In the past year or so I’ve spoken about five times about various aspects of the psychedelic experience to audiences here in Esalen and in Santa Barbara, and one of the things that is a personal interest of mine that stands out from the general background of the psychedelic experience is the way that it throws light on language. And I discovered that audiences seem fairly responsive to this question, even though it seemed to me at first fairly hard to articulate it, and fairly hard to say too much about it. So tonight, to indulge myself and anybody else who has a particular interest in this aspect of it, I want to say more about it and maybe talk for forty minutes or so, and then take questions. And I think it’s by talking—it’s perhaps a tautology to think that by talking about a linguistic phenomenon or a linguistic problem, you can illuminate it. But I’m interested in how it strikes other people, and the kind of dialogue that can be generated by talking about it.

First of all, to background what I’m saying a little bit: I recently ran across a very interesting analogy, or metaphor, that seemed useful to me, which was—it was a historical analogy saying that, when civilizations come into crisis, inevitably, one of their strategies for survival is to cast back to an earlier period of time, an earlier cultural ideal, and then to try to exemplify its values. And the obvious example and the most recent phenomenon of this sort on any large scale is the Renaissance, in which the breakdown of medieval society and the rise of mercantilism generated a need to cast back into time for a set of values, and then to realize them. And the period of time that was chosen was classical Greece and Rome. And so painting, sculpture, poetry reflected an effort to recapture classical values.

What I think is happening in the present—and by the present I mean the whole twentieth century—is a similar thing, a similar culture crisis, but on a much grander and more global and more threatening scale, and a casting back for a previous cultural model whose ideals, if we could realize them, would save our own civilization—the same idea that the Renaissance had about classical Greece. But strangely, the period that we have decided, that we have fastened on—without ever making a conscious decision, but as a reflection of decisions made in the mass psyche of the species—the period that we have settled on is the archaic period which precedes human history.

And so cubism, and the things that were done for literature by Joyce and Kant, and the glorification of barbarism, and the recovery of the unconscious—first the sexual nature of the unconscious through Freud, later the mass archetypal structure through Jung. In other words, the great movements of the twentieth century, even Marxism, can be seen as efforts to recapture prehistoric sacral values. And this process has been going on for fifty years or so, different adumbrations of it at different times. And now, and for the past ten years or so, the theme of shamanism, the rediscovery of Paleolithic religion, and the rise of the use of hallucinogenic drugs—which were the driving force of Paleolithic religion—has come into the fore.

Well, okay, holding that in your mind for a moment, recall Marshall McLuhan’s idea that technologies for conveying information shift ratios in the mass psyche in the way that it relates to the world. And he was famous for predicting what he called electronic feudalism. He said that the television screen was more like a page of manuscript than a page of print, and that as the linearity and uniformity and rational assumptions of grammar were transcended in the conveying of information to be replaced by electronic Gestalts that were looked at rather than read, that the ratios between the senses would shift, and that this would have profound effects on art, and the history of ideas, and this sort of thing. What is happening is that a kind of super-McLuhanistic phenomenon is happening, where we are collapsing not into the electronic feudalism that he discussed, but into the electronic tribalism which he discussed. And it is shifting our sensory ratios away from the audial and toward the visual.

And this brings me now to my subject, which is the transformations of language under the influence of the psychedelic experience. The fact that there is a spectrum of vocal and psychological and psycho-mental phenomena that range all the way from the recitation of learned material through freely formed speech and into these trance-like religious phenomena that go under the category glossolalia. And these things are experienced by the people who do them as having a varying relationship to the visual rather than the audial sense.

We had a discussion a couple of nights ago with Ralph Abraham about when you are asked to conjure the idea of an orange, what is this idea made out of? When you close your eyes and think of an orange, is what you think of made of language or is it made of light? And what you say in answer to this question, what does it say about you and the way in which you are embedded in your culture?

Under the influence of psilocybin, particularly, the language-forming centers are activated. And they are activated in tandem with the visual cortex, so that forms of synesthesia are experienced which are linked, first of all, to sound, so that people singing control the fabric of hallucination through sound. And we found this to be true of ayahuasca in the Amazon, where definitely the shaman’s use of voice controls the visual fabric of what’s going on. But there is yet another level to that phenomenon, which is: with the addition of meaning, the control of the visual surface—the topology of meaning, if you will, rather than the ongoing decoding from a dictionary—is transcended. Meaning, then, is able also to work its adumbrations on this topological surface, and you see into—well, there are different ways of cognizing it. The place where the Ursprache is coming from, the assembly language that lies behind all formalized or culturally validated languages. Wittgenstein called it the unspeakable. It’s the place where explication cannot go, almost by definition, in order to avoid the topology.

