In fact, I have a book due out fall of 1991 from Harper that will be called The Archaic Revival.

And when we talk about re-empowering these models from 15,000–20,000 years ago, we’re talking about partnership societies, a kind of nomadism, and especially shamanism, which is the integration of medicine, politics, and psychotherapy into the figure of a single individual who operates as a kind of exemplar within a society, and gives it cohesive direction and a sense of itself. And I see this happening in many different venues and guises.

12:01

McKenna

Yes, well, I think time is the domain that science has been least successful in dealing with, and this accounts for its inadequacies. You could almost describe science as that human endeavor which is concerned with processes which are independent of time. In other words, no legitimate scientist believes that an experiment done on a Tuesday will give different results than an experiment done on a Saturday. Science deals with time-independent phenomena. The problem is: in our own lives—our love affairs, our investment practices, historical vicissitudes—these things all are time-dependent.

And so what I’ve suggested is that probability theory—which averages many measurements to get a picture of a phenomena—is actually only adequate to the more coarse-grain phenomena in the universe, and what we need is a theory of what I call the ebb and flow of novelty. I take this word from Alfred North Whitehead; the idea that novelty is something which comes and goes on many temporal scales. It ebbs and flows within the context of a moment, a month, a millennium. It’s really the Eastern notion of the Tao, but stripped of some of its mysteriousness.

You see, I think that when we take a whole-systems view of the universe and look back through time, what we see is what I call the conservation of novelty: that the closer you get to the present moment, the more novelty there is in the world, and the more it tends to preserve itself and pass itself on. So the evolution of life out of non-life, the evolution of culture out of animal existence, the evolution of electronic culture out of previous print culture—these are steps along the path of the generation and conservation of novelty.

And the reason this idea is important is because it offers a context for the historical experience that we’re undergoing. If you go to the academies and ask, “What is history?” you’ll be told that it’s a trendless fluctuation. Well, if it’s a trendless fluctuation, it’s the only trendless fluctuation that has ever been identified in nature. And I want to suggest that actually it is not trendless, it is a process of knitting things together, folding one phenomenon into another, bringing distant peoples, languages, and technologies into ever closer association with each other, leading to the idea that history arises out of the natural world and points itself toward a kind of millennial conclusion.

I don’t believe we can look into the future five hundred or a thousand years and imagine human societies as we have known them with our infantile and primate politics and so forth. I think that history is actually an extraordinarily brief and self-transcending state. It only lasts perhaps a thousand generations. Now, of course, to an individual whose life is as ephemeral as that of a mayfly, a thousand generations seems like a long time. But from the point of view of the forces that have built this planet—subduction of tectonic plates, glaciation, and this sort of thing—a thousand generations is the wink of an eye. So part of this spiritual revolution that’s taking place, I think, is the dawning intuition on the part of many people that history is a process with a finite duration, and that actually—perhaps within our lifetimes, certainly within the lifetimes of our children—the human adventure is going to be transformed almost beyond our ability to recognize it.

17:08

McKenna

Well, synchronicity in Jung’s theory was a curious juxtaposition of a psychic event (like the thought of an old friend or something like that) and an event in the so-called exterior world (such as the old friend suddenly calling on the telephone), so that it gives the impression that psyche and world are somehow contiguous with each other. And I think this is true. I think that one of the great truths that has been lost by the prodigal journey into history is the truth of the seamlessness of reality and existence; that the ego is the great boundary definer, the great divider of phenomena, and it’s a kind of necessary evil.

I’ve written a book for Bantam that will be out early in 1992 called Food of the Gods, and there I argue based on my experience with preliterate people in South America taking hallucinogenic and psychedelic plants. I argue that, sociologically speaking, these hallucinogenic plants are almost like inoculation against the formation of ego; that ego is like a calcareous tumor that begins to grow within the structure of the psyche when there is not repeated contact with the kind of boundary-dissolving ecstasy that traditional preliterate tribal people have built into their societies through the institution of shamanism, and then through the institution of group use of psychedelic plants. The great fall into history, I believe, was occasioned by the slow fading of the use of these plants in the prehistory of the Middle East. So history is a kind of descent into a lower dimension where everything is seen through the distorting lens of the ego.

