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McKenna

How to slice into this pie? I try to never do it the same way because I don’t want to get bored, but that lays a sort of obligation on me that I’m not always able to meet. Two things, I think, are going on inside this rap as currently packaged. First of all, I’m very interested in talking about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution and values and institutions. And then, so that you don’t think we’ve just fallen into Fringe Anthropology 101, I’m interested in taking the insights from that discussion and trying to apply it to the modern—or postmodern, as the case may be—dilemma; trying to draw some implication from looking at human prehistory and the set of factors that were in place at the moment of human emergence.

And since I feel pretty much among friends and fringies here, it doesn’t trouble me to confess that my book, Food of the Gods, I really conceived of as a kind of intellectual Trojan horse. It’s written as though it were a scientific study—footnotes, bibliography, citations of impossible to obtain books, and so forth and so on. But this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists. The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep, rather like an abandoned baby or a Trojan horse, and they will open their doors to it and take it inside, only to discover that out of this very staid, rational discourse pour the self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace with their own agenda.

I feel like I should say this—it’s more for my ease than yours—that I reached the conclusions that I now espouse through skepticism, reason, rationalism, and tough argument. So it may sound ditzy, flaky, and soft-headed, but that’s just because you’re hearing it wrong! The guiding input was experience. And, in a way, what we’re gathered here to talk about tonight is an experience which is not only rare, transformative, challenging, but also (for reasons which we’ll probably get around to) illegal. So it’s a very peculiar situation. Very few experiences are illegal. And our models of the world are built up based on our experience. So if you make an experience illegal, you’re essentially saying it is off limits for model building. You can’t include that in your model, because it isn’t really there in some sense.

And this is the situation in Western society, vis-à-vis the psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being human as sexuality, personal independence, child rearing. These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation vis-à-vis the phenomenon of being. And a society which would deny that is a society whose secret—or maybe not so secret—agenda is the infantilization of its citizens. I mean, if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is? And are the people who made the rules, did they carefully, conscientiously, and at depth explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit for human consumption? Or was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear? I would submit to you that it’s the latter.

Well, first of all, I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics—especially in this case psilocybin—on humaneness, and then, if there’s time, maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it. I had a philosophy professor once, Paul Feyerabend—some of you may know his books—and he opened his Epistemology 101 course by saying, “I’m going to teach you what truth is, and then I’m going to teach you what’s so great about it.” While I won’t claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is—that you will have to find out on your own—but I think it is legitimate to discuss what’s so great about it. You know, are we, by any measurable index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience? Because if not, then really, the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there (speaking as a former member, of course).

Well, my notion of the way to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing—and I think one can show in fairly short order—that these things are not alien to the human experience, or ancillary, or the province of uneducated little brown people down in the rainforest, or anything like that. I submit to you that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings is central to understanding who we are and how we got this way. And if we can explore this issue and convince ourselves that there’s some merit in this point of view, then it will simply do more than rewrite the annals of a state science like anthropology. It will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we’re in the process of grinding into pollution.

So that’s the raison d’être for the politics behind it. Now, here’s the spiel. Some time in the last three million years, our remote ancestors, the proto-Hominids, were disrupted in their evolutionary climax in the canopies of the great rainforests of Africa. You see, most animal species evolve into a niche, tighter and tighter and tighter. We see this with termites and cockroaches and most life forms; this is what happens to them. Only if the niche is somehow disrupted or destroyed does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure. And this is what happened to us. Our remote ancestors would have lived happily in the climaxed rainforests of Africa in the same way that primates to this day live happily in the climaxed rainforests of Indonesia and South America, but for the fact that the dynamics of the planet—and this ultimately is, if we’re looking for a cause, or some people would say a villain—then it’s the climatological dynamics of the planet which began to limit these rainforest habitats, and a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa, which was grassland. It’s very recent. And under nutritional pressure, and under a pressure that was the result of this retreating environment, our remote ancestors descended from the trees and began to adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland. And they did this over a period of probably a couple of million years.

Now, I maintain—and if any of you are evolutionary biologists or anthropologists, this is the nub of my position; here’s what’s new scientifically—what they teach you about evolution is that it’s caused by mutation, which is a random process, which then meets another random process, which is natural selection. And out of these two random processes, lo and behold, you get sea urchins, birds of paradise, grey whales, and human beings. Now, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation, you will be told it’s cosmic rays: incident incoming hard radiation which can disrupt chromosomes, and then most of these mutations are lethal, some huge percentage of them. But a vanishingly small number of them actually confer adaptive advantage, and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on.

Now, what I want to suggest—and I’ve never seen it thoroughly treated by evolutionary thinkers—is that food is the unexamined source of evolutionary pressure. It can be. If you know anything about animal species, you know that most animals tend to specialize their diet. Insects are famous for this. If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar, you must give it the food plant you found it on, because they don’t just eat leaves, it doesn’t work like that. They have species-specific adaptations. Now, why is this? It’s because it’s a strategy to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue to discourage predation, essentially.

Well, so then what happens when an animal population, such as our remote ancestors, comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat or a limited availability of food? Well, what happens, if you have any sense, is: you start experimenting. You start digging up roots you never thought about before and chewing on them. You start eating leaves. You start eating insect protein. You experiment with the slaughter of small animals and so forth and so on. And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did. This is the much lamented transition from fruitarian holiness to predatory carnivorous messiness. But had we not been willing to lower our gourmet standards, we would have entered the fossil record at that point.

So here we have these proto-hominids foraging into this new grassland environment, beginning to beat on prairie dogs and stuff like that. And simultaneously, as we all know, evolving in this African belt environment were great herds of ungulate animals—proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes, many, many different kinds of animals. And one of the curiosities of nature is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of ungulate animals to just going out and making a deal with the raw natural environment. They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material when it passes through the double stomach of an ungulate animal. As a headline, what this means is: mushrooms grow in manure. And so our remote ancestors, testing for insects and eating small animals, would certainly have encountered the so-called coprophic or coprophilic (the dung-loving) mushrooms. And they would have tested them for food. Years ago when I was in Kenya, I observed baboon troops in this very environment we’re discussing, and their habit was: they were very interested in cow pies, because they had learned from experience that if you rush over to a relatively old cow pie and flip it over, there’s a high probability of beetles or beetle grubs under there, and so these were vectors for food-getting. I did not observe mushrooms in Africa, but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon, and they can attain the size of a dinner plate. I’ve never seen them in cultivation quite that large. But you come out after a hard rain, and these things are landed like little flying saucers or frisbees in the meadows. They would certainly have been tested for their nutritional potential.

And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals in nature—including, as far as I can tell, all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature—psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics which implicate it, to my mind, very strongly in the catalyzing of the emergence of humanness out of proto-hominid and hominid organization. And it works like this. It’s relatively easy to understand as major scientific breakthroughs go. At least you’re not going to be asked to do any partial differential equations this evening. Psilocybin, in very low doses—doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low, you could conceivably forget you had done it and just go out and shop and fiddle around—but at doses so low that they do not register as a psychedelic experience, psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity. Roland Fischer did this work in the late fifties and early sixties, and they built an experimental device where a person who could not be seen, by turning a crank—there were two parallel bars—and by turning a crank, this person could rotate one of the parallel bars so that it was no longer parallel. And, lacking talking rats, they went to the next preferred experimental animal, which is graduate students, and they would sit a graduate student down in front of this device, give them a very low dose of psilocybin, and then put a buzzer in their hand and say, “When the two bars are no longer parallel, push the buzzer.” And Fischer collected large amounts of data which showed that the people who had taken the psilocybin (and the other people were given placebo, of course) could detect this deformation long before the un-stoned subjects were able to do so. And Fischer, who was a totally straight European scientist—in fact, of Viennese—when I talked to him about this stuff, he was very cagey and he was funny. In fact, he said, “ell, you see, it’s very interesting. Apparently here we have data which argues significantly that we are perceiving reality better with the drug than without the drug!” Yes, yes. For him that was a joke. I mean, he never did anything with it. It was just a throwaway line. But it stuck with me.

And I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you are a hunting animal in a situation of nutritional pressure, as our remote ancestors were, and there is a food in that environment which will give you better vision, then by God, the animals which accept that item into their diet are going to be more successful hunters than the ones that do not. And consequently, they will outbreed those members of the population that have some aversion to this exotic food—either they don’t like the look of it, or they don’t like that it grows in manure, or they don’t like the taste of it. But those who accept it as a dietary item will be more successful at getting food, and consequently more successful at raising their offspring to sexual maturity. And that’s the name of the game in Darwinian evolution. You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity. Then the genes flow forward. If you fail in that, you get an F in the evolution game.

Well, okay, so visual acuity, that’s all very fine. But psilocybin has other properties which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity. If you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin—and this is typical of many indoles, many of which are hallucinogens—you get what is called CNS arousal: central nervous system arousal. You all know this feeling. It’s the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order. It’s that you do not sleep, you are very restless, you are very alert, your attention is scanning, scanning, scanning. And in highly sexed animals, like primates, arousal means exactly what it sounds like: it means erection in the male animal. And now, isn’t that interesting? That is a second factor feeding back into this increased success with offspring business. Not only are you a better hunter, but you’re a more highly sexed creature. And you’re having more of what straight anthropologists refer to as successful copulations—an amazing phrase, actually—meaning of course that impregnation is a consequence of this sexual activity.

Now, the other thing that psilocybin does at or slightly above this arousal level—and this is very important for the argument—is it causes what I call boundary dissolution. And boundary dissolution in human beings, like you and me, means ego loss. And I believe that this would have promoted a social and sexual style based not on monogamous pairing, but on orgy. The scenario is fairly easy to imagine. It’s that these remote ancestors of ours would take these mushrooms, probably at the new and full moon. The thinking is that ritual was originally lunar timed. And then they would—and we’re talking about nomadic groups of people, probably no more than 80 to 100 people. And then there would be group sexual activity. Now, an interesting social consequence of orgiastic social styles (besides a whole lot of fun, of course) is it’s impossible to trace lines of male paternity in that kind of a situation. You see, women know whose children are whose, because they see the child come out of their body and they nurse the child. But men do not in that situation have their children; “my children.” What they have are “our children”—the tribal group.

And this boundary-dissolving thing, let’s dwell on this for a moment, because this is central to my argument and it has political consequences for our own lives. All primates—clear back down into squirrel monkeys and lemurs—all primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies. And what this means is that the males with the longest claws, the hardest muscles, and the meanest dispositions take control of everybody else. Women, children, weaker males—everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha males of the pack. This is true, as I said, of squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, so forth and so on. It is also true of us sitting here in this room. This is a male dominance society. I mean, there’s a lot of complaining and hair pulling about it, and there’s a political alternative in the form of the women’s movement and feminist sensitivities. But for most people, male dominance is the rule.

Well, I would like to suggest that our peculiarly discomforted relationship to reality is a consequence of the fact that, for a long period of time—perhaps as short as 20,000 years, perhaps as long as a million years—as a species (and not consciously) we accepted into our diet a drug that had the consequences of suppressing male dominance. That this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet. The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumor, or a growth, if you do not have regular recourse to the cure. And the cure is psilocybin, and the boundary-dissolving sexual and social style which it carried in its wake. So the reason that we as a people are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise, a perfect world some time in the misty past, is not—you know Mircea Eliade called it the nostalgia for paradise, and thought it was a kind of a longing that had no basis. But I think that it’s entirely a memory of a period when male dominance was chemically suppressed, ego was chemically suppressed—and by male dominance and ego, I don’t mean to lay this entirely on men. I mean, I would wager probably everyone in this room has more ego than they need, certainly starting with me. And that’s part of the paradox that you’re supposed to enjoy in this. You know, the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego.

So essentially, you know, what happened was a chemically-driven leap in evolution as a consequence of the suppression of these behaviors that favored male dominance. As a species, we would have continued with male dominance forever, had it not been for psilocybin in the diet. And it established a situation in which, in less than two million years, the human brain size doubled. This is without contest the greatest mystery in the whole of evolutionary theory. Lumsden, who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, called the doubling of the human brain size in two million years the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. Well now, it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter or the pancreas of an elephant. But notice that it is the organ which created the theory of evolution itself, and all other theories! So that we’re getting a little topological here, folks. There’s something fishy going on. What was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size?

Well, I maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego, and their reinforcement in this situation of nomadic pastoralism. And that there was a period—let’s call it from the melting of the last glaciers in Çatalhöyük, 6,500 B.C.—there was a period when men and women were in balance with each other, children and adults were at peace with each other, and human beings and the planet were at peace with each other. And then it was lost and we fell into history. You know, the long slog toward Armageddon is what was initiated in its place.

Well now, if it was so wonderful, why would anybody ever let go of it? Why was it lost? Well, we have to go back to the very forces which created this situation. Remember, I said it was the climatological dynamics of the planet created the grasslands in place of the rainforest. Continuation of those processes turned those grasslands into desert. And where there once were waterholes, running rivers, grasslands, and vast herds of animals and their human symbiotes, suddenly there was encroaching desert, fewer waterholes. The mushrooms began to be seasonal, began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains. The great mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon became solsticeal, and then equinoctial, and then, you know, biennial or something, Anyway, you get the picture: it was fading.

And I don’t think people took this lying down—no pun intended. I think that there was great anxiety about the fading of the mushroom and the loss of the sacrament. And so these people searched for a strategy for preservation. Well, in a world without refrigeration, there is only one—well, no. There are two strategies for preservation of a delicate food like that. One is air drying, which is not terribly satisfying, because as soon as a rain cloud comes along, your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air and turns yuck. And so the only real option is preservation in honey. And this was done, I’m sure. It’s still done in Mexico to this day. In remote mushroom-using villages people preserve it in honey.

Now, the problem here—and this is a lot, my book goes into this kind of thing a lot; Food of the Gods. Because what Food of the Gods is really about are the hidden factors that drugs lay upon us that we are not even aware of. And if you are attempting to preserve a hallucinogenic mushroom in honey, what you have to be aware of is that honey itself is potentially a psychoactive drug. Honey will turn into mead. It will ferment into a crude kind of honeyed alcohol. Well, if the mushroom brings suppression of ego, group sexual activity, and the formation of group values, what does alcohol bring? Alcohol has two effects primarily. It lowers sensitivity to social queuing at the same time that it confers an exaggerated sense of verbal facility. In other words, people turn into jerks behind it. I mean, you only have to go to a busy singles bar somewhere here in Boulder, and you will see the alcohol ambiance being acted out right in front of you. And, you know, it’s perhaps not so true of our generation, but I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in Western civilization unless they were juiced. Because Christianity was laying such a heavy trip on everybody and, you know, people barely took their clothes off. In other words, you had to become blindly intoxicated to do what comes naturally. And I think, up until very recently, how many women have their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse? I mean, some huge percentage, I imagine.

So that is the story, basically, of the fall into history. The loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time that we were inventing agriculture. And agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relationship to each other on two unrelated levels. First of all, you suppress orgy because, once you have agriculture, it’s no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt. It’s all about getting up before dawn and going out and hoeing the weeds out of the crops. So it doesn’t promote a party mentality. The other thing is that, as human mental capacity was evolving—remember that exploding brain size—as human mental capacity was evolving, women in these nomadic groups began to notice a curious fact. Which was: every year they would return roughly to the same place as they had been the year before, and in the discards from last year’s camp, in the midden, they would discover food plants growing. And some brilliant woman or group of women put it together and said, “Aha, we buried food here last year, and now there is food here. Must be something about putting food into the ground that gets you food.” In other words, they were able to cognize a cause and effect relationship that were separated over many months of time.

At the same time that women were putting this together, men were noticing that the act of sex had certain consequences nine months later. The same perception had different impacts on both sexes, but it was an ability to coordinate a temporally separated cause and effect. Well, once men got onto the notion of male paternity, they realized that these aren’t “our” children. Some are mine, some are somebody else’s. And from that notion you go to “my child,” to “my woman,” to “my hunting area,” to “my weapons,” to “my group.” You get it all, you see. The ego is born, and it is born in an atmosphere of complete paranoia.

The first consequence of agriculture—well, it has a number of consequences—but one consequence is: it’s a tremendously efficient way of producing food. That’s obviously why people got into it. What does efficiency mean? Surplus. What does surplus mean? Haves and have-nots. The most spectacular architectural edifice of 10,000 B.C. on this planet was the grain tower at Jericho. It had thick walls to hold the grain, and it had high walls so you could climb up on top of it and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it. Surplus makes nomadism impossible, because you can’t drag this huge amount of grain with you. So you get sedentary populations. And then, since the people who want the grain are killing your people in fury when they can’t get the grain, you decide to put a wall around the whole encampment. Now you have a small town. Now you have urbanism. Now you have the division between nature and secular society. You have classes. You’ve got it all. And I maintain that this is the long march into hell.

And our particular obsession with drugs as a species, I maintain, can be traced back to this transition. That, you know—yes, elephants love fermented papayas, and so do butterflies, and so forth and so on. But this kind of intoxication is not what we’re about. We addict severely to several dozen substances. Less severely to probably a hundred more. And we addict to everything. What we call romantic love shows a lot of similarities to hard drug addiction when you separate the lovers: sleeplessness, suicidal tendencies, bursting into tears, hysteria, loss of weight. You can’t tell whether this person is getting off heroin or has separated from their partner.

Well, if you take an individual who is alcoholic or has some kind of serious drug problem, current thinking is: this can be traced to traumatic abuse in childhood. This is what happened to us: traumatic abuse in childhood. We were literally torn out of a symbiotic relationship to the Earth by the forces of male dominance, agriculture, sedentary living, so forth and so on. And we’ve been trying to scratch an itch that we can’t find ever since. And, you know, money doesn’t do it, power doesn’t do it. Nothing seems to do it. We seem to be the unhappy monkey, and we take this unhappiness out on each other with a vengeance.

And, you see, what happened was: when the mushroom faded, the million years of pharmacologically interrupted patterns of male dominance reasserted themselves. But it was no more a foraging monkey with this style, it was a creature with language, tools, music, social organization. And suddenly it got very ugly, and people began fighting over the women, so we don’t want to have orgies anymore. This woman is my woman. Touch her, you die. And so forth and so on. And we are living out the legacy of this.

Well, before I talk about the social consequences of it for us, I want to go back to the question: what was so great about it? I mean, we’ve talked about orgy, but you can have orgy without psilocybin. What was so wonderful about that proto-historical mode? Well, this is where it becomes slightly more woo-woo, because what we have to talk about is: what is the psychedelic experience, anyway? And I maintain that if we’re talking about psilocybin—and we’re talking about taking it in nature, as these people did—that, you know, yes, first come the dancing mice, the little candies, the colored grids, and so forth and so on. But what eventually happens—quickly; like, ten minutes later—is: there is an entity in the trance, in the vision. There is a mind there, waiting, that speaks good English and invites you up into its room. And once there, you realize that this is what all the hoopla about the Gaian mind and the rebirth of the goddess and all that is about. It’s not a metaphor, folks. It’s a headline in biology. We are not the only intelligent minded species occupying this planet. We may be the only bipedal hairless mammal with intelligence on this planet, but there is something out there, spread through the grasses, the forests, the rivers, and the oceans. Our own emergence into intelligence took less than two million years. Life has been on this planet for a billion and a half years. And we don’t know how many strange pathways beckon, but at some point a kind of mind came into existence, and it is real. It’s what lies behind the religious impulse in our species. There really is somebody else sharing the local mindspace.

And I don’t believe we’re talking theology here. In other words, this is not—you know, in Milton’s wonderful phrase—the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven. It’s not about that. For me that’s a big question mark. But it is the goddess of this Earth. It is the biological mind. It is that all boundaries are illusions, and that life is a thinking, feeling entelechy of some sort. And we are just like a little droplet that has somehow escaped from the river of cognition, and now imagine that we’re the only water in the cosmos. Not so, it turns out.

The reason the psychedelic experience is so baffling and transformative, even as we sit here—with your heads full of Heidegger and Husserl and… I don’t know, Wilson Phillips and all this stuff—is because in contact with that, we have no more sophistication than our orgiastic, mushroom-munching ancestors. Civilization doesn’t give you a leg up on this stuff. In fact, it makes it harder to figure out what’s going on. Because we have defined nature as dead. You know, atoms screaming through empty space ruled by tensor equations of the third degree—that’s our picture of what nature is. That isn’t what it is. It’s a mind of some sort.

Okay, what is the implication of all this? Is this just some kind of fringe-o, anthropological revisionism? No, it isn’t. Because the fall into history and its consequences is at this point a loaded gun held to the head of the entire planet. We are about to pull over the soup cauldron. And if we do this, then two and a half billion years of evolutionary advance will be shot. Nobody else ever dropped the ball. So, you know, we appear to be vying for this peculiar honor. If we do not awaken to the consequences of ego, then we are going to run this system right over the edge. The whole thing which characterizes our dilemma as a global society is our inability to feel—feel!—the consequences of what we are doing. We’ve got the data: the ozone hole is disappearing, the planktonic life in the sea will die. If it does, that will disrupt the food chain, the world food supply will drop by 60%, everybody who isn’t white as a sheet will have to starve in that case, and so forth and so on. We actually toy, not only with our own extinction, but with the extinction of all life on the planet, and with the extinction of the idea of dignity and decency itself.

Well I’m not in this psychedelic game because I think it’s easy, or because I think it’s going to be a cinch. I’m in it because I think it’s the only game in town. You know, if hortatory preaching could have done the trick, then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the corner. If cautionary data flowing back to ruling institutions could do the trick, then sometime after Thomas Malthus people would have begun to hit the brakes. Nothing seems to work. We’re sick. We need pharmacological intervention. The ego is permitting us to slowly—not so slowly—commit suicide. And, you know, the fact that we cannot act collectively, that we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism—really, “all for one and one for all” is not our style. Instead, what we have going is a catfight. And, you know, no less a straight person than Arthur Koestler, in a book called The Ghost in the Machine, said humans are so wired for beating the brains out of woolly mastodons—that’s what evolution has equipped us to do! Not negotiate weapons treaties and destroy bacteriological factories. We have to force our evolution. We have to chemically restructure the primate brain so that we do not commit suicide. And the only way to do it in the time left is for the psychedelic community to stand up on its hind legs and roar—and, you know, maybe they’ll build camps for us.

But the point being: I think there’s a moral imperative to try what works. I mean, you know, in the sixties, psychedelics were called consciousness-expanding drugs—a good old phenomenological description. Well, if consciousness does not loom large in the future history of our species, then what the hell kind of future is it going to be? No future at all, I maintain. So if there is even the slightest iota of possibility that these things do what I’m saying they do, then we need to get Johnny quick on it and check it out, because we may be beyond the point of no return right now. Nobody knows how bad this ozone hole thing is, or what’s locked up at Rocky Flats or behind the iron curtain, or dumped in the Arctic Ocean. We may be past the fail safe point right now, folks. There is no time to lose. It is time to engage the powers that be in a little more serious dialogue than the “just say no” horseshit that’s been peddled recently, because we’re talking about the survival of life on the only planet that we are at certain that has life on it. This may be the site of a cosmic experiment with universal implications, and it rests in our hands.

Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people didn’t drop the ball. And you think you’ve got problems? Nine times in the last million years the ice has moved south from the poles, miles thick. No antibiotics, no electronic communication—nothin’! And I’m sure these people were miserable, and they dragged through it, and they lived, and they passed it on. Now we’re it. And we will be judged the lamest of the lame if we cannot come to terms with this and begin to talk about what is going on. This is not obscure.

As I said, I view the psychedelic experience as central to humanness as our sexuality. We cannot allow dominator institutions to infantilize us, and to tell you where your mind can and cannot go. We even have a piece of paper locked up in a vault in Washington, D.C. that guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well now, what could the pursuit of happiness possibly mean if it doesn’t mean the freedom to practice your own relationship to nature and its gifts?

So I think we have been entirely too casual about the importance of the psychedelic experience. This is—for one reason, because we cannot publicly get together and discuss it in detail. And one of the things that I think is very important about get-togethers like this is: if you will look around, you will notice that we cannot really be distinguished from the rest of society. Some of us live under bridges, some of us clip coupons. There is a wide spectrum of people here. But this is your affinity group. This is your community. Someone in this room actually has what you need. And I have acted as a filter, so out of millions living along the front range, here we have gotten it down to two hundred. I cannot go any further than that, folks. The rest is up to you!

Well, I guess the last thing I want to say, and then we will take a little intermission, and then come back and do questions afterwards, which is my favorite part. But I want to just for a minute invoke the psychedelic experience without regard to the evolutionary forces that created it, or the political institutions that suppress it, and so forth, and just say—in case there is some soul in this room who has never had this experience—that this is extraordinary news. We are not talking about something like a dream. It is not like meditation. No, you can’t get there by yourself. And Babaji is equally useless, because you and Babaji are starting from the same place in this game. It requires pharmacological perturbation of ordinary neurochemistry in order to see this mystery.

And it is a mystery. It is not going to be reduced to the firing of synapses, or repressed sexual desires, or day residues, or anything like that. It is the very thing which all these religions are yammering about. It’s there. It’s real. I mean, if you think that the world is empty of adventure, then you just haven’t been hanging out with the right crowd. I mean, on a Saturday night, within the confines of your own apartment, on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness, I guarantee you, you will believe that Ferdinand Magellan should take second place to you. You will see things which no human being has ever seen before, and that no human being will ever see again. That’s how big that universe is. The incredibly constricted spacetime locus of the here and now that evolution has forced upon us for survival purposes is simply one point in an apparently infinite hologram of explorable data that is the human world. I mean, the entire world of every science fiction novel and story ever written is minuscule compared to the universes of strangeness and peculiarity that are accessible to any one of us—if you will but apply the method. And if you’re not willing to apply the method, then you’re going to sweep up around the ashram till hell freezes over and not understand what is going on!

I mean, I think—you know, I’m sorry to be so hard on religion. I think it has its place. Its place is the inspiration of ethical behavior. Religion should teach ethical behavior. But it has very, very little to say about the mystery of being, other than that it’s there. And that’s not practicing religion. Practicing religion is dancing with the mystery, losing and finding yourself in the mystery. And people often say to me, you know, “Well, how does this relate to other forms of spiritual work?” Well, the answer is: maybe not at all. I mean, I’ve certainly taken a lot of psychedelics, and I think I see no sign of spiritual attainment or ethical perfection, or anything so la-di-da as that. I don’t know what this is all about, but I do know it’s ours. It belongs to us. We are the creatures of mind. And 95% of what mind is lies on the other side of the psychedelic boundary.

Ordinary consciousness is just like keeping the accounts of life. But there’s more to life than the account books. I mean, everything else is out there: the color, the affection, the humor, the terror, the mystery, the incredible strangeness of it all. This is the domain that we want to claim and explore. And if we can find the collective institutional courage to do it, I think this current planetary crisis will be seen for what it really is. And what it is, is: it’s not a dying. These are not the last rites for intelligence. This is a birth process. I mean, if you were to come around—if you’d never seen somebody give birth, and you came around the corner and it was in progress, you would be thoroughly, profoundly alarmed. I mean, it looks like an enormous tumor is making its way out of somebody, and they are being split in two, and blood is being shed, and there’s pleading and screaming and thrashing. It would be a real leap of understanding for you to say, “Oh, how wonderful! New life is emerging! This is the way we do it!” Well, this is the way we do it. I mean, we are in the birth canal right now of a planetary civilization. Literally, the amniotic oceans of five hundred years ago—that’s all gone. There is no frontier. There is no going back. The peace of the fetal environment is gone. And now, in transition, literally, the walls are closing in. You can’t breathe. You can’t eat. You can’t find your way. It appears to be the end. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is: that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the backside of your mind, you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people, spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven. God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind. And if we will but explore the human mind, we can reclaim these relationships with our own authenticity, and shed the childishness of historical existence and gender politics and all the rest of it, and move on to the real business of establishing a real civilization.

Thank you very much!

59:01

McKenna

Does anyone want to ask a question, or is it all just perfectly clear, utterly convincing, and…? Yeah?

59:10

McKenna

Of psilocybin? Bad effects. Somebody once said, “What’s wrong with DMT?” And I said, “Well, nothing—unless you fear death by astonishment.” But your question is a good one. First of all, I talked a lot about how what we have to do is destroy and ablate ego. However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever. And for these people, boundary dissolution is no problem. Their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them. I would say that they are at the contraindicated end of the spectrum. That, if you’re fearful already and fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion of what’s going on in your life at the paper box factory or something, then probably tossing in mega doses of hallucinogens is not the way for you to do it—or if you do, if you’re just bent on doing that, then I would say: do it in the presence of some kind of professional. And how you find a professional in this legal climate, you’ll have to discuss with me privately.

I don’t want to make it sound though—I mean, it’s a tricky thing. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s absolutely riskless. Physically, I think it’s pretty safe, unless you are odd in some way. But you need to know. You don’t want to find out you’re odd an hour and a half into it. But the problem comes with the mind, you know? If you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that or that or that, then this is not your game. You should go back to watching Jeopardy.

The kind of person who is called to this is a person who has an exploring soul. I am not a courageous person, in the sense that you won’t find me shooting white water, you won’t see me rappelling down the faces of cliffs. But from the time I was the tiniest little kid, I was into the weird. What’s weird? Weird is the compass heading. And if you keep your compass always pointed toward the peculiar, the outré, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien, then you’ll find these places. The people who think life is all cut and dried and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality have never left the broad, swift stream of mundane thinking. But, you know, off in the byways and tributaries—

There’s a wonderful alchemical saying, which I generally mangle, but I think it goes something like this:

The tallest mountains,

The oldest books,

The widest deserts,

There you will find the stone.

And what it is, is: it’s a prescription for exploring weirdness. That’s all. It’s not going to be on MTV. It’s not going to be in, God forbid, Esquire. It’s going to come from, you know, doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands, and checking it out.

What I can’t give you—to return to your question—is: I can’t give you a guarantee that it will be fun. You know, the Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, “You don’t get what you want, you get what you need.” This stuff is ruthless. And if there’s something that you’re trying not to look at, it’s going to get you, for sure. But ask the veterans. Most people will tell you: you learn more from the bad trips than you do from the good ones. The good ones are ecstatic and connect you up to nature and other people. The bad ones show you your kinks and your limitations and your thought errors and that sort of thing. It’s not an easy row to hoe. That’s why I think there’s a little bit of social confusion about it.

One of the things I should make clear is: I really advocate high doses, rarely. I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic diddling where, you know, you take half a gram every day. All this is doing is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin. You’re not having the psilocybin experience, you’re having the tolerance to psilocybin experience. Really, the way to do these things is to do them rarely, so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium, and then just slam it. And this is amazing. I mean, I think that this works for all these psychedelics. I’m an inveterate cannabis user, and I wish, in a way, that I could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use, because I think the real way to do cannabis is, like, once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness, with the strongest stuff you can get, and then immense amounts of it. And, you know, people call it a recreational drug and a this and a that. Hey, done that way, it will catapult you into places where… I love it. The great place to get to on cannabis—and some people never in their whole life touch it—is the place where you say, “My God, I’ve done too much!” It’s not easy, folks, but it’s worth shooting for!

Basically what you should do is, you know: do some homework, read some books, talk to your friends, and then hang on Hannah. It’s very much like riding an enormous roller coaster. You know, once that baby rolls out of the station, do not stand up, do not try to climb out of your car, shut up, and hang on with the faith that most people have lived through this.

Somebody else. Yeah, in the purple.

1:06:44

McKenna

Well, having just heard that I’m a pothead, please ask them one at a time. What is your first literary question?

1:07:20

McKenna

Well, I don’t mean to imply that people first used it in low doses, and then middle, and then higher over time. What I meant to imply, I think they were using low, middle, and high doses from the very get-go, but they were using low doses to hunt, middle-range doses for orgy and ceremony, and truly high doses for this boundary-dissolving, tremendum. Second literary question?

1:08:21

McKenna

I’m not wedded to that. First of all, Çatalhöyük—for those of you who haven’t read the book or know about Çatal—was this immensely sophisticated civilization that existed in the seventh millennium B.C. We’re talking 6,000 years before zero. This civilization existed and was destroyed, and the characteristic of it is shrines dedicated to cattle. And in my book I argue that this was probably the last outpost of this partnership society. But it was still—I think the real golden age of mushroom use was probably from about 30,000 years ago to about 15,000 years ago. And by the time Çatalhöyük comes along, it’s a fading or yearly or seasonal thing.

1:10:16

McKenna

Well, my argument would be that people don’t take it enough and they don’t take it frequently enough. That there are a lot of people who really would rather not get loaded, but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group. So what they do—you know, you can always spot these people, because their first question at the get-go is, “Will I be able to drive?” I love this question! Because, you know, it indicates you’ve got a real tough nut on your hand—in every sense of the word. No, you will not be able to drive!

So, you know, one of the things that inspires me to do this is: I want to get to the people who’ve taken three grams of mushrooms, and the people who’ve taken 150 mics of LSD, and I want to convince those people that they never got close to what I’m talking about—even though they had a life-transforming experience and saw things totally differently. They never got close to what I’m talking about. And so what you have to do is convince people to take high doses—that’s to break them through—and then frequently enough that they don’t forget what the deal is. So I think if you take a psychedelic population and divide it into those who have done five grams and above, then you will see an exceptional slice. But not the dabblers. The dabblers don’t count. And we all can be—or at times—guilty of this.

And then—is that your last question? Does that do it for you? Or do you want to be thought psychotic? You choose.

1:12:24

McKenna

Well, I’d love competition. I mean, the competition is terrible. That’s the entire basis of my success. Yeah. You, because you were before—if you still wish.

1:13:10

McKenna

Why? Because—I mean, I don’t know if it’s preferable, but here’s the thing. People are going to think you’re a nut if you come down and say that Johann Sebastian Bach or Jerry Garcia is God. And this is what you will have to say if you listen to the Dead or the B Minor Mass. So what I’m interested in is: I want to know the thing in itself. Not what it does to Bach, not what it does to a river flowing through a forested valley—I want to see what it can do with darkness and silence. And I think most people think it will be boring, probably because they’ve been hanging out with these beady-eyed gurus, meditating—and God knows there’s nothing more boring on Earth than most meditations. However, sitting in a darkened room on five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms is nothing like meditating. And that’s where it can get at you.

My relationship to it is always one of: I want to know what it is. And so I think this sensory deprivation method is the only way to get at that. Other people might not like that. People say, “ell, you mean you put down the whole thing of going into nature? Isn’t nature the great affirmation and all this?” And the answer is: yeah, but it works for me sort of without the drugs. Plus—and this is just maybe my own weirdness, but I’ll share it with you—I have noticed that these things are incredibly disruptive of the ordinary flow of causuistry.

You all know the concept of synchronicity? Well, if you don’t stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged, the damnedest things will happen to you. I mean, you couldn’t pay me to go into an American city, even mildly loaded, because adventures beckon. Now, some people like that. You know, some people say, “Let’s take 500 mics and go meet weird people.” Nu-uh, not this cookie!

Yeah?

1:16:41

McKenna

Are you asking me: do I think a homeopathic preparation of a psychedelic would be effective? It would be homeopathically effective. I wouldn’t expect it to be experientially effective.

1:17:20

McKenna

But don’t you think that if that were true, and since in a high dilution like that no molecular trace of the original compound remains, that you have then just found the solution to the legalization conundrum?

1:17:55

McKenna

Because in a materialist world it’s assumed to be bogus. Right. Well, this seems to me not an abstract proposition at all. Let the best homeopaths succuss the strongest hallucinogens and set them out, and let’s give it a whirl!

Over on this side, yeah.

1:18:32

McKenna

Oh, I can hardly wait.

1:18:38

McKenna

Ah. Why am I not in jail? Hmm. Well, that’s an interesting question. Number one: I don’t know. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Notice that I use big words. I don’t try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan, like “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Nuh-uh, that—then they come. They come. So that’s one possibility: that simply if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual, then they automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources elsewhere. That’s one possibility.