Well, now, it seemed to me that the nearness of these tryptamine hallucinogens to normal metabolites of brain chemistry, and the fragileness that people like McLuhan and Julian Jaynes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world—in other words, it’s a delicate balance of chemistry and language and history and these sensory ratios—but given all this, it seemed probable to me that this phenomenon encountered in deep psychedelic experiences with psilocybin actually has a potential historical impact. It is a kind of human ability, which is at present submerged in the psyche, contactable only by the shamanic means of journeying into historical hyperspace. In other words, of going into that place where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough that you can have an intimation, at least, of what is to come.

And I think this is what is to come. And it is a kind of telepathy, but it’s not telepathy as we imagined it to be. When I imagined telepathy, I thought of it as hearing another person think and having them hear you think. This is something where the modality of meaning is shifted out of a common dictionary that is a cultural convention, and into a shared visual topology which is examined by both parties—both the speaker who caused this thing to be and the audience who shares the space where this is happening. It’s interesting that beta-carbolines, which are used to accentuate the hallucinogenic effect of DMT in these ayahuasca preparations in Amazonas, is very definitely a part of normal human brain metabolism. And the MAO inhibition that it’s performing on DMT that is introduced from the outside is a mirror in each of the kind of function that it’s performing in the brain. So the shifting of these sensory ratios is causing language to become more visual.

And at this point I always have to quote Philo Judaeus, who was a first-century Alexandrian Jew who talked about the lógos. And I have made analogies between the phenomenon I’m describing and the lógos. But in the critical quote what he said was that a more perfect lógos was possible, and that it would be a phenomenon which would pass from the modality of being heard to the modality of being beheld without ever crossing through a quantized point of transition, where you could say it was one, now it is the other. And I think the cultural shock waves that will be generated by the emergence of visible language will totally transform the culture, to the point that the point beyond the end of history, the entry into hyperspace, the eschatological monad, all these religious or theological constructs about history are actually intuitions about language undergoing this transformation.

Now, several things about this transformation. It’s obviously not something which the culture is doing as a decision. It isn’t like home computers and cable TV. It isn’t being brought on as an information utility. It’s something which is being imposed from outside. And I think it is—I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Gaia hypothesis of homeostatic regulation of the environment of the Earth through the interaction of all life acting as a single organism. Well, it obviously regulates—trigger species, such as we are, are part of this homeostatic method of regulation. And I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology. And it is regulated through control of the evolution of language. Because what you cannot think, you cannot do. And where you cannot imagine, you cannot steer your culture and go. So I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as human macro, almost social pheromones, that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate the evolution of human culture generally.

Now, one final thought about all this. It seems clear to me—and I’ve mentioned it in the other lectures—that another aspect of what psychedelics are doing, and an aspect of what’s happening to the culture generally, is: its transformation into a space-faring species, and that the momentum for this has been building for millennia. It is not something that was decided in the 1950s. It is in fact what we’re all about. I looked at a book recently by Terry Wilson about Brion Gysin called Here To Go. And he asked the question: what are we here for? And he answers himself: we’re here to go.

And I think there’s great truth in that, especially in the current historical moment, where it’s clear that man as a species and the planet as a unified ecosystem have become antagonistic to each other. And this is not unusual in nature. In fact, it’s a phenomenon that occurs between a mother and a fetus. When the fetus comes to term, when the birth is imminent, it must happen. Otherwise, the survival of both parties is threatened—even though the birth trauma for the mother and the child represents one of the major crises that they will face in their sojourn in existence. Nevertheless, it is inevitable and necessary. And if it comes off correctly, why, it’s to the good of everyone.

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it is going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process—to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile nineteenth-century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means. And the I Ching says, you know, you never confront evil directly, because when it is named, it sharpens its weapons and it learns to defend itself. So what is called for is this sideways attack through hyperspace. God forbid, I think it was Tim Leary who said we should become ecological secret agents. Is that what I’m going to conclude? Maybe.

Anyway, the transformation of language is, I think, the signal that this nostalgia for the archaic world is coming to a head. And that this is its culmination. This is the peculiar thing that we all sense is coming that we can’t quite imagine, that is synthetic yet natural, that is obvious yet hidden. And the interesting thing about it is that it emerges from an inner personal frontier. In other words, you’re not going to hear this on the evening news. The president is not going to explain it to you. The secretary general of the UN isn’t going to explain it to you. You are only going to advance into understanding this phenomenon to the degree that you apply yourself to your being, to attention to being, to reflection on reflection, to attention on attention. And then it will become clear.

And because it is a gradient of evolution, it doesn’t come with the force of a revelation. It is something which is drawn out. Almost in the same way that we move forward into time, this thing is drawn out. In fact, you could almost say that the act of history, or the fact of history, is a macro-phenomenon that arises out of the micro-physical fact of millions of people evolving their language. That is what causes the moving wave front of historical becoming. So transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.