Our present problems in the world—we have the technologies to solve our problems. We have the financial punch, we have the communication and educational systems necessary to inform people. What we lack is the cohesiveness of mind. It’s that we must change our minds—about racism, about how we relate to feminism, about how we relate to the exotic and the unfamiliar. It’s a mental gymnastic act that must be performed. And so I have spent a lifetime looking at these preliterate societies that use hallucinogenic plants, because what I see there is a dynamic, a kind of working out of the human dimension in a context of nature, that leaves both intact.

20:52

McKenna

Oh yes. Even in today’s high-tech world, 85% of all prescription and over-the-counter drugs can be traced to a botanical source of some sort. This is why my partner Kat and I, as our real-world political work, have founded and manage a botanical garden in Hawaiʻi whose mission is the rescue of medically important plants from preliterate cultures in the warm tropics.

You see, now there is a certain amount of understanding of the danger of clearing the rainforests, and perhaps these very large conservation organizations and international lending agencies like the World Bank and the IMF, they may eventually get their act together and halt the clearing of the rainforest. I mean, this would certainly be my hope. But even if the rainforests are preserved, what will not be preserved is the folk knowledge that preliterate tribal people have gained over 25,000–30,000 years in some cases. Every time we go to the Amazon, what we encounter are young people in these tribal societies desperate to move to the city, desperate to work as gas station attendants, outboard motor mechanics, chamber maids. And this means that, in a single generation, this vast repository of folk medical knowledge is going to be lost. So we are concerned both to physically preserve the living plants at our site in Hawaiʻi, but also (and of equal importance) to preserve the folk knowledge about these plants. Because once a species becomes extinct—you know, they say nothing is forever. Well, this is something which is forever. Once a species becomes extinct, it’s very hard to imagine that it will ever be brought back again. And as we deplete the gene pool of the planet, what we are eroding is the future availability of medically important compounds for our children. So it’s a very vital and important area to us to see that the information and the plants are preserved for the future.

24:06

McKenna

Well, you put your finger on it when you mentioned money. What happens is: the capitalist economies now penetrate everywhere, and a tribal culture where a man could previously have status by being a successful hunter or agriculturalist, now he must have an outboard motor, and he must work hard for that outboard motor, and metal tools, and transistor radios, and these kinds of things have become the status-defining objects in these societies.

Years ago, I did a study of food availability in the third world, and I discovered that, in a number of areas of the world where people are actually starving, if you look at the botany in those areas, there’s ample food available. It’s simply that the people have failed to define it as food, and sometimes for the most arbitrary reasons having to do with the capitalist system of values. I mean, people in an area will not eat a certain fruit because it has a short shelf life, and is therefore unattractive to a trucking industry. But these people are in the area where the plant is hanging on the trees! What difference does it make to them that it can’t be trucked hundreds of miles and sold in a capital city?

But, over and over, I saw plants—usually in the transition phase. These plants are designated as fit only for livestock. What this usually means is: this is a previously sanctioned human food that capitalism has now informed the people is worthless, and so they now define it as fit only for their animals. So their animals walk around in pretty good shape, and the people have very nutrition-poor lives.

26:22

McKenna

That’s right. We have no real agenda. We’re too small an operation to act as anything other than a repository. So we collect plants that native peoples tell us have medical importance, and then we make those plants available to any legitimate interested parties. And that could be drug companies, homeopathists, neo-shamanic healers in this culture, bach flower people—anybody who believes that they can medically apply these things for the maintenance of health, then we will cooperate with them. And we have a number of very interesting plants that have, since we collected them, been proven to have medical efficacy. One thing to be said about the AIDS epidemic is that it did give a tremendous impetus to looking at folk medicine again. And I would bet if there ever is an AIDS vaccine or an AIDS cure, plant botanical sources of this drug will be implicated.