Now, the other possibility is slightly more disturbing, but in the interest of thoroughness, let me raise it. Perhaps I’m sanctioned. Perhaps they decided we don’t really understand what this stuff is and we can’t have a mass movement. But let one guy just kind of keep the pilot light on, in case we ever change our minds about this. He will have kept the pilot light on.

And the other possibility, which is probably too naïve—but in the interest, again, of exhaustive thoroughness—maybe they just haven’t noticed yet. You know, Tim Leary, who’s a friend of mine, would address 25,000 people at a throw. My crowds are, you know, a couple of times a year they creep over a thousand. And I think the key is to keep it low key. And we don’t want to, you know, Dodger Stadium billed, or anything like that. It’s very good to atomize it and spread it through.

Now, the other thing is, you know: I advocate plant hallucinogens. And people always say, “Well, what about LSD? I mean, didn’t LSD change your life? Didn’t it change all our lives? Why aren’t you into LSD?” And the answer is: certainly, yes, and yes. The reason I’m not into LSD is not having to do with the effects of LSD, which I think are marvelous, but with the fact that a couple of enterprising second-year biochemistry students can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend. Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug? Suddenly, this is the realm of governments and criminal syndicates and revolutionary disruption of population. My brother and I wrote Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide If you work like a dog for six months, maybe you can produce two or three thousand hits. So that’s the thing. LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government. I mean, anybody with $50,000 worth of backing and two years of biochemistry could turn themselves into a major threat to political stability in this country. So they slammed that. They’re not going to put up with that.

The thing I love about the mushrooms is, you know, if you’re a dedicated mushroom grower, you produce this piddling amount. And if they come and drag you away because it is illegal, all they get is you. No syndicate collapses. No pyramid disappears. So it’s invasive and low-key and slowly spreading. The other thing is: mushrooms are—this is a cultural thing—mushrooms are inherently non-threatening. They’re absurd. You know, they’re what we put decals of on serving trays, and bath towels bear mushrooms on them. It’s a kind of silly thing. And so I think that they don’t really understand what a powerful hallucinogen this is.

Well, that’s enough on why I’m not in the can. This woman, yeah.

1:23:57

McKenna

Absolutely—if we could do it. I mean, I’m not yet convinced, see. I mean, you’ve got your gurus, but if you ever get close to any of these people in these gurus scenes, close enough where you can just say to them, “Look: level with me. Is this stuff as good as five grams in silent darkness?” And they say, “Are you serious?” The other possibility is technology—on two fronts, mind machines. The problem with mind machines is, you know, you have to smoke a bomber to put up with it more than ten minutes. I mean, you quickly satisfy yourself that this can’t possibly be it, because it’s, it is light, but it is contentless. Well, the psychedelic experience is all content.

The other possibility—and I’ve put in some time in this beat—is virtual reality. And I have more hope for virtual reality, because virtual reality is a technology that would allow us to show each other the inside of our heads, our dreams, our visions. And I think that, sufficiently perfected, it might have the consequences of these psychedelics. The problem is: it carries a huge amount of negative freight. You know that it’s not going to be a tool for us to show each other the inside of our minds. It’s going to be a tool to sell us crap that we don’t want. It’s going to be a tool for yet more realistic, vicarious, and gratuitous violence. It’s going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women. So it seems to me while it holds out the possibility of a technically driven psychedelic, it has a lot of negative freight. I agree with your premise, but I’m driven by a tremendous sense of urgency. I mean, why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin when you’ve got psilocybin?

1:26:39

McKenna

Well, how about this: maybe there’s something wrong with that metaphor. Because, notice it has to do with planes and transitions. It’s an inherently dualist metaphor. How about if we say there is no inside and outside, there is no with or without. You just use what you’ve got. Whatever works should be used. I spent time in India and visited all these people and so forth and so on, and I just became convinced that unless you were predisposed to believe in this stuff that it would never carry you where you wanted it to. And one thing about psychedelics: you don’t have to be predisposed. It doesn’t work for those who believe it works, it works for those who think it doesn’t work.

One last point, and then we’ll go on. There’s a story—maybe some of you know this story—of a man who lived by the side of a river, and he wanted to cross the river. So he practiced a siddhi of levitation so that he could walk across the water. And it took him forty years to perfect this siddhi, and finally he could cross the river. And Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood, and the guy came to him and he said, “Master, look what I’ve achieved. I can walk on the water to cross the river.” And Buddha said, “Yeah, but the ferry costs a nickel.” And that’s the thing: I think we’re not going to be able to replace this tool without wasting so much time in the act of replacing it that Armageddon will catch up with us. I think we have to humble ourselves so thoroughly that you have to admit that you can’t get where you want to go unless you form a partnership with somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie. And if you’re willing to partner up with this humble, humble member of the ecosystem, then you and it can fly to glory.

Have at it.

1:29:18

McKenna

Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend, especially in the late stages of pregnancy, doing anything that is going to wildly perturb you. And you know LSD was discovered in the act of trying to produce better drugs to induce labor. So that’s excellent advice: honor the fetus.

Yeah?

1:29:53

McKenna

Well, the true and honest answer is: how the hell can you find out when they won’t let you do research? It’s totally insidious. We don’t know. We don’t know, because they will not allow the research to be done. This is one of the reasons why I say that you should stick with shamanically sanctioned plants. Because we know, for instance, that people have been taking psilocybin in the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico for millennia. They don’t show blindness, tumors, miscarriage, madness, cataracts, whatever. That’s your human data for that. But you go to—let’s talk for a minute about something like ketamine: nobody knows. Nobody has any data. MDMA seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating interpersonal stuff. That’s a psychological issue. Chemically, what kind of data do we have? Six years’ worth of data gathered under duress. So to be safe, stick with the things that are sanctioned by human use. And then, in some more enlightened future, we will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are.

Yeah, finish up.

1:31:25

McKenna

No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying: take things which have been sanctioned by human usage. I mean, how about a plant like Strychnos nux-vomica? I mean, you’re dead in a minute and a half. And it’s a beautiful, wonderful plant. Why did it kill you? Well, because it’s jammed with strychnine. No, it’s nothing about its being a plant, it’s about having a repeated history of human usage. That’s what sanctifies it.

Yeah, the lady in magenta.

1:33:05

McKenna

That’s really an interesting point. I mean, it never occurred to me, but somebody brought it up to me. They said, “Have you noticed that the trips are changing?” And once you do ask yourself this question, it does seem to be so. And I don’t know whether—I mean, that’s a deep assertion. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on there. For instance, this goddess thing. I don’t think people gave the goddess a thought in the early 1970s, late 1960s. Now people have… some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess. So is it amplifying the general mindset of the society, and so there’s more goddess stuff there? Or I don’t really know. It’s a very interesting question. There are more questions than answers. I mean, this is definitely wide open stuff.

Yeah.

1:34:37

McKenna

We’re trying to restore the relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as 12,000 years ago. The ego has become a deadly growth in the historical societies, exacerbated by the phonetic alphabet, monotheism, modern science. This is like you’re getting sicker and sicker and sicker as you lay these things on. And so the idea is that if we could restore the original diminished role of the ego that it had for that period, however long it was, then we could begin to solve our problems. Because the problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice. And sacrifice is what the ego doesn’t want to hear about. And when you go to somebody and say, “Look, to save this planet, we’re going to have to redistribute income radically. That means everybody in this room is going to have less. We’re going to have to honor a whole bunch of cultural positions that we previously just were going to bulldoze over,” and so forth and so on. So it’s the diminishing of ego by any means necessary that lies to getting any grip on our problems. I mean, if we continue as we are, I think we have probably less than thirty years before life is irreconcilably screwed up.

Nobody believes that the future is rosy and wonderful. I mean, if you go to the people at the World Bank and the IMF and these people—who are straight suits, all of them—they have a set of curves which would stand your hair on end. When they propagate the curve of population, the curve of toxification of the environment, the curve related to the ozone hole disappearing, you see, you know, it’s finished some time in the next fifty years. They don’t talk about this because they don’t want to panic the vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all this. But they don’t believe there is any kind of normal future. And I don’t either.

I think we’re going to—business as usual is not on the menu, folks. We’re either going to go into an era of immense resource scarcity, regimentation, governmental interference in our lives, tremendous propagandistic efforts to make us do one thing or another, or we’re going to pull the plug on scientism and its stooges and the institutions which feed it. Capitalism is an interesting problem, more easily discussed now that communism is out of the picture. Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive. Because at this very moment we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less. And what’s the battle cry? Free trade everywhere! What does free trade mean? It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you’ve ever seen, and you will have no right to turn it away. Because in the name of free trade, crapola has to go everywhere.

It’s really—see, they try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance. Actually, the whole Marxist-Leninist socialist thing was a side dish. The real life-and-death struggle is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says: everybody has an innate worth that must be honored. Capitalism says: those who die with the most toys win. You cannot reconcile these two things. And nobody wants to talk about this. We’re still having the party over the fall of communism. But you go to the Soviet Union, or the former areas of the Soviet Union, and you see that what it was was it was a deep freeze for traditional culture. In Kurdisia and Turkmenistan people are basically—camel husbandry is what’s going on. Now, with communism on the rocks, McDonald’s will be there in five years, and Kmart will be following close behind. So I think we’re coming to a great crisis of our relation to our own fundamental institutions.

I’m not anti-capitalist. I think capitalism needs to sever its connection to materialism. This is, again, why virtual reality is interesting. You sell things made of light—not made of beryllium, metal, brass, steel and wood, but light. We’ve got all the light we need. But we have to stop making things out of stuff, or we’re not going to be around to tell the tale.

1:40:55

McKenna

No, I think that revolutions are made by percentages. If fifteen or twenty percent changed, then the example would spread. You see, we are not—psilocybin is the easy way to awaken: take a psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together. But the future is full of sledgehammers. It’s not going to end with a whimper, it’s going to end with a series of thuds and bangs. It could begin almost any time. We could get a hot, muggy day in Mexico City this summer and a million people would die. This thing in Los Angeles is a wake-up call. It is going to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy. There is going to be more starvation, more fascism, more dictatorship—unless we do something; until we do something. And how bad is it going to have to get before people say, you know: we’re doing something wrong. You know, people dance on the Russians, but you’ve got to admire people who have the guts to say, “We did it entirely wrong. 100%.” I mean, can you imagine in this country being able to—you know, I mean, it may be coming. It may be coming.

This character from Austin is a peculiar item in the mix. You know? I mean, I for years had a fantasy speech, which I always imagined that I would somehow end up giving. But it’s the speech where you say, “My fellow Americans, you have been lied to, screwed, and abused by these two criminal parties for a hundred years. And your only hope is to overthrow the Republicrats and create a decent world to live in.” Well, no Republican can make that speech. No Democrat can make that speech and be credible. It has to be somebody who wasn’t in bed with either of those forces. So I’m not at all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle. But, on the other hand, if change is what we need, then it’s probably not going to be a candidate that you and I can embrace. It’s going to be some oddball. So, you know, we have to recognize it when we see it coming.

Yeah.

1:43:57

McKenna

No, we don’t know what it is.

1:44:18

McKenna

Yeah, the great thing about it is it can talk.

1:44:27

McKenna

Good for you!

1:45:06

McKenna

Well, probably half at least in the room haven’t the faintest idea what this question is about. I’ve stayed away from this because this is the personalistic stuff, where I’ve created a certain model of reality based on a new way of looking at time, and I don’t want to go into it too much tonight. But I want to suggest something to you tonight, which is that: you know, at the very beginning of this talk, we talked about mutation and natural selection. And Darwin’s insight was vast and deep. And what he offered was an explanation for how rainbow trout come to be, monarch butterflies, redwood trees, herds of elephants, so forth and so on. What it doesn’t address is us. We are the weird bird on the block. I mean, yes, we’re some kind of monkey. But when you stand us next to our nearest relative, it’s very, very clear that it is not a very near relative. It doesn’t look like us much, certainly doesn’t act like us. What’s the deal with human beings?

And I think that—you know how all these Western religions have built in this idea of the end of the world, and they’re always running around expecting the Messiah or something? And this, to the scientific mind, is just the final proof of the pudding that these people have water between the ears. Because science just says, you know, that’s just ridiculous. But I wonder. I wonder. I mentioned just a minute ago these curves that, when you propagate them into the future, everything leads to the unimaginable, and it’s all within the next fifty years?

So I sort of think of human beings as analogous to iron filings on a piece of paper. And you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something, and there they lie, randomly arranged in heaps. Well then, you come underneath the paper with a very powerful magnet, and lo and behold, these little iron filings coherently arrange themselves into this beautiful double-mustache pattern, which I’m sure you’ve all seen.

Well, I think that there is an enormous punchline to the historical process that very, very few people suspect. And that what history is, is: it’s what happens to an animal who falls under the influence of a kind of strange attractor, and that we are being pulled into a well of transformative intentionality. History is not pushed by the causuistry of war, migration, imperial dynastic families, and stuff like that. History is pulled toward an unimaginable something, which is continuously trying to mirror itself in us. This is why these Egyptians say, you know: I don’t know what it is, but I just think we should really build a big simple building. I don’t know why, but I’m going to enslave 50,000 people and do it, and don’t ask me why. And this is the same force that reared Chartres Cathedral. This is the same force that created the space shuttle. We are in a relationship to an unseen something which we keep trying to image with our mythologies, our religions, our technologies, our epiphanies. And I think that it’s not so far away; that it isn’t 10,000 years in the future. It is some time in the next fifty years, and that this is what history was for.

You see, history is an incredibly peculiar and brief phenomenon. I mean, viewed from the point of view of biology, it’s less time than it takes for a new species to emerge. I mean, let’s call history 25,000 years. You know, in frame one, you’re chipping flint. In frame two, you’re hurtling an instrument toward Alpha Centauri. Like that, this happened. Well, what’s happening? It’s that mind itself is being pulled out of this creature—and it’s being given hands, and languages, and postsymbolic systems in order to image the unspeakable. The unspeakable; I call it the transcendental object at the end of time. It’s in another dimension, it’s in a kind of super-space, and what it casts into history is the enormous shadow of its eminence. This is what straight people call God. This is what all these visionaries are raving about. It’s that when you sink beneath the surface of ordinary causality and mundane ho-hum-nism, what you discover is this enormous transcendental object—which you could call it, you know, the sacred heart of Jesus, or the flying saucer, or the philosopher’s stone. It’s all of those things, and much, much more. It’s not only stranger than you suppose, it’s stranger than you can suppose. And it has called us out of animal organization over a 25,000-year period. We hang in the balance, and then we meet it. And we’re going to meet it. That’s the light at the end of that birth canal of transcendence that I referred to.

And now I see that our song is sung, our time is done. Thank you very, very much for turning in! Thank you. Thank you.

1:52:00

McKenna

Yeah, we’ll dig into this deep in the interim. I think it’s worth taking the time for everybody to just make a very brief statement about—you don’t have to say who you are if you don’t want to, but you can say what you’re hoping for, or why you’re here, or what your agenda is. Just so that if it turns out we’re 80% shrinks, or 80% ceramicists, or something, then we turn it that way. And those of you who are undercover, please stay undercover so you don’t alarm anybody—especially me, right? So why don’t we just start and go across in some reasonably logical fashion, which—yeah?

1:53:02

McKenna

Well, that tells you what you’re worth, doesn’t it? Oh, true. No, let’s not record it so people—and also, I had at one point thought I would be an art historian. That was one of my real obsessions. So I had enough art history to be trained in recognizing the evolution of motifs, how one artist passes on techniques and conceits to his students or his imitators, and all this art historical stuff. And I also had been very interested in Jung. And none of this seemed to explain the content of the psychedelic experience. I would get in there and say, “Well, how come I’m not seeing (A) archetypes, and (B) things which somebody else—you know, I don’t know, Dalí, Ensor, Caravaggio, Bosch—somebody should have seen this stuff and gotten it down.” And there didn’t seem to be a trail through the history of Western art of the presence of this dimension. So then I thought, “Wow, is it that nobody knew about all this?” I mean, Bosch would have given his right arm for a sheet of blotter, I would think. So it became for me like a mystery. Where is this stuff coming from? And what does it say about our humaneness?

Yeah?

1:54:50

McKenna

Well, there’s a lot of ink been spilled over Bosch, because he is such a startlingly radical painter in the context of his time. Many of his conceits were picked up after his life—Pieter Bruegel the Elder being the foremost exponent of it. He may have been an alchemical guinea pig. Who—let’s see… Fränger, I think, wrote a book called The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, in which he wanted to suggest that maybe datura use; that there was a cult called the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, which practiced ritual nudity, which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last night. It was a cult of printers. And it may be that The Garden of Earthly Delights was actually painted as an altarpiece for a congregation of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit. But this is all pretty murky stuff. It’s hard to get back to Bosch. He didn’t leave any written records. His birth is recorded in the parish church of the village where he was born. We know he was born sometime around 1450, died in 1516, but the details are pretty murky. Well, not to belabor Bosch.

So what I thought would be a reasonable way to do this this morning is to take the most extreme psychedelic case and experience, and describe it and talk about it a little, and then see what issues that raises. Because my experience with this stuff has led me to the conclusion that, in a way, it’s to be thought of—this other dimension—is to be thought of like a mandala. And different psychedelic compounds, and generously different kinds of yoga and different kinds of techniques of all sorts, land you in different parts of this mandala, but that what you’re always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala. And it’s simply my bias, my opinion, but I think the center of the mandala is probably the DMT experience—for a number of reasons. And so I thought it would be interesting to talk about it this morning.

First, let me talk about it physically. DMT is an indole hallucinogen, a beta—no, no, a tryptamine—and it’s produced endogenously in the human brain. This is very interesting. Very few psychedelic compounds are produced in the human brain. We don’t know what DMT is doing there, but it means essentially that we all are subject to arrest on a technicality, because we all are holding a schedule one drug. It’s sort of the ultimate Catch-22 where, if all else fails, they just say, “Well, you were holding anyway.”

Another interesting thing about it is that it’s incredibly rapid in its onset and in its disappearance. The whole trip lasts about fifteen minutes. This makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position. Because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn psychedelics, then you say, “Well, you have tried them, haven’t you?” And of course they never have. It’s like scientific denunciations of astrology. I mean, scientists love to denounce astrology, but find one who can cast a natal horoscope and I’ll give you a [???]. So DMT overcomes this objection. The entire experience lasts fifteen minutes. So you say to the critic, “You’re not going to experience it, and yet you’re going to carry on a pogrom against it? You won’t invest fifteen minutes to checking out what this is about? What kind of scientist are you?” So it has that social efficacy.

Now, the fact that it is the strongest of all hallucinogens—at least if there’re stronger, please keep them away from me. I mean, I don’t think anybody needs to get higher than that. I certainly don’t. I mean, I’ve at times come out of those places and said, “This stuff is illegal! It breaks cosmic law!” Of course, then Tim Leary told me that cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway, so it didn’t really matter. Okay.

2:00:18

McKenna

Well, good question. Yes, it’s the commonest of all hallucinogens in nature. It occurs in many grasses—Phalaris tuberosa, Phalaris arundinacea. It occurs in a number of leguminous plants—probably the most spectacular being Anadenanthera peregrina, this huge tropical locust-like tree from which the snuff called nyopa or ipina is made. That’s a tough way to get your DMT, let me tell you. Because there’s so much cellulose and other crap and corruption in the mix that you have to do like a tablespoon up each nostril. And the technique is: you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long, and you pour in this tablespoon of this stuff, and then you squat down on your haunches and you get a friend, and you put the tube up your nostril, and then the friend blows with the full force of his breath, blows the stuff into your head. Well, you fall—it’s like being hit in the face with a two-by-four. It’s like you think he kicked you. And you fall over backwards, you scream, you salivate, you get back up on your haunches, and by this time he has refilled the tube for the other nostril. And then after—

2:01:58

McKenna

Yopo, ipina, nipa—it depends on the language group. And the Waiká, the Yanomámi. It’s also called Vilka in the Carib language. And then, after… ten minutes or so, it slowly begins to form up in your head. But, you know, God! Your sinuses are in stat for sure. And it’s not very pleasant. And the other thing is: it never reaches the blinding transformative intensity that you can achieve with the chemically pure compound.

2:02:40

McKenna

No, no. Good point. If you orally ingest it, it will be destroyed in your guts. It won’t work. The Amazon Indians have encountered this problem and created a very sophisticated pharmacological strategy for dealing with this. You’ve all heard of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is DMT from one plant combined with another plant which contains a chemical which is called an MAO inhibitor. MAO is monoamine oxidase, and your gut is full of MAO. And its job is to take monoamines, small molecules, and oxidize them into a harmless byproduct—usually in indole-acetic acid, which can be shunted to the bladder. Well, when you take DMT orally, these monoamine oxidase compounds just grab onto it and destroy it. But if you take an MAO inhibitor with it—and harmine, which occurs in Banisteriopsis caapi, is an MAO inhibitor—then, lo and behold, it isn’t destroyed in your gut. Instead, it passes into the bloodstream, it passes through the blood-brain barrier—which is a very tight chemical filter that keeps the brain from being exposed to toxic materials. But these drugs can cross that barrier. And then what the ayahuasca experience really is, is a slow-release DMT trip that, instead of taking five minutes, takes about two and a half hours. And if you really know your psychedelics and your breath control techniques, on ayahuasca, over an hour or so, you can work yourself to a place where you say, “Lordy me, it looks just like a DMT flash!” And it does. But you had to do some hard climbing to get there. With DMT itself, once you push the start button, there’s no stopping it.

And I think it’s worth describing it. How many people have had this experience? So they can somewhat anchor it. It’s very subjective, obviously. But I will describe what happens to me, and then we can work out from there. One point that I want to make about these things is that the great strength of the psychedelic possibility is: it’s democratic. It isn’t that people of great spiritual advancement attain these states, or people who have studied under some lineage. It’s truly available to everyone. When I had my DMT experiences, I realized either I am incredibly special (which, there’s no other evidence to support that), or this is something that can happen to anyone. And that’s the more interesting possibility. After all, if it can only happen to very, very special people, then that lets most people out. But if it’s generally available, then it’s big, big news about the human condition.

Yeah?

2:06:27

McKenna

How did they find DMT in the human brain? Hmm. Interesting question.

2:06:36

McKenna

No, I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced. Well, I think they were studying—the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana; Christian and his group. They were studying fast reactions in the brain. For fast reactions, you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of structural change and return to their zero point very, very quickly. Their original thought was that DMT mediated attention. I mean, I’m talking to you right now—suppose there were a loud noise over here. We would all immediately project our mind onto the source of the sound. They thought that that was a neurological function mediated by DMT. Could be. I’m not sure.

I suspect it has more to do with the chemistry of dreaming. Once they discovered DMT and began to track it, they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm, means a daily rhythm in its production in the human organism, and that it reaches its greatest concentration in the brain around 3.30 a.m. in most people. Well, this is when the deep dreaming and the high REM states are really chugging. I suspect—I mean, lucid dreamers may want to argue with this—but I suspect that every night we go deeper places than we can ever speak of; that ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness, big lucid dreams are an inch deeper, but I think we go a hundred feet down every night into places where you cannot say anything about it.

Yeah?

2:08:40

McKenna

Let’s make that perspiration. Well—

2:08:52

McKenna

It’s hard as hell to find DMT. And this is a puzzle, because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry, it presents it as a trivial synthesis—much more simple than LSD, which it always presents as quite a difficult synthesis. But when you actually talk to workbench chemists, it’s tricky to make DMT. It’s especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization. So what you’re usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck, which looks sort of like maple syrup half gone to sugar. I wouldn’t get near that, actually. It means they botched their synthesis. What you’re hoping for is a white powder. However, in thirty years of chasing this all over the world, I’ve only seen it as a white powder a couple of times. Usually the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard, and what you get is a pale yellow powder, sometimes a pale rose or pink powder, and then the real rough trade is orange. And this is what you, if you’ve seen it, this is probably what you’ve seen. It looks like orange mothballs, and it has the smell of indole, this very sharp smell, which if you’re not a chemist and you’ve never smelled indole, when you reach in your mind for what is this like, you’ll say, “Well, it’s sort of like mothballs.” Not quite, but it has that same sharp, chemical…—and this is what you’re going to smoke. So a lot of people beef about that and say, “Well, it’s like smoking, burning plastic.” Yeeah, mas o menos. But it is a little bit like that.

The other objection to DMT that has been around since the sixties is: people say it destroys brain cells. There’s no evidence for or against this, but I would submit to you as—and the people who are neurophysiologists can argue with this if they disagree—but I think an excellent index for the low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system. And DMT clears your system in about fifteen minutes. If you take some compound drug or whatever, and 48 hours later you’re still taking hot baths and, you know, wishing you could have a massage, and sitting staring at the wall, then this drug is really sticking to your ribs. It means that your metabolic pathways have no way of dealing with it. They can’t grab it here, they can’t grab it there, and it takes a long time to leave your system. An example of this in the pseudo-psychedelic domain would be ketamine. You know, ketamine, the experience lasts about 45 minutes, but 48 hours later you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery, or you can have what are technically called fugue states: strange states of disconnectedness from what’s going on around you. This is not a very good advertisement for a drug.

Here, this woman, and then—

2:12:27

McKenna

Well, less. Because if you smoke DMT, the dose is approximately fifty milligrams, which is like the size of a kitchen match head. If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally, you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams of DMT and—oh, I don’t know—100 milligrams of harmaline. Now, harmaline itself is sometimes described as a psychedelic drug. I really think this is sort of misleading. You will have hallucinations if you take pure harmine, but only at doses approaching the toxic dose. Many compounds will give you hallucinations approaching the toxic dose. Bee venom, rattlesnake venom, stuff like this. That doesn’t mean it’s a hallucinogenic drug, it means you’re dying and you should take steps to correct the situation.

Now—yes?

2:13:50

McKenna

Well, DMT—one of the things that has caused me to think that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming is that one of the frustrating things about it is: you have this experience. Without doubt, the most bizarre, appalling, peculiar experience you could possibly have. That’s at minute two. At minute five you’re raving about it. At minute seven you can’t remember it. And so it’s literally like gold running through your fingers. You say, “This is the most amazing thing! This is the most amazing thing! What am I talking about?” And you know how you can have a very engaging, complex dream, and the alarm goes off, and by the time your feet hit the floor you’re grasping for it. And it’s literally melting before your eyes. That’s a very DMT-like presentation: the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away at the same speed.

Well, over time, and using tricks, you can drag a certain amount of data out of it. And what I’ll do is I’ll describe a DMT trip—and it’s a composite of maybe forty of these trips—and then you can see what you make of it. So this is—I’ll just describe it. I’ll be the graduate student, you be the guy with the clipboard. You’re saying to me, “So what happened?” Okay, here’s what happened.

I took—one takes… most people can get off in about three to four hits. Now, there’s a trick to it. Hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor, because you really need leather lungs for this. The great problem is that people will cough or not be able to hold it in. You take two hits—in a situation where your clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward when you need to. You take two hits. Now, many people miss the point. Because after two hits you feel completely peculiar. You feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia. All the air has been pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night. The colors jump up. The edges sharpen. And at that point people say, “Whoa, wow! It’s really coming on strong.” And then what you have to do is: you have to take one more enormous hit. And this separates the intrepid from the casual, believe me! And the facilitator doesn’t want to lean on the person. You say, “Dammit, take the third hit!” And they say, “No, I feel completely weird!” “I know you feel weird, but take the third hit.”

Well, if you can coax somebody into that, then what happens is: you close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm, brown, closed eyelid scenario. And then these colors begin racing together, and it forms this mandalic, floral, slowly rotating thing, which I call the chrysanthemum. This is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go by it. The chrysanthemum forms, and you watch it for like fifteen seconds. If it doesn’t give way, then you didn’t do enough. You have to do more. One more hit usually will do it. Well then, what happens is: it like physically propels you through this chrysanthemum-like thing. And there’s a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled up and thrown away—you know, that crackle? A friend of mine says this is your radio entelechy leaving through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head. I don’t know what it is, but something is being—

2:18:32

McKenna

Yeah, right. That’s what it is. And then there’s this very, very defined sense of bursting through something; a membrane. And on the other side—and this is now, remember, my experience—on the other side, as you break through, there’s a cheer. There’s a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side. And you know that Pink Floyd song, “The gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray.” Well, it’s that place. It’s those gnomes. And you burst into this space, and they’re saying, “How wonderful that you’re here! You come so rarely! We’re so delighted to see you!”

And one of the things about DMT that’s really puzzling is: in a sense, it doesn’t affect your mind. In other words, you don’t change. For instance, if you take ketamine, the very first thing you notice before the trip hits is: you notice that you no longer are anxious about having taken ketamine. You just sort of—anxiety leaves you. That means it’s affecting your mind. It’s doing something to the judgmental machinery. DMT doesn’t lay a hand on the judgmental machinery. You break through into that space exactly who you were before breaking through. And the usual reaction of most people is something like, aaaah-pakkkk! You know, you think, “God! Heartbeat? Normal. Pulse? Normal. Everything’s normal. Yeah, everything’s normal. Oh God!” Because these things are there, and they’re hammering at you, and they come forward. They’re like jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs. And there are many of them, and they come pounding toward you, and they will stop in front of you and vibrate. But then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is: they jump into your body. They jump into your body, and then they jump back out again.

And the whole thing is going on in this very high-speed mode, where you’re being presented with thousands of details per second, and you can’t get a hold on—you say, you know, “My God, what’s happening?” And these things are saying, “Don’t abandon yourself to amazement.” Which is exactly what you want to do. You just want to go nuts with how crazy this is. They say, “Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Pay attention. Pay attention to what we’re doing.”

Well, what are they doing? Well, what they’re doing is: they’re making objects with their voices. They’re singing structures into existence. These things are—and what they will do is: they’ll come toward you and then—and you have to understand, they don’t have arms, so we’re kind of downloading this into a lower dimension to even describe it. But what they do is: they offer things to you and say, “Look at this! Look at this!” And as your attention goes toward these objects, you realize that what you’re being shown is impossible. It’s impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful, and hard to manufacture. It’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be to the Fabergé eggs or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a UFO or something. Celestial toys. And the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive. The toys themselves can sing other objects into existence.

So what’s happening is: there’s just this proliferation of elf gifts. And the elf gifts are moving around, singing, and the whole thing is directed toward—they’re saying, “Do what we are doing.” And they’re very insistent. They say, “Do it! Do it! Do it!” And you feel like a bubble. And now this is subjective; I mean, only, you know, 5% report this, but it happens to me. You feel like some kind of bubble inside your body that’s beginning to move up toward your mouth. And when it comes out, it isn’t sound, it’s vision. You discover that you can pump stuff out of your mouth by singing. And they’re urging you to do this. They say, “That’s it! That’s it! Keep doing it!”

And the whole thing is like—you know, we’re now at minute 4.5 with this stuff. And you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There’s a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning. It’s sort of the, you know, hee dingua uaxapidi muldep didi-ding gyek wahaxikipik dingen wua havedepdam buaha gageytec. And this is accompanied by a modality; something seen. And they say, “Yes. Do it. Do it. Do it.”

And then, after a minute or so of this, the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself. And they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is: they actually wave goodbye and they say, “Deja vu! Deja vu!” Which makes no sense at all if you analyze it.

So then you come down. You’re now at minute 6 to 7. And you come down, and it’s like being more loaded than you’ve ever been. It’s like about a 700-mic acid trip. But you embrace it as totally down. You say, “I’m totally down. I mean, you look like a termite from Arcturus and the room is decorated in Amish quilts, but I’m completely back!” And then, over a minute or a minute and a half or so, the room just comes right back together. And four minutes after that, some people can give no account of it whatsoever. They just say, “I don’t know. It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me and I can’t remember it now.”

So that’s the basic run-through. Now, a lot of stuff is going on in there. First of all: what are these things? And why do they want you to do this strange activity? And what’s so great about it? Well, hmm. Well, first of all, who are these things? We can be good scientists and make a list of the possibilities, and then see what seems more likely. They could be a disincarnate race of hyper-dimensional dwellers who live in some kind of parallel continuum just over some kind of energy barrier, and they’re there all the time. You do have the feeling that they’re there all the time, that it’s ongoing, that you have just cut into their scene. So that’s one possibility.

Another possibility is that, behind all these psychedelics (and especially DMT), that this is not a drug at all, but it is essentially a pay telephone of some sort to aliens—good old National Inquirer type aliens—who are using this as a communication domain. Say, you know, “We can’t land on the White House lawn. That would create panic and hysteria. So let’s create a drug which, inside the drug, we will be able to deal with people.” And I was hoping that John Mack, who’s an expert on UFO abductions, would be here this weekend. I expected him, because I think this whole abduction thing is not going to be illuminated until they start giving abductees DMT and saying, “So is this what happened to you? Was it like this, or was it completely different?”

Well, so then those are the two possibilities that I sort of dealt with over the first ten or fifteen years of thinking about this. And then recently—hmm?

2:28:22

McKenna

It could be. What puzzles me is that the abduction thing is so non-psychedelic. It’s so cut and dried. And all this anal examination stuff with strange machinery—there’s nothing comparable to that, I’m happy to report to you going on in the DMT thing. But it may be, you see—

2:28:48

McKenna

Well, I’d be interested in looking at the possibility that DMT, under normal or abnormal conditions, could be sequestered in the human brain, and then some unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped. And—yeah?

2:29:36

McKenna

Yeah, that’s an interesting possibility. I also have migraines, or the kind called cluster headaches. And yes, a lot of—the nice thing about DMT is that it’s painless, but the sense of being split open and of the traveling scotoma, as they call these hallucinations that migraine people see. It’s related in some way, yeah. Yeah?

2:31:18

McKenna

Ain’t that the truth!

2:32:10

McKenna

Yeah, I think—no, I think that that’s a very interesting avenue to pursue, this thing about frequency. Somebody told me—one of the great things about this job is you hear a lot of weird stories—and somebody told me a story recently about… it didn’t involve DMT, it involved LSD. But this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of LSD, larger than they intended, and they went to a party. And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as partygoers. So they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall and watched this party rage in front of them. And after about twenty minutes of sitting there, they both simultaneously noticed it was a dance party, noticed that the music was sounding really strange, and everybody was moving very slowly. And as they watched, the thing came to an absolute halt and people were just frozen, and there was absolute silence. And at that point, the door at the other end of the room swung open, and an elf entered the room and moved among all these frozen people, and then left by the door he came in. And they both saw this, and they said that they could tell that it was—the people in the room didn’t know it happened because for them it occupied a microsecond. But this thing that was—you know, in Carlos Castaneda, who, God knows, is not the world’s most reliable reporter on these things. Nevertheless, there is this thing about stopping the world. So maybe it’s something like that: that there is, as you suggest, a frequency phase.

2:34:10

McKenna

Yeah. This sort of leads into the third possibility having to do with the origin of these things. And, in a sense, this is the hardest one to swallow. But in another sense this is the most conservative—in some crazy notion of conservative—the most conservative explanation. Because we have no evidence other than the tabloids that this world is being visited by friendly visitors from Zubenelgenubi or Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades or anywhere else. I mean, to my mind, the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming. The other possibility that there is some kind of parallel dimension in which these things exist is also somewhat poorly supported.

If we’re talking about something which thinks, something which can communicate, something which is intelligent, then we should look to ourselves as the source of it, because we are the only intelligent communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things. So that it’s occurred to me with greater and greater force, and largely prompted by giving DMT occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans. And when you say to them—to the shamans in the Amazon—when you say to them, “What is happening with this stuff, and what are those little things in there?” they say, “Oh, well those are our ancestor spirits. Didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits.” You say, “Hm, ancestor spirits. Let’s get this straight: dead people is what you’re talking about, right? These are dead people.”

And maybe because I was raised Catholic, I resisted this grim death. But I’m beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place is something that we might call an ecology of souls. That, is it possible to entertain the notion that at death you actually don’t just become worm food, but that something survives in some other dimension, and that it has this bizarre character to it, and that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity and their involvement somehow in our fate? Well, this is to me fairly mind-bending as a possibility. If what is awaiting us at the end of the twentieth century is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, then we’ve all been too conservative in our projections of what is going on.

Yeah?