My brother is working on the theory, putting together the argument for the idea that actually, human history has always been mediated by man’s interaction with hallucinogenic drugs, and that this is the pheromonal regulator that links us to the rest of the ecology. And it is simply accidents of botany and alkaloid distribution and historiography that allowed the culture to arise in Europe, which was an area confined geographically and poor in psychedelic plants. So that the mystery was confined in places like Eleusis and peripheral cults, like possibly the mushroom berserkers or amanita-using cults in the Arctic regions.

And because of those accidents of botany and geography, a culture was able to get loose from such tight constraints that the unconscious imposes. But nevertheless, that culture then was the Promethean culture, the Faustian culture, which claimed the energies, which will then send the mind tribes to the stars. If it had not been for this historical episode, we would essentially be at the Amazonian level of culture, which is suspended in the hallucinogenic dream, but oblivious to the historical forces which are bearing down on that. And tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.

So this must seem very strange to some people and home ground to other people. Are there any questions at this point? Nary a taker? Yes?

22:55

McKenna

Well, I think it’s an attitude toward genes and property and information. The institutional, hierarchically structured societies that we associate with our own culture—which I assume we define consciously or unconsciously as somehow the superior culture—is just inherited from tribal organization, but with a need to abstract the leadership quality so that control could function over wide areas. But electronics actually is—you know, the entire human community is enclosed in a light-second of travel. So the globalism is real. I mean, when I first read McLuhan, it seemed to me very true, but a thin voice crying in the wilderness. It was hard to see out of all the trends working in society that that was how it would come to be. But it certainly seems to be so. I think—well, as H. G. Wells said: history is a race between education and disaster. And I think, you know, that education was losing that race until electronics came along. And now I would probably be optimistic.

I think that there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being, and it is not necessarily fostered by institutions. For instance, the invention of the microchip, which makes possible the personal computer: it was actually thought to be a mistake. It was not fast enough for the Defense Department purposes that it was engineered; that the research project that produced it was aiming for. And they produced instead this weird thing, which they couldn’t imagine what to do with because it was too slow for any military or industrial application. But someone realized, you know, that it was just fine for human beings, and that it would shift the pieces around on the board in the war between freedom and oligarchy and human individuality and all these forces which seek to oppress it.

So I don’t believe, you know, that the historical process is under the control of any of the many, many institutions that would wish to control it. I don’t—the break between nature and man has been overstressed, I think, and that we should realize, you know, that we are very strange, but you can find very odd adaptations at many levels. And when you look at the global ecology, you see that there must be a species like us, or otherwise it would mean that evolution gives up at the planetary level. That somehow when it encounters the edge of the atmosphere, it just says, “Okay. Well, that’s it. If the star goes, we all go, and there’s no way around that.”

But actually, the obvious way around that is a technical species, a minded species, that will open a hole using energy and understanding through which everything could escape if it had to. Because, you know, as the data flows back from these probes moving up through the solar system and beyond, it turns out that the nineteenth-century intuition of catastrophism was very correct; that the universe is in fact a very turbulent place, and that you only have to open your time window a little bit—like a hundred thousand years—for the probability of very turbulent events that a global ecosystem would react to.

And the strategies have to be evolved. I mean, Francis Crick has come out with his belief, the panspermia idea, that life actually evolves in a deep space environment and is conveyed, then, to planetary environments where it can adapt and evolve evolutionary strategies by cometary material. At one point we suggested that Stropharia cubensis, the psilocybin mushroom, was actually an intelligent species whose strategy of evolutionary advance was the spore, which could actually go into a kind of suspended animation for hundreds of thousands, millions of years, and by that means radiate through the galaxy over very long periods of time. And that seemed like a very radical idea at the time.

We hypothesized that spore liberation by an agaricus on a planetary surface, then through Brownian motion and accumulation of global charge on the surface of the spore, that there would be a small number of these tending to percolate out of any given atmosphere. And given the enormous amounts of spores that are released, you could make an argument for this kind of evolutionary strategy. But Crick, who discovered DNA, makes a much wilder hypothesis, which is that you don’t even require a planetary ecosystem for DNA and life chemistry to evolve, but that it can evolve in ultra-cold regimens in interstellar space, and then be conveyed to various planetary chemical regimens, where it can respond and grow.

And all of these things—life, which we know from the rock that is dug out of the South African chert, you can date back to at least 3.5 billion years—that’s longer than the life of 40% of the stars in the universe. So life is not an ephemeral process in an entropic universe. Life is a process that has a duration that exceeds that of star-life. And life’s strategy for running against the second law of thermodynamics, and expanding and conserving ordered structure over vast periods of time, is a strategy of encoding information and retaining it—in other words: languages. And these languages—which are abstract systems of notation that can be laid onto nucleotides or coconuts or scratches on clay or whatever—allow the conserving of complexity.

And the cross into visible language that I see as the culmination of human historical culture is a similar advance into this information self-expression of the magnitude similar to the generation of epigenetic information. In other words: the first writing, the first notation, that represented a break with genetic information that allowed, then, culture and memory and self-reflection. Visible language will allow a similar forward thrust deeper into human becoming. But it is also part of the phenomenon of leaving the planet, and being anticipated now in these psychedelic drug states. Because as we continue to insist on exploring the archaic—through drugs and music and archeology and the whole thrust of twentieth-century self-explication—I think we’re going to find that this was the basis of the Ur-Shamanism. This is what magic is. It’s being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language; for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.

32:11

McKenna

Well, you know, people had to look at language probably 15,000 years before Noam Chomsky was able to write down the fifteen rules of transformational grammar. There may be a pixel or an alphabet or a reducible unit to it. It doesn’t seem like that. It seems like—well, no, no, maybe topology that we could imagine that René Thom’s catastrophes, of which there are seven good in three dimensions. But as you add dimensions to any system, the number of these potential catastrophes increases. And Ralph Abraham has described a number of the hyper-dimensional catastrophe states. Perhaps they could eventually, it could eventually be recognized as a grammar of catastrophe flow, where it changes first into one thing, then into another. What you’re asking basically is: what is the meaning of meaning? Or, put another way, this language eventually becomes somehow a mirror of mathematics. And I don’t know, it would take a lot more analysis than I have done.

I think describing this stuff is at the level of sailing up jungle rivers, and sticking to the broad rivers and noting that, you know, at three in the afternoon you passed a river mouth flowing in. It was a mile and a half wide and you don’t know where it was coming from, or how many thousand square miles it was draining, and you just put a note on your map to return someday and ascend it. In other words, there’s this archaic area of the mind. It’s going to take a long time to explicate it. By the time we have assimilated our re-contact with the archaic, you know, there will be colonies on Alpha Centauri, there will be thinking machines, there will be trans-dimensional vehicles and out-of-body consciousness via electronics. All these things will arise out of our grappling with an understanding of this shift in the sensory ratios that will essentially return modern man to the age of miracles—though we won’t put it that way, but we will privately experience it that way. I mean, that’s what psychedelic drugs are. We don’t put it that way, but we all (who have been through it, you know) privately experience it as a miracle.

35:33

McKenna

Well, it seems as though there is a tuning mechanism—that you must somehow, by trial and error, find how to twiddle this knob. And you move through these very concentrated areas of information. And some of it can be blindingly personal, some of it appear to be movies of historical periods, some of it appear to be conformed to Jungian stuff. And then the alien part of it. And I don’t know—I mean, this is the area I work in. I’ve held all kinds of opinions about this information, and finally decided that it’s too early to say what it is.

There’s a school of New Age—or I don’t know exactly how to put it—but the Seth Books, and Isha Schwaller de Lubicz and these people, where it’s just nobody asks any hard questions. It’s just, “Oh, you’re channeling a being from Arcturus and they’re laying the law down. Fascinating! What are they saying?” Well, that’s interesting; what they’re saying. But more interesting is trying to actually work up close to the mechanics involved in this channeling. And I’m very skeptical. And yet it hasn’t stopped me at all from doing it. I mean, I talk to them—but I don’t give away the barn or the cow, I just try to engage in dialogue. And, you know, some traditions are very blasé about this sort of thing. Buddhism, for instance; Vajrayana. It’s just: oh yes, many worlds, many beings, beings, beings, all kinds of beings on every level, and you have to learn to deal with them. But that’s well and good until you actually are dealing with these beings and go through—like that wonderful moment in Rosemary’s Baby where she says, “My God, this is really happening!” Well, there are those moments where you realize, you know, that this doesn’t appear to be a hypothesization of discriminating intellect, it appears to be some kind of eight-armed Shmiggy which is coming at you with all these implements. And… I don’t know.

See, I think it’s going to take a long time to sort this all out. And that, in order to learn what we had to learn about matter, to leave the planet, we had to really put ourselves through a head trip and close down the imagination, or deputize special people to be imaginative—who we called poets, and then labeled irrelevant. It’s going to now come upon us. And science is flowing into this area and beginning to recognize that it must have a romantic component. This is just the way of things. Ideas beget their opposites, and then are subsumed by them.

Anyone? Yes?

39:07

McKenna

Could all this be related to the crisis in art? Well, I don’t know whether you mean the crisis since 1905 or 1975, or which…. Well, it’s not exactly a crisis. The goal of art is to be incomprehensible, or a portion of it has to be incomprehensible. I think that, you know, these paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, which are now dated at 19,000 years old, when the first ones were discovered in the 1890s, they were thought to be 400 to 500 years old. And as it dawned on people what this was—and this was like 1905 to 1925—the abyss of time and history that opened up for people who were sensitive to it, the realization that, my God, people have been feeling what I’ve been feeling, thinking what I’ve been feeling for at least 20,000 years. And this impacted on Picasso, it impacted on Miró, it impacted on Clay, it impacted on Marcel Duchamp—all of these people. And much of the bad boy antics of modern art is actually, it’s when you bring a primitive home to dinner. You know, when the nineteenth-century academy brings home a savage from the South Sea island, Jari with the cast of his penis, Marcel Duchamp insisting on wearing a toilet thing around his neck at certain formal occasions. And, for instance, in the current punk phenomenon of body painting, they would be perfectly at home in the mountains of New Guinea. People loved to paint themselves. This was very big before the last ice age. And if you believe heavy metal sets fashion, it looks like it’s going to be very big in the next century.

But a more serious answer to your question is: I think that the crisis is not—it depends. It’s a crisis, it’s an opportunity. What it is is that art is becoming eschatological. From Duccio on, from the close of the medieval period on, art was conceived of a series of self-transcending styles moving toward various goals, which usually derive from the philosophy of the time. So that realism or manorism, these various tendencies would be pursued. What’s happened in the twentieth century with the legitimizing of experience, and the legitimizing of experiment, and the destruction of the patronage system and the academy, is that everything happens. There are people painting in New York today in the style of Jan van Eyck and making a living at it. And there are also people doing all kinds of things. But it’s very, very hard to pick out a new piece of art—if by, I don’t think… well, the art of the last twenty years has been art outside of time. Since the middle sixties, since William Wiley and Funk and all that stuff began. It’s impossible to date art objects. They can have been made any time in the last twenty years.

This is what eschatological time will be like: a transcendence of style, and people simply working in these various modes of self-expression which compete in a great atemporal carnival—wherein, unfortunately, the values of the marketplace play too great a role, but no other way of mediating it has been found. Part of what’s happened to art is that it’s been transformed into an enormous industry that must produce objects to decorate the apartments of the affluent on all continents who want to have art and be involved in art. But they don’t have enough power to dictate style. They’ll take whatever is put before them—which is very liberating for artists.

Anybody else have anything on their mind? Not a soul. Yes?

44:05

McKenna

Well, you’re asking: what is the difference between self and other? Well—

44:15

McKenna

What you’re asking is: how do you know you’re not talking to yourself? Aha. Well, that’s a very tricky question. I’m surprised that, in 3,000 years of philosophizing, somebody hasn’t figured out a nifty way to always tell this. It would make a marvelous short story; some little litmus test that you could perform. Pretty much you have to go on intuition. Of course, what you always say is: I can’t possibly know what I’m being told, therefore it isn’t myself. But that’s a very naïve view of the psyche. On the other hand, when that reaches excruciating proportions, there’s a tendency to abandon sophistication and just believe in it anyway.

But this thing about the shifting boundary between self and other is very tricky. When I first smoked DMT, for instance, I saw an absolute break between self and alien. I was myself and they were the aliens. But then, over years of working with it and seeing how it comes on with psilocybin—where, instead of forming up over forty seconds or so, it comes together over a half an hour or forty minutes, and you have to breathe and you have to ease it in—then you see how it is a kind of thing which emerges out of myself. It’s like I pull a psychic plug, and the opaque ink drains away, and there’s this marvelous coral-like organism which I didn’t think was a part of me, but perhaps all through life and death we keep discovering new organs capable of amazing things that we didn’t know we had. But I don’t know.

I mean, I don’t think you can ask a single person to know. I think this is the question that shamanism deals with. It’s a mystery. Not only is the other the self, but is the other God? Is the other the species-mind of the planet? Is the other a genus loci? A kind of God but a local force of some sort? I mean, these are wonderful questions to entertain when they have immediacy. And this is what people did before history, was: religion was their job, and they worked at it very hard. But I’m not sure there are ever answers.

More and more, recently, I’ve—and I’ve always known this on some level. I think about when I was about sixteen or so I realized it, and briefly pursued it and never returned to it. But I think that Taoism, if I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism—for the following reasons. It’s the only mystical tradition I know of—possibly with the exception of shamanism, but shamanism doesn’t really reflect on this—it’s the only mystical tradition I know of that is not anti scientific. It has no hostility to science. It is highly experimental. It’s about compounding drugs with fungi and minerals, and doing strange things on the side of fog-swept mountains, and looking into your head, and looking into your head, and looking into your head, and trying to refine description. And it is open ended. But it is ecologically sensitive. It is sensitive to the—it is not at all antagonistic to drugs. In fact, on the subject of drugs it’s extremely straightforward and practical. Its stated goal is to compound the ninefold elixir of immortality—and then how you do this, various methods came and went through the ages. But it’s stress on technique, it’s stress on analysis, it’s stress on contemplation without method. In fact it’s general antagonism toward method. All these things endear it to me a lot, and I think it’s very compatible with the shamanic stance.

In fact, we are modern people, and even if you think of yourself as a practicing shaman—I don’t think of myself that way; I think of myself as a shamanologist—but even if you think of yourself as a practicing shaman, you have to weld it to later traditions that answer more sophisticated questions that were posed later in historical time, and Taoism would be an excellent vehicle for that, I think.

Yeah?

49:52

McKenna

Yeah, I think it is. This “one without a second” caused me to think of Plotinus. One of his definitions of the mystical experience was, he called it the flight of the alone to the alone—which mathematically adds up to the one without a second. As far as the end of history that seems to be appointed for history by Western religion: yes, it is like dissolution; the dissolution of the cosmos that goes on in Hindu cosmology. Hindu cosmology is a set of nested cycles, similar in structure to the set of nested cycles that I proposed for time in The Invisible Landscape. And I think we’re running into one of those compression points; that everything that has been going on on this planet for the last billion years has been a series of telescoping processes of ever-accelerating intensity, connectivity, and momentum, leading finally to the generation of consciousness; a moment after that, historical civilization; a moment after that, modern science; and a moment after that, starflight. And it is just a 10,000-year rush from monkeyhood to starflight—a geological moment, but historically a grand opera that has everybody on the edge of their seat, because if the ball is fumbled, that’s all she wrote. And there’s nothing that says that we must succeed, or at least we cannot assume that there’s something which says that we must succeed, even if we are the chosen target species of Gaia. Gaia may not have all fingers on the button. But we don’t know where our own power ends and begins, and where the power of the other begins and ends. And so we have to make our way carefully into these dimensions. Shamanism is thousands of years of accumulated information on how to navigate in these spaces. If we are becoming a shamanic society through the metaphor of space flight, we are going to have to recover this information. And there will be some chills and spills along the way, I’m sure.

Yeah?

53:11

McKenna

Right.

53:31

McKenna

Well, it isn’t so much in confrontation with the being that you have to have this critical analysis. In confrontation with the being you act from the heart and in the moment. But it’s later—it’s: what do we think about these things as we sit here now, relatively un-stoned? And your question raises all kinds of issues. I said I didn’t think anyone was a shaman, or that I thought of myself as a shamanologist. This is because a shaman is educated by other shaman, inculcated, chosen out, educated, and brought along. In our society we have to do it all by ourselves. And, you know, I’ve made a comparison to a man walking along the beach and coming upon a fully rigged sailboat—comparing the sailboat to the psychedelic drug. How likely is it that this man can learn to sail without killing himself? Where, you know, it is no great matter to learn to sail if you learn from a sailor. So this is the first barrier that’s posed for us—or was posed, I think, in the sixties when there were a lot of casualties to psychedelics, because it was assumed that everyone should do it. And so millions of people did. And actually, there are few societies where everyone does it. And those where that is the case—or where for instance all men do it—are not probably the most advanced shamanisms on the planet. So it’s a kind of a profession. It’s almost like a clergy. It’s to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.

The chief thing which grounds the shaman—at least in my practical experience with them—is the curing. And Mircea Eliade insists on this: that the primary function of the shaman is to cure, and that all these other things go toward that. We all have to cure ourselves, in a sense, in the sense that is contained in the notion that a psychedelic drug is a deconditioning agent. Now, I don’t think a psychedelic drug is particularly a deconditioning agent if you’re Witoto or Bora or Muinani, or something like that, and you take it, you don’t then denounce being that and leave for Lima. But in our culture psychedelics have had this effect of triggering a very fundamental questioning of values and intensifying alienation, creating alienated subclasses. This is a symptom of the general unhealthiness of the society—that you can’t be psychedelic and be 100% of this society; that certain things seem to impose themselves in your way. So I don’t think that there is any easy answer to your question.

What we have over shaman is our wonderful electronic information-retrieval systems. And the way that works is like this: you go to the Amazon, and you’re dealing with a tribe, and they say, “We need a certain drug plant, and the secret word for it is so-and-so. And we’ll go and get it.” And they do. And they know more about that drug plant than you do by a long crack. But you ask them: did they know that the people twenty miles further up the river use a different plant called something else, and you know this because you read it in a Harvard Museum botanical leaflet which tells you that. And they are astonished, you know? You have this weird overview which they cannot conceive of. They are fully informed in a vertical fashion about one tradition. But you—by writing to Boston, Massachusetts, and getting these leaflets and reading them—are more prepared to discuss the generalities of Amazon shamanism than most of the people you meet. And this is a great resource not to be sneered that.

There’s a lot of information. And, like, for instance, when you read Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, this is a global overview, and you—I’m not saying you know more than anyone single shaman knows about shamanic ecstasy, but you have a certain kind of knowledge which prepares you, a generalized cosmology which prepares you. And these are the best maps that we have, so we have to make use of them.

Yeah?

59:32

McKenna

Well, obviously just on the surface of it, Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, made the point that sexuality is necessarily repressed for civilization to be possible. Sexuality is being redefined in this modern context in an archaic context, so that it becomes more generalized. The romantic ideal gives place to a kind of tribal ideal. This is obviously happening, and related to psychedelics and this effort to recapture the archaic. That’s probably the major impact that it will have. Because we have no—our hangups are all hung around the issues that sexuality posed for civilization, and the various solutions that were found in various times—none of which were ever viable. This is what makes us feel sort of uncomfortable about ourselves, is: there’s never been a set of social rules that worked so well that most people weren’t involved in trying to subvert them. What does that say about us and the ten-thousand-year endeavor we’ve been involved in?

But I see that giving way to a more natural order. In other words, many constraints have been placed upon us. We have accepted many constraints. We’ve accepted a kind of wounding. The myth of the fall is a statement about our feelings about ourselves: that we had to go into history to recover something which had been lost that had been ours in the beginning, but that we fumbled away. And then we had to descend into history and recover it. It is the Edenic innocence and the adumbrations that it will create at all levels of society.

Singing is a ritual act that automatically sets up its own rules, and can be initiated at any time without hardly moving a muscle. We were saying during the break up here that it’s possible to imagine a form of psychoanalysis where what you would do is simply urge people and go through with them learning as much about history as possible, so that there were no blank spots, so that their amnesia about their historical position was recovered, as a way of treating neurosis, a way of actually—by locating people on the grid, by forcing them to find out who they really are in terms of all the other somebodies who have been around in all the other someplaces that preceded them.And I think that you can almost see that that is a recovery of the unconscious. The history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don’t know is what your personal unconscious is made out of. However, much of the history of man that you don’t know can probably be found by going and reading a book on the subject. And this has a tremendous centering, a spiritual efficacy, all out of proportion to the act of studying history, which seems rather removed from everyday concerns.

Anything else?

1:03:40

McKenna

Well, I think the I Ching is an effort, the most advanced effort, to do something like that. But it’s a language of Gestalt. And I don’t speak Japanese, but it’s said of Japanese that nothing which is obvious is ever mentioned. Language is reserved for clarifying the unclear. So people are not saying, “It’s a hot day, isn’t it?” and that kind of stuff. They’re reserving language.

The other possibility is that the visual language is this, and that as more and more of it is experienced and done, it will be realized. The visual language—I’m not sure I stressed this this evening—but it is perhaps non-translatable into English, because it is a language of emotion where emotion is seen to be as subtle a spectrum of integrated gradients of meaning, or integrated gradients of combination, as meaning has. So that there isn’t love, hate, disgust, and something else, but in fact an infinitude of emotional states that can be triggered by vocal sound. And in a way, of course, I’m simply describing singing, wordless singing—except that I’m describing how that can rise to an ontologically different level and become so emotive that you understand very subtle differentiations of emotion.

I noticed, when we were in the Amazon taking ayahuasca with these people, and they would sing these thousand-year-old songs, and you would eventually get to the place where you had the absolute conviction that you understood, because you could stand off from your mind and say: the speed at which I’m going through emotional changes over what I’m hearing must mean that I understand what I’m hearing. Because if I didn’t understand it, I would just have a certain generalized emotion about it. But it is changing my interior state so rapidly that it is like the experience of understanding. That’s the only thing it can be compared to.

Yeah?

1:06:32

McKenna

Aha. Yes, well, the core chemical idea in The Invisible Landscape, for those of you who haven’t read it, is that it is possible (or it was hypothesized that it was possible) to use sound to cause hallucinogenic drug molecules that were present in the nucleus of neurons, having arrived there through axioplasmic transport from the synapse, to cause them to occupy bond sites in DNA. The bond sites specifically which lie between the nucleotides. And the molecular dimensions and everything are correct for this to be possible. In fact, it’s been shown in vitro that certain hallucinogens do preferentially bond into DNA in very elegant experiments in which DNA was exposed to hallucinogenic drug molecules, and then centrifuged, and shown that its specific gravity had increased by precisely the molecular weight of the drug molecule, and no other compounds were present.

So there is an affinity for bonding with the DNA on the part of these drug molecules. We hypothesized that the general psychedelic experience, the common psychedelic experience, is simply these things displacing normal neurotransmitters such as serotonin at the synapse, undergoing axioplasmic transport to the nucleus, intercalating—which is the technical term for this kind of bonding—intercalating into the nuclear material there, and shifting the generalized electron spin resonance signature of the molecule so that millions of cells having this happen to them are amplified into a higher cortical experience, which is the hallucinogenic experience.

But, in answer to your question, my brother went beyond this and hypothesized that you could intervene in this process—which normally you would expect to be quenched in four to six hours, whatever the duration of the psychedelic drug was. But it would be possible to intervene in this process with vocally generated sound, generated in such a way that, of these millions of molecules in these bond states, a very few of them would be oriented in space toward the incoming wave front of sound in such a way that they would be canceled, that they would undergo the kind of harmonic canceling that happens when you, like, sound a note on the cello and then quench the string of sound, and you hear the overtones in octaves above and below it. And he felt that this could be done with the human voice, and performed an experiment to test this idea which seemed to indicate that it was possible—or at least that some bizarre drug synergy was prolonged and triggered by vocal sound. And we have never proceeded into this any further. It would be easy to do so. You would get square wave generators and oscillating systems, and you would try to tune into this sound. Because it’s a very specific sound.

Now, it sounds at first preposterous that acoustically mediated quantum-mechanical chemical changes could be controlled by the voice. But you have to remember: populations of millions of molecules are involved, only a very few of which have to fulfill the complete set of special conditions that would allow this situation to arise. And also, it isn’t generally realized at what level the human perceptual apparatus operates in relationship to quantum-mechanical events. For instance, a single photon can be registered by the human eye. I’m sure some of you who had chemistry sets when you were children, they threw in a little thing called a spinthariscope, which was nothing more than a closed tube with a little lens in the end, and at the other end a speck of radium on the end of a pin, and then a phosphorous screen behind it. You would sit in a dark room for ten minutes and then look into the spinthariscope, and you would see flashes of light coming out of the phosphorous screen at the end of it. Those flashes of light were single photons being released from the phosphorous matrix by the impact of decaying hard radiation from the radium.

In a similar vein, a single molecule bumping against the tympanic membrane of the human ear can be distinguished, and they’ve done this in very elegant experimental situations. So actually, the human sensory apparatus, for what a continuous picture of the world it gives us, is under experimental conditions shown to be rather closer to portraying the quantum-mechanical nature of reality than we might expect. So I don’t think it’s, on the face of it, preposterous that there could be technologies of vocal sound and control of physiological states of oneself and other people through the controlled use of sound.

After all, if you are of the brain theory of consciousness, and believe that every thought that we think is accompanied by chemical changes, the breaking and forming of chemical bonds, well, that means that as I speak to you, my voice, if you understand me—or maybe if you even don’t understand me—is going through a continuing process of generating and breaking down hundreds of compounds as your brain takes on a configuration somewhat analogous to the configuration of my brain at the moment of speaking. This is what communication must be seen to be by people who have a hard brain theory of consciousness.

1:13:16

McKenna

Well, then you’re probably in better shape than all of us. You should go to the side of cold mountain and compound mushrooms, and draw cold water from a well, and thank lucky stars that that’s the situation you find yourself in. In other words, knowledge—or verbal facility—is no proof of knowing what you’re talking about. You know? It’s just verbal facility.

No, I think the Taoist thing, I’m coming more and more to it to see that it’s its open-endedness, its insistence on humor. It’s not grinding a bunch of dogmatic knives. And now I’m talking about the cultural ideal of Taoism. Taoism became secularized and played power politics at various times in the history of China, just like the other Chinese religions. But its ideal remained the psychedelic ideal, I think. And it’s basically a dropped out ideal. It isn’t that you should return to the court and take up the counsel of the king and try to save his ass, it’s that someone else can take care of that. But these Taoist immortals became strange people. I mean, they were fleetingly glimpsed from the road, running naked in the woods as people passed to and fro.

Knowledge—I have said this before; made the analogy between understanding and gravity. That, you know, as something becomes gravitationally more and more dense, it eventually is so dense that light can’t leave it, no information can leave it. It’s said to be a black hole. It has curved space around itself and no information can leave it. I think as you advance on the path toward enlightenment, it becomes harder and harder for people to understand you. And when you finally achieve enlightenment, you can’t say anything at all. And anything you say must be misunderstood. That’s the proof that you’re enlightened. If you’re a perfect black hole, you must be incomprehensible. No information must leave you.

So if you understood anything I said tonight, it’s a perfect proof that I’m far from [???]. But thank you for coming anyway. Maybe on that note we should knock off. Is anyone burning? Good, then let’s knock ’em.