27:46

McKenna

Well, there are a number of mushrooms with extremely exotic chemistries. The lingzhi fungus in China was used for centuries to maintain the health of the Chinese emperors, and a number of fungi sequester heavy metals and toxins. In fact, for the past few years, people in Germany and Switzerland have not been collecting mushrooms as they once did because the mushrooms have sequestered much of the radioactivity from the Chernobyl meltdown. So fungi clean the environment of toxins. And then, in some cases, they elaborate exotic chemistries of their own that have a medical impact. Ergot is the source of one of the major drugs of choice for migraine. And, of course, penicillin is a fungus. And these examples could be multiplied.

30:05

McKenna

Well, it’s an interesting question. Gordon Wasson—who was the discoverer of the mushroom cults of Mexico that were based on psilocybin mushrooms—pointed out that cultures are either mycophobic or mycophilic. For instance, the English are a tremendously mycophobic culture. To the English, all mushrooms are toadstools, and you shouldn’t touch them because they’re poisonous. On the other hand, the Italians and the Poles have dozens of words for mushrooms in their languages, and it’s very common in those countries for people to go mushroom hunting on weekends, and grandmothers teach their grandchildren the many names for mushrooms.

Yes, I’ve at times asked of my audiences: what mushroom is it that blooms at the end of history? Is it the mushroom of Teller and Oppenheimer and Fermi, or is it this shamanic sacrament that was the basis of the high cultures of Mesoamerica? I hope that it’s the latter, because in writing this book I mentioned for Bantam I’ve managed to convince myself that mushrooms were probably very important in the emergence of language and consciousness in early human beings.

As the early hominids evolved in the grasslands of Africa, we underwent a period of great dietary pressure—having abandoned our fruitarian ways in the treetops. And during that period when we were testing many items for food, including becoming carnivorous, we doubtless encountered many of these species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, because they tend to grow in the dung of the ungulate mammals—primitive cattle and so forth that roved on the African plain. And a very interesting thing about psilocybin is that, at low doses, it actually increases visual acuity. These are doses so low that you feel no psychological effect at all. But in rigorous testing situations it’s been shown that there is an increase in visual acuity. Well, you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to realize that if there is a food in the food chain of a hunting animal that increases its visual perception, then the animals that accept that food into their diet are going to be more successful hunters, and consequently outbreed the individuals that don’t accept this item into the diet.

Well then, at slightly higher doses, psilocybin creates what is called CNS arousal: central nervous system arousal. This means a kind of generalized restlessness and state of energy within the body, and it also means sexual arousal, which means a heightened sexual activity on the part of those individuals that are accepting this item into the food chain. Again, a factor tending to cause them to outbreed the non-mushroom-using other members of the population.

And then, finally, at what we would call a psychoactive or psychedelic dose, psilocybin—for reasons unstudied—seems to act on the language-forming areas of the brain. So you get outbursts of spontaneous glossolalia and singing and chanting. This may be the catalyst for language in the original African situation in which human beings were evolving.

Generally speaking, after twenty-five years of looking at these things, the way I’ve come to see these psychoactive plants that are in use by these preliterate tribal peoples is as catalysts for the imagination. And the imagination and its products is what really distinguishes us from the rest of animal nature. I mean, we (15,000–20,000 years ago) got the knack of exteriorizing our mental conceptions—first as throwing sticks and chipped flint and crude carvings, but the process is unbroken right up to the NeXT computer, the space shuttle, and what have you. We seem to be the creature that makes its own ideas manifest in matter.

And I think that this catalysis of the imagination is what makes these psychoactive compounds so interesting. You’ll recall, Michael, that in the sixties psychoactive drugs were called “consciousness-expanding.” Well, if we take that notion seriously for a moment, then I think we’re going to have to ask ourselves some deep questions about these shamanic sacraments. Because it’s the absence of consciousness that is our greatest peril. It’s the absence of our ability to communicate to each other, or to inspire masses of our fellows to embark on a sane political agenda, that is pushing us toward Armageddon. So if we really believe that there is any factor in the environment which expands consciousness, I think it would behoove us to give it a very careful going-over.