2:37:28

McKenna

Yes, that there will be some kind of erasure of the boundary between the two. Well, once I had this idea—you know, I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities. And so that means you always look back through tradition and folklore to try and find something analogous to this. Well, there ain’t much, but there is one area that seems suggestive to me. And that is, as you all know: the Irish are a fairy-haunted race. They’re also an intoxication-obsessed race, at least in stereotype. Well, it turns out that—you probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory? Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven if you’re not bad enough to go to hell. So you put in a few chiliocosms of eternity in Purgatory, and then you get let into heaven.

Well, I had always assumed that this dogma, I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought about it. I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity. But when I began looking into this, I discovered that the idea of purgatory was invented by St. Patrick. And it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish, because the pagan Irish believed in the land of Fae. They believed there was this nearby dimension full of the souls of the dead surrounding us all the time, and that certain people with the gift of second sight could see this. So Patrick just said to them, “Oh no, that isn’t it. It’s purgatory.” and was able to push that on them so successfully that a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church to use in converting the pagan Slavs as well. So it’s an idea of a nearby dimension inhabited by disincarnate souls that is apparently very old, but very alien to our tradition.

Yes?

2:41:10

McKenna

Well, yeah, this could be. I mean, I’ve always felt that what biology is, is some weird kind of chemical strategy for amplifying quantum-mechanical indeterminacy. That, you know, macro-physical objects are not subject to quantum-mechanical indeterminacy, but organisms apparently are—especially thinking organisms.

2:42:10

McKenna

What you’re sort of saying is that natural laws only apply some of the time, which gives them a curious status as laws in that case.

2:42:34

McKenna

Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting is that there are so many large black holes in the universe that you come up with, you know, 10⁶ singularities. That’s a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate, I would think. I mean, what kind of theory is it that hands you back 10⁹ singularities which are exceptions to the theory?

2:43:06

McKenna

Ain’t that the truth!

2:43:47

McKenna

That’s true. It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the big bang begins with a singularity. And so then you have this whole vast interlocking schema of rational explanation, except that it begins with a hard swallow. You’re asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point no larger than a cross-section of a gnat’s eyelash. Whatever else one could say about that theory, I think you’d agree it’s the limit case for credulity. I mean, if you believe that, try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say, “Well, I’m not buying that!” It’s sort of like when you join the Catholic Church, you make a declaration of faith. Well, when you join science, you sort of make this declaration of faith that I do believe that the universe sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny, hot, dense dot. Unlikely, but who knows?

Yeah?

2:45:35

McKenna

Well, this is why I say the psychedelic experience is a boundary-dissolving experience, because it takes away past, present, cause, effect—all of these things disappear. Now, remember I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow-release DMT trip. And one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca—to my mind perhaps the most interesting thing—is that the style in the Amazon of taking ayahuasca is: people get together in a darkened hut at night, and they take it, and they sing. But the songs—they’re selling them at the table back there—the songs, when there’s a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs, they don’t discuss them like music. They discuss them like sculpture and painting. And they say to the shaman, “I like the part with the gray bars and the blue speckling. But when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white, I thought it was too much.” Say, what kind of a discussion is this about a song?

You realize, then, when you take ayahuasca: they see the songs. And now this is really interesting to me. Because you remember, in the DMT flash, they wanted you to use your voice to make objects. Well then, in the ayahuasca trance, you use your voice to control these colored modalities. And the whole thing is done that way. So then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of ayahuasca somehow allows for the ordinary signal processing, which is being shunted into the audio pathway in the brain, is instead being shunted into the optical pathway. This is what’s called a synesthesia. These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to people. But the synesthesia means that, you know, sounds are seen. Well, now what was this anything other than a neurophysiological curiosity? Well, I maintain it is, because I think that a language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathic language.

If you thought much about telepathy, you might have naïvely assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think. That isn’t what it is, I think. Telepathy is you seeing what I mean. And it’s not something which happens dramatically. It is a function of eloquence. You know, first you have the speaker who is boring you to death, then you have the speaker who at least holds your attention, then you have the speaker of whom it is said “she paints a picture.” It means we’re moving toward poetry. Well, it’s possible to imagine a transformation of the neural processing of language—it may be a behavioral possibility; it may not even require a gene shift—where then we would see what we each mean.

You know, there’s this persistent idea promulgated by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, among other people, that there was once what he calls an Ursprache, a primal language, so emotionally intense that to be in the presence of poetry (he claimed, in this language) is to see the poetry, and that this is what the lost poetics of the high Paleolithic were about. And probably it was pharmacologically assisted: that you could gather people in the presence of a great bard or singer, and that person could then create telepathic modalities. And that telepathic modality—that richer, more unifying language—was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego. The ego speaks and hears through sound. The superego projects images and is perceived as images.

Now, it’s very interesting, at least to me, that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings there is a compound called adrenoglomerulotropin which, when analyzed in inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry, turns out to be a beta-carboline closely related to harmaline. Well, is it possible that we are as close as a one-gene mutation away from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field, and that then we would cross over into a realm of beheld understanding, and that this is the evolutionary leap that we’re trying to make? That it’s in the body, not in the technology. In the body there is actually going to be a minor, a one-gene, click to another channel, and then we will be able to see what we mean. And I maintain that if you can see what somebody means, you are that person.

Contrast it to ordinary communication. Ordinary communication is achieved through small mouth noises. As primates, we have a throat and voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises for hours if necessary—I’m the living proof of it. But it’s not a very efficient mode of communication, because what happens is: I have a thought. I look in a culturally sanctioned dictionary which I have copied into my head. I translate the thought into an acoustical signal using my mouth, which moves across space, which enters your ears. You rush to your interior dictionary, and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary. Now, notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption. It rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by the same folks in the same year. If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning, and we will have what we call misunderstanding.

Notice how, among us as a species, one of the most bring-down things you can say to somebody is, “Would you please explain to me what I just said?” Because it means: oh boy, here comes trouble! Now you’re going to find out that people didn’t understand you, they horribly misunderstood, and the communication is very provisional. The amount of noise in the circuit is huge. Well then, contrast this to: I utter something, and it condenses as a sculpture in the air, and you and I then become its observers. And we rotate this syntactical object and we look at it. We regard it from many points of view. This is not ambiguous—or it’s certainly considerably less ambiguous than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries. So perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages to become visual, and therefore to become more unified and less riddled with noise, which creates misunderstanding, which creates horrible social realities.

Yes?

2:53:56

McKenna

Oh, Michael Talbot’s book.

2:54:18

McKenna

Yes, although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging. I mean, we could do many things with it. It’s not a completely outlandish idea. In nature it occurs. There’s a wonderful phenomenon in nature which is worth talking about to sort of legitimate such a far out notion, which is: as you all probably know, octopi can change color. This is one of those things you learn on those science specials on TV: octopi can change color. Well, most people, I think, assume that they do this for camouflage. That would be a reasonable assumption. They don’t do it for camouflage.

Let’s talk about octopi for just a moment. First of all, they’re mollusks. They divided from our evolutionary line 700 million years ago. They’re related to escargot. They have no backbone, for crying out loud. They’re not even vertebrates. But what is always said in biology classes about octopi is that they’re a wonderful example of parallel evolution, because their optical system is very much like a mammalian optical system. Well, why is this? Well, it’s because they evolved in an environment, the reef environment, that is an environment as dense with signals as a rainforest is. And an octopus is soft-bodied. It can not only change color, but it can also change its surface from smooth and rubbery to bumpy, pimply, rugose, ribbed, so forth and so on. And also, because it is soft-bodied and in an aqueous environment, it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very, very quickly.

Well, all of these behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus an excellent visual communicator. And the color changes, the blushes, traveling dots and bars that these creatures manifest—and the squids do it, too—are language. And if you’re interested in this, there’s a wonderful book by a guy named Moynihan called Communication and Noncommunication among the Cephalopoidia. And he goes as far as creating a grammar for this stuff.

Well, so then, in a way, if you pull back from the mundane assumptions about this, what’s happening is: the octopus wears its mind on its skin. It is dressed in its mental state. One octopus encountering another can tell its mood, how recently it’s eaten, how recently it’s had sex, whether it’s ovulating—all by looking. And so the only way an octopus can have a private thought is by squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it. This is essentially its correction fluid for misspoken octopi, you see.

So, in a sense, this is what I think we are being beckoned toward: that we want to clothe ourselves in language. We do it to a degree in a funny way. I mean, if you want to think about virtual reality, this is a virtual reality. All this stuff—these fixtures, the architecture, the infrastructure, the road—these are ideas. It was an idea, and it has then been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds, the spending of money, the hiring of craftsmen, so forth and so on. Our whole civilization is an excreted set of interlocking ideas; agreements. We’re like coral animals. And we—somewhere, you know, there’s this naked pulpy creature, but, you know, clothed in denim, clothed in a harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet, moving around inside a larger environment produced by the state of Colorado, and so forth and so on. So I think octopi offer an excellent metaphoric example of what naked-mindedness would be.

And some of these octopi, as I said, they evolved in the coastal reef domain. But that’s a very competitive domain. Everybody in the ocean wants to be there, because that’s where the sunlight and the food is. So if you’re smart, you’ll try and evolve into a more hostile niche. And some of these octopi have become what are called benthic or abyssal. It means they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches. Yes. And they have retained this communication ability by switching over to interiorly-generated phosphorescence. So there are species of octopi which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent of eyelids over them, but they’re flasher lights. So when you descend into the benthic depths of the ocean, you enter a domain where all one octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic productivity, because that’s interior generated light that can be seen. And I think if you want to set the compass of virtual reality towards something worth writing home about, then producing an octopus environment so that we could experience this kind of thing would be a kind of proto-telepathic playpen of some sort.

Yeah?

3:00:58

McKenna

Aha. So you think that subterfuge enters here, too?

3:02:03

McKenna

Well, you raise a lot of issues. First of all, since the discovery of retroviruses—of which the HIV virus is one—we now know that it is not always information transcripted from DNA to RNA to protein. The retroviruses transcript from RNA to DNA. So the central dogma, which is that the genome is not being altered by the environment, is sort of shaky at this point.

You bring up a very interesting point, which has never to my mind been really thrashed out in orthodox science, which is: if you had a bunch of these psychedelic molecules, and we could raise them up to the size of loaves of bread or something like that, what you would notice about them is they’re all what are called by chemists planar, meaning they tend to be flat. They’re not lumpy, they’re flat. Well, if you look at DMT or harmine, harmine is built off a pentexal group and with two benzene rings off of it. It is the perfect size to slip in between two nucleotides in DNA. It can actually bond into the DNA there.

Now, many drugs do this. These drugs are called dimers. The usual problem with a dimer that will intercalate—this is the other term, intercalate; means slide between the rungs of the DNA—is it usually deforms the DNA (it passes a bulge along it), and then transcription is difficult. But these indole hallucinogens can dimer with DNA without disrupting its structural integrity. This is why I believe that this is the source of the visions that—and, you know, orthodox biologists just roll their eyes at this idea and say, “Well now, you’ve made a very common error here. You’ve confused genetic information with information. Don’t you understand that genetic information is just a sequence of codon coding for protein? And that has no relationship to your memory of Aunt Minnie’s space.” However, by being so unyielding on that point, they create a huge problem for their brothers and sisters across the hall, who are trying to understand memory. Because the molecular theory of memory is a nightmare.

Here’s the problem. Every molecule in your body is changed every five to seven years, depending on who you talk to—except neurons. The nerves are generally the nerves you’re born with and the nerves you die with. But it’s an absolute no-no to suggest that memory is lodged in the neurons. Well, but if Aunt Minnie died 45 years ago and you can still remember the dear woman’s face when she used to walk you in the park, then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five times since she quit the plane. How can you have this memory of Aunt Minnie? And then they say, “Well”—well, they don’t say, actually. They just throw up their hands.

Now, to the people who say DNA can’t store any kind of information other than codon sequences for protein, they have to explain why, then, 90% of the genomes seems devoted to junk sequencing that does not produce protein, that does in fact not do anything that anybody knows about. It seems to me that we might as well just take the path of least resistance and say if the neurons are the only part of the body that persists throughout life, if the memories persist throughout life, then you’ve got two choices. Either the memories are in the neurons or the memories were never stored in the body in the first place. And if you believe that, well, then the obligation to explain just where they were stored is hard upon you, and the mechanism for retrieving them. So I think molecular biology, by being so reductionist, has made certain problems in neurophysiology and higher cortical functioning almost insoluble.

For years and years, it was held that—this was another one of these central dogmas of biology—it was held that information could move from the nucleus of the neuron to the synapse, but that there was no transport mechanism for moving any molecular species from the synapse back to the nucleus. So consequently they said learning cannot take place in the nucleus of the neuron, because the materials for learning—which would be present in the synapse; modifications through experience—there’s no transport system. This was dogma until ten years ago. Well, then they discovered what’s called axioplasmic transport, and they, by putting labeled compounds in the synapse, they were able to locate these labeled compounds later complexed with nuclear material in the neuron, proving to the most die-hearted materialist that synaptic material was in fact moving backward to the neuron. So I think that, you know, there’s much that isn’t understood about how all this works.

Something worth pointing out: you know, science seeks closure and explanation; explanatory closure. My brother one time made a little aphorism, which I think says it all on this subject. He said to me once—actually on a mushroom trip—he said, “Have you ever noticed how, as the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger?” Seems perfectly clear. You know, a simple-minded way of saying that is: the bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness you will reveal.

Yeah?

3:09:34

McKenna

Yes, well, some of you have probably read Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he shows, you know, that it’s never the way they tell it afterwards. The after-telling is always about the primary insight, the careful experiment, the gathering of data, the correlation. Actually, it doesn’t work like that at all. It is entirely psychic, piecemeal, ruled by synchronicity. One of the most interesting things—I’ll tell this story and then we can go to lunch—because I think, you know, science has great pretensions about itself. I mean, it basically regards itself as a meta-theory. It regards itself as capable of passing judgment on all other theories. They are supposed to submit themselves to science to be told whether they’re real or not.

3:10:31

McKenna

Yeah, like a religion. Well, how many people know the—you know, modern science was founded by René Descartes in the early seventeenth century. What were the circumstances under which Descartes founded modern science? René Descartes was a nineteen-year-old, basically, ne’er-do-well, and he decided that he would go wenching and soldiering across Europe, which was a thing that young men of certain class did at that time. And so he joined a Habsburg army that was laying siege to Prague in the summer of 1619. And after they had taken care of the problem there in Prague, this Habsburg army began to retreat across southern Germany. And in the evening of—now, there’s a lot of arm wrestling about this, but let’s just say the seventeenth of August 1619—this army made camp near the little town of Ulm in southern Germany, which (synchronicity freaks, pay attention), Ulm will later be the birthplace of Albert Einstein. Worth noting.

But that night Descartes, in the barracks, had a dream. And an angel appeared to him, and the angel said, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measurement.” And he was thunderstruck. He took that angelic revelation and turned it into modern science. Modern science was founded by an angel! You know, they don’t tell you this at MIT. You know? It’s astonishing how things which claim roots in rationalism are actually among some of the most irrational productions in the historical continuum. It appears that our development, our history, our histories have always been created at the promptings of invisible voices. I mean Socrates—who is at the very center of what’s called thinking by Western civilizations—Socrates had a daemon. It was a little voice. It was his crap detector. It told him the difference between profound philosophical thinking and bullpucky. And so, you know, the edifice of Western thinking built on Platonism owes its debt to an invisible agency speaking from hyperspace. So does modern science à la Descartes.

How much more of this? I mean, we don’t care if artists talk to angels because our definition of them is that they’re screwballs. But to believe that an enterprise like modern science has to trace its way back to the same ecstatic roots is, I think, very suggestive that the world is stranger than we can suppose, and that we need to open these channels of communication to these invisible worlds. Probably the next great paradigm shift will be enunciated by a mushroom, an angel, an elf, an alien, what have you.

Yeah?

3:14:25

McKenna

Repetition. Yeah. The first few times I did it, I couldn’t get any grip at all on it. And by talking a lot and trying to describe it, you slowly, slowly build up a map.

So about the lógos. The lógos is this phenomenon that was sort of the centerpiece of Greco-Hellenic spirituality. What it is, is: it’s a voice in the head that people strove to attain for a thousand years. This was the sine qua non of intellectual accomplishment in the Greco-Roman world. And the lógos told you the right way to live. And this is sort of what you get with psilocybin. You get a voice that can confound you with the depth and brilliance of its answers. And one of the puzzles of trying to understand Greco-Hellenic spirituality is: what were they talking about? And if this ever was a general phenomenon, then what happened to it? Why do we not experience this? This is not well understood. I mean, the rational scholars who have created our vision of Greece basically just don’t even want to talk about this. They would rather gloss over it.

You know, one of the things that sort of relates to all this is: I think human beings are a lot more malleable than we tend to imagine. In other words, we imagine that people in the distant past or in Greece or somewhere were just like us, except they were living in a different time and place. There’s no way to find out, of course, because they’re all dead. But there are certain episodes in the evolution of Western culture that suggest that people may be much more plastic than we ordinarily suppose. First example would be: how can it be that, in the middle 1500s, perspective was discovered? I mean, how do you discover perspective? This is very hard, I think, for modern people to understand, because it’s a given for us. I mean, we see in perspective. We accept it as a quality of the world rather than a cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment. But, in fact, during the Renaissance only the most inspired people could paint in perspective on the natch. Most people, they had complex devices called perspectographs that would project over the scene a receding grid, and then people would essentially fill in the lines.

Now, another example of this kind of thing that’s not so well known, but that is an example that Marshall McLuhan makes a lot of, is: St. Augustine, the great father of the Christian church. He had a reputation for being a very holy man. And the accounts of his contemporaries say that the way people would satisfy themselves that St. Augustine had a pipeline to God is: they would bring him scripture—the Bible, essentially—and open it in front of him and let him look at it, and then they would close the book and question him about what was there. And he could always tell them. And they were amazed. As far as we can tell, St. Augustine was the only man in Europe who could read silently. Nobody else could do it. It was regarded as a miracle. Now, we all read silently. And there may be a few unfortunate individuals among us who move their lips while they read, but that’s the only vestigital trace we have of this previous cultural mode where everyone, to read meant to read aloud. No one could conceive of any other way of doing it.

The lógos seems to me a kind of similar thing. It was a mental behavior function which—for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable—slipped out of reach. That’s why it seems to me these psychedelics are very close to being able to modify our behaviors along these kinds of lines, because there are a number of behavioral and experiential possibilities that we suppress. I mean, I think it’s—just as an example of how little we know about what’s going on—look at the Gräfen—don’t look at it, but conceive of—the Gräfenberg spot; the G-spot. Now, we all know what this is. Clearly people were looking for it for a long, long time. How come they only discovered it twelve years ago? If something that major can be overlooked, then it’s hard to imagine what might have been overlooked. And that’s pretty central into the project of being a human being. And apparently it was unknown until very, very recently.

So yes, the lógos was probably what I call the Gaian mind. And at a certain point in cultural development, people just became so chuckle-headed that the Gaian mind just said, “What the hell was this?” And then the voice fell silent. It fell silent right around the time of the birth of Christ; right at the time of the shift of the zodiacal aeon.

3:20:59

McKenna

How it works with psilocybin?

3:21:05

McKenna

Well, when I take psilocybin, I take it on an empty stomach. I don’t fast or anything like that. I just don’t eat for six hours. I don’t call that fasting. And then I take it in silent darkness. That’s number one; very important. The next thing is: weigh the dose. You must weigh the dose. Because five grams is what you want. And I’ve had over and over the experience of showing somebody what five grams is, and they’re appalled. They say, “My God, you can’t be serious! I take a fifth that much, a fourth that much.” Yeah, well, that’s the problem! That’s why you don’t have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do, you know?

And so then you take it. And I take it on an empty stomach. And a lot of people don’t like the taste. I don’t really understand that. I just chew them up. I sit with them and I chew them up. And then—huh?

3:22:12

McKenna

Dried. None of this mixing in applesauce or any of that malarkey, and what’s that about.

3:22:19

McKenna

Oh well, fresh… sixty grams. Sixty grams. Because there’s a huge water loss there. And then it takes—people sometimes say it came on within five minutes, or it came on within ten minutes. I don’t know what that could possibly be about. First of all, it defies pharmacodynamics to imagine that it could come on that fast. For me, it comes on almost always at the one-hour-and-twenty-minute mark. I think it can come on sooner than that. I think I’m fairly resistant to these things. After I take it, I sit, I roll bombers, and I carry out what all good Catholics know as an examination of conscience. This means you think about all the bummers that you’re afraid are going to jump out at you as soon as you get loaded. If you will carry out the examination of conscience, you’ll be so bored with that by the time the compound actually hits that you usually don’t have to pay any dues, because you’ve faced the fact that you’re a jerk fifty times in the preceding hours.

And then, the way I do it is, at about the hour-and-twenty-minute mark—and I should say in the time preceding that you may have to go to the bathroom once. It makes your nose run, which is a funny thing. It also makes you yawn. These are definitely qualities of psilocybin, but not related to its psychoactivity. And I think that it’s very good to decide before it hits that, once it begins, you will not alter the plan. In other words, you decide ahead of time, “I’m going to sit here and do this.” Because at about the hour-and-fifteen-minute mark, it will begin hitting you with stuff like, “Y”ou’d really be more comfortable downstairs.” Or, you know, “It’s awfully hot in here. Why don’t you get up and adjust the thermostat?” All this stuff. And you say, “No, no. No, no. We’re holding the space.” And sit there.

And then it begins to come on. And it comes—the image I have is like a jellyfish or a silk scarf or something like that. It just kind of drifts down and surrounds you. And at that point I… I guess I pray. I say to it, you know, “I’m completely in your hands. Please don’t hurt me.” You know, “I’m yours. I’m completely committed. I’ve held nothing back, so don’t burn me, please.” And then there is a kind of—it’s hard to describe—a kind of potential begins to build up. And you say, “Hm. The rush hasn’t begun.” But you can almost close your eyes and see millions of little psilocybin molecules elbowing serotonin molecules out of the way and fitting themselves into the receptor site, and the electron spin resonance dynamics is beginning to shift, and the whole thing is about to take off.

At that point I smoke furiously. And that usually is all it takes, and it comes on. And the first rush is really astonishing. I mean, sometimes it’s more mind-boggling than others. But I can remember situations where we just see it coming and say, “Oh my god!” You know? It’s a hundred miles wide and ten miles high. Where are you going to run to, you know? It’s just kind of… you say, “Good grief! I guess I’m not going to meet this one sitting up. I think I’d better lay down.” And in about the time it takes to make and execute that decision, then it just hits. And it’s like a tidal wave. I mean, I have the feeling when I’m doing it in California that everybody from Vancouver to Tijuana has just crawled under their desk. Because you can’t imagine! This is happening between my ears? You know? It’s more like an asteroid must have fallen in the Pacific Ocean and raised some enormous incoming wave.What it’s sort of like, it’s like watching a thermonuclear explosion through fifty feet of crystal-clear glass. So you’re perfectly calm. It’s not getting at you. But the energy that is being released in your presence is awesome!

And then it—and sometimes in that first pass, the linguistic machinery is burned out. You’ve probably seen these scenes where they will test a hydrogen bomb, and they set up cameras a quarter mile from ground zero, a half mile, a mile, two miles. And then when they actually detonate the bomb, they get the view from the first camera, and then they switch to the second camera as the first camera is blown to bits and vaporized, and they keep pulling back as each successive instrument is destroyed. Well, this is sort of the feeling you have as this thing spreads out toward you.

And then it does what it wants to do. It tells you what it wants to tell you. And it’s highly unpredictable. I mean, you cannot—people always say you should ask it a question. This seems absurd to me. I mean, I don’t know. Once when my life was in turmoil, I did ask a question. I said—I wrote it down ahead of time, and the question was, “Am I doing the right thing with my life?” And then, when I got in there and I posed the question, and the answer came back instantly. It was a ripoff from Lyndon Johnson. It said, “What kind of a chickenshit question is that to ask me?” I said, “Oh. Sorry! It didn’t mean to presume, you know?” It said, “Get your act together and then we’ll have a conversation. But if that’s what you want to talk about, you should have taken MDMA.”

And then, you know, paralleling what we talked about this morning—and again, I’m just giving you my subjective take on it—it’s like I come into a place. It’s hard to describe. It’s a feeling, and the content of the feeling is: now the elves are near, but they won’t appear unless I invoke them. And, you know, I wish I could tell you that I chant in Mandaean or something like that, but I don’t. I stole a line from an old, old I Love Lucy program, where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFOs. And Lucy says she talks to the UFOs. And Ethel says, “Well, how can you talk to UFOs?” And Lucy said, “Well, it’s simple. I just say: come in, little green men! Come in, little green men!” And that’s what I do. I say, “Come in, little green men!” And then there is a—and women, if there are any out there—and then there is a… it’s like a marching band. It’s like a Nepalese marching band, is what it’s like. And it comes from a distance. Like, there’s a place in my vision that’s small; a little dancing light and a little faint sound. And the light comes closer, and the sound gets louder, until finally, you know, they pick me up on their shoulders and with tubas blaring and sackbuts and [???] and all of this stuff. And then they carry me around and talk to me.

And the whole thing is shot through with such a weird sense of zaniness, Irish-ness, Joyce-ishness. I mean, it’s almost unbearable. It’s so—I don’t know, not exactly Disney-esque, because their humor tends to be a little more savage than that. And then that is part of the first wave. And then the rest of the trip unfolds pretty much as you—there’s a kind of a pushing and pulling that goes on. You can direct it. Each one of these plants does have a character of its own—

Sure.

3:31:52

McKenna

One of the most puzzling things about these plants is that they have characters that seem irreducible. For instance, psilocybin, it is the science fiction drug. In other words, it says, you know, “We have been denizens of this planet for 400 million years. Our original home planet is in the M5-83C system. We are connected via hyperspace to all intelligent life forms in the galaxy.” It shows you enormous machines in orbit around alien planets. It talks about the end of history and the collectivizing of humanity. And it’s this enormous, hortatory, salvational, dramatic, science fiction-type scenario. Well, then you take ayahuasca—which in molecular terms is just a few nitrogens are moved around; I mean, it’s basically the same thing—and you get a completely different message. You feel the energy of the rainforest and the rivers, and it’s very feminine. You think about childbirth. You think about the continuity of generations. You think about the mystery of the meat. You think about tantric sexuality. It’s all redirected back into the human and natural world in some way. And then, of course, DMT, which I described this morning, which—the DMT elves are not from outer space, or they don’t present themselves that way. In fact, one of the odd things about the DMT thing is that you have the feeling that this space that you break into, even though it’s large—some people even refer to the dome of DMT. That tells you they really were there. But wherever this huge vaulted space is, you have the feeling, although it’s hard to explain how you know this, but you have the feeling that you’re way, way, way underground, which fits with the elf motif. You’re in the hall of the mountain king. You’re under the hills with the little people who retreated under the hills. The character of these things is one of the most puzzling things about them.

3:34:36

McKenna

Well, that’s a real question. The lógos seems more—first of all, it doesn’t crack jokes and do quadruple entendre puns and stuff like that. It’s more like a wise and loving teacher. These DMT things are—you know, it’s a troupe of maddened elves, and they are just doing their own thing. And then with ayahuasca, though some people claim they contact an entity, it hasn’t been like that for me. It seems to me that on ayahuasca you become like a camera. You just fly through a visual world. I mean, after a good ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes are bugging out of your head. I mean, it’s like buying prints on Madison Avenue, you know, and you’ve just been looking and looking and looking, and you literally have to give your eyes a rest after an ayahuasca trip.

And the ayahuasca visions are more… they seem to cover a broader spectrum. The psilocybin hallucinations tend toward this highly polished, machine-like, insect-like outer space bit. And the ayahuasca hallucinations are wonderful pastels, laces, layering of colors. And then one of the most interesting things to me about ayahuasca—and I just cannot understand how this works. If I could, I’d be [???] or somebody—and that is that you, in the middle of the ayahuasca trip, you can suggest motifs; you can lead it. So that, for instance, you can say to it, “Art Deco,” and suddenly there will be thousands of candy dishes, cigarette lighters, champagne buckets, automobiles, stained glass windows, doorknobs, silverware, all rolling in black space in front of you, all the perfect exemplification of this aesthetic, the Art Deco aesthetic. And then you can say to it, “Okay, Italian baroque.” And it’s just like that, suddenly altarpieces, Madonna’s, Martyr’s Saints, and fantastic scrollwork and fleur-de-lis. And you can say, “Well, surprise me!” And then you will get a coherent style like Art Deco, like Italian baroque, except that nobody’s ever bothered to realize it on this planet. But it’s as coherent. It’s like, you know, twenty years ago there was no such thing as Southwest as a style—you know, this weird thing coming out of Santa Fe that I noticed has planted its roots deep here as well; the turquoise and beige endlessness of feathers and hammered titanium and all that. Well, that’s an aesthetic that has cohered in the last twenty years and come into being. There seem to be an infinite number of these things, as different as the bronzes of the Han dynasty are to a Dalí or a Pollock or a Bosch.

And then you can say to it, going beyond the surprise me challenge, is what I always say to it is: “I want to see more of what you are for yourself.” And then it’s like there’s this low organ tone, and it begins to lift the veils, and the temperature in the room drops about twenty degrees. And after about twenty seconds of that you just say, “Enough of how you are for yourself!” Because you can tell what’s happening is: it’s starting to reveal something so peculiar and so untailored for the human mind or eye that you become afraid. You say, you know, “Can we go back to dancing mice, Art Deco cigarette lighters, and to Baroque altarpieces, please? This is turning into deep water as far as I’m concerned.”

So… yes?

3:39:29

McKenna

Oh, that’s a good question. Good question. It requires a small detour into pharmacology. The concept which all pharmacologists are familiar with—and which you should be too, if you’re going to deal in this realm—called LD50. This is not a pretty notion, but a necessary one. It stands for lethal dose 50. What does this mean? It means if we have a hundred mice, how much psilocybin do we have to give each mouse to kill half of them? Do you see? LD50. Half the sample dies at the LD50 dose level, whether it’s graduate students or rats.

Now, when you’re designing a drug, or when you’re thinking about a drug, what you want is a drug with an extremely high LD50 opposed to its effective dose. So, say the effective dose of psilocybin is probably about 0.5 milligrams per kilogram. And the LD50 is probably 200 milligrams per kilogram. The LD50 of psilocybin is 400 times the effective dose. This is a pharmacologist’s way of saying this is very, very safe.

3:41:03

McKenna

A pound wouldn’t kill you, I don’t think. It might be getting close, but you’d have to eat in that range to die. Now, some drugs have horrendous LD50 to effective dose profiles. Unfortunately—and I hope I don’t rain on anybody’s parade here—MDMA has a terrible LD50 profile. The effective dose is 125 milligrams. You can kill yourself with a thousand milligrams. So that’s not good at all. Because sure as hell, some street person or some depressed person or some maniac is going to take a thousand milligrams. And then you’ve got a stiff on your hands.

So… yeah?

3:42:36

McKenna

There was a difference. Well, I think MDMA is—I don’t want to trash MDMA. It’s changed a lot of people’s lives and saved relationships and so forth and so on. But to me it’s a perfect example of why you’re better off taking plants. Because here was this drug. Somebody invented it. They gave it to a few friends. It seemed to be wonderful for solving personal problems. So without any collection of human data, this thing becomes an item in the underground. And so then thousands of people take it. The psychological effects seem completely benign. It’s a wonderful thing. The physiological effects, it’s a very disturbing profile. It isn’t exactly as you said. It’s not that it destroys the serotonin receptor site. It’s that nerves, neurons, are covered by these very delicate structures called dendritic spines. Now, nobody knows what dendritic spines do, but every neuron in your body has them. And when you take MDMA, it mows them down. They just, they go away.

Now, so then you get two schools of thought. One says: well, my god, anything impacting the physical brain that dramatically should be stayed away from. And the other camp says: well, do you see any behavioral changes in people who take MDMA a lot? Do you see any physical destruction, seizures, blindness, anything? And the answer is: no. So they say: well, here we have histological evidence that this thing is making major physiological changes in the dendrites, and no behavioral sequela to back up that this is of any consequence.

Well, my position—being basically a very conservative person—is: in that case, wait. You know, they’re doing work on this in a dozen labs around the country. They’ll figure it out. In the meantime, take psilocybin or mescaline or something else that has been sanctioned. Because you just do not want to insult the physical brain. You know, that’s the whole name of the game. You have to keep the brain in good shape.

Yeah?

3:45:13

McKenna

Oh yeah. That’s where we were—that’s why we started talking about LD50. Because I wanted to explain to you that taking a compound like psilocybin, if the effective dose is 20 milligrams—20 milligrams for somebody who weighs 135 pounds—well then, looking at the pharmacological data, they should be able to take 2,000 milligrams without any trouble at all. That’s a hundred times more. But, in fact, what happens as you raise the dose is that the psychological presentation becomes unbearable. It becomes so strange that you fear for your sanity in a good old Edgar Allan Poe-ish phrase, you know? It gets stranger and stranger. And, you know, I’ve talked to pretty naïve people who have overdosed. Usually the way these overdose situations occur is: people are gathering mushrooms in the wild and they start eating them, and then they just keep eating them, and then they realize they’ve eaten four times more than the effective dose. And this is where you get into places where you don’t know what to say. Because if you tell people, they’ll throw a net over you. But you want to say, because you’re so personally disturbed. This is where the flying saucers land and the rectal examinations begin, and you are told that you’re the messiah, and they, you know—it becomes quirkier and quirkier. So I think you have to—you know, I’m very admiring of people who can take very high doses, but I find it quite challenging enough in the five to seven gram range.

A friend of mine says of psilocybin that every time he takes it, he tries to stand more—meaning more of the vision. Because it is filtering itself. It’s definitely filtering itself. This is why beginners almost never have bad trips. Because somebody in there looks at your clipboard and says, “Oh, this guy has never done this before, so lay off the rough stuff. Just, you know, bring him through the standard number.” It’s the people who consider themselves experienced, who’ve done it twenty, thirty, forty times. It says, you know, “We can take the gloves off with this guy.” And, you know, it always amazes me. I sometimes meet people who say, you know, “I’ve taken mushrooms fifty times and I’ve never had a bad trip.” And I think, you know, “Lucky soul.” Because when it goes left, it’s hard, you know. It’s hard. You have to really, then, you know… do not your mantras bungle is the best advice I can give you, because you need to steer back towards the mainstream.

Now, maybe at this point this is a good point at which to talk about what do you do when the going gets rough? There are two things at least that you can do that are very effective. The first is—and it’s a very simple thing, but people in our culture seem to be resistant to this—is: you sing. You force air into your lungs and body, and you chant. You sing anything you want. And it will radically alter the parameters. There’s a certain place in psilocybin that is my bête noire, which I call the meat locker. And I don’t like this place, you know? And meat locker is a mild term for it. It’s more like, you know, the morgue for the homicide unit or something. Whenever I start drifting that way, I sing. And then you can navigate through it.

The other thing you can do, although this is sometimes trickier, is: smoke cannabis. This is what those bombers are for that you rolled in the first hour while you were waiting for it to come on. As soon as it begins to press in in some really invasive or alarming way, just take a couple of hits of the good and chant, and then you can bring it back on track. And also talk to it. Don’t be afraid to say, you know, “I don’t like this. Take it off me. It’s too peculiar. I’m not ready for this.” It says, “Oh, sorry. Back to dancing mice.”

Yeah?

3:50:16

McKenna

Well, there hasn’t been a lot of work on this. Michael Buckley at Evergreen College years ago grew stropharia cubensis by the method that’s described in my book; the book I wrote with my brother. And what they discovered—see, psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. That phosphorus group is removed as soon as it crosses the blood-brain barrier. So really, what’s active is a simpler compound called psilocin. And psilocin lacks the phosphorus attachment. And what they discovered was that, in the early flushes, the psilocybin ratio is high and the psilocin ratio is low. And you all know what a flush is, right? And in the later flushes, the psilocin level rises and the psilocybin level drops. So really, the two together stay remarkably stable throughout the life of the organism.

Something worth mentioning—I suppose it’s worth mentioning—is: when I was into my extraterrestrial phase, when I was assuming that the mushroom was an extraterrestrial (either the extraterrestrial itself or something designed by some kind of an extraterrestrial), it was very interesting to me that psilocybin is, as I said, 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. It is the only four-substituted indole in nature. The only one. Well, if you were to search for evidence of extraterrestrial tampering with the biome of this planet, what you would look for is a unique compound occurring in one lifeform and no other. Here it is, folks. This phosphorus group is unique. And I’ve never read any description or discussion of what the evolutionary history of that, why it would appear in an organism like that and not in any other. That’s just an aside, because I’m always searching for the thumbprint of the alien. There may not be an alien thumbprint, but the phosphorus group attached to psilocybin is a good candidate for it.

Yeah?

3:53:40

McKenna

Maybe they were just being polite.

3:54:10

McKenna

True.

3:54:18

McKenna

Well, my original presupposition was to try to have no presupposition at all, and then out of that came all of these assumptions. You’re right that nobody has trips exactly like mine, although if you question people carefully you can begin to see how it works. For example, I described this thing this morning, the elves, the presentational thing, the high-speed motion, the gifts, all that. Well sometimes, people will take DMT and they will come back and you’ll realize that it’s as though there is an archetype there which has different levels in it. And if I had to say what the archetype of DMT is, it’s the archetype of the circus. And one time I saw a woman come out of DMT—she was an anthropologist, she had fairly high body weight—and I could tell that she had not gotten a complete hit, came down and said, “Okay, what was it?” She said “It was the saddest carnival in the world.” She said the carnival was closed. All the tents had their flaps rolled down, and there were just paper cups and candy wrappers blowing in the aisles in between them, and the ferris wheel was stopped. Well, she was just at the edge of this thing.

And if you think about the archetype of the circus, it is an interesting one. First of all, you have the three center rings where wild and zany activity is continuously being presented. Tiny cars keep arriving with fourteen clowns in each one, and they keep climbing out, falling all over each other. But it isn’t all fun and games. It has a strange erotic content. And as a child I think my first awareness of what I would really call Eros was watching this beautiful long-haired woman in a tiny spangled costume hang by her teeth 120 feet above the center ring doing acrobatics. So you’ve got the clown, and you’ve got the lady in the tiny spangled costume. And then, off from the center ring, you have these dark alleyways where the side shows are: the Siamese twins, and the goat boy, and all the rest of it. It has a very weird vibe about it. So it can land you in any of these places. But if you try and correlate people’s experiences, it seems to me that it’s pretty clear that through their own life history and their own programming, nevertheless something is trying to poke through.

Now, my DMT experience seems pretty radically different from other people’s, although other people don’t give any account at all. I mean, it’s amazing how inarticulate people are. They come down and you say, “How was it?” And they say, “It was far out.” You say, “You know, you don’t get out of here with that rap. How was it?” And they say, “Well… uhh….” They can’t give a good account. On psilocybin, I think most people experience something very much like what I describe: huge machines, a sense of danger to the Earth, apocalyptic visions, the idea that someone will come and help. And I’m pretty resistant to all the flotsam and jetsam the New Age. I mean, I don’t spend a moment worrying about the exact physical location of Atlantis or stuff like that. And I think people, it inflates their personal mythologies and intellectual misconceptions. But there is something trying to get through. That’s why this exercise—show me what you are for yourself—is really a good one. And maybe my trips are so weird because I have always worshiped weirdness, so I can go further down that road without being alarmed while somebody else would pull back.

One of the problems is that we don’t have complete maps of these places. At this stage in exploring that new world, what we have, essentially, are the scribbled diaries of frightened explorers. And we don’t know if explorer A is talking about the same river system as explorer B, or whether they were on opposite sides of the planet or the universe. Building a coherent picture of the psychedelic dimension would be the first challenge to a rational approach to understanding it.

3:59:51

McKenna

Is that the first book? No, I read the first book.

4:00:43

McKenna

Well, I read the first book, and I was puzzled by how much of it didn’t seem familiar to me. Like, I remember in the first book he talks about a world that’s just like this world, except the cars are nine feet wide. That would be a very puzzling psychedelic experience, to go to that world. I knew someone who was very close to him, and I don’t want to set off any lawsuits here, but I once cornered this person and said, “So what about it?” And he said, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to worry, this is not getting close to your bailiwick at all.” Buddhism, of the Mahayana, has a tremendously complex system of levels and entities. [???] Buddhas and dharmapālas and peaceful entities. And I think that that’s pretty interesting as a phenomenological description of mind. I reject the philosophical premise of Buddhism, because I think it’s an unbelievably uncompromising kind of nihilism. But Buddhism, as it’s pitched in America, soft pedals that a lot. They don’t present it as a form of nihilism, but I think ultimately it is—in the most positive sense. But still, I’m of the school that follows Alfred North Whitehead, who said, “Say what you may, there are certain stubborn facts.” And that’s not a very Buddhist point of view.

Yeah?

4:02:39

McKenna

If I can control myself and not do it too often. The problem is: cannabis does so many other wonderful things, and I tend to use it for those other wonderful things. But if I were totally dedicated to vision, then I would only smoke once a week, because then you completely come to equilibrium. And then, again, I think people do it, not wrong, but not the way you should do it if you want visions. You should do it the way you do all these other things: alone in silent darkness and at high doses. Bursts of hallucination on cannabis are hard to control and predict, but sometimes they’re as intense as anything can be. If you read nineteenth-century descriptions of cannabis used by people like Fitz Hugh Ludlow and the Club des Hashischins and that crowd where they were eating the hashish, it’s very clear that it was the LSD of the nineteenth century. I mean, nobody can read those descriptions without realizing these people were loaded for sure! They were thoroughly and completely smashed to be able to write those kinds of accounts.

Yeah, go ahead.

4:04:21

McKenna

Well, you didn’t exactly make clear to me what the effect was. It fuzzes you out going into…?

4:04:36

McKenna

What it does to me is: it just slightly cuts my anxiety. I’m able to let the thing unfold of its own. I don’t know. I mean, I have a lifelong, intense relationship to cannabis, and I basically make my living out of being able to do feats of memory. And cannabis is supposed to trash your memory. So I don’t… maybe I’m different, but I resist any “maybe I’m different” argument because it’s malarkey. Nobody’s different enough that they can, you know—

4:05:26

McKenna

No, more so. My great dream is that, as my powers of locution fade with old age, that cannabis will be legalized. Then I can sit in front of you and smoke, and my career can be pushed twenty years further into the future. The way I use cannabis is to think, and I do a lot of thinking. I do a lot. And I, at night before I go to bed, I smoke, and then I play the tapes of the day, and then I understand what happened. If I didn’t have cannabis, I don’t think—I would be sort of at sea, or a kind of a space case, because I never get what somebody really meant, really intended, really had in mind till I play the tapes stoned, and then I see: aha, that’s what the agenda was. That’s what was going on.

4:06:26

McKenna

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And if I don’t smoke, then I’m insomniac. Yeah?

4:06:41

McKenna

Okay. Well, LSD—again, remember: I’m only speaking for myself, because there is no other way to approach it. I found LSD very interesting, but ultimately kind of frustrating because I wanted visions. And to me, what LSD by itself does is: it does a lot of slippery and hard to name stuff. It accelerates and changes the quality of thought. It—well, basically, that’s it. It does something to the quality of thought. But I had been reading Aldous Huxley and Havelock Ellis and those people, and I kept saying, you know, “Where are the ruins of alien civilizations? Where are the jeweled tapestries?” And then, fiddling around with LSD, I discovered that if I would take it with mescaline, then it became the psychedelic experience that I was seeking. But in and of itself, it’s kind of psychoanalytic. It’s sort of like cleaning up your act. It often focuses you on your own personal stuff. And, you know, I have to confess to you: I’m not that interested in my own personal stuff, probably because it’s so horrendous. But I don’t like personalized trips. I like cosmic vision information trips.

And then mescaline—mescaline is… you have to take a lot to get it to really do what you want it to do. And it being an amphetamine has not a very good LD50 profile. It’s not like MDMA, where at ten times the effective dose you’re in real trouble. But probably forty times the effective dose, and you’d be sweating bullets. And then just the nature of my life. I’ve not had as much to do with mescaline as these other things.

I’m really a vision freak. And people say, you know, “Well, there’s feeling, and there’s insight, and there’s this and that.” But the reason I’m so fixated on vision—or the excuse I give—somebody said, “It’s because you’re a double Scorpio.” But to me it’s the proof that it’s not coming from me. I can come up with insights. I can come up with funny ideas. But I can’t come up with objects never before seen by the human eye or mind. And so when the visions start, then I feel this is the transpersonal part of the trip. This isn’t my unconscious, my memories, my fears, my hopes. This is something else.

Yeah?

4:09:44

McKenna

How do you boundary dissolution and—

4:09:52

McKenna

Well, I think in very practical terms they show you that everything you know is wrong. You know? I mean, how can the ego survive that piece of information? It just puts in your lap incontrovertible evidence that everything you ever thought or believed is hokum. And that’s extraordinarily humbling. And that word, humbling, means: the feeling you have when your ego is reduced. You know? Humble yourself enough and you’ll begin to feel humiliated. And, you know, that’s a deeper ego reduction.

I think they—aside from any magical chemical effect they might have on ego—they’re just simply showing you the true size of the universe and your place in it. And, you know, in our down, personal lives, every man, every woman, a king or a queen, I mean, we build castles in the air. Our career, our children, our whatever. Well, then you get into those places, you just say, you know, “What? How preposterous!”

4:11:06

McKenna

For men and women?

4:11:09

McKenna

Well, that’s an interesting question.

4:11:15

McKenna

Yeah. You mean what we talked about last night?

4:11:22

McKenna

Well, I think women, by virtue of the fact that they menstruate and give birth, are just inherently more chemically driven creatures than men. Men are Apollonian in intent: the idea is always some kind of abstract purity, clarity kind of thing. And women know from the get-go that that’s an illusion; that the reality is the floor of the rainforest, the interconnected tissue, the levels, the trade-offs, and so forth and so on. This is why I think generally men tend to be more interested in these things than women, and to also be more impacted by them. For women it seems to sort of fit in and affirm what they knew. For men it seems to come as a tremendous surprise that this is the way things are put together. I think that if everybody gave birth and experienced menstruation, probably we never would have launched ourselves into history.

In a way—you know, without going too far with it—men are the ancillary sex. I mean, the original blastula in the embryonic development is female. And I was listening to somebody the other night talk about this, saying no wonder men have the problems they have. What a man is, is a woman who has been under incredible chemical assault for nine months in the womb. And you just have been hammered, sculpted, shaped, and recast again and again, and then you’re born male. A female fetus doesn’t experience anything like that. It starts out with a smooth shot at its end-phylogenetic expression, and then achieves it.

I don’t think of the ego as particularly male, because I think we all have it to excessive degrees. But men are able to express it. A woman with an ego is frustrated. A man with an ego is a menace to all concerned.

Yeah?

4:13:54

McKenna

I think it’s a very major decision to do that. That if you’re going to take a high dose of psychedelics with somebody else, then you better be prepared to get all entangled with them—which can be great. It can also be fairly confusing. I don’t like taking psychedelics—this is not an issue of entanglement. That’s sort of what goes on between lovers or close friends. But I get a lot of requests to sit for people, and I don’t do it because—I don’t know whether it’s my personality or what it is, but I am unable to contain my anxiety in the presence of another stoned person, especially if I’m stoned. If I’m stoned and they’re stoned and we’re in a dark room, I cannot get off. I listen to them breathe. I worry. I wonder if I should ask them if they’re all right. Then I go off on long trips about not interrupting them. And then that loops back into: but I haven’t heard them breathe for twenty minutes. And I’m always afraid. I don’t know. So really, people say, “Doesn’t take courage to do it alone?” For me it takes more courage to do it with people, because inevitably, then, you get tangled up into some kind of craziness. You can think you’re having a telepathic experience, and they’ve decided that they want to have sex or something. and meanwhile, I’ve just had their revelation about that entry Molière made in his diary when he was talking to his niece Agnes about the nature of the French comic theater. And so you say, “Boy, we’ve got too much on the menu here.” But I’m weird. Remember that.

Yeah?

4:16:08

McKenna

You mean the group mind on ayahuasca? Oh yeah. No, it’s very possible. You can sit with someone and play a little game where you will describe the hallucinations for thirty seconds, and then they get to describe the hallucinations for thirty seconds, and you can absolutely convince yourself that people are seeing the same—that you’re seeing the same thing. And when you toss sex into the mix, it just goes over the top. I mean, I’ve had the impression—I don’t want to trod it out as a position of mine or something that I assert as true—but I have had the impression (stoned on mushrooms, making love) that… it’s like perspiration forms on the surface of the skin, and there’s some kind of electrolytic thing that goes on, and the boundaries dissolve between the people. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean that you become one organism. And that’s pretty amazing.

4:17:26

McKenna

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, after I just said I don’t like taking psychedelics with people, I guess what I should have said is I hate being responsible. Because I don’t mind taking ayahuasca with thirty people, none of whom speak English, in a hut up some river, but that’s because I know that the old shamans are in charge; that I’m just a face in the crowd. Nobody’s gonna turn to me for explanation or help. I’ll tell you an ayahuasca story, just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff that goes on in these sessions.

Years ago in 1976, Kat and I (it was before we were married) were in Peru, and we had found this shaman who was very good, and he had a following. And we were, you know, apprenticing ourselves to him. And the style of these Peruvian mestizo people is that—I mean, cultures handle this differently—but they are never straight with each other. It’s an incredibly masked culture, almost like the Japanese, but without the formality. In other words, if you think somebody’s a jerk, you would never say that. That’s the last thing you would say, because that’s your true opinion. So we got into a situation with these people where this elder shaman—who was very respected; beloved, even, by these people—he had a nephew, a sobrino, who was an absolute jerk. I mean, this guy was into pimping a little on the side, and he was very ambitious to perfect his ayahuasca so he could go to Lima and charge yuppies a bunch of money for taking it, and so forth. And he had this really awful habit. And I don’t know what really had gone on before we got there. But they would all get together to take ayahuasca and these old, old guys—you know, 80, 85 years old—the totally authentic dudes would sing these beautiful ayahuasca songs. And he would sing against them. I mean, can you imagine a scene like this where everybody’s singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat, except the one guy wants to sing Five For Two, Eyes of Blue, and does. And the level of social tension in these meetings would just rise and rise, but nobody would ever say anything to this guy and tell him to bug out and can that crap.

So one night—this had happened two meetings in a row. It was the third meeting like this. Everybody hoped this guy wouldn’t come. So then he showed up. So then we all dose, then we get loaded, and the singing begins, and he begins his singing. And in the wave of hallucinations—and Kat was sitting next to me. He was sitting up on his haunches, kind of rocking back and forth on his heels, and I would look at him, and I could see he was going through these weird animal transformations. First he would become like a jackal, then he would become like a monkey. And it was really intense. And I mentioned it to Kat and she could see it too.

Well, so then he kept—and we were also trying to tape these ayahuasca songs, so it was a double irritation to us that this guy was so out of control. So after a particularly long song by the old guys with him just hammering against them, I could feel Kat—who has a real Irish temper—getting more and more pissed off at this guy. And finally at the end of this song, when the silence fell, she had been just staring at the floor. And she looked across the room at Don Jose and gave him a look of pure loathing. And I saw these red things, these red triangular shaped things, come out of her eyes and go across the room like oom, oom, oom, oom, oom, oom, oom. And when it got to him it knocked him off his feet. He was thrown backwards from the impact of these things, literally. And everything going on in the room stopped dead, and the elder shaman said to the guy sitting next to him, he said, “Oh, the gringa sends the ba-da-da-da-da-da!” And, you know, then you realize: wow, we’re in over our heads here. You can’t tell shit from shinola in this scene. So that’s an example of, you know, magical power condensed onto the material plane.

Yes?

4:22:36

McKenna

Clearly the same phenomenon. Yeah.

4:22:45

McKenna

He actually didn’t come back after that evening.

4:23:33

McKenna

Well, it seems to imply that we are all potentially linked together in many ways that civilization has suppressed. We are no longer telepathic, we are no longer able to reach out and cap somebody with a glance, like that, and—

4:23:52

McKenna

—but somehow our perception of what’s been going on is skewed. Rupert and I talked a lot about this. He had the idea that, he said, you know, the search for proof of psychic power has not been a very happy story with card flipping and this sort of thing. And Rupert had the genius to realize that: what is the commonest psychic power that we all believe exists and have experienced and so forth, but which science is utterly unable to explain that could be statistically studied? Well, what it is, is the sense that someone is looking at you. You know? And you could test this—and in fact we did test—where you would choose one person and put them at the front of a room full of people, and then you would tell people either look at your lap or look at the back of this person’s head, and they would be asked: are people looking at you or are people looking at their lap? And certain people, you could quickly satisfy yourself, were able to detect this a phenomenal amount of the time, well beyond statistical… you know, the rules of probability.

So I think we’re surrounded by subliminal abilities that we can’t really understand. I mean, I—from years of traveling in Asia—I have an amazing psychic power, which is: I can tell when food shouldn’t be eaten, you know? And it will happen to me, you know, in very good restaurants. And if I go against it, you know, I’ll spend the evening over the toilet, because I couldn’t believe that Chez So-And-So would serve poison food, because it was costing me so much money. But then, when I get back to the hotel room, sure enough, by overriding my own instincts I get into trouble.

I think psychic ability—well, this is worth talking about: that we cannot be, or—how can I put it? We cannot evolve beyond the confines of our language. And if you have a language that makes telepathy impossible, then telepathy will be impossible inside that culture. You see, we all pay lip service to the idea that language and culture create each other. But we actually act as though culture is real, and it isn’t. I learned this, you know, in Peru very dramatically, because in the Peruvian Amazon there’s a disease which people are very, very concerned about called susto. Have all of you heard of this? Susto only affects Peruvians. This is the first clue that something weird is going on. And its major manifestation is bad luck. But if you get it and you’re a Peruvian, you prepare to cash in your chips. You know, it’s as horrible as melanoma. You know, you’re doomed if you have this stuff. And you have to go to a shaman and get it taken care of, or you’re dead within six months. But I can’t get susto. It’s a linguistic disease of some sort. It travels around inside the confines of Mestizo Spanish and nowhere else.

4:27:47

McKenna

Well, people have these ideas, yeah. And, you know, like people say, “Well, magic is accomplished because the person the magic is being done to knows that it’s happening, and therefore they unconsciously participate in their own demise.” But I’ve observed these shamans in the Amazon, and they will go—if a shaman has decided to actually get somebody, then he will go to incredible lengths to conceal what he’s doing, so that the person never knows and never knows how to blame. So it isn’t some kind of psychological co-option that’s happening, it’s something a good deal more complex than that.

Yeah?

4:29:16

McKenna

Well, I’m not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to. Try again.

4:29:48

McKenna

Yes, sure. Because what you have to do is: you have to shift the locus—I mean, it’s kind of hard to explain, but every civilization has a locus. And we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts. We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together. First of all, we rely a lot of the time on the notion of the eency-beency: genes, viruses, atoms, elementary particles. These are the things which shape our world, we tell each other, and yet who has ever seen any of these things? I mean, a virus, maybe a few people have seen. A hydrogen atom? It’s a pretty airy-fairy concept. And when you start talking about the anti-mu mason and stuff like that, where you can only approach it through an arcane mathematical language, the reality—whatever that means—of these things becomes pretty questionable.

See, one of the things I think that psychedelics could do is give back to us what I call the immediacy of felt experience. Since the rise of Cartesian analysis in the seventeenth century, everything that we experience has been defined as what are called secondary characteristics. Color: a secondary characteristic. Feeling. And what’s real is mass, momentum, charge, spin, stuff like this—which, you know, these are the primary qualities of the universe, whoever encounters or deals with them. We need to model reality so that it is understandable to us. I mean, that that statement should even have to be made shows how far off track we are. Our current model of reality is excellent for describing the behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars or something like that, terrible for explaining to you how you’re supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend. So somehow we have sold out to abstraction. And this is something about science, you know, and and the demonic power of numerical analysis, and stuff like this.

I think that part of what the psychedelic revolution is, and why it is so politically threatening, is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves through thought, intuition, or feeling. And a non-psychedelic person joins up with the quantum physicists, or the Hasidic Jews, or some group of people who have already got it packaged and figured out. The UFO thing is a good example. Everybody is interested in UFOs, and are there space people, are there not? And I think most people think that the news will come that the way you encounter a UFO, the way most of us will encounter a UFO, is that the president will call a press conference and say that the time has come to speak frankly about certain declassified material, and that, yes, in fact, it has been going on. I mean, that’s not how it’s going to happen. The way it’s going to happen is on five grams in silent darkness in your living room—and that’s real.

If flying saucers were to land on the South Lawn of the White House tomorrow, it would be minor news compared to what can happen to you a minute and a half after smoking DMT. We don’t realize that we are not real unless we are the center of our own private mandala. And so we look to media, to experts. Maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it, or Mother Teresa, or Stephen Hawking. Well, forget all that. Those are just linguistic concepts as far as you’re concerned. The only thing that’s real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings. And if we could empower that, our political problems would disappear overnight. We are infantile, and we do love it. We don’t really try to claim our existential validity. And those who do are called mad, because they depart from the sanctioned paradigm.

Over here, somebody. Yeah?

4:35:01

McKenna

Yes. Well, it becomes real when we talk about it. One of the most satisfying experiences that I have as a public speaker is sometimes, after speaking to groups like last night, somebody will come up afterward and say, “I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak. Now I know there are at least two of us.” And the truth is there are more than two of us. There are thousands. If you—it’s a delusion if it happens to one person. It’s a cult if it happens to twenty people. And it’s true if it happens to ten thousand people. Well, this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity conferred upon something. We vote on it?

So I would like competition. I feel pretty lonely out here. I’m surprised nobody has followed me into this. There must be other people who can articulate these things as well or better than I can, but boy they don’t seem to come forth. I really don’t know why that is. Because what I say is not all that exceptional. It’s just the sum total of it is kind of eerie. But if we don’t—that’s why I was saying we cannot evolve faster than we evolve our language. Our language is like the collective skin of our culture. So until you say the words “self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace,” then there aren’t such things. Once you say it, it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency.

4:37:03

McKenna

See, people are buying other people’s experience. I mean, if you’re not a quantum physicist, why in the world should you take those people seriously? They’re talking gibberish. What power does it have over you, except that it comes presented on the platter of science? They say, “You must believe this. If you don’t believe this, you’re not a well educated, trendy, with it person.” We can just say: well, malarkey! Didn’t you people believe something completely different fifteen years ago? They say “Yes, but now we’ve got it!” I say, “Well, am I supposed to take that assertion seriously? You change your mind every six months.”

4:38:39

McKenna

Well, every entity has the value dark dimension. I mean, surely, only the most naïve of quantum physicists believe that the quantum electrodynamic description of the electron is all there is to say about the electron. Because biology is made out of electrons, and you can’t reason from quantum electrodynamics to the rainforests. Obviously, other factors are present which are escaping this particular linguistic model. So being able to talk about something doesn’t rob it of its mystery, it merely is a sectioning through it that gives you a kind of a lower-dimensional map of it. But the mystery remains intact.

You know, Wittgenstein talks about what he called the unspeakable. And, you know, the unspeakable is the true domain of being. And then within that there is a very small subset of those things which can actually be captured in language, but they’re a vanishingly small set of the whole thing. Mostly it’s all mystery. I don’t know why this is so surprising to people. I mean, where is it writ large that bipedal primates with binocular vision are supposed to be carrying around in their heads true models of the cosmos? I mean, would you expect an apple tree or a monarch butterfly to have a true map of the cosmos inside them? No more than that we should have.

So I think all knowledge is provisional. And I think the new science will honor this. This is why the rise in the use of the word “model.” They no longer believe they’re giving a complete explanation of phenomenon. They just say: well, here’s a model, and next year we’ll get a better model, and we’ll keep modeling, and our models will get better and better. But they will never be more than crude approximations to an unspeakable mystery.

4:41:02

McKenna

No, I find it exhilarating. I think part of the male (or part of the ego-dominator) pathology is to demand closure out of everything. There is no closure. You have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery. You know, it’s this thing we said this morning: the bigger you build the bonfire of understanding, the more darkness is revealed to your startled eye. So no, I think it’s open-ended and exhilarating and tremendously exciting that that’s the kind of universe we’re living in.

4:42:00

McKenna

That’s right. Well, you know, this is not merely the stoned ravings of the psilocybin brigade. Do you all know or have you ever heard of Gödel’s incommensurability theorem? This sounds daunting and disturbing. Have you ever heard of this? Does anybody have a clue what I’m talking about? Okay, that in itself is a measure of the kind of society we’re living in. Because to my mind, more important than Einstein or Schrödinger or any of those people was Kurt Gödel, a German mathematician. He began by studying the calculus. And he had a very funny method. What he did was: he would number every operation in a partial differential equation. And these numbers are called Gödel numbers. Gödel. Kurt Gödel. And what he showed—and I think this is maybe the most important intellectual step taken in the twentieth century—he showed that any formal system will produce true statements which are not provable within the confines of the formal system itself.

Now, what this actually means is that mathematics can fail. It means that there is no closure. He proved this logically. He showed that closure is impossible. That everything—he showed it for arithmetic, the most secure of all intellectual edifices. Essentially what he showed was that “2 + 2 = 4” is a very strong tendency, not a law. And this incommensurability theorem means that no program of formal analysis will ever completely exhaust its subject. There will always be a residuum of mystery. And we need to come to terms with this.

I mean, it’s taken us eighty years to get Einstein under our belts, and that’s a simple notion compared to what Gödel was saying. Because what he’s saying is not about the distortion of spacetime near massive objects, but something which actually affects our own lives on a day-to-day basis. And if you live for closure, you’re beating your head against a stone wall and your head will wear out long before the stone wall will. There’s a kind of—an appreciation for the mystery needs to replace the attitude that the mystery is an unsolved problem. Mysteries have no relationship whatsoever to unsolved problems.

Yeah?

4:45:40

McKenna

You don’t need to complete a map. I mean, I’m not such a fan of Wittgenstein, but he seems to have raised his ugly head here. Wittgenstein used to say: “We do not seek statements which are true, we seek statements which are true enough.” That’s this genuflection to the incommensurability theorem. That’s as good as it gets, folks: true enough. Beyond that, there’s just, you know, the airy realm of metaphysics, which will never be plumbed. So what we’re trying to do is refine our model, make it more responsive to what we want the model to tell us. But you don’t want to confuse the model with the phenomenon being modeled, because it will always have dimensions which exceed the grasp of the theory.

4:46:43

McKenna

Yes, although I have real problems with probability theory, which we’ll probably get into tomorrow. I think that in a sense probability theory has made it almost impossible for us to think clearly about anything, because it contains certain insidious built-in assumptions that are purely assumptions. For instance, probability theory tells you that when you flip a coin, the odds of it being heads or tails are fifty-fifty. If, in fact, that were true, the coin would land on its edge every single time. So what we need, you see, is not a theory of what is possible. That’s science. If you want to know if something is possible, you find a scientist, and they’re always perfectly happy to fulfill this function and tell you whether this is possible or not. What we completely lack as a civilization is a theory that explains to us how it is, out of the vast class of possible things, certain things undergo what Alfred North Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring. We have no theory. Science can say, “Well, it’s probable that it’ll be this, but it’s also 40% probable that it’ll be that.” We say, “Well, which will it be?” They say, “Well, I just told you the probabilities.” We say, “That’s not good enough. I want more.” They say, “We have no theory of selecting among the probabilities.”

The other problem that haunts probability theory is that it assumes that time is an absolute flat plane. It assumes that—no physicist tells you in his lab notes, “Please perform my experiment on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, because it won’t work any other time.” In other words, the assumption is made that the experiment will produce the data predicted by theory no matter when the experiment is performed. In other words, it’s assumed that the phenomenon is time independent. But that’s just an assumption that Newton got into. Proving that phenomena are time independent is absolutely beyond our intellectual reach. It can’t be done.

A curious thing about probability theory is: say you want to know how much current is flowing through a wire. Here’s how probability theory finds out. It measures the current flowing through the wire with a meter. It measures it a thousand times. It takes those values and adds them together. Then it divides by 1,000. Then it tells you this is how much current is flowing through the wire. You look at the value they’ve given you and you say, “But we took a thousand measurements and we never got this number.” They say, “Well, that’s because you didn’t average the probability.” “Well, if we took a thousand measurements and not one is the value you’re offering, why should we believe that this is the amount of current flowing through the wire?” Well, then there’s a bunch of hand-waving and epistemic foot-stamping and so forth.

Science is an incredibly fragile edifice, which, if it weren’t for its ability to hand its findings on to technologists who make pretty things, it would have to take its place somewhere to the left of, I don’t know, homeopathy, acupressure, something like that. In other words, it is not a meta-theory. It has not God’s truth by the jugular. It has a bunch of fishy mathematical formula which it’s flailing you with, but I think a serious revision of probability theory is going to have to take place.

4:51:13

McKenna

Well, but for instance, if the odds that the coin comes up heads or tails are fifty-fifty, why doesn’t it land on its edge every single time?

4:51:34

McKenna

Well, another thing probability theory says is that chance has no memory. They always, in first year statistics, they say: if you flip a coin and it comes up heads 49 times, what are the odds that will come up heads the 50th time? The answer is fifty-fifty. But any gambler would tell you that, you know, if it comes up heads five times in a row, bet on heads, for crying out loud! So there’s something.

4:52:30

McKenna

But don’t you think the other assumption is that time is a non-inputting… it’s not variable? You know, that you don’t say the odds of the coin coming up heads or tails are 50-50 in Canada, but 48-52 in Bolivia.

4:53:22

McKenna

Oh, I don’t have any trouble with that. I understand why science latched on to probability with such a vengeance. It’s because, you know, thanks to William of Ockham, there is this notion called Ockham’s razor, which is this idea that is most simply stated as: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. So since the idea that time is a flat invariant is the simplest assumption, try it first and see if it works. But I maintain that, you know, science has in certain areas been very slow to make progress in the social domain, in econometrics, in the, you know, multiple body problems, and stuff like that. Well, I think this is because this simple assumption that time is an invariant has to be reexamined. I would almost offer a new definition of science: science is that field of human endeavor which studies phenomena so crude that they are time invariant. You know, the hydrogen atom cleaves from the oxygen atom the same way every time. But love affairs don’t come apart the same way every time. Bankruptcies don’t occur the same way every time. These are complex compound phenomena that are then influenced by the temporal variables and the variables embedded in the environment around them. Now, the problem is: these are the things we’re interested in. Love affairs, bankruptcies, and the establishment of empires, very few people have a passionate interest in the dynamics of the water molecule.

4:55:25

McKenna

Oh, now I know I have you on the run because this is a “but it makes pretty things” argument.

4:55:38

McKenna

Well, see, I think science is a great enterprise and noble, but not the arbiter of truth. There are no arbiters of truth. The truth of the Tarot, the truth of quantum physics—these are truths in the supermarket of truth. But there’s no top end to that process. There may not even be one truth.

4:56:09

McKenna

In a given situation. If you’re flipping coins, probability theory is probably a good guide. You wouldn’t want to run your love affair on probability theory. So you have to choose the domain. You have to recognize the applicable models, the applicable tools for whatever domain you’re looking at.

4:56:32

McKenna

Well, you’re allowed to be a heretic. You just don’t get paid well. That’s the price you pay for that. Still—yeah?

4:57:35

McKenna

No, no. No, I don’t think it’s bad. I’m entirely in support of whatever the universe is in the process of trying to do here. I think that history is ending, and that it was a temporary perturbation of the system, and that we can anchor ourselves through this chaostrophe, or whatever it is, by going back to archaic models. But I think that—and this is what we’ll talk about tomorrow when we get the computer, because I don’t merely talk about it. Even though I’ve been flailing the mathematicians, ultimately I, too, come to rest with a fishy formula. I think that the universe is some kind—I think that there’s something that has been overlooked by science called (and I’ll name it), it’s called novelty. The universe is a novelty-conserving engine of some sort.

From the very first nanoseconds after the big bang, novelty has been conserving itself, and building newer and deeper levels of novelty on novelty already achieved. So that, you know, in the first few—I mean, you have the big bang. Then you have this era called the pre-physical era. It’s brief. It lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance equivalent to the diameter of the proton, electron—something dinky for sure. That’s called the era before physics. Then physics begins one jiffy after that. And the original universe was so hot that it was a plasma of free electrons. So since it was a plasma, there was nothing that you could call atomic physics, because the ambient temperature was so high that electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei. As the temperature of the universe fell, atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment.

Well then, further cooling of the universe leads to more complex kinds of bonds, and the cooking out of complex elements from stars. The original universe was made entirely of hydrogen. This hydrogen aggregated into masses so large that at their centers there was actually—and if you think I’m not nervous doing this in front of you, you’re crazy—these aggregates of hydrogen at the center, it was so massive in temperature and pressure that fusion could actually begin. And fusion cooked out heavier elements: iron, sulfur, and eventually carbon. Well, when you get four-valent carbon, this throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty. You get now for the first time not atomic systems, but molecular systems. These molecular systems lead into protobiological systems. Protobiological systems lead into prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, then true higher multicellular animals, then mammals, then human beings, then electronic culture, then the big surprise.

Now, the thing to notice about all this is that novelty keeps building on novelty already achieved. It crosses biological lines, atomic lines, molecular lines. It is a law of the universe I’m proposing: that novelty is conserved. So then, what we represent is the kind of ultimate nexus of novelty. And I believe that we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole—but it isn’t a gravitational singularity that I’m talking about, it’s a novelty singularity. And so the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyperconnectivity. And when that is achieved, the process will cease to be describable in the locus of ordinary spacetime and energy.

Now, science has no notion of this concept of novelty. In the East there is such a concept. It’s called Tao. And Tao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws. Tomorrow I will argue, when we get the computer, that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious, and that we can discover the nature of the novelty constant. And instead of treating spacetime as an absolutely featureless plane, we can take that zero value—which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics—and substitute instead a fractal dimension number, which will be some kind of decimal fraction between one and two. And then this will allow us to do things previously inconceivable, like predict the future and stuff like that.

See, one thing I guess I should say, since we sort of drifted into this fairly ratty place, is the idea that the universe is growing toward itself. It’s not moving outward from its origin, it’s moving toward its completion. And this is called teleology. It’s very unwelcome in most scientific modeling, but that’s a legacy from the nineteenth century, where they were so concerned to get God out of the picture that they wanted everything to happen through one random process colliding with another random process, and flipping out mule, deer, elephants, and redwood trees. But in principle we don’t have to believe in God to believe in an attractor at the end of the process. We see many kinds of attractors in the natural world.

One way that I think of the psychedelic experience is: you know, you’ve heard me talk about hyperspace, superspace, this kind of thing. It really does seem to me that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort. And you know how they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone? And that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and reconstruct them, you can reconstruct the cone? Well, the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping is: you are sectioning a hyper-dimensional object, and what you’re coming back with is a lower-dimensional map of this higher-dimensional object. Well, everybody has a different map in the same way that there are an infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone. But they’re all generated by the same object. And if it’s a mystery to you how a simple finite object like a cone can generate an infinite number of elliptical sections, then it’s going to be hard for you to understand how everybody can have a different psychedelic trip and yet be actually dealing with the same reality in hyperspace.

Yeah?

5:06:19

McKenna

You mean its completion closure? Well, what does closure mean to you?

5:06:34

McKenna

Well, maybe what we should say is: there’s only one closure, and all others are false closure. Closure isn’t really the word I would use. I steal shamelessly from Alfred North Whitehead, and probably others as well, but I’m willing to cop to that. He has this notion called concrescence, which I think is a great idea. He says everything grows toward a nexus of concrescence. So complexification is at the service of concrescence. We can see how this planet is caught in a concrescent process. A hundred years ago, you know, it took three months to go around the world. Now it takes a third of a second. A hundred years ago, a newspaper carried local news. Now local news means the news of this planet. We can telephone Prague or Shanghai by just going outside to the phone booth. We are being knitted more and more tightly together.

Now, most people think this is a human world phenomenon and it will stop at some point with everybody connected to everybody else, I guess. I don’t think it is a process of the human world. I think we’re embedded in a collapse of physical law. This is a fairly pathological notion from the point of view of most scientists, because they believe that the universe will exist for, you know, millennia or millions of years into the future. But I think our presence on this planet indicates that we’re deep into Act 3 of the cosmic drama.

Yeah?

5:08:33

McKenna

Yes. I mean, in a way, the problem is not the end of the universe, but why it existed in the first place. What happened to flaw the original nothingness to contort itself into this fantastic cascade of interconnected complexity? It’s very, very tricky, this stuff. I mean, you know—well, without dragging that in, it’s tricky enough so let’s leave it at that.

Yeah?

5:09:15

McKenna

Oh. Well, ask a question. Seize the tiller.

5:09:31

McKenna

Oh, I see what you’re asking. Should you boost it? I don’t like doing that, simply because I like to get—I think the real action is in the flash. And the flash comes by getting as much of the material to the synapses in as coherent a wave front as possible. So I tend not to do that, but to take an initial large dose. Of course, if you take an initial dose and it doesn’t do anything, then you could follow it up.

5:10:07

McKenna

You mean just to discuss it generally? Do you all know what ibogaine is? It’s a psychedelic. It’s an interesting one. One of the things interesting about it is how little people are aware of its existence. It’s the root scraping of an African small tree or bush called Tabernanthe iboga. And interestingly enough, it’s a true aphrodisiac; perhaps the only real aphrodisiac in the world. Because what are called aphrodisiacs are usually either just stimulants or things which cause genital itching. But ibogaine actually seems to work on the psychology of sexual drive in some way. It’s a powerful hallucinogen.

One of the puzzling things about ibogaine is that we can’t confirm its use by human beings before 1850. And the Portuguese were into the areas of Africa where this is happening. They’ve been in there since the 1430s. So it probably is a new pattern of drug use that has arisen. And it’s a major force among the Fang people of Zaire and Gabon holding back Christianity and mission culture. And it’s a visionary hallucinogen without doubt. Ibogaine. Probably in the future, eventually, society will get around to exploiting this particular one just like it does everything else.

5:12:04

McKenna

The drug is ibogaine. The plant it comes from is Tabernanthe iboga. Yes?

5:12:21

McKenna

Well, that’s what ayahuasca is. You see, the DMT is then not destroyed in your intestine, and so you have a slow release DMT trip by doing that.

5:12:38

McKenna

In theory and probably in fact that would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded. The problem is it might be a too successful way. You want to be very careful with these MAO inhibitors. There are MAO inhibitors that drug companies have produced where a single dose inhibits all the MAO in your body for up to a month. This would be murder if you got around some DMT on that. The nice thing about harmine is that it’s fully reversible in four to six hours. So it’s a gentle MAO inhibitor. But yes, this is the strategy. This is why you could conceivably take the seeds of a plant like Peganum harmala, which grows around here more or less and contains harmine, and combine it with a plant like Desmanthus illinoensis, which contains DMT, and come up with a North American pseudo-ayahuasca of some sort. People are doing this. But if you think it takes courage to just do these compounds naturally, imagine the kind of courage it takes to diddle with recipes and to do your own bioassay—which you must do, because the cook must taste the soup.

5:14:08

McKenna

Peganum harmala, in the Zygophyllaceae. Yeah?

5:14:24

McKenna

Well, we never tried the experiment again because Dennis felt that he’d really made the maximum contribution to the effort. There are many experiments, though, which could be tried which would put no human being in danger. For instance, you could use square wave generators, which are acoustical generators, to try and derive these drug molecules into DNA in vitro, in a test tube. What you would do is: you would simply put the denatured DNA into solution, put some DMT into the solution, shake it furiously, ultracentrifuge the mix to get the loose DMT out, and then weigh the DNA and see if its weight had increased by a number which was magically divisible by the molecular weight of the DMT molecule. These kinds of studies have been done and show that DMT does intercalate and locate itself into DNA. So yeah, there are a lot of different things like that that could be done that wouldn’t put anyone at risk.

5:15:49

McKenna

Well, he doesn’t remember it very clearly. His impression was that it lasted about five days. It actually lasted three weeks. So the real stuff that would have alarmed him, he fortunately was too out of it to see or remember. But I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it. And I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly before we charge off and try that particular trick again, yeah.

5:16:24

McKenna

Well, this is what’s being referred to in True Hallucinations, which is a tape set which will be published as a book next year. It describes an expedition to the Amazon in 1971, which was really where we got the whammy. I mean, I’m still running on what happened from the 28th of February 1971 to the 21st of March. The rest of my life is pretty much throw away. But what he… I don’t know. It was weirder than flying saucer abduction, because that now there’s a whole form for it. It was hard to say. Something was waiting for us down in the Amazon. And as soon as we started taking these mushrooms, it began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom and your voice and certain other materials present at hand in that environment to essentially… well, there aren’t even words to say what it was. Condense the soul into three-dimensional space? Or create the philosopher’s stone inside your body and then give birth to it? Or, in other words, some radical transformation of the ontology of being human was held out as a possibility.

And it all came down to an experiment that he wanted to perform that seemed to me so unlikely to have any effect whatsoever that I felt it was perfectly all right to let this experiment go forward, because I would have bet dollars to donuts that nothing would happen. Instead, all hell broke loose at the conclusion of this experiment. And he claimed at the time that what he had done was bonded into my DNA enough psilocybin in a superconducting kind of bond—which, if you know how superconductivity works, a superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt. It’s not like an ordinary chemical bond. And he felt that you could do what he called bell the cat: that you could actually hang a transceiver around the neck of the lógos itself. And from then on it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind. And it just seemed so wildly improbable to me that it went forward. But in fact, at the conclusion of the experiment something changed in me, and I essentially became who I now appear to be. But before that I wasn’t. I was sort of a wastrel and undirected person of some sort.

And then tomorrow you will see, when we get the computer, what the bottom line of this is. Because what was eventually revealed was a kind of mathematical mandala of space and time that rested for its veracity on the fact that it made prediction of the future possible. And tomorrow afternoon I will display this thing for you, and you can judge for yourself whether this is a product of a pathological incident or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton’s laws of motion, or something like that.

I think in principle all this is possible. I think transforming—part of what human history’s conclusion will be is what I call turning the human body inside out. We want the soul to become visible. We want the body to become an idea freely commanded in the imagination. And then, at that point, as James Joyce said, man will be dirigible. That was as close as he could get in 1939 to saying: you’ll turn into a flying saucer. He knew it was an airship, he knew it was oblate. But he thought it was a dirigible. Anyway, enough about La Chorrera. Maybe we’ll get into that tomorrow.

Yeah?

5:21:04

McKenna

No. Good point. The vine contains he harmine, another plant contains the DMT. This makes ayahuasca unique among these shamanic tools, because, you see, all the rest of them—peyote, mushrooms, San Pedro, ibogaine, morning glories, and whatever else; cannabis—are simply plants which you ingest. Ayahuasca is a drug, a product, something made by pharmacologists. I mean, pharmacologists who wear penis sheathes, but pharmacologists nevertheless, you see. So suddenly the human dimension enters into it. Not all ayahuasca is alike. Ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it. So it’s not about a relationship between you and a plant. When you take ayahuasca, between you and the plant there stands a human being. And if you’re headed down there to seriously get into this, don’t give up in a hurry. You will drink a lot of swill before you find someone who is conscientious enough, honest enough, and cares about you enough to not shortchange you in some way.

5:22:27

McKenna

Telepathine. Yes, ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce in 1853, and then in the early years of the twentieth century the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grünberg brought a lot of it back to Berlin. And Louis Lewin and his group characterized an alkaloid which they named telepathine. But it was not realized then until, I think, 1957 by the chemists [???] and [???] that telepathine was exactly the same compound as an earlier compound isolated from the Syrian rue named harmine. And since the rules of chemical nomenclature are that the first compound, the first name, takes precedent, telepathine had to be dropped and harmine substituted. But it tells you how convinced these early ethnographers were that this stuff was exciting paranormal mental abilities.

5:23:35

McKenna

The harmaline? Oh Well, no, no. See, what happened was, what Koch-Grünberg took back to Berlin was the liana, the vine; the Banisteriopsis caapi. The other active ingredient in ayahuasca was not isolated chemically until 1956.

5:24:03

McKenna

The vine doesn’t contain DMT.

5:24:09

McKenna

Well, yes, has an effect. At high doses it can cause hallucination by itself. The plant which contains the DMT, normally there are a couple of possible substitutes. But normally what’s used in the Amazon is Psychotria viridis. This is a little coffee-like plant that contains DMT in the roots. One of the great mysteries of ayahuasca is how, out of 475,000 species of plants in the Amazon, these people figured out that you pound the vine and combine it with the leaves, and then go through this elaborate boiling and concentrating, and then you get this fantastic visionary beverage. If you ask them how they figured it out, they say: the plants told us—which is so far the best answer anybody has come up with.

In 1962, Melvin Bristol, who was a graduate student of Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard, was studying ayahuasca among the [???] Indians. And he took ayahuasca, and during the trip a plant was revealed to him, and he was told that it would be alkaloid positive. And it was alkaloid positive. Well, this is now anecdotally embedded in the literature. Was it dumb luck? Was it synchronicity? Or was it that plants tell you about other plants?

The way ayahuasca is used by research pharmacologists in these Amazon tribes is: they brew a standard brew, and then if they have a plant that they, for some reason, suspect might have some medical usage, they will put a little bit of that plant into the ayahuasca, and then the ayahuasca will give them a readout on it and explain what it is. I had one of the longest evenings I’ve ever put in where I took half a dose of ayahuasca and half a dose of mushrooms, and it was absolutely god-awful. It was different than any bad trip I’ve ever had. It didn’t seem to be about my personality. It seemed to be about core processes. There was a little Pac-Man thing, and I could see it moving through my memory just choo-choo-choo-choo-choo, and I didn’t know—you know that horrifying scene in 2001 where the guy is outside the spaceship and he says, “Open the pod doors, HAL. Open the pod doors, HAL.” Well, that’s how I felt. I felt I could almost see the molecular machinery had jammed. I said, “Oh my god, it’s not going to de-animate or de-alcalate. It’s somehow caught in some kind of a loop.” And I sweated bullets for an hour and a half with it. It was really horrible. And then it finally released and let me go. But as I sat in that chair, I said, you know, “If I can’t pull out of this place, then there’s a room in a back ward somewhere, and they will just sit me there and look in on me every twelve or fourteen hours, and that’ll be my story.”

Yeah?

5:27:58

McKenna

Because I don’t feel particularly courageous. I don’t feel that this is unusual what we’re doing here. Am I crazy? Could be. It seems to me perfect—it seemed to me, knowing what I know—which is no more than a thousand other people know—I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t talk about these things. Because our problem is: we’re disempowered, unhappy, and disconnected from ourselves and each other. Here’s the solution. How can you—it’s a political obligation, or it’s a moral obligation, to try and at least inform people. They don’t have to take it, but they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them as they live their lives. So I just do it because I couldn’t do it any other way. And I’m puzzled that nobody else feels this imperative, because the people I talk to—you know, a thousand people have told me psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them, but not one of those thousand people ever said, “And I’ve scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing that you’re doing,” so I don’t know.

5:29:23

McKenna

Wow! Well, either I’m crazy or they are. I don’t know. See, I think that—you know how, if you confront certain butterflies or deer, there are certain kinds of animals that if you move slowly enough, they can’t tell you’re there because they’re set up for edge detection. And if you move slowly enough, they don’t register the edge transiting. So you can actually walk right up to them and grab them if you know how to do it. Lizards are like this. Cats. So I think that, by moving with stealth rather than going to Harvard or Berkeley and inviting the freshman class to pour into the street and smash bank windows, that we can actually slip this thing along. I think that eventually such desperation is going to strike straight institutions that they will come to us and ask. They’re going to try everything when the going gets rough, and when they finally decide to drop all their pretension we’ll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue. I’m sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it. I don’t think the political climate is that repressive. I think people are doing the work of the man for the man by being that paranoid.

5:30:58

McKenna

Well, Counter Pressures, this book was banned in Florida. But for crying out loud, look at the Russians. They were able to toss out the Communist Party. Well now, that’s a pretty scary thing to go up against. We don’t have anything comparable to that in terms of its depth of penetration into our lives, and yet they were able to do that. I think there’s more to life than hiding out. You’ve got to make the grand gesture at a certain point, and then let the chips fall where they may. Brave words, oh boy!

5:31:46

McKenna

Basically, I think people should see these kinds of meetings as a tremendous opportunity to form local alliances. The last thing on Earth we want here is the Terence McKenna cult. That would just be the stupidest resolution of the whole thing. The whole message is: you don’t need me or Tim or anybody else. Just take a little metaphysical responsibility upon yourself, realize you are the microcosm of the macrocosm, and then get with like-minded people and proceed. I mean, this is how political revolutions are made, despite people just ignoring as irrelevant outmoded social forms and structures, and insisting on their own authenticity.

5:32:43

McKenna

Oh, it might help people. I mean, how would it help?

5:32:50

McKenna

Strength in numbers. Well, I think people should support psychedelic communities, archival projects, legalization moves. Yes. But mainly I think what we all need to do is get more loaded. You know? Deeper trips, higher doses. See, it’s not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms. It’s that we just want to be left alone to do what we want to do. The mushroom, if it’s as great as I say it is, then it doesn’t need a mob clearing the way for it. It’s perfectly able to advance its own agenda. The thing is just not to yield to fear. Because, as I said, if you yield to fear, you do the man’s work for the man, and that makes you the man. So what you have to do is just say, “Well, you know, this is what we do, and eventually it will change.”

I mean, gay people is a good example. I mean, in our own lifetimes, we’ve seen this go from, you know, an unspeakable crime against nature which decent people took care to not even be informed of, to, you know, a political subculture with its own agenda, and its own press, and its own political clout. Well, we are not as under the thumb as gay people were, say, in the early fifties or something. If they can do it, we can do it. If black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social integration into the body politic, then we can do it too. But not if we—in America, nobody gets nothing unless they demand it. So as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and are looking over our shoulder, well, then they’ve got us on the run. But we just have to say: look! This is it. This is who I am. If this doesn’t jive with your political agenda, adjust your political agenda! Because this is who we are.

Well now, let’s knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point. Thanks very much!

5:35:11

McKenna

Well, before we get into this morning’s rigid agenda, where were we yesterday? I recall there were hands up. Do the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns that went with them?

5:35:39

McKenna

Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities? Well, I think, as I said: this is your affinity group. You can’t recognize psychedelic people walking around on the street, because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even freaks look like freaks. So yeah, I’ve been in a number of places where people organize the—I don’t know what you would call them—discussion groups, affinity groups in the wake of it. It’s something you sort of have to self-organize. Maybe in the period after the close this afternoon, the people who are into that should exchange names and get something going. I mean, obviously it’s a delicate thing, but on the other hand—yeah?

5:36:46

McKenna

For me? Well, a lot of people feel more secure doing journeys if they have some kind of ground control. And in the most casual form that can just be your best friend who doesn’t do it, but you do. Or if you suspect that fairly deep and charged issues are going to arise out of it, why, you want it to be someone with some psychotherapeutic experience. But, on the other hand, you’re in such a vulnerable state in that dimension that you really want to choose the facilitator carefully, and have some kind of set of agreements worked out before. I mean, the psychedelic trip doesn’t always take the direction you want it to. I mean, you write down before you take it that you want to deal with some episode of childhood trauma or abandonment, then you get loaded, and it seems so preposterous that you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing aloud. And the facilitator keeps trying to bring you back, say, “Well, you’re not doing the work. We’re here to do the work.” Well, then you say—well, you know, having a knockdown drag out fight while somebody’s loaded isn’t exactly the way to go either.

You sort of have to feel into that issue. As I said yesterday, I can’t get where I want to go in the presence of somebody else, because they hold me to the surface. If I were to have my idea of the perfect facilitator situation is that they’re two rooms away, and you have something equivalent of a beeper. And then, you know, you can beep them and they’ll come in and pat you on the head and tell you that it’s all right if you need that. But otherwise they stay completely out of it. It’s really nice to follow your own thought, you know? And I think we change in the presence of another person. You know, we create a persona. And it takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona. And in that situation there’s no reason, so why do it?

Yeah?

5:39:35

McKenna

Well, not exactly. I mean, people always say: can you do it on the natch? And I sort of feel like if I could do it on the natch, I’d be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care. It’s too radical. You don’t want to be able to do that on the natch. It’s a wonderful control on it to know that it won’t happen unless you take the stuff. You know, because it’s not a mood shift or a subtle refocusing from foreground to background. It’s an absolutely ontology-peeling breakthrough.

5:40:20

McKenna

In principle I agree with that, and I’m fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind. But you have to be very demanding. And I think too many people are not demanding at all. I mean, you sit people down in a room and tell them we’re going to repeat oh ma hum 500 times, and at the end of it they come to you with tears of joy in their eyes and tell you it was the most profound thing that’s ever happened to them. I don’t understand where those people could be coming from, you know? I mean, it’s… I can sit down and, like, think about being stoned on DMT, and I can give myself the butterflies with that exercise, but not much else. That’s as far as I get, you know?

Persistently, these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods, but when you look at the art, which is the paper trail that they leave, it doesn’t look like what I’m talking about. You know, I mean, I went through—once, for a while, I was a professional art buyer for Tibetan art. Thank Thankas and that kind of thing. And I interiorized all of that iconography. But it isn’t very much like what we’re seeing. And, you know, there are a number of highly idiosyncratic artists scattered through the history of art. Gustave Moreau, James Ensor. We mentioned Heronymus Bosch, you know, you know, well, Mati Klarwein. But I’m trying to think of older ones. But these seem to be unique visions, but not exactly the vision that seems to come out of this stuff. Part of what’s so interesting to me is how alien it is. How, if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society anticipating the visions which will later become the paradigms, then they’re not doing the job very well in this psychedelic domain.

Yeah? Or did you have a follow-up?

5:43:03

McKenna

Well, but this is where the action is. You know, it has to make sense in the world. Now, I don’t want to suggest—I mean, I think, like, in the case of psilocybin I have no doubt whatsoever that if you take five grams of psilocybin every four days, or let’s say forty days, then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us. You know, if what you—see, the thing is, in the spiritual quest, all these methods (yoga, and mantra, and then all the new versions of this), the whole stance of the spiritual quester is an accelerator to the floor all the time. When you switch over to this method, it’s the brake pads that are going to get the workout. We psychedelic people do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind. We strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar.

5:44:17

McKenna

Why? Because it can become so peculiar that… that… that… I don’t know why! Yes, that’s it. It can become so peculiar that it is unspeakable. And if it’s unspeakable, it’s just dropped out of the social contract, you know?

5:44:58

McKenna

Yes. Well, that’s what I wanted to say. If you want to be the guy on Cold Mountain who is covered with hair, who the village people occasionally see when the mist clears when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood, you can become that Taoist immortal. You know, what I like to say about psychedelics is: once you get to this, it’s no longer about seeking the answer. It’s now a tougher go. Now you have to face the answer. And it’s so easy to seek. You know, this Rishi, that Roshi, that Geshe, that Guru, and all the wonderful people, and the gossip and hijinks around the ashram, and all that malarkey. But once you get to this, and it’s just you and it, you know, it’s a whole different ball game.

5:46:04

McKenna

Well, we’re talking… there are two things: the experience, and the wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience. You don’t have to keep dosing to do that but to attain, maintain, and work out the implications of that. But you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that maturation and so forth.

My gosh, everybody’s agitated here. Yeah?

5:46:55

McKenna

No, largely not. In the Amazon—I mean, I discuss this with people and they said, “No.” You know? “The plant is the teacher.” I mentioned, or maybe I didn’t, that there’s an interesting book called Haoma and Harmaline by Flattery and Schwartz, and it discusses the ambiance of the religious attitudes of early Zoroastrianism. And they believed in what they called the Menang existence. And we’re talking, you know, 2000 BC here, and they believed there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs. That was the entire way to do it. And I think it’s a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier. It’s good that these things are isolated from ordinary experience by the formality of having to take the compound. If they weren’t, it would be flooding in upon us all the time and we would have a hard time indeed.

Yeah?

5:48:59

McKenna

Why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with psychedelica? Well, I don’t know exactly. I mean, I would certainly agree. See, I think that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy. And a religion like Hinduism represents, to my mind, an extreme case. The roots of Hinduism are in the soma rite. For 3,000 years this is what Hindu religiosity was about. It was an intoxicant. And without the intoxicant, there was no connection to the mystery. Well then, for some reason, it became tremendously hierarchically structured and constipated and dogmatic and, well, certainly dominator, if not outright fascism. And so I think all these religions have their roots in this irrational experience, but they constantly want to turn it into a real estate operation, and they do. And they do.

And so—but in answer to your question, all these techniques work with psychedelics. Mantra, Yantra, magical invocation, raising the Kundalini—all of these things which seem so totally obscure from this level of consciousness, it just becomes an: of course. Of course it works. So it seems to me the lost ingredient is the psychedelic. I mean, you know, if you go to India and you have any illusions about sadhus, I mean, sadhus are hash heads with a line of patter, that’s all. I mean, the main concern in any community of sadhus is: how many chillums can you make and smoke before you fall asleep? And I’ve never seen a yoga text that came clean about this and said, you know: this is basically a “How to use cannabis” technique. So it’s good to go to the actual place and see how it’s being handled.

What’s going on in the Amazon is: the shamans cure, they chant, they provide an exemplar for their society, but when you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them, their attitude is more like scientists. They will agree that they can cure and find lost objects and predict the weather and all that, but they don’t understand how this works. They’re very eager to admit that it’s all a big mystery, and that beyond the cheerful set of shamanic techniques that they—the Witoto, the Guarani, whoever they are—beyond the cheerful power of the conjuration of these techniques lies the absolute unknown, and they’re aware of that. There’s no closure in shamanism, so it sort of keeps you humble.

Yeah?

5:53:16

McKenna

Oh, I think contact highs are very real. Not only contact highs, but there are also contact lows, which are very noticeable. You know, there’s a phenomenon called alophrenia. Do you know what alophrenia is? Alophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia, and you go to visit him, and you begin acting so peculiar that they don’t let you out. This is a common phenomenon: misbehavior by people who have come to visit people who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis. The best theory is that it’s pheromonal. You know, there’s one theory of what schizophrenia is that schizophrenia is a pheromonal disorder, and what happens is your pheromone system goes haywire. So then you don’t smell right. So then the people around you begin frowning at you, avoiding you, turning their back on you when you approach. Then you begin thinking: there’s something wrong with me. I’m weird. Then you secrete more of this weird pheromone and people get more—and a dissonance begins to happen until finally you have to be plucked out of the situation. There are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose schizophrenia by a sniff test. You know, they just walk over and take a hit off the side of your neck and then say, you know, “Lock this one up, put this one on.”

Yeah?

5:55:12

McKenna

Now, the problem is one of—the question is: is there in Huichol art a trace of this psychedelic dimension? I guess there’s a trace. The problem is twofold. The problem is one of material: that with wood and beads and pitch it’s very hard to contort that into the objects seen. And then the other thing is conceptually: you know, that it’s very hard to grab and hold these very weird images. The other thing that’s happening in most traditional societies is that you operate within a canon. You know, if you’re a Huichol, you have a very limited vocabulary of expression within the iconography of Huichol art. If you’re a Tibetan thangka painter, similarly, it’s all laid out for you. The walls of tradition are very high. The channel is very narrow. That’s why it’s so interesting when an artist can transcend the momentum of their cultural position and really produce something unique.

I don’t see—I mean, I think, you know, the reason I like talking to artists is because all the art of the past 20,000 years is like a teacup dipped into the ocean. And yet, any one of us—not particularly self-defined as artists, most of us—can access the ocean, can swim in the ocean. And so you say, you know, we all can touch the same source that these great artists must have touched. Their skill was that they were able to bring out a thimble full of this material, and the rest of us can only look at it in wonder and then it passes by.

Yeah?

5:57:31

McKenna

No, I’m not sure exactly. I mean, the funny thing about the extraterrestrial position is that it depends on how long it’s been since you’ve taken mushrooms how creditable it seems. If it’s recent, it seems the only possible explanation. If you wait a few months, then skepticism and reason begins to level the landscape and you say, “Well, no, it couldn’t possibly really be that.” But I think—you know, I think that we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of the world and the real history of life on this planet. And we don’t know how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is. Does it always have to be in a body? Does it always have to be in a body that stands upright with binocular vision? I think the real task with dealing with extraterrestrials is to know when you’ve got one. It’s completely silly to search the galaxy with radio telescopes for a radio civilization. I mean, to my mind, that is as chuckle-headed as deciding you’re going to search the galaxy for a decent Italian restaurant. I mean, it doesn’t work like that.

So, you know, if you think about the mushroom, try to think about it objectively, it looks to me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial. First of all, you know, DNA has been known to us only since 1950—less than a century. And we’re already involved in this thing called the human genome project. Well, what that means is we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings. It seems to me anything we would recognize as intelligence would pass through a phase of self-analysis where it would realize that it was made out of DNA, and would then sequence itself. We’re about to do this ourselves. Well, that means that most extraterrestrials will be the product of their own reflexive design process. In other words, an extraterrestrial that can cross the gulf between the stars must surely then be able to control its own form.

Well then, if you look at the mushroom, it’s a curious combination of artifact and entity. It looks sort of manufactured. There’s very little fat on that system. I mean, first of all, fungi are primary decomposers. This means that they are at the very bottom of the food chain. This makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused by Buddhists look like an orgy of slaughter, you know? Because if you’re at the very bottom of the food chain, that is the only place that is absolutely karma-free. So there’s the mushroom, occupying the karma-free position in the food chain.

Well then, it’s—you know, we’ve been reading about these huge mycelial clones spread under acres of soil in Michigan and Wyoming. Well, those things, what that is, is that’s a cobweb-like network—and in the case of a psilocybin species filled with neurotransmitter-like compounds. Can you imagine how many synaptic clamps there must be in a 1500-acre mushroom clone? If brain size is any relationship to intelligence, then hang on Hannah, because it means that this thing spread through the forests of the Midwest has a brain approximate in weight to a couple of dozen gray whales.

The other thing is then: the spore looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer space. If you want to store spores for longevity, you create conditions as close to the conditions in outer space as you possibly can: high vacuum, very low temperature. The casing of a spore is one of the most electron-dense organic materials in nature. So electron-dense that it approximates a metal. Well, global currents can form on the quasi-metallic surface of an airborne spore, and they act as a further repellent for hard radiation. And percolating through the galaxy at an ordinary rate typical of stellar material, a mushroom species could percolate from one side of the galaxy to the other in under 400,000 years. Well, that’s lightning speed compared to the size and age of the universe.

If we were to gain the power to design ourselves, I think (after a whole bunch of Madonna and Robert Redford clones) we would probably move on to becoming something very much like a mushroom. It’s mild, it’s non-invasive, it’s at the bottom of the food chain, it’s virtually immortal, it’s laden with neurotransmitters, and it’s living in the imagination.

And this, you know, brings me to a favorite subject of mine. This is where we have to go. We have to enter into the Blakeian divine imagination. That’s where our future lies. At this point, our relationship to this planet as infant to child is a relationship of impending toxemia. We have to be parted from the mother—to save the mother and to save us. And there are not that many possibilities. Where are we going to go? The political geniuses who run this planet have made migration to the stars virtually impossible. I mean, don’t kid yourself. It isn’t only a matter of announcing a program. Our short, stubby fingers couldn’t assemble something like a Saturn V moon rocket. That was made by a generation of people now deceased. Americans in this era are rather dull-witted people who have a good deal of trouble even running a third world economy. So we’re not going to the stars. You can forget that.

So then, where are we going? Well, nanotech—is that a possibility? Can we download everybody into a super-cooled cube of gold ytterbium alloy buried five hundred feet deep in the center of Copernicus? And then we’ll go there and leave the Earth and dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is: is there a way to diffuse consciousness into the environment? Can we become dolphins, caterpillars, gray whales, and mosquitoes, and just sort of defocus ourselves? I mean, all of these are, of course, wildly radical notions. But, on the other hand, we’re headed straight toward a brick wall at about 5,000 miles an hour. We have to figure out something pretty astonishing in a hurry.

Yeah?

6:05:55

McKenna

The heat shield. Yes, precisely. Yes?

6:06:10

McKenna

That’s a funny question. I don’t know, because it’s so hard to tease apart genetics and environment. They certainly have had a jump start on evolution by virtue of hanging out in the space that our lives have created. I think children need lots of attention, lots of nurturing physical and spiritual. I guess I would say so. Certainly they haven’t been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding that is in the society. We just got through anti-dope week at our school, which is an incredibly painful experience at this particular school, because I don’t think there’s a person associated with it who believes it for a moment. But it’s like we all have to study fascism because we live in a fascist state. A teacher made a statement that LSD caused brain damage, and my son dared to challenge this, and the guy said, “Well, who told you it doesn’t cause brain damage?” No, not my daddy. He said, “Well, Albert Hofmann told me it doesn’t cause brain damage.” End of discussion.

Yeah?

6:08:00

McKenna

Yes, well, when children are very young, all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen. And I think nursing mothers and their relationship to their children is intensely telepathic. I remember when my daughter was not very old—she must have been like about three and a half—and I had a dream, and it was a very unusual dream for me, and very highly realized, and I dreamed of an orrery. Do you know what an orrery is? It’s a model of the solar system made of gears, and you crank it and there’s the sun in the center and the planets go around it. But this was a huge orrery. I dreamed I walked down a hall and I opened the door, and I walked into this room, and there was this orrery, and these planets were circling around the sun inside this room. And then I was awakened by my daughter crying, and I went downstairs, and she said there were planets circling around inside my bedroom. And that’s a very specific and rare image for an adult or a child to have. So yes, I think that our chuckle-headedness is the main barrier to our encountering all kinds of special abilities that move around us all the time. We are truly the prisoners of our limited conceptions.

Yeah?

6:11:16

McKenna

Uh-huh, the reconnect affirmation. Yeah, well, I think that’s not a bad idea.

6:11:38

McKenna

Well, I don’t have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the mushroom, because I just quote the mushroom. And I said, “What about ritual?” And it said, “That’s fine if you don’t know what you’re doing.” And I think that, you know, it’s really not an anti-ritualist position, because that is what ritual is. That’s what you do if you don’t know what you’re doing.

6:12:07

McKenna

None of us. But you can tell the ritual works because it makes itself obsolete. That’s the… it’s… yeah.

6:12:41

McKenna

Well, you know, even in the most ritualistic context, there’s always a footnote made for the crazy wisdom. I mean, every great teacher has said that what he’s saying is malarkey. A teacher who doesn’t tell you that what he or she is saying is malarkey is not to be taken seriously. So, you know, it’s the “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” style of thinking. Or I was just reading this guru who’s coming on strong—is his name Pooja Ji? No, no, not Da. But anyway, somebody, this guy said, “Don’t do practice. Don’t do practice. Practice is only distraction.” He said, “We have to keep thinking up.” He said, you know, “Running an ashram isn’t easy. These students, they expect so much of us. We have to continually keep inventing stuff to keep them happy, and send them off on these crazy quests and, you know, endless fasts and all this stuff, because they want that.” But, you know, the guru is pretty much content to kick back with the latest Rolling Stone.

Yeah?

6:14:03

McKenna

Right. Well, are you all familiar with Rupert Sheldrake’s work? Sheldrake is a British biologist who’s written a number of books. His first book was called A New Science of Life. And it was catapulted to fame by virtue of a review in Nature which said that it should be burned. And then he wrote a book called The Presence of the Past. Sheldrake has an extraordinarily simple, interesting, revolutionary idea that just drives scientists straight up a tree. His idea is that, once something happens, it’s easier for it to happen the next time. Yes, simple. But it takes then forms which drive people crazy, because he asserts based on that that if you teach rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia, then rats in Massachusetts should be able to run this maze faster than if the rats in Australia hadn’t learned it. Because once something has occurred, then it has a momentum in time. He calls this the theory of formative causation or morphogenesis. And it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to explain, but it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky.

And so Rupert and I have been close friends for years, and even longer I’ve been tight with a mathematician in Santa Cruz named Ralph Abraham, who’s a chaos dynamicist. And Ralph and Rupert and I did a book together called Trialogues at the Edge of the West, which will be out at the end of the summer from Bear. And we’ll all get together at Esalen at the end of August and do a bunch more of these public three-way dialogues, which are pretty spirited because we are very different people from each other, but all psychedelic and all interested in paradigm recasting. So that’s what it’s about. And it’ll be out in mid-summer. End of August for that Esalen thing.

Anybody else? Yeah?

6:17:06

McKenna

Well, feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future because the archaic world was so dominated by—well that’s a bad choice of words, isn’t it?—was so characterized by an awareness of the feminine and the boundary-dissolving and the organic. The whole problem with the world is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing. You know, I mean, recently we had paraded in front of us the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer as who you don’t want to be like. And yet, Jeffrey Dahmer (to me) was an absolute paradigm of global civilization, because his problem was that he couldn’t feel the consequences of his actions. And this is what we are doing. I mean, we are lacerating ourselves by cutting down the rainforests and poisoning the oceans. This is not some airy-fairy, save-the-redwoods kind of mentality that protects against this. This is our own atmosphere, our own environment that we’re destroying. It’s a slow suicide—not so slow at the rate that we are carrying it out.

Well, somehow we have to reactivate the maternal, nurturing, caring circuitry that kept the tendencies that have evolved in this fatal direction at bay for a long, long time. And you can call it ego, you can call it male dominance, you can call it the phonetic alphabet—whatever it is, it has to be stopped because the planet is imperiled by it. And my analysis of it is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundaries that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create. And they are largely boundaries that suppress women—not because men hate women, but because men hate the feminine, and they want to control and hold it back. It’s threatening. It’s devouring. I mean, the fact that the French refer to orgasm as the “little death” tells you what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts our relationship to anything which dissolves us out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into.

So I’m a kind of non-feminist feminist. I mean, I think most feminists are feminists because they think women have gotten a raw deal. I’m a feminist because I think mankind is headed for suicide if we don’t return to a more intense expression of the feminine. So it’s not a political agenda for me to liberate an oppressed group of people, it’s a collectivist agenda necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet.

Yeah?

6:21:10

McKenna

Well, no. I mean, there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there and out there. But I don’t see the world really as a struggle between good and evil in some kind of Manichean situation. It seems to me that we confer value; that nature is neither good nor evil, and that must then include all these allies. It’s just that we confer judgment. This is because, when you begin to get down toward the bottom line, we don’t know what the bottom line is. For instance, we’re headed toward a great historical bifurcation where we’re going to have to make some really hard choices. And most of the time in the so-called New Age they try to fuzz all the distinctions and make you think you’re never going to be slammed to the wall and have to make a choice. But the choice that’s coming up for us is fundamental. It is: are we to become the caregivers, the nurturers, and the gardeners of the Earth? Or is the Earth—I put it this way to somebody the other night. The question was: is the Earth our mother—therefore to be cared for into her old age, nurtured, revered, and loved? Or is the Earth our placenta—therefore to be examined for signs of toxin and then buried under the apple tree? In other words, what is the true nature of human beings? Are we to be integrated into nature, to celebrate it? Or is nature a demonic and titanic force that is imprisoning spirit and holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien light and higher dimension so far from here that it’s a miracle that even rumor reached us of the possibility of salvation?

This is a tough choice. Because one path leads to radical renunciation of technology, radical pairing of population, and an attempt to come to terms with this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves. And the other direction says, you know: forget it, it’s the husk of a seed and it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama, and the real destiny lies out there, halfway to the Zubenelgenubi or Zeta Reticuli or some other exotic port of call. I don’t see how you can have that both ways.

6:24:06

McKenna

Yes, and most stars have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet. We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow-burning, stable star. There are a lot of mys—I haven’t forgotten your second question, Ray—there are a lot of mysteries in our cosmic neighborhood that we rarely hear addressed. For example—I mean, just as an example—if our destiny lies out in the great universe, it’s a hell of a technological barrier to cross to the stars. I mean, it may be insurmountable. However, isn’t it interesting that the most Earth-like star within seventy light years is the nearest star? Not technically the nearest star, which is a glowing red clinker called Alpha Centauri, right? But Beta Centauri is 1.1 solar masses. 1.1 solar masses. No star within seventy light years is as Earth-like, I mean as sun-like, as that star. From the point of view of the galaxy, Beta Centauri and our sun almost look like lightly bounded binaries. If this is an accident, it’s a tremendously fortuitous accident for us, because it may well mean that there is an Earth-like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighborhood. In fact, probably within the next ten years telescopes of sufficient resolving power will be created that, if there is a water-heavy, oxygen-rich world out there, it’s going to show up.

Well then, that is going to become a tremendous attractor in the historical matrix, because it will be hailed as the answer. I mean, can you imagine? Because there will then be two possibilities: that there is intelligence next door—not likely—or that there is—but… “likely;” how do you assess it? How many water-heavy, oxygen-rich planets have we examined, for cryin’ out loud? And the other possibility is that it’s empty real estate. In either case it will excite keen interest throughout society. So that’s a little oddness in our cosmic neighborhood that is rarely mentioned or taken account of.

Yeah?

6:27:13

McKenna

Yes, although I leave that to the Zecheria Sitchins of the world to work out the details. There is, after all, a fossil record that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these Christers. The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of the protohominids, who emerged out of the [???] radiation, that emerged out of… and so forth and so on.

I think that there may be mysteries. I mean, one question that I’m surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends—when I tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees, the ape encounter with the mushrooms, and so forth and so on—is, nobody ever asks: well, but who put the mushrooms in the path of these binocular, bipedal, evolving primates? I mean, is this just the story of nature’s happiest accident, or did someone say, you know: tweak the planet, start the retraction of the rainforest, seed the spores into the grasslands, and watch what happens? Because then we come down out of the trees, brainless as a wombat, and begin testing food sources. And, lo and behold, here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen. I mean, mushrooms are a form of display. They’re designed to be seen. They demand to be eaten. And the consequences of that, you know, are to lead a species to the brink of star flight. Well is that just a coincidence or is there a mind behind all of this?

See, I think that mind—the problem I have with all the extraterrestrial scenarios and all the channeling and all the abducting and all the stuff that goes on is: it’s all too B-movie. It’s all too simple, too straightforward. That’s what troubles me about the [???] scenario—is that it’s perfectly understandable to us. If it’s understandable to us, you can bet your booties it’s the wrong answer. I mean, it’s going to be weirder than that. It’s not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill.

I had a professor years ago, his cosmology went like this. You know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low-grade gold ore, and the bacteria will concentrate the gold, and then you just wash the gold out of the bacteria? It’s a mining technique that’s very efficient for poor-yielding gold ore. So this guy’s idea was that someday UFOs would appear over every major city on Earth, and they would just load up all the plutonium and fissionable material and take it away and say, “Thank you very much. This mining operation is now concluded. You people can go back to hurling shit at each other in the treetops as far as we’re concerned. We have real application for this fissionable material. You people are going to use it to blow each other up. What a bunch of dummies! And farewell and good luck.” So that’s one possibility.

6:30:50

McKenna

Yes, then I insist on getting to these plants.

6:30:57

McKenna

No, haoma, H-A-O-M-A. Haoma and Harmaline by Flattery and Schwartz. And it’s published by the University of California Press, Near Eastern Studies Division, Publication Number 23.

6:31:22

McKenna

Yeah, isn’t that a grabber? Well, what I thought we should talk about this morning, since we seem to range wide and free, is the practicum of all this, which is: how many of these vision plants are there, and where are they, and how do you obtain them, and how do you use them once you obtain them? So I thought how many of you have ever seen—can you all hear me? Get with it. This is a poster, which I don’t even know if it’s still available. It may be out of print. It is still available. And it’s a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens on one sheet of paper. What it’s divided into basically is: this is the old world, and this is the new. Immediately you notice that there are a lot more hallucinogens in the new world than the old. This is one of the great puzzles of evolutionary botany, because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be nearly three times as many hallucinogenic plants in the new world as in the old. I mean, other than “that’s where the flying saucers planted them,” nobody has come up with a good explanation.

Major hallucinogenic plant complexes that I’ve had experience with and can address are—well, let’s do a little quick geographical tour. First of all, North America, for reasons not well understood, is quite poor in native hallucinogens. There are no major North American hallucinogens. Peyote is—well, yes, it’s North American. The funny thing about peyote—I mean, you can feed me questions as long as we stick to the subject—the thing about peyote is, you know, we have this tremendous respect for it. We imagine that it’s tremendously ancient, and it apparently isn’t. There is no archaeological evidence of peyote use any earlier than 500 years ago. It’s almost a phenomenon of the conquest. What you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area are the seeds of Sophora secundiflora, which is an ordeal poison: strychnine.

And often human–plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time. It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet. Peyote is a major hallucinogen, should have been used for the past 50,000 years. If it has only been used for the past 500 years, that’s pretty peculiar, all right. And yet that appears to be the evidence. Ibogaine, not only a visionary hallucinogen, but an aphrodisiac as well—no evidence of any use before 1850. And yet, in an area where the Portuguese had been trading for the past 500 years, and writing cultural descriptions, and interviewing the people—and if it was there, it would have been mentioned. So this is a puzzle. You know, ayahuasca use, we assume, is millennia old. But, on the other hand, archaeology is a real miserable proposition in the Amazon because the climate is so degradative. So we can’t really know. But aside from peyote and whatever its history, North America seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically.

Another puzzle about culture and attitudes is: as you all know, the Northwest Coast Indians, the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, and Tlingit language groups have an extraordinarily evolved shamanism, and where the people who developed that X-ray vision style of art. Well, their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world—no cultural evidence of psilocybin use. No evidence that these people even knew these things were there. I mean, I know this challenges the tradition of the all-knowing aboriginal, but this is what the data seems to imply.

Now, in Southern California and across portions of the Southwest there have been datura religions, which are very old, apparently. The so-called Toloache religion. I don’t recommend datura. I don’t know what astrological sign you have to be to make your peace with that stuff, but I find it really peculiar and menacing. It’s about magic, which is about power and control and usually sexuality and some invasive and dominator application. I’ve taken datura a number of times, and it’s been interesting, but it feels watery and dark and dangerous to me.

There was a period when I lived in Nepal when I became aware that these sadhus, not content with their superior meditation techniques and their endless smoking of hashish, were also availing themselves of the seeds of Datura metel, which is conspecific to what we call jimsonweed in this country. And so I thought, “Well, I should take this too and find out what it’s about.” Well, it was a very odd trip. I sat in my room in Bodhna and I would sit and say, “Hm. Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening.” Well, you can only think that so many times. Then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state, and then these rape-like entities—I mean, they were like Victorian ghosts; they were like women in shredded damask gowns or something—would fly into my window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms, and they would let these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap, and I would begin to read, and I would be so astonished by what I was reading that it would jerk me out of it, and I’d say, “What’s happening? Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening.” And then my attention would drift, and this would happen again.

Well then, after about a half an hour of that, as the stuff began to build up, I began to, like, I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness, and when I came out of them, I would discover that my leg had been thrown up around behind my head, and my arm shot through, and I was, like, all knotted up. Then I would very carefully unfold myself and lay back down. And I remember thinking, “I’m certainly glad there’s nobody else here, because this is the kind of thing just designed to drive a sitter into a coniction fit of alarm.” And about six times over the next hour and a half I went into these convulsive spasms.

And then, on another night, these English people shared a suite of rooms off of mine, and I had to get to the bathroom. I had to go through this one guy’s room. So this one night I hadn’t taken datura, but this fellow had taken datura. And at one point I had to go to the john, so I debated for a long time about how this was going to disturb his trip, and maybe I should piss out the window, but no, that didn’t seem—although in India it’s perfectly alright. And so finally I decided I would just walk through the room. So then, as I was tiptoeing through the room, I saw that he was actually having sex with this girl that we knew from Kathmandu, and it had a slight emotional tinge for me, because I had actually had my eye on her, although I had never said anything about it to anybody. So then, the next morning, I mentioned this, and he said that yes, it had been his impression as well, but that in fact she wasn’t there. And so it was like, you know, I saw somebody else’s hallucination.

And then what finally decided me that datura was too peculiar was: I had another English friend who lived a couple of houses away. And one day I was in the market buying potatoes, and this guy came along and we were just talking. And in the course of this conversation—he was telling me how he’d been taking a lot of datura—and in the course of this conversation I became aware that he thought that I was visiting him in his apartment. And I decided that’s too fucked up—you know, to not know whether you’re entertaining someone in the confines of your apartment or buying vegetables in the market means that you have become too disengaged from the modalities of the real. And of course it creates tremendous drying. And it’s a deliriant, is what the literature calls it. It’s a deliriant.

But these, you know—I think that people all over the world utilize plants for bizarre experiences. Time and time again I’ve run up against this. You know, there’s a very rare drug in South America called ukuhe. It’s made by the Witoto and the Bora and the Muinani in this very circumscribed area. And what fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug. And we couldn’t, as pharmacologists, understand how an orally active DMT drug was possible, because the DMT should be destroyed in your gut. So we wanted to get a sample of this stuff. And it’s made from the resin of virola trees; the inner bark of the virola sheds a red resin. And we eventually, in 1981—my brother and I and Wade Davis, the guy who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow—we all launched an expedition up the Rio Yaguas Yasu, and where there was this stuff. And we would do what we called bioassays, which means somebody has to test this stuff, because we would get samples from these shaman, and we would draw straws for who got to do the bioassay.

Well, taking this ukuhe was appalling. I mean, your heart rate goes up to about three times normal. You shed water by the gallon. Your blood pressure shoots up. I mean, it felt like a precoronary to me. And then we come down and say to this shaman, you know, “Lorenzio, what’s the story?” And he said, “Yeah, it takes getting used to, doesn’t it?” And so then, when you look at it, when you look at this ukuhe chemically, you see: well, yes, there’s DMT in there, and there’s 5-MAO DMT in there. But then, when you do the gas chromatogram, you see that marching along behind those spots are all these other spots of various tryptamine compounds, some of which are cardio regulators, some of which nobody knows what they do. And so then you realize that it’s a dirty drug. There’s too much junk in there. What you want is something that has a very clean signature. So ukuhe didn’t exactly seem the way to go.

I think that this is the real situation with Amanita muscaria—probably the most discussed uninteresting drug in the world, because so many people have tried to hang so much on it, and, you know, it’s a horrible experience most of the time. I mean, it’s—

6:45:00

McKenna

Yeah, yeah. And occasionally you’ll meet someone who says, “Well, you’re just wrong. It’s wonderful. I’ve taken it for years. I love it.” And I don’t know. First of all, it’s genetically variable. It’s geographically variable. It’s seasonally variable. And it fluctuates at various times in its process of maturation. So what must be going on with Amanita muscaria is: you have to learn how to take it in your area from people who know where to collect it, when to collect it, how much to collect, and how to prepare it. But if you just go out and find one and chow down, I guarantee you it’ll turn you every way but loose, and then it’ll turn you loose. So…

6:45:58

McKenna

No, that’s what they always say. They say, “Have you drunk your urine recently?” I got a letter last week. No, I understand. Do you all understand the basis of the question? Why does urine come into it? Because in Siberia they have discovered—which is where this Amanita thing originates—that the active principle is not destroyed inside your body; that it is excreted in the urine. And the true aficionados of this stuff believe that the so-called second pass is better than the first pass. And so you have to, you know, they drink the urine. One of the great hazards of Siberian shamanism is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night to take a leak, and being pitched head first into the snow by frantic reindeer who butt you out of the way to try to get to the yellow snow, because they’re so completely hooked on Amanita that nothing stands in their way of this stuff.

6:47:09

McKenna

Oh, your students are pushing you out of them. Well, I’ve never hung out with the Yakuts. Maybe they are a pretty wild-eyed gang. An example of how a very ancient folk way can be incorporated into our culture without us even realizing it, and is provided by discussing Amanita muscaria: if you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica and you look up Santa Claus, they’ll tell you that it has to do with St. Nicholas, and it got started in the eleventh century. But when you look at the Santa Claus story, it’s a perfect mythologium to analyze from this point of view. Because look what’s going on with Santa Claus.

First of all, Santa Claus’ colors are red and white, the colors of the Amanita muscaria for sure. Santa Claus lives at the North Pole. What does this mean? It means that Santa Claus lives at the axis mundi where Yggdrasil, the magic world-ash of Welsh mythology, has taken root. Santa Claus flies. This is what shaman do. Santa Claus is the master of the reindeer, the animal most associated with the Amanita muscaria. Santa Claus is aided in his work by troops of elves. And what is the work of Santa Claus? To build toys for children. Remember the DMT thing saying, “Look at this! Look at this!” Well, those were off-duty elves, clearly. So here are all the motifs. And I believe that for children in our culture that all the Christ or stuff is not what Christmas is about. Christmas is about standing in front of the tree on Christmas morning with the gifts arrayed and the twinkling lights on. Well, that tree is the tree that the Amanita muscaria forms its symbiotic relationship to. It’s always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal relationship to. So the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of Amanita muscaria—there’s almost nothing but relational motifs there. And yet, if you suggest this to people, they just back away in horror, you know.

Well, these hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the New World in two areas. The first area is the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico and related areas. And there you have a number of things overlapping. You have a mushroom area of multiple species where, unlike the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, and Tlingit language area, in this central Mexican area they absolutely did use and discover these mushrooms. And we have these things called mushroom stones that go 2,500 BC. So the mushroom religion is truly archaic in Mexico. In the same cultural area you have the morning glory seeds that come from Ipomoea purpurea and related hybrids. Are you all familiar with these? This is a psychedelic plant that you can grow yourself and take. Don’t buy the packages of seeds and take them, because a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in horrendous poison so that you can’t get loaded on them. But you can grow a crop out of them that will be toxin-free. And this is a tremendous visionary intoxicant. It takes a couple of hundred of these seeds. But in that same area, strangely enough, there’s another morning glory, Turbina corymbosa—it used to be called Rivea corymbosa—that as few as thirteen seeds will flatten you.

Now, it’s interesting as long as we’re talking about morning glory seeds to note that, per unit volume, by weight, probably the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is Hawaiian baby woodrose. And yet there is no record of any culture ever utilizing that. There are thirteen species of Argyreia. It’s called Hawaiian baby woodrose, but it has nothing to do with Hawaiʻi. It’s native to India. There are thirteen species of Argyreia scattered from southern India out to Fiji, and all contain ergot-like, LSD-like compounds, like chinoclavine and so forth. These, I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available, but don’t sell this stuff short, folks. It’ll give you a ride that you’ll never forget. And the baby woodrose even more so. Be very careful with the Hawaiian baby woodrose, because it contains cardioactive glycosides. And maybe six seeds will do you. Twelve seeds might well plant you. And twelve seeds will fit on a tablespoon. So this is nothing to start choking down in large amounts.

Yeah?

6:53:07

McKenna

Yes, and could be extracted in a fairly simple filtration system. Yeah, good point. Yeah?

6:53:18

McKenna

Well they are dry. They’re little crescent shaped. Yeah, grind them in a Braun grinder. And applesauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things, or milkshakes. But it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry. The emetic in the morning glories is estercumerone, not the cardioactive glycoside in Argyreia nervosa, but in Ipomoea purpurea it’s estercumerone. And you could devise a simple chemical system for removing that. I think LSD—have you ever had what’s called woodrose LSD? Well, it’s wonderful. It’s unlike LSD. It’s more like psilocybin, because it is highly visionary. And one of the things about these morning glories is—I don’t know whether we have to talk about Rupert’s theory or what—but it is just an archive of Mayan and Toltec imagery. I mean, you take this stuff and you’re there in the pyramidal complex on the day of Venus’ heliacal rising when they do their thing. I mean, it’s pretty amazing.

6:54:41

McKenna

It’s a close relative. It’s active not in the microgram range, but in the milligram range. And there are several active compounds. You’re right. And I think chanoclavine is psychoactive, and ergonovine. All these occur there.

6:55:01

McKenna

No, you grind them to a powder and then just take a capsule. It’s a lot of capsules. It’s like half a cup of this horrible, whitish meal with a strange smell. But yeah, basically about 200 seeds. You may want to go higher, but start with that. Yeah.

6:55:44

McKenna

Well, no. But if what you’re saying is true, that’s where the glycoside would reside. That’s not my understanding, actually. What—

6:56:02

McKenna

Well, maybe the caption got mislabeled or something. Bbecause the way they do it where I’ve seen it is: they take the little seeds and they grind them on a matate to powder. Then they put it in water, as you said, and they shake it and leave it and come back an hour later and shake it again and do that for a while. And then the stuff precipitates to the bottom, the matter, and the liquid fraction is poured off and discarded. And they take the solid matter and they let it dry in the sun until it’s no longer runny, but it’s kind of like the consistency of oatmeal or Play-Doh or something like that. And then they make a little tiny tortilla, which they then toast on a metal griddle. And so you get this thing which looks slightly smaller than a Ritz cracker and is a toasted morning glory seed wafer. And you eat that, and that is the thing which is active. That’s how I’ve seen it done.

6:57:19

McKenna

Apparently not. They toast it lightly. It’s not blackened, it’s just sort of golden.

6:57:29

McKenna

No, it’s one species of morning glory, Turbina, previously called Rivea corymbosa. The other one, the morning glory that you have to take a couple of hundred seeds for, is used in that area as a hallucinogen, but it’s also used to induce labor and has a whole role in midwifery and like that.

6:58:03

McKenna

No, that’s the Hawaiian woodrose—and it has no history of human usage, so you’re on your own. It’s worth talking about maybe for a minute that hallucinogens that are like hotel rooms: some are occupied and some are not. And it’s always interesting to fiddle with the unoccupied ones, because if you believe Sheldrake, then it’s an empty field. One way of thinking of these things is: when you take a plant, it takes you. So when you take mushrooms, for instance, what the trip is, is all the mushroom trips that anybody ever had. And you make a tiny contribution, too. You leave a piece of your trip in the trip. And so the trip is slowly evolving over time as those who take the plant each leaves a brick—or an offering, or a little architectural motif—on this vast edifice.

Well then, if you come… that was why a plant like Hawaiian woodrose—or to some degree, Stropharia cubensis, because it is not the preferred mushroom among the Mexican traditionalists—then it’s unoccupied. You can make of it what you want. It can be sort of your vehicle. And this is why a drug like ketamine—which is a new drug, a drug without a thousand years of input—my impression of where you go on ketamine is: it’s like visiting a new office building that nobody has rented offices yet. All the water coolers work, and there are these recessional distances with fluorescent lighting, but there are no hurrying secretaries and crowded offices and chatter around the water fountains. It’s just empty. It’s empty because not enough people have left their initials on the walls.

Yeah?

7:00:18

McKenna

Well, if you mean growing on manure, yeah, that’s Stropharia cubensis. See, there are about thirty species of mushrooms that grow in that Mexican area, and most of them are what are called—well, not most of them. Some are ephemeral mushrooms, meaning they’re very small and they can be almost anywhere. And then there are some larger ones too that can be almost anywhere. Stropharia cubensis is the only one of the good ones that locates on cow dung. Now, there are other mushrooms which grow on cow dung that contain psilocybin, but they also are more sickening. There are species of Panaeolus and species of Coprinus. If you collect a mushroom off dung and you want to know whether it’s a Panaeolus or a Coprinus or a Stropharia, just keep it around for a few hours. If it’s a Stropharia, it will just sort of be around. If it’s a Coprinus or a Panaeolus, it will do what’s called autodigest: it will turn into a slimy mess, and…

7:01:34

McKenna

No, you can’t tell from the spore print, but you can tell from the macromorphology of it. If you know mushrooms, they’re easy to tell apart.

7:01:45

McKenna

Yeah, well, that’s tricky. You need somebody who really knows their stuff.

7:02:01

McKenna

It was more speculative, but I think it would be worth trying. Yeah. Yeah?

7:02:11

McKenna

Some are and some aren’t.

7:02:31

McKenna

Yeah, that sounds right. Petether is a good one. So is chloroform. Have any of you read The Road to Eleusis? That’s about the Eleusinian Mysteries and argues—it’s by Wasson and Hofmann and Ruck—and argues that the mystery at Eleusis was a kind of ergotized beer; that they were gathering ergot off Paspalum and making an ergotized beer. And the only way they could have done that for 2,000 years—stoning thousands of people each September at this cult site, without the thing getting a reputation for being toxic or causing convulsions—is if they had some way that was very efficient of separating the dangerous alkaloids from the hallucinogenic ones. So that may have been a water fractionation technique as well. Or, you know, the whole theory may be wrong, and whatever was drunk at Eleusis may not have been ergotized beer. It could have been a mushroom of some sort. This is what Robert Graves thought: that it was a mushroom.

7:03:48

McKenna

The Road to Eleusis? Probably not, because Wasson is now dead and the estate is kind of funny about that kind of thing. Yeah?

7:04:08

McKenna

The emetic is estercumerone. If you’re not a chemist and used to dealing with high molecular weight solvents, then you should do some kind of a water… you know, dissolve it in water, and then try to separate out the fractions. This would be—I mean, I think a lot of work needs to be done. I think in the underground there are publications which have circulated that are, you know, the Wizard’s Workbook for Morning Glory Reclamation, and stuff like this. You pay your dues with morning glories, but it’s usually worth the price of admission. It’s just nausea, after all, for crying out loud.

Yeah?

7:05:22

McKenna

Yeah, I think so. I mean, that we leave our fingerprints upon the drugs we take, and drugs that have been taken for thousands of years have a lot of fingerprints on them, and you join up with that. You enter into the field, you know? One way of thinking—since somebody talked about Sheldrake earlier—one way of thinking about psychedelics, and trying to define what do they do, is that they are amplifiers of the morphogenetic field. That, you know, the past of objects somehow becomes present. This would fit in with my notion that, when you take a psychedelic, you are rising into some kind of super-space that can be mathematically described. Because having the past be co-present with the present is a way of saying that you have shifted your dimensional relationship to the data field, and now it all appears to be one coherent thing.

Yeah?

7:06:34

McKenna

Peganum harmala, the giant Syrian rue. Its original range is from Morocco to Manchuria, but at some time in the nineteenth century it was brought into this country as a range fodder for goats. I mean, it’s a pretty rasty plant. It has small yellow flowers, and it has succulent leaves, sort of water-holding leaves, and it looks like a form of sagebrush, and when you cut into it with a knife or a machete, it’s brilliant yellow inside, and that brilliant yellow is the harmine.

7:07:21

McKenna

Pound it up with a sledgehammer to separate the fibers, and do a hot water wash on it, and then do a second hot water wash. Then get rid of the physical stuff, combine the two mother liquors, and drive it down to a reasonable volume, and it’ll do the trick.

Yeah?

7:07:48

McKenna

John Allegro and Andrija Puharich. Yeah.

7:07:57

McKenna

Well, not to rain on anybody’s parade. Andrija Puharich is a very mercurial person. Is that what we want to say? Recall that he was the guy who pushed Yuri Geller for a long time, and they were forever tromping into the Negev and coming out with blank cassettes that had held the wisdom of the galaxy, but the aliens erased them before they let them return? That could happen here. So that’s Andrija Puharich. He’s been around for a long time. I mean, you have to—these people are such eccentrics. I mean, you have to just respect people’s persistence and survival power. But I think, you know, his scholarship and his notion of the rules of evidence is fairly divergent, even from my fairly loose canon.

So Allegro is a little different case. You all know the book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross? He managed to hypothesize one of the most radical theories ever to come down the pike. I don’t know how true it is, but his theory is that Jesus was a mushroom. And, you know, this would not probably have cut too much mustard, except that the guy was a Dead Sea scroll scholar of world renown, had a scholar’s grasp of Aramaic and Akkadian, and was fully licensed to be one of the people who tell us what the primary documents of Christianity really mean. The problem was, when Allegro got a hold of him, he said: well, what they really mean is that a sacramental mushroom was being grown in caves by Nabataeans down around Qumram, and they called it Jesus in order to befuddle the Roman authorities, and created the cheerful theory of the friendly carpenter who tells us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. And this was all a publicity stunt just to keep the Roman authorities guessing. And he claims he has textual support for this. The problem is: you have to be an Aramaic philologist to follow the argument. I mean, the argument is unbelievably tortured.

There is a lot of question. There is a peculiar opaqueness about the early history of Christianity. I mean, if we are to try and take it seriously and understand what happened there, then it must be that, first of all, if we believe Christ was a real person, then he must have been born in 6 BC because there was a coniunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn at that time, which is a good astrological event to hang the nativity on. Which means, then, that the crucifixion would have occurred in 27. Well, why is it, then, that there are no mentions? No mention of Christ can be pushed back earlier than AD 69? What was going on between 27 and 69? The Gospels are not contemporaneous. And the mention in 69 is not even a sure thing. It’s in Suetonius. And he says: Jews have recently come to Rome agitating in the name of their leader, Crespus. And that’s the reference.

And it’s puzzling. Because, take a figure as minor as Mani. Mani is the founder of Manichaeanism. He was born in Seleucia-Ctesiphon in the 700s. Well, God, we have Mani’s laundry bills. I mean, we know how much he paid in taxes, the nickname he had for his dog. I mean, we have a lot of data on Mani. And so why a figure like Christ should be so peculiarly swagged in ambiguity—if it was a real person with these people eager to chronicle it—is a little hard to figure out.

7:12:44

McKenna

Yeah. I mean, Mani got right with it. I mean, he cultivated the court. He knew how to get his thing going, yeah. If any of you are interested in these kinds of questions and like your data in novel form, read The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick, which is a wonderful intellectual romp through all of these issues. It’s essentially the fictional telling of the story of James Pike, who you may remember was the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco and a great enthusiast for LSD. And he died in the Negev under very mysterious conditions. He parked his car, and with a roadside map and a bottle of Coca-Cola in 115-degree heat started walking toward the Dead Sea and dehydrated and died. And he was very close to John Allegro.

You know, I’m not given to conspiracy theory, but you must have been following this whole hassle about the Dead Sea scrolls. Well, a lot of people think it’s because what is written there is incommensurate with Christianity as it has existed for 1,700 years, and nobody knows what to do with this stuff. I mean, it’s the equivalent of: what do you do with the doctrine of the resurrection if somebody comes up with the mummy of Christ? Well, that’s the kind of situation that these Dead Sea scrolls may place Christian hermeneutics in.

7:14:27

McKenna

John Allegro’s book? No, John Allegro died recently. Sacred Mushroom—oh. Oh no, the book by Philip K. Dick is called The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Yeah.

7:14:44

McKenna

Oh yes, he’s another one.

7:14:58

McKenna

Yes, well, the Empire never died—which is Philip K. Dick’s motto. The Gnostic temperament is alive and well. In fact, there hasn’t been a century as friendly to Gnosticism as the twentieth since the fourth. So there you have it.

7:15:25

McKenna

Well, this has been suggested. What you need—to put the Gospel of John in context, get to Charles’s book, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament, and then you see everything that the Church Fathers tossed out. Because, you see, the canon—the New Testament—is a group of accounts that were able to survive the sorting process of the Council of Nicaea. And there was a huge literature which was just tossed out as being too weird. I mean, read the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas. Have you all looked at the Nag Hammadi Library? Do you know what this is? The Nag Hammadi Library is 42 texts which were dug up in Upper Egypt in 1948 at a Coptic monastery called Chenoboskion. 42 texts that went into the ground AD 220. Means nobody has been able to put a finger on them since AD 220. It’s like a fossil of Christianity in the third century. Well, my God, you can barely map it on to the cheerful religion that we inherit as Christianity. I mean, it is an exotic and complicated situation. It’s very well worth reading. James—

7:17:01

McKenna

Oh, I’m sure the metaphysical bookstore in Boulder will sell you—James M. Robinson is the editor, and it’s called The Nag Hammadi Library. 42 texts reflecting early Christianity, Gnosticism, and so forth and so on. Hans Jonas is a brilliant—his book, Gnosticism: The Message of the Alien God to Infant Christianity; if that’s not a title to die for!

7:17:01

McKenna

Oh, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament by Charles. And that weighs in at about 35 pounds. But theological libraries will have it, but it’s in the locked case. You don’t want seminarians mucking around with this kind of stuff.

7:18:04

McKenna

That’s right. The Urantia Book is a very spectacular and early example of channeling before it was even named. And very interesting. Of all the channeled material, The Urantia Book, for pure grandiosity, puts everybody else to shame, right?

7:18:28

McKenna

Yeah, well these are persistent themes, you know. I mean, all of Gnosticism is the perception that we don’t belong here, that we are creatures of another realm—beings of light who, because of some horrible cosmic mistake, have been trapped in the world of matter. And the Gnostics take the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, and turn it into a nightmare story and say that, you know, the God of this world—which in Jewish tradition is called Yahwe, who is the creator of the world—for the Gnostics he is not the real God at all. He’s the demiurge. He’s a kind of mad God who has entrapped the light. And the task of salvation is to gather the light and then release it back to its hidden, higher source beyond the machinery of cosmic fate.

7:19:36

McKenna

Well, that’s good. It’s sort of like—you know the Mandukya Upanishad? It’s my favorite Upanishad because it’s the shortest. It’s only a page and a half long, which, you know, others should have been so similarly inspired to brevity. But it’s the breath of Brahman. It traces—it’s the description of one exhalation–inhalation cycle.

Yeah?

7:20:06

McKenna

Well, you’re not even supposed to say it if you’re orthodox. G-D. Yeah.

7:20:33

McKenna

Well, I don’t know too much about Rastafarianism. It was founded by Marcus Garvey and had this notion of return to Africa. You know, syncretism is always with us. Gnosticism was characterized by syncretism. The whole late Hellenic religious efflorescence was largely syncretic. And certainly that’s what we have now. I mean, you know, the New Age, you go to these fairs and the people who are talking to the Pleiades have the booth next to the people who are talking to Zubenelgenubi, and both have world plans from the Saussurean All-Fathers, and the two plans are different. And you just, ptui, you know?

7:21:34

McKenna

No, I agree. There are two sentiments loose in the world, and you’re going to not get through this life without taking sides. You know, do you believe that our destiny is in another dimension made of light on the other side of the universe? Or do you believe that we should, you know, clean up the rainforests and save the planet?

You want to be very careful with your political agenda. One of my sub-interests—which sort of has a relationship to this, but it’s oblique—is asteroidal impacts. I think asteroidal impacts are one of the great undiscussed factors in evolution. That every solid body in the solar system is heavily cratered with impacts by in-falling bodies. There’s this thing down in Arizona that only happened 50,000 years ago. It was a piss-ant-sized object, and everything within 800 miles of the impact point died instantly. It dug a whole half a mile into the ground. It was a nothing burger. This thing which came down 65 million years ago—they now think on the Yucatan—it killed… everything on the Earth larger than a chicken died. You know? I mean, you want to talk about ecotastrophe! I mean, we have never—you can’t even conceive of what it’s like when something like that happens to a planet. They estimate that at the velocity this thing must have been traveling, it was five miles into the planet in the first second and a half. It raised a wall of rocks 6,000 feet high that moved outward at Mach 7. And the planet rang for a million years, you know? But if it hadn’t been for that, there would be no flowering plants, no triumph of the mammals, no Whitney Houston, no—

7:23:44

McKenna

Well, but suppose, you know, there’s all this tumult in our psyche about the great change that’s supposed to happen, and where are we supposed to put our political energies, and what are we supposed to be doing? Well, it would be pretty ironic if we beat ourselves over the head and save the rainforest and all this malarkey, and then this something came down and just turned the whole thing into hash. Then people would say: my God, how could we have been so stupid? We should have been extracting and sequestering U-235 and plutonium. We should have been building starships the size of Montana. We should have been sparing no effort. And what did we do? We replanted rainforests? And now look the whole thing!

So you have to—you know, good intentions are not sufficient. You have to locate where the threat is coming from and act accordingly. There are no points for good intentions in the game of evolution. And we have to decide: what does life want? Is it that life at its most basic level senses the finite duration of the star’s life, And so it wants to use this moment of sunshine to build something that could carry us out into the mainstream of the galaxy to the denser star field? Or, you know, is that some kind of titanic, Apollonian, male-dominated, technofascist, materialist trip, and what we need to do is cultivate gentleness and attention to the bugs and the grasses and the water? I don’t have an answer to that. I think it’s a real dilemma. I think people who think they do have answers haven’t really connected with how ambiguous the situation really is.

7:25:49

McKenna

Well, what the mushroom says is—it’s a total apocalyptarian. I mean, it says: rouse your camels, pack your tents. We’re moving out. This has been fine for a while, but ahead lie worlds of unimaginable challenge at great distance. But, of course, the mushroom sounds like a technofascist, hortatory male dominator when it talks like that. You take ayahuasca and it says: clean up the rivers, care for the children, replant the forest. Well—

7:26:33

McKenna

That’s right. It has nomadic ethics, so it pushes nomadic solutions, where the ayahuasca—an enormous jungle plant, a flowering plant, a creature born out of the last catastrophe just like we are—has a different agenda.

No, the demons are of many kinds.

Some are made of ions, some of mind.

The ones of DMT you’ll find

Stutter often and are blind.

It means just because somebody wants to have a channeling, just because somebody is dead, doesn’t mean they’re smart. It could be. Everybody has their own agenda.

Well, why don’t we break—yeah, question. Last question.

7:27:30

McKenna

On the steady state or something? Oh, yeah. The panspermia theory.

7:27:55

McKenna

Yeah. Well, I think that the next revolution in biology is so obvious that you can be totally radical and completely confident you’re on safe ground, and say the next great revolution in biology is the realization that space is not a barrier to life, and that technology is only one method for traversing between the stars. If in fact planets are regularly pulverized by cosmic catastrophes, then they must be like bursting seed pods. And everything is subjected to a tremendous evolutionary hammering, but spores, viruses, stuff like that—particulate matter—it just drifts out between the stars, and then when it finds another suitable environment it breaks out.

We don’t know what the constraints on life are. You know, the oceans of Europa could harbor life. You know, these hot vent, sulfur vent, organisms that we find in the deep oceans here, they could survive in the oceans of Europa. If there were hot sulfur vents at the bottom of those oceans, those organisms wouldn’t bat an eye.

7:29:22

McKenna

Europa is covered with ice, but underneath the ice is water, and there are fractures. And, you know, the exotic chemistries and pressures and temperatures of the Jovian environment could produce life. We don’t know what the constraints are. If cometary environments are a better place for life to arise than a warm pond on a newly condensed planet, then all bets are off as to what—you know, planetary surfaces may be unlikely places for life to get going. It’s hard to say.

7:30:07

McKenna

That’s right. We don’t know. You could have life at temperatures and pressures where we couldn’t exist for a microsecond, like at the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere, something like that. No, there’s more mystery than anything else.

7:30:29

McKenna

Okay, the notion here is: I’ve always felt that the psychedelic experience should be good for something in a very practical sense. And I always felt that there was something that wanted that you should be able to learn that was very hard to bring out. And we talked a little bit yesterday about this strange episode that happened in the Amazon, where instead of an ordinary trip, it was locked in for weeks and weeks, and then people differed as to whether it was a transformative incident or a psychosis, or what exactly it was. But what happened was—or what I think wants to happen in every psychedelic experience is that there is a totality symbol. You know, Jung tried to get his patients to make mandalas because he said they were totality symbols. Well, eventually the totality symbol is more than a symbol. It actually becomes a true map of the totality.

And what this boils down to is a kind of very strange revelation about the nature of the I Ching that takes very seriously the idea that the I Ching is a tool for studying time, but then takes the idea much further. It’s hard to give this lecture. It’s hard to listen to this lecture, because the learning curve is steep. And you just have to stick with it for a while, and then there will be pay dirt. But you have to bear with me. And I had to bear with the entity which was revealing this stuff to me, because it took the form of a—are you all familiar with the idea of a kōan? This is something that your guru—a little saying or something—that your guru gives you, that if you can figure it out, then you move on to the next stage.

Well, so the kōan that I was presented with had to do with the I Ching—which I was not that passionately fascinated by. I was just sort of mildly interested in it, like a lot of other freaks. And I was not at all mathematically inclined. I mean, that I am the author of a theory of pure mathematics is as astonishing to me as it is to anybody else, I’m sure. Basically (as you know, but let me review it), the I Ching is a Chinese system of divination that uses 64 structures called hexagrams. And hexagrams are made of broken and unbroken lines stacked one above another. And they are—the sum total of the possible set of such structures is 64. And it’s been remarked by a number of people that the I Ching has peculiar structural affinities with the DNA, but nobody has ever really known what to make of that.

Well, this dialogue with this mushroom entity began by posing a very simple question, which is, as you know (most of you): the I Ching hexagrams occur in a sequence which is called the King Wen sequence, which is very old. In fact, portions of the King Wen sequence are scratched on shoulder scapula that are 3,500 years old. It’s possible to argue that the King Wen sequence of the I Ching is the oldest abstract sequence in the world. The question is, or what the kōan was, was: is the King Wen sequence a sequence, or is it simply a jumble of hexagrams that over time has become traditionally sanctioned as the sequence? In other words, if it’s a sequence, you should be able to write the rules that generate that sequence and no other.

So let me dig into this here. The first hexagram—can you see this colored chalk? We have two other choices. We have the orange and blue. Here we’ll do a visual test. (Oh. Is this the stuff? Okay, why is this so half-assed, as they say?) So here’s the first hexagram. It’s called the creative, and it’s made of six lines. This is no news to anybody, I hope. Here’s the second hexagram. It’s called the receptive, the yellow. (Okay, let me do these this way, and then I’ll switch.) So when I started looking at this question of the order in the I Ching, the first thing I saw; it only took me about ten minutes of just looking at it, and I noticed—and I’m not the first person to have noticed this—that it isn’t 64 hexagrams. It’s 32 pairs of hexagrams, and the second member of each pair is formed by turning the first member upside down. Do you see? So that only took ten minutes. That was no problem.

Now, there are eight cases in the I Ching where inverting the first hexagram causes no change because of the nature of its structure. You meet the first case here. Obviously, if you turn this thing upside down, it’s still six unbroken lines. So in the eight cases where inverting a hexagram causes no change, a second rule is generated. The second rule is: if inverting the first hexagram causes no change, then all lines change. Very straightforward, right? But now the problem, the kōan, has changed, and the question is: what rules order the 32 pairs? And this was much trickier, much trickier. And after a while, the prompting voice said: look at the first order of difference. This is just a fancy way of saying: count how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another. If you go from this hexagram to this hexagram, how many lines change? Six. So the first order of difference is six between these two hexagrams. Similarly, we can go from two to three, and there will be another first order of difference.

Now, logic should tell you that the values of the first order of difference are going to be whole numbers, one through six, right? What I did was I went through the I Ching and actually checked on these, and I discovered that again immediately what jumped out at me was there were no fives. So we wrote computer programs to randomly arrange hexagrams and check for fives, and we discovered fives are as common as any other number. The exclusion of fives in the King Wen sequence was a human decision. Someone didn’t want fives to show up in the first order of difference.

Okay, so then I looked at these values, and what I discovered was when you inside the pairs, when you invert one to get the other, the first order of difference is always an even number. So within the pairs, you have no freedom. It’s going to be an even number. Between the pairs, you can arrange them so that you get odd numbers or even numbers. And what I discovered was: between the pairs, half are odd and half are even. Again, human agency did this. We wrote computer programs to randomly throw hexagram sequences and test for this quality, and we found that only one in every 7,500 times could you expect to get a sequence which would be 25% odd, 75% even, which is what this enforces.

So I was very excited by this because I said: wow, there’s all this hidden stuff in the I Ching that I’ve never [???] This thing? Okay. So I thought: how weird that all this structure is in there, and I’d read all of Wilhelm’s commentaries and Lama Govinda and these people, and it didn’t seem that they had noticed this kind of stuff. So I was very excited. I thought that I was really on to something, and I made a graph of the first order of difference, and it looks something like this. Of course, it has one, two, three, four, five, six on this axis (blue?), and one, two, three, four, to 64 this way, because there are 64 hexagrams. And then I drew the first order of difference.

Now, notice—remember, this was six, so up here we put a point, and the next one is something else, and the next one is something else, and then we connect the points. And what you get is a structure which looks like this, roughly. In other words, it looks stochastic, it looks random, it doesn’t look like you’re on the track of any kind of order here. Except that I noticed a really funny thing about this. What I noticed was that this section and this section are mirror images of each other. So imagine for a moment that you have a copy of this right here. What you’re then able to do is rotate the copy 180 degrees within the plane, and you’ll discover that it fits perfectly in here. It dovetails at the beginning and at the end, but nowhere in between. This is again a product of human decision. Someone made it so that it would do this. And the question is why? Why would anyone want to do that? And when it works, you have hexagram one across from hexagram 63, and hexagram two across from 62. In other words, these always sum to 64 when it’s in the right position.

So I just thought that I was uncovering some kind of, like, the equivalent of Chinese kabbalism; some kind of lost intellectual system. But the voice said to me: this is a picture of time. And I couldn’t understand what exactly was meant by that. It seemed to me a fairly esoteric thing to assert that it was a picture of time. Now, remember there are 64 hexagrams in the I Ching and they have six lines each? Six times 64 is 384. When it told me that this was a picture of time, I began to entertain the idea that this somehow could be used as a calendar. So then I said: well, what it is, is it’s the whole I Ching running one way, and the whole I Ching running backwards the other way, combined into this peculiar structure which has 384 data points in it, which are the lines or so-called yao of the I Ching.

Now, 384 is 19 days longer than the solar year length. So if you had a calendar of 384 days, it would precess against the equinoxes 19 days every year. So it doesn’t seem a good candidate for a calendar if you’re trying to keep solar dynamics central. But I discovered something weird about this number, 384 days—now think of it as days—and that is that peculiar things happen when you multiply this number by numbers that are inherent to the structure of the I Ching. When you multiply this number by 64, you get a day number which, when you break it down into years, is 67 years, 104.25 days. Now, what’s interesting about that number is that it is six sunspots cycles of 11+ years. There’s also a major sunspot cycle of 33 years. So it meant each line in a super hexagram made by multiplying this number will be associated with one sunspot cycle. And the trigrams inside the hexagram will be associated with the major sunspot cycle.

Well when you take 67 years, 104.25 days, again by 64, you get 4,306 years plus some days. This number is very close to twice the amount of time that it takes for a zodiacal era, such as the age of Pisces or the age of Aquarius. They last roughly this long. Well, if you take this number by six—not 64, but six, which is a legitimate number because it’s built into the I Ching—you get 25,000 years, roughly. This is the procession of the great year or the equinocdeal year, as it’s called. So I thought: wow, this is really far out. It’s some kind of multi-leveled resonance calendar.

Oh, and I forgot to say about 384 days—this was central, excuse me—that this is 13 lunations. A lunation is 29 point something days, and when you multiply that number by 13, you get 383.89. So I said: aha, what this thing is, is it keeps track of the moon on this level, it keeps track of the sunspots on this level, and it keeps track of the great year of the zodiac on this level. All naked eye astronomical phenomena, not hypothesizing any advanced technology, but hypothesizing an advanced intellectual point of view.

Well, so I thought I was finished and that somehow it wanted to tell me about a neolithic calendar in ancient China for some reason. But there was more. (Popeye had spinach, I have this.) The prompting voice said: this structure which you have created—and by the way, some of you who are scholars of the I Ching, remember in the second half of the Wilhelm-Baynes translation, there are a whole bunch of very ancient sayings that nobody knows what they’re talking about, they’re so esoteric. And the most mysterious of these sayings is the saying which says: the forward-running numbers refer to the future, the backward-running numbers refer to the past. Well, in the I Ching there are no forward- or backward-running numbers unless you do something like this. And then look what you get. One, two, three, sixty-three, sixty-two, sixty-one, sixty, fifty-nine. You get forward- and backward-running numbers. So I said: wow, you know, we’re digging this thing out. The I Ching is not an oracle as it’s been done at country fairs for three millennia. The I Ching as we possess it is a piece of broken machinery. It’s as though you had, you know, the main gear out of a machine, and you’re trying by archaeological reconstruction to rebuild that machine.

So I was sort of stuck at this point, and the prompting voice turned on and: said this structure which you’ve made, which is the entire I Ching running forward and backward against itself, which would place it then at the top of a hierarchy, should be placed at the bottom of a hierarchy. Treat this thing as a single line, it said. And I was calling this at that point the simple wave. It said: treat the simple wave as a line in a hexagram. Well, when you do that—bear with me folks. Remember, I said the learning curve was steep. However, it’s not long.

7:49:27

McKenna

Oh yeah. (What color? Yellow. Yellow? Yellow? Let me see.) Okay, well, so if we treat this module as the bottom of a hierarchy, then we want to treat it like a line. So what do you do with lines in I Ching land? You stack six of them on top of each other. So I’m going to symbolize this thing with an S. Okay? So here’s what I did. I took one of them, and another one, and another one, and another one, and I said: did I do good? And it said: sort of, but a hexagram is more than six lines, isn’t it? And I said: well, what more is it than six lines? And it said: well, it’s two trigrams. I said: oh, okay. So then I went like this. Do you see how I superimposed the thing over the six two larger ones, which were superimposed over three? So then I said: it’s all right? It said: yes, except you forgot one thing. A hexagram has an identity as a whole, as a hexagram. I said: okay. Good? It said: yes, good. Now what are you going to do with it?

And I’ll show this to you just so you can get the idea. I don’t know how visible this will be. This is what you get if you do that. And what it looks like is exactly what it looks like, which is a hodgepodge of crazy lines running everywhere on three levels. And the thing said to me, it said: this is a map of time. And I made the mistake of saying to my friends and acquaintances: this is a map of time. And they said, you know: we’re very concerned. Apparently you didn’t get better, even though you claimed you got better. And now, you know, you run around showing this thing to people. And notice that everything is in closure up here. And then everything attains closure down here. And then there are subclosures, six on one level, two on another, and the final one on this one. And finally, my friend Ralph Abraham took pity on me and he said: the problem with this thing is that it’s an occult dogma. Nobody can understand this thing except you. You are necessary for its interpretation. And I said: so what do I do? And he said: you must learn how to change this into a more orthodox mathematical object that mathematicians can then discuss with you.

And I was completely stuck, and I sat with it for two years. Because it just seemed—like, I’m not a mathematician. I had no clue as to how to do that. And finally, one afternoon, the pot was good enough, or the stars moved into position, or something, and in a single instant I saw how to carry out the mathematical reduction of this wave. And I did it.

7:53:39

McKenna

On this? Well, if you look at it closely, you’ll see that, because they are at different scales, it isn’t that one side is exactly like the other side. Yeah, there are dissimilarities. So I finally figured out how to mathematicalize and conserve all the qualities of that wave, and I put it into an ordinary Cartesian object—which I doubt you can see, but you don’t really have to see it anyway. All this is, see what that is? It’s just an ordinary graph of some sort.

7:54:20

McKenna

It’s the sum of certain qualities. There was skew, parallelism, angle of approach, crossover. There were about five things that I felt were important, and I figured out how to mathematicalize them all so that this, which is an ordinary Cartesian graph, is in fact a topological equivalent of my occult diagram. And—yeah?

7:54:49

McKenna

Yeah, right. So then I started saying to people: this is a map of time. And they said: is it? Well, where are we? And I said: well, we, hmm, in order to know where we are, we would have to know where the endpoint is. If you have a wave, you have a wavelength. So we have to find the endpoint. So then I began collecting historical data and fitting curves to it, trying to define the endpoint.

Now, remember yesterday at the close of the day or in the afternoon, we got off on what appeared to some people to be a tangent about novelty and science and time, and whether it should be viewed as a flat plane or a fractal or something like that? Well, what the thing was telling me was that novelty is something which can be charted in time, and that these waves were actually pictures of the ebb and flow of novelty. That this wasn’t charting stock prices or population rise or average temperatures, it was charting the ebb and flow of novelty through time. And that—como?

7:56:21

McKenna

Novelty is… how about density of connection? As opposed—you know, if complexity can be quantified, then you say complexity ebbs and flows. I mean, if we had a device which measured complexity, and we measured this point right here as opposed to this point an inch behind my finger, I’m hoping it would tell us that an inch behind my finger is a more complex environment than this point right here. So space and time is then seen to be medium with densification of complexity embedded in it like raisins or something.

Yeah?

7:57:17

McKenna

Well, until you scale it against time, you don’t have to. I mean, I think—

7:57:23

McKenna

Well, I think if I understand your question right, remember how I said that over here it was at closure? It goes like this. And that’s both lines. They’re running—that’s both sides of the graph. They’re perfectly superimposed over each other. At this point they cease to be superimposed. One goes that way and one goes that way. And then you start getting this kind of stuff. And then, when you come down to the end, they fall into closure again. Yes, it’s a thing of fa—exactly, you got it. Okay.

7:58:07

McKenna

Well, to this point, we haven’t discussed this thing scaled against calendrical time. We’re just trying to look at it as a mathematical object. Then what I realized was: if these are part—if this thing has 384 points in it, and this has six, then what the thing was telling me was: you have to map the wave back over itself. So you take all 384 points, and you cram them into this space, wandering up this hill. Then you go to this space and you cram all 384 points in here. And you create a fractal infinite regress. Do you understand? Say you understand! You will understand. Okay, so then that was the time map. It was saying novelty can be described by an infinite fractal regress that is contained in the I Ching.

Now the main objection that I was meeting from people who wanted to lock me up was, they were saying, “Now, let’s get this straight. You want to revise modern physics based on a pattern which you found in an ancient Chinese book of divination. Is that correct?” And I could feel the force of that criticism, because that’s how I think. You know, where somebody from some nut piece of data then wants to build castles in the air. And so I created a metaphor which is satisfying to me—I hope it’s satisfying to somebody else—trying to explain why we should seek a law of physics inside the structure of the I Ching. And here’s the metaphor.

Think of sand dunes. Picture them in your mind. Since this is the new age, you may even close your eyes if it helps. Picture sand dunes. Now, notice that sand dunes look like wind. Sand dunes look like wind. And sand dunes are made by wind. So now let’s analyze the situation. Let’s think of wind as input, and let’s think of sand grains as bits inside a computer. So when the wind blows, the program runs, and the bits rearrange themselves, and they arrange themselves into a lower-dimensional slice of wind. Essentially, wind—which is a pressure variant phenomenon variable in time—turns into a pictorial phenomenon variant across the pictorial surface. Do you see how that works?

Well, now, sand dunes created by wind bear the impression of wind. Lines of foam and beach detritus deposited by the incoming tide bear the form of waves. So what it was telling me was it was telling me that things formed in time bear the impression of the forces which created them. And I said: “Well, then what is the equivalent of sand dunes or waves of beach detritus in the real world?” And it said, “Human beings.” Genes—not grains of sand—genes are moved by time. And we, as hyper-dimensional objects—we human beings and other animals—we bear the impression of the forces that created us. And if novelty truly does ebb and flow the way wind speed ebbs and flows over a landscape, then the creatures that have arisen in time will bear the imprint of this ebb and flow.

And I believe that what was going on with the people who created the I Ching was that they were practicing some kind of yoga, or some kind of psychedelic plus yoga thing, and they were stilling their macro-physical functions, and they were descending deep into organism. And there they were seeing the ebb and flow of variables of some sort. And they watched. Who knows how long—centuries maybe. And they said, you know: in the organism there is the ebb and flow of variables. And then they asked questions like: how many variables are there? Are there an infinite number? And they began to create notation systems for these variables. And finally they came to the conclusion: no, there are not an infinite number. There are 64 of these temporal variables. And think of them as elements: in the same way that the entire world of physical manifestation can be created out of 104 physical elements, the entire world of temporal manifestation can be created out of 64 elements.

And so the way I think of reality, having survived this experience, is: you have hexagrams moving on many levels. Let’s say you have a hexagram which rules this 10,000-year period. For 10,000 years, this hexagram will rule. And then on the next level, the hexagrams are changing every 100 years. And then on the next level every 10 minutes. And on the next level every 15 seconds. Well, what any point in the matrix called “now” is, is the perspective you have when you look through the moving film of these temporal elements moving on many, many levels, you see. They create a unique juxtaposition with each other in every single moment. And that is what the unique felt presence of immediate reality is all about. Well, by this time—yeah, question?

8:05:26

McKenna

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. It’s a wave front, and it’s an interference pattern. Yes, it’s a kind of hologram, and a set of resonances and interference patterns that are created when these waves moving at many levels of expression superimpose and collide with each other. And through the use of small computers we can explore various places in the wave, and we can position it against time. Because what it’s saying is that novelty comes and goes. You know, yesterday was wonderful, tomorrow could be dog shit. Same for last year and next year. Time undergoes changes on many scales. I mean, from moment to moment, if you watch your mind, you’re going up, you’re going down; and then on the daily scale up, down; yearly scale up, down. And then on all scales there is ebb and flow of novelty. And all these scales can be mathematically collapsed into one wave. And then, with a computer, you can not only predict the future—which is fairly trivial, because who can gain say it—but you can also predict the past, which is very tricky. Because most people have a good deal more information about the past than they do about the future.

Yeah?

8:07:20

McKenna

Well, no, you’ve got the whole concept correct, except you don’t need an infinite number. Because look what happens: if you start with 384 days, and you start multiplying upward by 64—remember I said the first one was 67 years?—well, you only have to carry out about six of these until you have 72 billion years. More time than is necessary for the universe to have birthed itself and reached its present state. Similarly, if you start dividing, you only have to divide eleven times to reach the realm of Planck’s constant, 6.55 × 10^-23 erg seconds, in technical parlance known as a jiffy. Beyond the jiffy there is no need to continue the divisions, because the jiffy defines the grain of the canvas on which reality is projected. So what we have are a cosmology of roughly 22 levels. At the highest level it’s 72 billion years. At the lowest level it’s in the realm of Planck’s constant. And we’re somewhere suspended in between, and these thins are coming and going at every level.

Yeah?

8:08:57

McKenna

Yes, I’m hurrying us toward the more fun part of this, and I think that we’ll do it now. What we’re going to do now is look at the wave placed against history with my end date, December 22nd, 2012— although the machine will accept any end date. The idea that you should be asking yourself is: this clown claims that this thing describes the ebb and flow of novelty, but does it in fact fit my intuition of the ebb and flow of novelty? Now, here’s the good news: the next part of the lecture does not depend on anything that’s been said in the first part. You don’t have to understand anything I said in the last half hour to appreciate the newtness of the next level. Lucky for us, eh?

So now—because, you know, some people aren’t interested in this. You tell them you can predict the future and they say, “Well, predict it.” And then you predict it correctly, and then they say, “Great!” It never enters their mind to ask the question: how did you predict it? Which is what I, out of obligation to intellectual fairness, feel that I should expose you to. Now, let’s look at the wave.

Now, let me explain the rules of the game here. There are six billion years currently on screen. Today is over here at 98.8%. This is the last six billion years. And let me explain to you how you interpret the wave. And if you want to take a moment and rearrange yourselves, the rest of it is going to be fairly close focus on this thing. So don’t be shy and don’t make yourself uncomfortable.

8:11:03

McKenna

Ah, the end date. I got it by fitting historical data to the wave and seeing—I had certain intuitions. I mean, for instance, I said, “Well, if I have a way which described historical novelty, by God, it better do well on the Italian Renaissance. It should do well on the twentieth century, and it should do well on the Golden Age of Greece. If a theory of novelty incorrectly predicts those episodes, it’s a pretty worthless theory of novelty.” Once I had chosen an end date—and I chose December 22nd, 2012—I got a lot of support for that by realizing that the Mayan calendar chose the same end date. Now, the only thing I had in common with the ancient Maya is that we both take psychedelic mushrooms. Now, is it conceivable that there is a message in the mushroom as specific as, no matter where in space and time you are, and you take these mushrooms, it says: December 22nd, 2012 AD? It appears so. Because the Mayans, their civilization rose and fell at a very uninteresting part of their own calendrical machinery. They predicted the end of the world a thousand years after their own eclipse, and they set the birth of their calendar a thousand years preceding the emergence of their civilization.

Yeah?

8:12:49

McKenna

It depends on who you talk to. The Mayan calendar is built up of nested cycles—some 20 years in length, some 240—and there are 13 baktuns; which I think a baktun is 396 years in duration. And most Mayanists believe that a set of 13 baktuns is the complete calendrical set. There is a minority of Mayanists who want to argue that there are greater cycles than that. In any case, baktun 13 will come to an end December 22nd, 2012. So it was good enough for me.

8:13:42

McKenna

Well, you know, since this is a push–pull theory, and we have novelty versus something, the opposite of novelty is habit. Rupert insisted on that. I was calling it entropy and conservatism and recidivism, and he said, “No, no. It’s a war between habit and novelty.” “Habit” means a reversion to a traditional and already established pattern. “Novelty” means a breaking out into a previous untested domain of new connections and new possibilities.

8:14:24

McKenna

You mean as in—yes, the unexpected is built into it. Because when you come around some of these curves, there are unexpected things going on.

8:14:39

McKenna

Yeah, well, you could think of it that way. I haven’t completely resolved how novelty should be defined, because if you know anything about information theory, you know that they had a hell of a time getting a definition of complexity together over there. They also are interested in mathematical definitions of complexity, but they haven’t made too much progress.

Let me explain to you how to read the graph, because it’s the exact opposite, psychologically, of a stock market graph. I think when you look at a stock market, most of us want it to go up, not down. In this game we want it to go down. The higher states of novelty occur as you approach zero. So this is the most novel point on the screen. This is the most habit-impacted moment on the screen. And what you see is habit and novelty are at war with each other.

Now, here’s how I interpret this particular screen, and it is a basis for interpreting all the rest. This is a turning point. After a long period of habit, consolidation, and recidivism—whatever that means at 4.7 billion years ago—something very novel happened along this descent. I maintain that it’s actually the stabilization of the surface of the Earth itself. That what we’re seeing here is the Earth changing into a stable planetary body. And then the earliest forms of life, the proto-life, appears right here and undergoes a series, then, of fluctuations.

Then there is some kind of a problem—some impediment to what would otherwise be the rather straight shot toward novelty—by this spike here. Well, evolutionary biologists say that in the early history of the Earth there was a crisis having to do with the production of oxygen as a waste gas. Life arose in a non-reducing atmosphere. The first pollution crisis in the history of the Earth was pollution by oxygen. And organisms had to develop complex membranes and mechanisms for dealing with this, and that’s what happened along here. And once that was achieved, then the pace of novelty quickened and the descent continued.

And we, our entire civilization—in fact, the last million years, as a matter of fact—is lost down here in this stochastic fluctuation near the zero point. In other words, relative to these places in the wave, we’re so near the maximum of novelty that it’s practically punching in through the walls. And, in fact, human civilization correctly mirrors that. I mean, where you would expect to find the civilization on this graph is somewhere down in here. Well, now, if everything is working right—

8:18:01

McKenna

Yeah, 98.8% is the target date today. Now, what I’m going to do is: there’s a zoom function here, and we’re going to start flying toward the present. And every time a screen changes, we’re going to see half as much time on the screen. We have six billion years up, we’ll go to three, then one and a half, then 0.75, and so forth. This seems to be an excellent computer with a fast chip, so…

8:18:39

McKenna

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’re going to get greater and greater detail. And your attitude toward this should be: I’m asserting that this is true. You have a notion of where the high points in evolutionary and human history have occurred. You should be asking yourself whether this fits your intuition. Now, obviously, it’s pretty vague stuff when we’re looking at six billion years. But, on the other hand, we can take this thing down to three days if necessary. And we know where the great changes have come in the last thousand years. It’s not that ambiguous. So let’s test the zoom function. Zoom, it asks me. Yes, I reply. Seek minimum, it asks me. No, I reply. Approach factor, it asks me. And I’m going to tell it two in order to halve the screen each time. It would accept any number, but two seems rational for demonstration purposes.

8:19:47

McKenna

No, it’s going to slice the time. It’s going to slice it each time and rescale.

8:19:58

McKenna

You would presume so.

8:20:04

McKenna

The Big Bang would be—no, the Big Bang would be very high, because there’s no life, there’s no atomic systems, there’s no molecules. It’s a very low-complexity situation at the birth of the universe.

8:20:22

McKenna

Yeah, no, yes, that’s right. The Big Bang is somewhere up here. Okay, now, before I do this, let me locate escape. Okay. This is such a pleasure to do it with fast machines. Okay, there’s three billion. See how detail is coming up as time is lost? And if anybody wants me to stop at any point, I will.

8:20:51

McKenna

Here’s 750 million years. This is virtually the entire history of life on Earth. And, in fact—of higher life, I’m sorry. You know, organisms, not multicellular life. This is the history of multicellular life. And what you see is there was a steep descent into novelty until about 300 million years ago, and then there are a series of oscillations close to zero until about 65 million years ago. And then there’s a sudden plunge deeper into novelty immediately preceding the concrescence, which occurs at dawn, Greenwich Mean Time, December 22nd, 2012. One thing about this theory: it’s not vague. And notice that it doesn’t hedge on predictions either. Every screen is full of predictions.

8:21:54

McKenna

Two. Approach factor, yeah. Okay, we’ve got 750 million years on the screen, 375 million years on the screen. Now, I want to talk about this for a minute. Now, this is a screen full of dramatic predictions. These are tremendously punctuated and temporally defined plunges into novelty. And we don’t have tremendous paleontological records for what’s going on 275 million years ago, but from studying these low points and talking to geochronologists about them, I’ve decided that these are planetesimal impacts on the Earth. Now, you know that the last one was 65 million years ago. That’s this one right there. But there were others. There was this one, 220 million years ago.

8:22:57

McKenna

Oh, asteroid strikes on the Earth.

8:23:03

McKenna

Oh, well there was a little tiny one in Arizona. Those happen all the time in cosmic terms; every 100,000 years or so. But this thing that happened 65 million years ago was a planet-shatterer, and they’re rare. They’re rare. Okay, so I’m suggesting that these are asteroid impacts, which then evolution has to restart, reclaim its territory, and then there is something else happening. They may not all be asteroid impacts. They could be, you know, enormous episodes of volcanism on the Earth, such as the Deccan Traps in India, or something like that. Now let’s start the thing again.

8:23:49

McKenna

What we’re looking at now, 375. Seek minimum: no. Approach factor: two. Go for it. That’s 187 million years. There’s the impact 65 million years ago. Now let’s look at this. This is the last 93 million years.

8:24:15

McKenna

Ah, yes, it looks like the thing we started out with. Somebody’s paying attention. Right on! Yes, yes. See, what happens is: a fractal is a nested data set, and every time you pass through a whole number, the pattern repeats. This sets up a very interesting set of circumstances inside the wave, which is that we can talk about temporal resonance. We can talk about how the Third Reich is a resonance of ancient Egypt. We can talk about Saddam Hussein as a resonance of Mohammed. Because when we look at the way these things are lined up historically, we see that, directly above Saddam Hussein and in a relationship of parallelism, is the career of the prophet. And so what is being suggested here is that every day, every moment, is in fact an interference pattern created by other times and places. This is a fairly challenging and peculiar idea, not something the linear Western mind would have ever come up with. So, for instance, if you should find yourself having lunch in a place called Hadrian’s Hamburger Stand, this has something to do with the Emperor Hadrian and his four-year military campaign in Scotland. He is a direct causal influence on your being at Hadrian’s Hamburger Stand for lunch. I like to say Rome falls nine times an hour. And you have to be perceptive. You have to be paying attention to the ebb and flow of your own inner thoughts. But if you are, you feel the fall of Rome. You also feel the age of exploration, the birth of Buddha, the fall of Carthage. It all happens nine times an hour. It also happens twice a day and once a year.

Yeah?

8:26:28

McKenna

Sometimes. Yeah, it is very similar. That’s right.

8:26:43

McKenna

Yeah, we’ve never tried to do it scientifically, where you would actually keep track. But major astrological conjunctions are often reflected in major ingressions into novelty.

8:27:07

McKenna

No, because I’m not smart enough to do that.

8:27:19

McKenna

I think God has chosen you for this work!

8:27:33

McKenna

Oh, well Ronald Reagan was—his historical antecedents were the last six Roman emperors before the fall of Rome in 475. And Bush’s antecedent is—no, I think Bush gets to be Justinian. You remember somebody said: history always occurs twice, first as tragedy, then as farce? That person had a good intuitive…. So now let’s go into this a little more. How much time do we have? Oh, 93 million years. Okay, so here’s the asteroid impact—and dead on! I mean, 65 million years is right there. To the degree that we can date these two events, it’s a bullseye. And it was a huge setback for organic life. As I said this morning, nothing larger than a chicken survived it. The mammals began their radiation, and these are just different vicissitudes. I’m not sure what to make of this spike here, but I don’t really spend a lot of time on that period from 40 to 36 million years ago. Somebody else may have a notion as to what this represents.

8:29:05

McKenna

Which it was. Evolutionary biologists say that forms quickly reoccupied all the niches. And remember: if this hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be the planetary rulers that we are. We’d still be little furry creatures trying to steal eggs out of the nests of the saurian masters who ruled the planet. What?

8:29:32

McKenna

Because all the dinosaurs were killed in this impact, and that allowed these little egg-stealing, rodent-like furry creatures to undergo an explosive evolutionary radiation, leading directly to our own vast superiority over the rest of nature. Yeah?

8:29:55

McKenna

Oh, that’s a whole different scale. You see, the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago. The ice ages are a phenomenon of the last five million years. And we’ll see the ice ages, but not there. Right now, those ice ages are down in here somewhere, lost in the detail. Let’s go back to our zoom.

8:30:22

McKenna

Oh yeah, we’ll get there.

8:30:25

McKenna

Don’t worry. No, we don’t want to seek the minimum. The approach factor should be two. Okay, 93 million years on the screen. 46 million years on the screen. 23 million. 11 million. 5 million. 5 million years on the screen. Now, here are your ice ages. Here they are. You see, when the ice is in place, species are bottled up and gene transfer is impeded. This constitutes a non-novel situation. Then, when the ice melts, these gene pools re-encounter each other and you get proliferation of form. We’re getting excellent agreement here. This is the melting of the last glacier—maybe.

8:31:32

McKenna

Yeah, I think it’s actually over here, still lost in detail. But these are—you know how evolution is described as punctuated? How it isn’t that evolution precedes smoothly, but there will be a climaxed stasis, and then suddenly many new species? Well, these are the punctuated evolution. This is actually a picture of punctuated evolution. And the high numbers of species are down in these troughs, and the low numbers of species are on these ascents close to the changeover points. So again, the paleontological data isn’t that clear, but at this scale of resolution we’re getting good agreement between data and theory.

8:32:33

McKenna

Well, they are topologically equivalent, but not numerically equivalent.

8:32:40

McKenna

Yeah. That’s right, it’s a damped oscillation, is really what we’re seeing.

8:32:54

McKenna

Yeah, well, I hope you’ll be on it by Monday afternoon. Okay, let me restart the zoom. No, I’m restarting the zoom, Zoom. Yes?

8:33:10

McKenna

Yes, these could very well be magnetic reversals. Yeah, they very well could be magnetic reversals. What we’re looking at is: I’m suggesting they’re ice ages. It was suggested that they’re geomagnetic reversals. Geomagnetic reversals and ice ages may even have links to each other.

8:33:38

McKenna

Well, we see that, over here, a steep descent into novelty going deeper than we’ve ever gone before, and that would probably indicate that an animal or an organ has appeared of a density of complexity greater than anything which preceded it. So I would say yes.

8:33:58

McKenna

Well, let me start the zoom and we’ll get over in here on a big scale, and then you can see. Okay, we’re going to go from five million down to two million. Now, let’s discuss this, because this is the domain in which we evolved. Our story is on screen at this point. It’s said that 100,000 years ago, at the Colossus Cave River mouth in South Africa, there were Homo sapiens indistinguishable from the people sitting in this room. The oldest Homo sapiens skeletons are from there. That’s clear over here. This is the Pongidae radiation, meaning the proliferation of these primate forms. And that’s about 900 million years ago. This is the whole period in which the primates were breaking away from the rest of nature. And this is, I think, probably where the mushrooms begin to come into the picture. And see how the whole system is propelled into lower levels of novelty than anything which preceded it—higher levels of novelty. When the wave moves down, novelty is increasing. Zoom: yes. Minimum: no.

8:35:40

McKenna

That’s one way of saying it, or increased density of connection. Or—it means something happening which has never happened before, which allows novelty to build upon itself. We talked about this a little bit yesterday; about how the early universe was very simple, and then came ordinary chemistry, and then organic chemistry, and then life, and then complex life, and then higher animals, and then primitive human beings, and then language and culture, and then computers and particle accelerators, and all of this representing steeper and steeper descents into novelty—headed toward a confrontation with novelty at infinite density. Not millennia or millennia in the future, but twenty years from now.

8:36:44

McKenna

“Conserved” is the word I use—but yes, that’s right.

8:36:59

McKenna

That’s right. Well, when we get to the present, you’ll be able to see the past few months, the next few months, the next few years. We approach it this way because I want to convince you that there’s something sort of woo-woo about this thing. It does seem to have an uncanny predictive ability. Now, the most commonly met objection to this—and it may be forming in your mind—is that this guy just doesn’t understand patterns, and that every pattern can be used to describe a different pattern. But I resist this, because notice that this whole set of correlations is dependent upon this zero date which we inputted. If we shift the zero date, then all the other predictions would be thrown off. Well now, naturally, if we shift the zero date fifty years, it’s not going to have a hell of an effect on an event 175 million years ago. But if we move the date fifty years and we look at 1492, you know, it’s all screwed up. You have to be right on the money when you get into the historical data field, because the historical data field can vary over a 24-hour period. I mean, John F. Kennedy dead, John F. Kennedy alive, the difference is ten minutes. So it can be very highly quantified, specific, yeah.

Okay, enter. That’s two million, roughly three million years on the screen. One and a half million years on the screen. 700,000. Let’s look at this for a minute. This is the last million years. And the last 100,000 years are right there. This is the emergence of modern human types, and it sets off the last cascade—at least at this scale. So all of this is evolutionary advance and climatological flux and so forth. And then, from the time the modern human type emerges, it’s a straight shot down in there.

Now, obviously we all know more about time as we get closer to the present. This is 366,000 years. It’s 100,000 years up there. There’s the last 200,000 years. There’s the last 100,000 years. This is the environment in which we were shaped. These are climatological fluctuations here. This is the last glaciation.

8:40:13

McKenna

Is it dying or is it having a good time?

8:40:25

McKenna

What are you doing this evening?

8:40:38

McKenna

Remember the orgasm in the restaurant when Harry met Sally? Vaguely. Okay, the last 91,000 years, the glaciers melt here. The glacial melt begins around 19,000 years ago. And, as you see, it’s just a straight fall from there to the moon flight and to H. Ross Perot and to all the rest of it. And these are, again, episodes probably of glaciation or flux in the incidence of incoming cosmic radiation. It’s hard to say what it is.

8:41:18

McKenna

Oh yeah, We can take it down to very small. Understand that the program does many wonderful things which we’re not doing. I’m just doing a simple demo, but obviously all this stuff has got to be about something. Now we’re getting into the area where people have real data. That’s 45,000 years… 22,000 years on the screen. Let’s look at this for a minute. This is worth talking about. Now the pressure begins to come on. It’s all very well to predict interglacials that may or may not have occurred, but predicting assassinations of dynastic families is a little trickier. Here glacial melt begins, and this is where the mushroom paradise existed in its fullest expression. From about 17,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago.

Well now, what is this sudden interruption of the descent into novelty here? I maintain—based on the archaeological record—that it’s what is called the Tanged Point Technocomplex. Do you all know what that is? Does anybody know what it is? Tanged Point Technocomplex means that, before this point, when an arrowhead is found, you find one. It means it was lost by somebody who was hunting. Around 10,000 BC, you begin to find large numbers of arrowheads all in one place without chipping fragments. This was not an arrowhead factory. This was the site of a battle between human populations. War is invented here, because agriculture is invented here. You’re looking at the end of the partnership paradise. The era of orgy gives way to the era of anxious monogamy, warfare, agriculture… you know, egohood is born.

Now somebody asked about—who asked about Çatalhöyük? Somebody. Çatalhöyük, bottom of this stab here. The fire that burned through Çatal level 5A occurred in 6500 BC. We know this from charcoal dating. It’s right there. It’s on the money. See, somehow this whole Tanged Point Technocomplex bummer was overcome, and there was a steep descent into novelty. And Çatalhöyük was the product of that. But then it was destroyed, and there was a rebound into chuckleheadedness for a while. And then right down here, in the bottom of this thing, is where the Great Pyramid is sitting. You know, the Great Pyramid was finished in September of 2970 BC. Why this should be so controversial, I do not understand, because there are grains of charcoal between the unmoved stones. That charcoal has not been anywhere since the day that stone was set in place. And it’s 2790 BC. These people who want to push it back and say it’s 10,000 years old—well, the obligation to prove is on them, because the carbon radiological data argues.

You see, there’s some tendency in the New Age—which I don’t understand very well—that wants to make everything older than it is. You know, the pyramids are 50,000 years old, Atlantis, Rosenfell, 100,000 years old. The miracle is how new everything is. The pyramids were built day before yesterday. Charlemagne was king of France early this morning. It’s all very, very recent. I mean, the emergence of mind out of non-mind is an event practically on top of us. Now let’s start it up and we’ll get really down to the—

8:45:50

McKenna

Well, yes, in a sense. Because, you see, what happens is when you—it’s a built-in mathematical property of this wave that, when you get to the end of a big wave, you get to the end on any scale, there’s a sudden drop to the next scale, and then it goes along to the end, and then there’s a sudden drop. So if what we’re saying is that a universe is made like—a universe that actually had this structure that I outlined for you, of 26 levels—where each level was ¹⁄₆₄th smaller than the level which preceded it—a universe built on that kind of architectonics would only be halfway through its life an hour and 35 minutes before the end. Do you see how that would work? That, in the last hour and 35 minutes, it’s going to go through as much development as it went through in the previous 72 billion years. So yes, time is accelerating. Accelerating into—you know, we’ve gone from barely moving to approaching a staggering speed. And I maintain that, in 2012, the last six days preceding the approach to concrescence will be the jackpot. I mean, the laws of physics will break down. Everything will be in a state of visible, motile transformation. This isn’t happening in the human world. It isn’t happening in our minds. It’s a crisis in the structure of physical law itself. And that’s why this theory will be hard to disprove or prove until so close to the end date that you’ll barely have time to make a telephone call to say whether it’s true or not before, if it is true, your telephone call becomes totally irrelevant.

8:47:59

McKenna

Yeah, that’s right. No, that’s right. And if that seems unlikely to you, let’s never forget what the orthodox guys are peddling. They’re peddling the Big Bang theory, which says the universe sprang from nothing in a single instance. I would prefer what I call the Big Surprise cosmology, because it seems to me if you have to have a singularity, the least likely place to find a singularity would be in a featureless high vacuum. If you want to find a singularity, look in a corner of the universe where there are planets, stars, elements, organisms, alphabets, civilizations, minds. In other words, look in a complex domain if you want to find a singularity. That’s where you might have some chance of finding it. But finding it in an unflod nothingness is a strange place to look, even.

8:49:40

McKenna

Well, one possibility is that it’s a wrap around, that we’re just not whistling Dixie when we talk about the archaic revival. What history is, is a finger reaching for the reset button. And when you finally touch it, you find yourself at the moment of the Big Bang. You’ve actually sent it screaming back to the first moment.

8:49:44

McKenna

That’s right. And every cycle is a holographic description of the cycles that preceded it.

8:49:51

McKenna

Right. So in 1945, when the bomb flickers into existence over Hiroshima, this is the resonance of the Big Bang. It’s being caused by the Big Bang. And the entire life of the universe is then somehow reenacted in the remaining 67 years. In the same way that, remember, there was a 4,306-year cycle. We are reenacting that cycle in the present 67-year cycle. We have reached AD 700 right now. I mean, if you wonder why things are so benighted, it’s because we’re in the heart of the Dark Ages. You wonder why you can’t understand the nature of the collapse of the state vector? Well, it’s because you have an AD 700 intellectual machine looking at it. My God, the calculus hasn’t been invented. Algebra hasn’t been invented. The New World hasn’t been discovered. These things will all happen ahead of us. Right now, we are in the heart of the Dark Ages. By the late nineties we’ll be closing distance with the Renaissance. Clearly, we have to put up with a bunch of Christer fundamentalism, epidemic diseases, and general knot-headedness until we get to that point. But then, after the turn of the century, we can expect the equivalent of the Renaissance, the industrial reformation, the rise of Napoleon, the Civil War, Adolf Hitler. It’ll just be coming quick, quick, quick, quick. And finally, you know, it just pulls you in and everything happens at once. One way of thinking of this is that the entire rest of the future history of the universe is being compressed into the next twenty years.

8:51:51

McKenna

Yeah. But, in other words, the heat death of the universe is twenty years away, essentially, is what is being suggested. Because time is beginning to accelerate at such a rate that this compression factor is enormous. Okay. Now, let me see. What have we got? We’ve got 22,000 years on the screen, and we talked about it. So let me shift here. Oh, no, zoom: yes. Is that minimum? No.

8:52:25

McKenna

Yes. I think, you know, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book. Anybody read it? What was it called? Nobody read it. It was called… anyway, the premise of the book was that time is accelerating, but he thought of it as social time, cultural time. I don’t. I think it’s embedded in the fabric of spacetime itself. Yes, I think in a few—you see, you can only react to crises that you understand. So if I tell you the ozone hole is disappearing, you’re alarmed. If I tell you an asteroid is going to strike the Earth, you’re alarmed. But if I tell you that the Earth is about to collide with a hyper-dimensional knot in the nexus of spacetime… you know? But that’s what’s happening. Ahead of us is an enormous speed bump. We’re about to collide with something that we can barely cognize, so it’s hard to know what to think about it.

Yeah?

8:53:58

McKenna

It stops. Yeah, well, see—

8:54:13

McKenna

Yes, it’s possible that dying takes forever, you see. And so, you know, you start to die, and then you die and die, and then you realize you’re going to die forever and never approach it, because the seconds become stretched into millions of years. It’s something like that. And I think psychedelics are about the fabric of time. When you strip away the hallucinations and the personal reference and the craziness, the bare bones of it are: it’s about time. It illuminates what time is.

Yeah?

8:55:19

McKenna

Yeah. I mean, see, part of the problem with perceiving what’s going on is that we’re like mayflies or something. I mean, we live so briefly that, to us, it looks like the world is standing still. But, in fact, staggering amounts of change are going on. I mean, the automobile is a hundred years old, for crying out loud. We can’t conceive of a reality without the automobile. And just in my lifetime, you know, I’ve seen immense change. And this is going to accelerate eventually to the point where I believe they’ll hold conferences on the acceleration of time. And boards will be appointed to try and figure out if anything can be done about it, and stuff like that.

8:56:34

McKenna

Yeah, time is the great misunderstood or un-understood quantity in our lives, for sure.

8:56:52

McKenna

I don’t necessarily reject it. I just think they shouldn’t sneer at me when their theory is so cockamamie. I mean, in other words, I haven’t proposed anything weirder than the Big Bang, saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster down into a super-novel object. Sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement than to say that a universe can spring from nothing for no reason in a single instant. They’ve cornered the market on the unlikely approach to cosmology.

8:57:33

McKenna

To their theory? No, but I’m going to write one.

8:57:47

McKenna

Well, the Big Bang looked like it was in real trouble as recently as six months ago, but the new data from this—is it OGOS 3, or one of these satellites—they finally actually found irregularities in the microwave background. And until they found some irregularities, they were in a real mess, because they couldn’t figure out how you get from the super smooth initial conditions to the clumpy present situation. Now this new data appears to have pulled their chestnuts out of the fire. But I think the Big Bang may be in need of serious revision. I mean, the super-inflationary cosmology is an attempt to fix some of those problems, but there are problems.

Yeah?

8:58:47

McKenna

That’s right.

8:58:56

McKenna

What did he say, exactly?

8:59:06

McKenna

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. If we get a little deeper into this we can even discuss maybe why he would’ve said such a thing. Because I think we can illuminate it. Here, let’s do a little more. We’ve got 22,000 years on the screen. 11,000 years on the screen. 5,000 and some. This is, in a way, my favorite screen, because this book I want to write I’m going to call History’s Fractal Mountain. And there it is, folks. History’s fractal mountain. Çatalhöyük is over here, in the bottom of this. Along this descending gradient here, like pearls on a string, you get the great ancient civilizations: Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt. And the graph actually confirms the intuition of the theosophical mentality that Egypt did achieve some level of advance that was not surpassed until late Roman times; that there was a tremendous breakthrough on the part of these civilizations. This negative, habitual, or recidivist upward curve is studded with a whole bunch of warlike male-dominator civilizations: the Hittites, the Mitanni, the Assyrians. And up here at the top, Mycenaean pirates overwhelm the last outpost of the goddess culture on Minoan Crete. This is Homer. Right there, Homer sings his song. And that, that to me, fits, because I had a professor who once said to me, “You want to know where it went wrong? I’ll tell you where it went wrong. When these Greeks pulled their boats up on the shore and stopped being fishermen and started talking philosophy, the shit hit the fan.” And that’s precisely what happened. There it is. You see the steep, steep descent into novelty. And then, after the fall of Rome, oscillation around a mean, where it’s sort of up, it’s sort of down, but there’s no real progress until the industrial revolution of the 1740s. Let’s—

9:01:51

McKenna

That’s right. Of course, this isn’t Euro-centric, it’s global.

9:01:56

McKenna

Oh, you mean where is the birth of Christ? Roughly, it’s right here. It’s this—there’s a little kind of a choke, and then a very steep fall right afterwards. That’s the birth of Christianity, of the Roman Empire versus the Republic, and so forth.

9:02:23

McKenna

Yeah, right about there. Well, let’s see, we may get it on the next pass.

9:02:40

McKenna

Well, it wasn’t—at first it was physical. It was that atomic physics gave way to chemistry, which gave way to molecular biology, which gave way to life. It keeps moving, it keeps being active, at the front of the wave, but it leaves a residuum behind it of these previously created structures. Right now the wave is clearly lodged in our species. While everything else is under the aegis of Darwinian mechanics, we’re apparently under the aegis of cultural mechanics.

9:03:29

McKenna

Yeah, that’s right.

9:03:40

McKenna

How so?

9:03:53

McKenna

It keeps condensing toward—it builds on complexity. Wherever there is complexity, you will get more complexity. It doesn’t build on simplicity. It builds on the last most complex achievement, see? So intelligence rests on animal organization, which rests on cellular biology, which rests on molecular biology, which rests on physical—you got it, okay. Uh, two.

Now, pretty soon we’re—now, there is the descent. Here, let’s stop and look. The crucifixion is right there. And it’s interesting. You know, Christ was an absolute contemporary of Caesar Augustus. So you get this great religious reformer at the same time that you get the great reformer of Roman polity. So two of the most important personalities who ever lived are alive at that point. That, strangely enough, does not win the prize. See this deep little chip here? If we were to blow that up and look at the bottom of that trough, there was a moment when you could have had a dinner party when Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Pythagoras, and Ezekiel could have all gotten drunk together (had they been able to find each other) right back there immediately preceding the Greek renaissance. Now, the fall of Rome is in 475, right there. And you see how the time after the fall of Rome is all of a certain general character clear up to 1700. And then certain technologies and mathematical techniques propel to an even deeper level of novelty. Now, the next screen is the one that I think is probably where we either win or lose you.

9:06:35

McKenna

No, it’s not being driven by these great personalities. They are being driven by it. I’m sure that, if you could have stepped into Christ’s mind while he was undergoing the passion, the main question he was asking himself was: “What is going on?” You know? “Why do I say what I do? Why do I do what I do? I don’t seem to be my own person.” You know? “I seem to be a puppet of some cosmic force.” Because he was a puppet of some cosmic force.

You see, the transcendental object at the end of time is like one of those reflecto-balls that hang in discos, you know? And as it turns and spins, it sends off distorted reflections of itself which ricochet into the past. And if you are correctly situated, it’ll turn you into a Christ, or a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu. If you’re not quite correctly situated, it turns you into a Madame Blavatsky, a Meister Eckhart—in other words, second-stringers. If it’s, you know, if you just get a little of it, well, then you’re a person with strange insights and great personal charisma, and the people around you love you. We all are very close to this thing. Every night when you dream, you come into the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time. We are all distorted reflections of the last thing.

And as we get closer and closer to the eschaton—the last thing—the distortion begins to leave. And you say, my God, it’s like watching a photograph from an SX-70 develop. First it’s just murk, and then you say, oh, there’s a person there, and it’s getting clearer and clearer. You know, we are actually being pulled into the attractor. The veils are being parted. The truth is becoming more and more and more imminent. And in the final confrontation with it, you know, it’s the apotheosis. It’s the apocalypse, the apotheosis, the apocatastasis, a whole bunch of Greek words beginning with “a.”

9:09:01

McKenna

No. Okay.

9:09:14

McKenna

Well, no, it picked up the time span that we had. See, it just accepted the correction. Thank you very much. Good thinking. Now, is it all right? Yes. Okay, now, this is the screen upon which the theory will stand or fall, because this is the screen that is filled with the history that we know. We’re not talking fossil records or Çatalhöyük or any of that. We’re talking very precise dates. It’s saying that there was a very steep descent into novelty around 948 AD. What is this?

9:09:55

McKenna

1,400 years. And this first steep descent into novelty is the intellectual flowering of Islam within the confines of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphate—and the invention of algebra, an intellectual tool that sets the stage for modern science. Essentially, this is the birth of modern science. And you see how steep, sudden, and precipitous it was.

Okay, then you go over to this next one. And let me try something here, since this is such a fast machine. See, I’m moving the little pointer, and it’s telling me exactly what I’m pointing at. I haven’t done this for you before, but this is very good for checking these things. To know exactly, yes. We’re pointing at the exact date. And I want to get it over here to the bottom of this sucker. 1121. The first crusade. The collapse of fortress Europe. This is the beginning of the globalization of the European mind. We’re dead on here.

Okay, now the next steep descent into novelty is this one, obviously. Let’s go over there and see what it is. There it is. 1430. Oh, no, 1358. I’m sorry, just a minute here. Let me get my ducks in a row. Okay, do we all agree it’s pointing at the bottom of the thing? Yes.

9:11:59

McKenna

No, that’s the densest point of the novelty. It’s 1354. What happened in 1354?

9:12:11

McKenna

That’s right. One-third of the population of Europe dies in an 18-month period, beginning in late 1354. The greatest demographic collapse that Europe has ever experienced. It’s an absolute hit, dead on.

Now let’s go over here to this. Now notice, though, that the recovery is quick. There’s a steep descent into novelty and an almost immediate reversion back up to the same level of habit—exactly, business as usual. But this next one is different. It’s a steep descent into novelty, and then it really stays down for a long time and explores this. So let’s go over to the turning point, which is up at the top.

9:13:07

McKenna

It’s global. But, having said that, you have to notice that the world is now dominated by European values and culture. So while we can chart the ebb and flow of the Han dynasty, at this point, European culture is moving to the fore, because European culture is beginning to put its imprint on all of world history.

9:13:35

McKenna

That’s right. This is a picture of a resonance pattern, an interference pattern of many times and places. Now, up here at the top of this thing, at the very top, it’s 1455. What happened in 1455? Does anyone know? What? Columbus was born? Thanks for playing. In 1455, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turk, making European access to the Far East impossible. Therefore, the age of exploration begins, and you get Vasco da Gama and all those people. This was a tremendously shattering event for European civilization; to lose Constantinople to the Ottoman Turk.

Now, let’s go over to—or wait; back, I mean—to this place. This is another very seminal event which, combined with this Constantinople loss, sets the stage for this descent into novelty. Even though it’s way up here in habit, there’s a little chip out as there’s a novel invention of some sort that happens in 1540—1440, I’m sorry. The invention is the invention of printing in Mainz in 1440. That did it, friends, as far as most people are concerned.

9:15:17

McKenna

Enlarge at one set now? Good idea. Yeah, let’s do one zoom. I think I have to move it over clear all the way before we do that zoom or there’ll be some kind of a screw up. Right, let me—well, I’m glad you like it, because it’s my best trick.

9:15:51

McKenna

I do, I do. It’s just we haven’t written the manual yet.

9:15:58

McKenna

Oh, hard to say. Okay, now it’s pointing at today. Now let’s do our zoom. Approach factor: two. Strangely, it didn’t ask for the seek minimum, isn’t it? Okay. Now we’re seeing the same thing again, we’re just seeing it in higher detail. But what I’ll fudge by telling you that up here, 1455, down here, 1492. Along this screaming descent into novelty are all the painters of the Quattrocento. This is the Italian Renaissance, this descent into novelty. And this is the era of exploration. 1492. Good, huh? Good, good. The absolute thing is in 1485, and all the painters of the Italian Renaissance are along this thing.

Now, notice that in 1492 there isn’t an instant rebound. There’s 1492. But instead, because the lost half of the planet has been discovered, this sets off the age of discovery. And habit is unable to reassert itself, because too much peculiar data is flowing in. Too many new lands, peoples, materials, philosophies, alphabets, languages, sexual styles, cuisines—it’s like they’re overwhelmed. However, after a while they get their act together and manage to turn it into hell itself right there, right? What that is—what ends the era of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica—is the Thirty Years’ War. The Thirty Years’ War begins in 1619, it ends in 1648. It begins with Europe medieval. It ends with Europe modern. Parliaments have replaced popes and kings. The whole name of the game has been changed.

Now, the Thirty Years’ War lasts, as I said, until 1648. Sorry, 1648. At the bottom of this cut in here, which is in a situation of rising habit, there nevertheless is a strong tendency toward novelty, reaching a culmination in 1677. Newton publishes the Principia. The celestial mechanics are put on a firm basis. The calculus has been invented. The world of modern science is now completely in place then. And aside from the Thirty Years’ War, what Europe is exporting to the rest of the world on this hellish upswing is slavery, the patrón system, forced labor—a brutal return to habitual methods of the past. You may not know that slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire. If you owned a slave during the medieval period, you owned one slave. It was a house slave, and your ownership of this person proved that you were a person of immense wealth. It would be like owning a beach bonanza today. It’s beyond owning a Rolls Royce. But the need for a drug, strangely enough—the drug being sugar—reversed this, and in the 1440s they began buying Africans and taking them to the Canary Islands to work sugar. So, you know, the moral power of Western civilization could not stand in the way of the re-establishment of slavery and the sugar trade.

Now, up here at the top of this thing, there’s a twist, a turn, right there in 1739. This is the European Enlightenment. The European Enlightenment was the great intellectual step that set the stage for secular civilization, people like Voltaire. And out of that came two revolutions.

9:21:16

McKenna

Well, the Inquisition would have been, I presume, a fairly un-novel thing, since what it was was a power group torturing the helpless—which, there’s nothing new in that, for heaven’s sake.

9:21:32

McKenna

It went on for a long time. You know, actually, it was a Spanish phenomenon. It was confined geographically to a very small number of places. Right there, August 1st, 1776, the American Revolution takes place as a consequence of this steep descent into novelty at the beginning of the European Enlightenment. Well, as you know, the American Revolution is generally thought to have had a happy conclusion. The French Revolution, not so happy. And if you explode that area and look, you can see that they’re happening on different slopes of this thing. Then the Restoration of Louis Napoleon in 1803 is there. This bump is the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, which were the first modern wars and completely distorted the demographics of the United States and Europe. And now I want to—

9:22:41

McKenna

The Franco-Prussian War began in 1848, I think, and the Civil War was 1865. I want to go over here to… I think you’re right. I didn’t feel right about saying that. And that was—

9:23:09

McKenna

1848 was the year of revolution, but the Franco-Prussian War was at the same time as the American Civil War. You’re right. Okay, there’s today’s date. Now let’s do the approach. Approach factor: two. Okay, that’s 357 years on the screen. You see the American and French Revolution. Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War, the twentieth century. Now, let’s look at the twentieth century. And this is—remember how I said that the Great Pyramids were at the bottom of this trough at a higher level, and now we’re seeing the same pattern again? What we get at the bottom of this trough here is the Third Reich.

And to show you how the resonances work, think about the Third Reich in relationship to ancient Egypt. First of all, probably the word “Führer” can be traced to the word “pharaoh.” This is the same concept of a master leader. In addition, the Third Reich and ancient Egypt shared an obsession with large-scale tasteless architecture. In addition, both civilizations had a real tendency to lean on the Jews. So, you see, you get this strange kind of microscope on history. I mean, most people, I think, would not associate ancient Egypt to the Third Reich. And yet when you begin listing the similarities, you see, in a way, one is a reflection of the other.

Okay, within the twentieth century—this is somewhere like 1903—Einstein was in 1905, the general theory, I think, which came first… the general or the special? Special came first in 1905, and the general came slightly later. Down here, in the bottom of this trough, let me show you. Right there, Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. And then all of World War II is fought in the bottom of that trench. Here’s 39. Here’s August 1939. That’s June. That’s September. So that’s when it begins. And see how, even though it’s a novel situation, because it’s a war, it’s a recursion to habit. So at the bottom of a trough of novelty, you get a little upward pimple of recursion to habit.

Then let’s look at… there it is. That’s Hiroshima right there, and Nagasaki right there. The war ends and novelty is left behind. And remember that the psychology of the postwar mind was everybody wanted things to just get back to normal. I mean, certainly the Europeans wanted things to get back to normal. Their whole scene had been bombed into the Stone Age. And in this country, people just wanted to get their place in the suburbs, and marry the girl next door, and have a slew of kids, and buy a Chevrolet, and forget about thousand-year millennial plans and all the rest of it. And so this is the postwar Cold War era. And it lasts… let’s look… oh, there’s 1952. The launching of Sputnik is there.

9:27:14

McKenna

No, no. October 1st, 1957. A day graven on my mind until they lower my box. The first American satellite was launched right around there. Explorer 1.

9:27:41

McKenna

Give me the date! Okay, there’s the assassination of John Kennedy, as close as I can get it at this resolution. If I go back one, I’m before it. So you see it’s right at the bottom of that steep stab that takes place against this other thing.

9:28:01

McKenna

What turned it around? You mean: what’s the turning point? I thought you’d never ask!

9:28:08

McKenna

Oh, I’m about to get it for you. There it is: August 1967. It’s the Summer of Love. Not only does this thing illuminate history, it also fulfills my deepest inner delusions. And remember I said (when we were looking at history’s fractal mountain) that this was Homer up here? So then you can see that the freak thing, the hippies, were like the pre-Hellenic Greeks. All that bralessness, and loose-fitting clothes, and tambourines, and ecstatic bacchanalia with a philosophical undertow—I mean, it was a Greek mentality that broke out in 1967.

And then here’s the long descent into the dreary present moment. What can I show you here? Richard Nixon getting the axe. Now we’re into the Reagan era down here.

9:29:30

McKenna

Yeah, I’m going to cut it. I’m just trying to get back to today. There it is. Okay, cut it. Zoom: yes. Approach factor: two. Enter.

9:29:51

McKenna

Well, it’s going to be… there it is. That’s the hippie thing, and then the descent. Now that’s the seventies and the eighties. That’s the last eleven years. I want to stop it here. Now—now—see how tight it has to be to work? Remember that we’ve descended from six billion years to eleven years. We have predicted asteroid impacts, glaciation, speciation, the rise and fall of empires. Now we’re down to the short and curly, I would think. Let’s take a look here at what we’ve got.

9:30:45

McKenna

I suppose now we’re all experts on this phase of things, because we’ve all just lived through—I don’t see anyone here under eleven. So we’ve just lived through all of this. So let’s take a look at what it is. Now, let’s see, when was George Bush elected president? 1988, so it would have been November 88. That’s October, that’s November. Now, what is the resonance to that moment? I don’t think of it so much as Bush being elected as Reagan leaving office. The resonance here is the fall of Rome. Rome falls right there. Well then, see, we have a series of high and low points which we should be able to correlate to recent catastrophic or world-changing events. So let’s play the game.

What’s happening down here for the thirty days preceding that day is: a million people are camping out in Tiananmen Square. At the very bottom of the trough is the night that they had the most people in the square. And then it turns upward, as you can see, because the constipated fascist oligarchs in charge of that society were preparing to do murder. And there’s nothing novel or new about murder. It’s the oldest game in the book. So that went on there. Then, remember the Romanian—oh, no, no. Let’s go over here. The next steep descent into novelty is right there. Right? That’s too far. No, no, no, that’s right. Okay, right there. Who knows what happened very close to 11-11-1989? The Berlin Wall fell down. Germany is unified right there. So Tiananmen, Germany, then a bummer of some sort. And what is that bummer? It’s the Romanian Revolution, which, as you’ll recall, was handled in the messier style where you put people up against walls and machine gun them, and so forth and so on.

9:33:24

McKenna

August 87?

9:33:31

McKenna

Along that line. Well then, let’s go over to here.

9:33:37

McKenna

Oh, you want to see the harmonic conversion? Give me the date. 8-87? In judging this you have to ask yourself: was the harmonic—

9:34:00

McKenna

Don’t you want to go back to 87? Yeah.

9:34:08

McKenna

Well, maybe it’s not—oh, okay. August what? There is as close as we can get. What it shows is that a long descent into novelty that had previously been impeded, but there isn’t anything particularly special about that date. But it does fall in the domain of going over this hump. Over here, you’ll recall the Gulf War and all that. Here’s how that looks.

Okay, now look here. August 3rd, 1990. There’s where Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. It’s also where Muhammad is born, one level up. I can get higher and lower resonances simply by touching “I” here. We haven’t done that, but it’s possible. Now, remember how, after he invaded, then there was a lot of breast-beating and armies being moved into position and so forth? That goes on until there. Now there—no, no. There is where the thirty-day ultimatum from the Security Council is issued. The war begins, the air war on the 17th of January, right there. And the land war

9:35:58

McKenna

Well, you can see that there’s a steep descent into novelty, which then is slightly moderated, and at the kink is where the war begins. Now, the next steep descent into novelty

9:36:18

McKenna

To habit. That’s the usual habit.

9:36:24

McKenna

Well, war is a kind of ambiguous thing. War is a habitual activity, but it does cause novelty, especially technological novelty. So, you know, that’s why it’s nice that you can blow up these waves and see the variations within the theme. Now, this point…

9:36:53

McKenna

That’s it. There it is, the coup in the Soviet Union, right at the bottom of this one. And now the next one is really intriguing to me, and I’ll show you why. There it is. It’s February 21st of this year, and it’s the lowest point of novelty for this year. Now, I was really puzzled by this, because I watched very carefully that week, and there didn’t seem to be anything very novel going on.

9:37:30

McKenna

My book did come out, you’re right. But I was modest enough not to place that in the context of world history.

9:37:42

McKenna

Well, you know what happened? And this leads us to the slippery edge of prophecy. There was an event which happened—not on the 21st of February, but on the 20th—which may be trivial and forgettable and absolutely not worth talking about, or may be one of the most important events in the history of the twentieth century. Do you know what it was?

9:38:08

McKenna

No, no. Ross Perot goes on Larry King and offers a suggestion about his availability for the presidency. Now, if the guy fades and becomes a nothing burger, it doesn’t count. But he does have the wave blowing at his back, that’s for sure. So that’s basically it. If you want to see, let’s see.

9:38:38

McKenna

No, well, let’s look at the future. Let me get the shmiggy somewhere roughly into the middle, and then we’ll do it.

9:38:55

McKenna

Okay, now let’s see if I can figure out how to do this. Specify target date: C. Target date, month… let’s do today. Today is the fifth month, the 31st day of 1992. We don’t want to add days. Okay, we want to move that over to 50%.

9:39:29

McKenna

Yes, that’s where the cursor pops up. Now let’s choose the time span: E. Let’s do 10 years. Plus months: zero. Plus days: zero. Now let’s graph the wave. F, F. So it’s pointing at today. Ten years. The last five, the next five. And what it shows is that we are actually—as if you didn’t know—exploring a very deep trough of novelty. It will last until August of next year, and then there will be some kind of return to habit with a vengeance. Now, the November election is—no, wait a minute, there’s something wrong here. Let me see. No, I want to point at it today. Okay, that’s as close to today as we can get. We’re definitely getting ready to go down into novelty.

9:40:54

McKenna

You mean clear to here? Okay, well, it’s all going to last until… August 1993. The thing to keep your eye on is this, which is such a spectacular drop. I mean, look how much weirdness we’ve been through, but it’s taken us this much time to do it. This sucker is going to do it in a three-month period in early 1996.

9:41:27

McKenna

I haven’t the faintest.

9:41:49

McKenna

Well, I hope you’ll do this. I think it should be done. Here, I’ll show you a function you haven’t seen. Instead of zooming in, we’ll zoom out.

9:42:05

McKenna

Well, no, I’ll just instead of ten years on the screen, we’ll see twenty. Now, it’s still pointing—well, no, wait a minute. Okay, there you see it.

9:42:20

McKenna

Yeah, right. Right. And there’s the whole thing. So that’s the idea. Now, the notion is that, remember how I kept talking about how a cone contains all possible ellipses when you section it? What the psychedelic experience is, is a sectioning of eternity, and you can build up a picture of the cone by sectioning eternity sufficiently that you get a map like this. I mean, I’m convinced by this that time is fractal. That, instead of treating time as a zero quantity (as the Newtonian equations do), or as a very gentle curvature (as the Einstein equations do), that we have to sub in this fractal dimension, and that this will make possible a science more powerful relatively to present science as present science is (through the power of the calculus) to Greek science. Time—about which we previously knew next to nothing, except that it seemed to keep happening—can actually be described in the same way that energy and other factors in the universe can be described.

Now, the last thought I want to leave you with is: I don’t think anybody could make this up. Certainly not me, a person with no training in mathematics, no interest in this kind of thing. I was told this stuff. And, you know, most—God forbid—channeling is of the horrible variety which tells you to, you know, eat brown rice and love your neighbor. You don’t need channels to tell you that, you have channels in your own head which tell you that. This is a mathematical equation. I mean, it’s embedded in a lot of rap, but the real channel is an equation for the description of time which makes assertions, makes predictions, is willing to be held to mathematical analysis. All the things scientists are always screaming that occultists never will provide them with their theories, this provides. So I’m willing—since it’s only one person’s life—I’m willing to preach this a little bit, because I’m not… maybe I can’t believe. See, the choice here is pretty stark. Either I’m nuts or I’m Newton. There’s no in between. There is no in between! Yes, if it’s right, I’m the greatest intellectual synthesizer in the history of math. If I’m wrong, it’s just horseshit. So then the question is: which is it?

9:45:36

McKenna

You mean: who am I the [???]? A question I’ve never asked.

9:45:47

McKenna

I figured this out… there were many… it took a long time, but from 1971 to 1973 is when I figured it out.

9:46:03

McKenna

Here, let’s see. Let’s go back. Let’s go there and see.

9:46:21

McKenna

Then you would have it. Okay, let’s see.

9:46:31

McKenna

No, the life-changing experience was in 1971. Well, let’s point it at this little dip here, giving me the benefit of the doubt, and say that it was—January, March—April 26, 1973. I’m sure that, had you visited me in April 26, 1973, you would have found me hunched over graph paper and working furiously. Now let’s see what the resonance of that is. I is the resonance call. It asks: higher or lower? We answer: higher. That means earlier. Higher. Major or trigrammatic resonance. Forget that. Major is the answer. Which point? First, second, third, 99th? I have no idea what that means. Let’s answer first. 526 BC. Oh, it’s the Greek Renaissance. It’s Plato, Pythagoras, Ezekiel, Confucius, Lao Tzu. Hey, I think it’s time to knock off. You should quit when you’re ahead, you know?

Yes?

9:48:02

McKenna

Well, in a sense, there—no, no, wait a minute—in a sense there is. This is a fractal. It was invented or channeled by me before fractals became the absolute obsession of frontier mathematics. Now everybody wants to talk about fractals. And everybody says, you know, population growth, river mouths, everything can be modeled by fractals, but nobody has said time can be modeled by a fractal. So I think probably the rise of fractal mathematics is indicative of this. The other thing is: this could never have been brought to the public without small personal computers. I developed this and finished it in 1975, and in 1977 they began selling small computers. So it’s a weirdness, it’s a hallucination. That’s what it is. My dream has always been to bring something here from there. And apparently the only things which travel well from there to here are ideas. And I’m not an artist, so I couldn’t paint. So this is a psychedelic idea. I think there are millions of these kinds of ideas swimming in the psychedelic ocean.

Yeah?

9:49:35

McKenna

Well, that’s because we really haven’t talked about the nature of the concrescence. You know, this all argues for an impossible conclusion; that the world is going to disappear up its own wazoo at dawn December 22nd, 2012.

9:50:07

McKenna

Oh, you want to see the last day? Well, here, let me—yeah, I’ll show you. I’ll show you the final thing. We’re running over here, but anybody who wants to leave has my blessing and my sympathy. Okay, let’s change the date of interest. Where is the date of interest?

9:50:47

McKenna

Well, they don’t get date specific. Why don’t I see—oh, there it is, C. Target date. Oh, let’s look at January 1st, 2010, on a time span… oh, wait a minute. Do you wish to have the number of days? No.

9:51:24

McKenna

That’s right. That’s right. Time span, specify time span: E. Years: 2010—no, 12 years. Plus months: zip. Plus days: zip. Yes. Okay, the pointer will be pointing at January 1, 2010, but you see, there it is. It runs down. He don’t go no more. That’s the end. Now, I have created one way out that preserves the theory and the rational universe, and it is simply this: that what happens on December 22nd, 2012, is that time travel is invented. And because it is invented, it is no longer possible to portray historical data on a linear graph. So that’s all. It’s just: it was a thing about technology, and eventually a technology was created which made the three-dimensional spacetime matrix itself obsolete.

9:52:38

McKenna

Yes, dimensional octave jump. The transcendental object is the despair of description. It cannot be known. It can only be approximated. It’s the sacred heart of Jesus. It’s the flying saucer. It’s the philosopher’s stone. It’s tantric union. It’s good LSD. It’s all of these things and more. It transcends language and understanding. But the closer we get to it, the more it will be revealed. And the reason the twentieth century is so peculiar is because we’re so close to the zero point. We’re so close to the transcendental object that, you know, take a hit—there it is! Close your eyes and daydream—there it is! Have an orgasm—there it is! It’s trying to break through. It’s almost upon us. We’ve been sailing toward this thing for 72 billion years, and we are now 22 years from impact. The walls are so steep. The acceleration is so great. We are there, for all practical purposes. And then what spiritual life and headdom and all that means is: realize that we are there, so that anxiety drains from your life, body, and worldview, and then you just ride the wave. And when people talk of catastrophe, revelation, salvation, and destruction, you just smile a small smile, knowing that it will be all that and more and more and more.

It’s something—I think it’s to reassure us. You see, I think the world is going to get hip to the fact that we are actually caught in a whirlpool in time that is sucking us into another dimension. Without something like Time Wave Zero, a notion like that could get fairly alarming and spread a lot of panic. With Time Wave Zero, you just say: look, we have a map of what’s going on. We’ll check off the milestones. As long as the wave keeps working, nobody should freak out. Just settle in, hang on, and we’ll navigate through this. So it’s a vital piece of knowledge necessary to face the eschaton without panic. Because these crazy religions want to tell you that you’re going to be judged and damned and fired and roasted. No, no, that’s not it. They got the story wrong. We’re just being sucked into hyperspace.

And hyperspace is the human imagination, the human heart, the human soul. It’s the domain of our dreams. Our imagination is a flickering image of what it will be. But what it really will be is the despair of prose. What it will really be can only be approached in silent darkness on five grams. And then you can’t tell anybody about it.

Thank you very much!