36:38

McKenna

Yes. They were made illegal in the sixties at the same time LSD was made illegal, although no evidence was ever presented vis-à-vis the toxicity or social dangers posed by psilocybin. What happened was: in that era of great social concern and hysteria over the millions of doses of LSD that were being sold into society, all hallucinogens of the indole type were made illegal in spite of the fact that many of them had never even been available in American society.

The consequences of this are that, for over twenty-five years, science—which prides itself on its unflinching ability to explore all phenomena with a dispassionate eye—has actually been legally barred from exploring these compounds, which (if you go back to the original literature) the psychotherapeutic community anticipated these things with the same kind of fervor that penicillin was received by the orthodox medical community, or the splitting of the atom had on the physics community. It’s really to science’s great discredit that the fears of government were translated into policies which actually directed pharmaceutical research over the past twenty-five or thirty years.

I always think back to the evolution of anatomy in western Europe. The science of anatomy was created by people who stole bodies off the gallows in order to dissect corpses, because the church forbade the dissection of corpses—this was thought to be witchcraft or something—and it was the scientific curiosity of Renaissance geniuses like Vesalius that created the modern science of anatomy. And if scientists of our own age had a similar kind of courage, I think you would see more argument against this blanket ban into psychedelic research. I’m not advocating a societal wave of psychedelic experimentation, but I certainly think that qualified researchers—who are, in a sense, deputized by the institutions that the rest of us have put in place—those scientific researchers should be able to go where their curiosity leads them.

40:04

McKenna

Well, I think that we are the most ego-bound culture that has ever existed. And that, if you look at the psychedelic experience—not mine or yours, but thousands and thousands of these experiences, and try to say what do they all have in common—what is the generic aspect of the psychedelic experience? It’s boundary dissolution. And we in Western culture have a lot of problems with boundary dissolution. It’s the most frightening thing we can imagine. The way in which we are obsessed by private property, and stuff, and legality, and what’s mine and what’s yours means that something which dissolves those boundaries, or makes them appear irrelevant, is just so corrosive to our social institutions that we react with fear.

This goes back to what I was talking about earlier in our conversation: the fact that the early partnership style of human organization—that existed up until, let’s say, 10,000 years ago—existed because of the presence of the institution of psychedelic shamanism. And when that faded in the culture’s antecedent to our own, then you suddenly get the appearance of the ego, the abandonment of the nomadic lifestyle, the invention of agriculture. And the invention of agriculture brings with it the overproduction of food, which then creates the problem of hoarding. The most advanced building in the world of 10,000 years ago was the grain storage tower at Jericho. And it was specifically built to keep somebody from eating that grain, and to provide that grain for somebody else. And at that same point in history where agriculture and heavy wall-building appears, we see suddenly the accumulation of many chipped flint points around habitation sites. It means that hunting wasn’t going on, but warfare was going on. And so the whole panoply of Western cultural institutions—patriarchy, male dominance, agriculture, urbanization, hierarchy—all arise as the old psychedelic shamanism fades.

That’s why I think the notion of an archaic revival is so powerful. Because I think if we continue with the old dominator model, then we’re going to create insoluble problems for ourselves. We have to think back to the techniques and approaches of the high paleolithic if we want to work ourselves out of the jam that we’re in.

43:49

McKenna

Yes. I’m not advocating any kind of rollback or anything like that. I think we’ve gone much too far for that to happen. I’m fond of saying that the only escape is what’s called a forward escape. We cannot reject technology. We cannot pretend that we are not five billion strong. But we can accept and explore the styles of that previous era. Obviously, the feminine was given a much more balanced emphasis in that previous situation. Obviously, the spirit was an accepted and recognized part of life.

I mean, I like to think that the whole rise of Gaian consciousness is rooted in the awareness that nature is a kind of minded world-soul, and that the awareness and the ability to connect to that minded world-soul is what we lost when we descended into history. And I’m not particularly airy-fairy in my approach to this. This is what I’ve seen by spending time with these cultures that live much closer to the land and to great nature than we do.

Nature is some kind of communicating, language-generating engine. The way plants and animals look, the chemicals they shed into the atmosphere, the way they relate to each other through symbiosis and so forth—nature is some kind of great piece of integrated linguistic machinery. And we have fallen out of that system, and we believe that it is inert—or, even worse, ours to devour and ravage as we see fit. And the consequences of this are fatal; simply fatal. I mean, we have invented a sin for which there isn’t even a word, which is the sin of looting the future so that your children have no future. I mean, no culture on Earth has been so insensitive to its own survival as we have become. And this is because we are completely disconnected from this sense of a living dynamic world in which people have a place, but it is only their place, and it has to then be integrated with the larger systems in which it’s embedded.

And this is really what the psychedelic shamanism informs one of. And it’s not a cult of the primitive. Primates have always been into dominance hierarchies and male dominance and that sort of thing. But I believe that, for a brief period of 10,000 or 15,000 years—because of the elaboration of these relationships to these boundary-dissolving plants—a whole different style of relating was able to evolve within the protohominid line, and that’s what created language, and caring, and notions of self-sacrifice, and notions of beauty, and poetry. And then it was lost, and life became once again about dominance hierarchies and flimflam and that sort of thing. But the values and the goals that we all hold as the highest values that human beings are capable of were all generated in that tribal situation 15,000 or 20,000 years ago. To give life meaning, we’re going to have to return to the essence of those styles.

48:33

McKenna

Yes. Well, this is my favorite animal example, because what I noticed when I was in the Amazon with these tribal people who use a psychedelic brew called ayahuasca: they lay great stress on singing while under the influence of these plants. But then they critique the songs—but not as musical performance, but as pictorial performance. So that people will say, “I liked the blue part where you had the silver stripes and the chartreuse polka dots.” Well, to an anthropologist coming in from the outside, this is very puzzling. We thought we just heard a song, but this person criticizes it as though it were a work of pictorial art like a painting. And then I realized that the neurological shift in the brain that was being created by these plants was somehow allowing language to be processed as a visual rather than an audio phenomenon.

Well, you know, it’s said that if you stand in somebody else’s shoes, you see what they mean. In a sense, you are that person. Seeing somebody else’s point of view is a much deeper kind of connection than simply hearing their point of view. Well, having made this connection, I then looked around at the animal world for a model for this kind of communication, and (as you mentioned) nature always provides a model, and the model I found was the communication system of the octopi.

Many people know that octopi change color. But I think most people think it’s for camouflage. It’s something very—protection, right. This is not it at all. Octopi have a huge repertoire of blushes, dots, traveling lines, textures, colors. And these are for purposes of communication. An octopus—which is a very soft-bodied creature; it’s essentially a very large mollusk. It divided from our line of development hundreds of millions of years ago. It’s essentially a naked nervous system. It becomes its linguistic intent. It doesn’t turn its thoughts into acoustical signals, it turns its body into a visible manifestation of its inner states. I like to say that the only way a voluble octopus can change its mind is by injecting the correction fluid of its ink into its environment.

And I think that this visual mode of communication that the octopus exemplifies is something that we could take as a model for the way we want our technologies to develop. We have always taken animals as the models for our technological development. The nineteenth century’s obsession with the steam engine and the railroad was nothing more than a love affair with the horse. In fact, the locomotive was called an “iron horse.” Well then, in the twentieth century, the bird of prey is the symbol both of the United States and the Third Reich, and we realized that technology in these stealth fighters and F-16s and F-18s. This is the dominator dream come true: to come streaking out of the heavens at Mach 3.

But I would like to suggest that the animal model for the future is this visually communicating, soft-bodied, essentially telepathic cephalopod: the lowly octopus that becomes its language and thereby eliminates ambiguity from communication. This is another way of dissolving the ego: by eliminating the ambiguities in our language.

53:20

McKenna

Yes, he has a wonderful presentational ambiance about him.

53:27

McKenna

There are others. That’s right. One of the reasons I’ve spent a little bit of time recently associating myself with the new technology called virtual reality is because I think that the real purpose of virtual reality would be to objectify (or make visual) language, and that we can change the way we relate to language by moving language more and more away from the acoustical, and toward the image that McLuhan said all those twenty-five years ago. It’s just taken this long for the rest of us to understand what he meant.

54:20

McKenna

Thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure.