Rabin
Welcome to the show A Better World. This is your host, Mitchell J. Rabin. And we’re very glad that you’re joining us again today. Today we are again, if I may say so, going to have a very interesting show. Today we have Terence McKenna on with us. And we’re very pleased, since Terence is here in New York, he decided to come and join us here at the studio. Terence is here going to be talking at St. John the Divine and at Source of Life Center doing a weekend, this weekend. And you’ll be seeing this show actually after the weekend. So if you get a taste of Terence’s antics and wild thinking, you will be able to find out when Terence will be back in town for the next round. So welcome, Terence.
McKenna
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Rabin
Great. Good to have you, absolutely! So—God, there’s so much that we can really embark upon to talk about because you have… Terence has been so interesting in this world because he’s bringing such a rich array of different kinds of thoughts and fantasies to the fore. And so what I would like to talk about first is: if you would bring us up to speed on one of the main focuses of your work, which has been the software program dealing with time and novelty. You’ve spun out this entire idea of a theory of novelty, as you describe it. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
McKenna
Well, the software is now available in a DOS version and in a very advanced Mac version. The raison d’être for this present speaking tour is: we’re in what’s called a novelty plunge, according to the theory—in other words, a very concentrated period of time in which a lot is predicted to happen. And since these predictions are the only way we have of testing novelty theory, it’s very interesting when there is a prediction of a very deep plunge in novelty, because then you get to actually measure the incoming data from the real world (so-called) against theory.
Rabin
So we are now in a deep novel plunge?
McKenna
Yes, we’re in a novelty plunge which began around the end of February, and which will reach its maxima the middle of next week, and then sustain itself through the summer. So it’s not simply a plunge into novelty, but a plunge into novelty followed by a period of very intense exploration of that deep state of novelty.
Rabin
Perhaps it’s only fair, Terence, to let the audience know from the outset that one of the main places of focus that you’ve been involved in in the past twenty years or so has been in dealing with shamanically-sanctioned plants, and bringing the wisdom of the plant world, you could say, to the foreground of our society.
McKenna
Yes, I’ve been very interested in hallucinogenic experience and shamanism and that sort of thing since the sixties. And what it has to do with time is: I think if you spend enough time looking at these things, you come to see that the shamanic metaphor, the magical metaphor, are not as fully satisfying as thinking about these things in terms of dimensionality—that actually you do go into another dimension, not in the metaphorical sense, but in a sense that a mathematician would understand.
Rabin
Would you say a literal sense?
McKenna
A literal sense, yes.
Rabin
Now, many people who are very interested in dimensionality have been using all sorts of different ways, have been attracted to anywhere from the use of flotation tanks to all sorts of different kinds of tantric meditations—from the Buddhists, from the Sufis, from the Kabbalists, and elsewhere. Now, maybe it would be interesting to hear your point of view on these, which are really post-shamanic religious kinds of disciplines. And you have some points of view on it that would be nice to hear here.
McKenna
Well, I mean, the most practical point of view is: whatever works for you you should use. If we then try to generalize to what works for most people, it seems to me the use of plant hallucinogens is particularly effective, simply because it transcends ideology, it transcends ritual. It goes directly to the physical brain, and by perturbing the living brain it perturbs consciousness. And then, out of that experience, conclusions are drawn within a cultural framework. And so an aboriginal rainforest shaman may get one reading on that, and someone with training in quantum physics or something like that may reach a different conclusion. But the important thing of all these techniques—whether pharmacological, or you mentioned tantra—is to perturb consciousness into insight about itself by some means. And it’s very tricky, because consciousness is like a very heavy fluid: it always seems to seek the gravity of the familiar.
Rabin
Right, so in a sense, what we’re always struggling with or against is the tendency toward habituation. And one of the places we see that, of course, is mainly mental habituation. We think along the same lines, we think in the same linguistic patterns.
McKenna
Yes. Well, an interesting thing about people is our tendency to habituate and addict to not only drugs and foods, but behavior patterns, ideologies, routines. The founder of general systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, said once an amusing thing. He said: people are not machines, but in every situation in which they’re given the chance to behave like machines, they will do so.
Rabin
God, I think we have a society that proves that. The beehive mentality Robert Anton Wilson refers to.
McKenna
Well, the problem is the power of media to co-opt people’s ordinary impulses and to channel them along corporate or consumerist channels that are useful, then, not so much to the individual, but to the organization that’s doing the manipulating.
Rabin
Absolutely, and that is no doubt one of the main reasons there has been such legislation on all levels—social as well as legal—about such things as hallucinogenic plants. Because, in fact—I think your life is very much testimony to that—when people ingest certain kinds of hallucinogens, the last thing they’re thinking about is authority, consumerism, or legality for that matter.
McKenna
Well, it isn’t even so much that it neutralizes the consumerist impulses, it actually dissolves and erodes them, because it sort of shows the relativity of all existence. Consumerism is based on a strong reinforcement of ego, and ego is so easily relativized by the psychedelic experience. But in some sense, then, the psychedelic experience is the enemy of the consumer society. And this makes for political dynamite, or at least interesting political rhetoric.
Rabin
At least! Well, one of the things that really does happen with the psychedelic experience, as well as through such kind of simple matters as contemplation and meditation, is people start to become cognizant of their lives, of their bodies, of the world around them, and the values that they’re (in a sense) being asked to embrace through standard practices in the society. These no longer look very tasteful, I think, is one of the things that happens.
McKenna
Yeah, I think you could make a simple model of the psychedelic experience, and say that what really happens is that you develop attention to attention. There’s a pulling back. There’s a second level of attention. And when you have that point of view, you are to some degree alienated, because you’re more aware of the ambiguity that haunts every situation. But, on the other hand, you are more conscious. You’re picking up on more of what the information that’s actually being passed in the situation.
Rabin
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know, I want everyone to know that Terence McKenna has written a number of books, one of which is, I happen to have with me, called The Archaic Revival. And there are numbers of others, True Hallucinations is the last.
McKenna
True Hallucinations. Invisible Landscape. Food of the Gods. I did one with the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, Trialogues at the Edge of the West, which a threefer: you get not only me, but two other pretty interesting guys.
Rabin
Yeah. What were those explorations like in that book?
McKenna
We would have a dialogue, and then the third person would critique the dialogue. And these dialogues were on subjects like quantum physics, chaos theory, psychedelics, the millennium, the soul—just sort of things we thought were in the air that people might be interested in.
Rabin
You know, I wish maybe you would tell that story about how you came across the whole idea of novelty, and what brought you eventually to looking at the I Ching and the 64 hexagrams. I just love that story. It’s very revealing.
McKenna
Well, if by the story you mean the entire story of my life. Yes, the Invisible Landscape story.
Rabin
Start in Colorado. Just pick it up at Berkeley.
McKenna
Basically, we were poking around in the Amazon jungle looking at hallucinogenic plants in the early seventies, and had a series of very intense experiences which—
Rabin
This was you and your brother?
McKenna
Yes. Which resolved themselves down to a kind of mathematical obsession with the structure of the I Ching. For people watching who don’t know what the I Ching is, it’s a very old system of Chinese divination, a system for predicting the future. And the thing about it that’s so astonishing is: many very skeptical people have come to the conclusion that it somehow works. And the question that we were asking was: how does it work? How could such a thing work, rather than just treating it as a mystical revelation. Well, it—
Rabin
People have been asking that one for ages, including the Chinese.
McKenna
To have a system which allows you to predict the future, you would have to understand what time is. And so by grappling with this problem in the I Ching, I came to have a notion of what time is, or at least a theory I was willing to put out for argument. And that’s what the software you mentioned earlier was all about. What it comes down to is: the mathematics produces a graph, not that different from a stock market graph. It rises and it falls. But it’s not a graph of stock movement, it’s a graph of this quality of reality called novelty, which is slippery to define, but I think intuitively pretty easy to grasp. And novelty comes and goes. It haunts time like a ghost. Sometimes there are long stretches where it is absent. Its opposite is habit. So you can think of reality as a kind of push-pull, a struggle between habit and novelty.
And the good news, from my point of view, is that novelty is slowly winning. There is—the history of the universe, or of the twentieth century, or of the past six weeks, is a history of steadily accumulating novelty. And it’s what makes human society possible, electronic culture possible, a city like New York. These are obviously manifestations of novelty that have taken a very long time to accumulate, to come into being. I mean, Manhattan 500 years ago was a wooded, rocky island. So clearly, novelty has come to rest here, and we see what it has wrought. Well, in a sense, the entire planet is in the grip of this developing efflorescence of novelty. But it isn’t something which develops smoothly—you know, one percent more per day or something like that.
Rabin
It’s like fits and starts.
McKenna
Exactly. Fits and starts, ebb and flow—but tending always toward greater novelty eventually. And I think, you know, we’re reaching the place with it now where the speed at which the novelty is ingressing is so great that people can feel it in their own lives. It’s not an abstraction. People feel something akin to psychic weather. And it comes in, and novelty is frozen for a few weeks, and then the front breaks up and novelty you have more than you can handle.
Rabin
So there must be this intimate relationship, really, between your description of novelty and our perception?
McKenna
Yes. In a sense, I’m asking people to observe something within their own inner dynamic that was always there, but that they really had no vocabulary for. I mean, one vocabulary that someone speaks to this is the concept of Tao. I mean, if you know anything about Tao, it’s an idea that there is an invisible force that permeates the world and it builds things up—dynasties, love affairs, corporations—and it tears them down according to very mysterious dynamics of its own. Well, that’s precisely what we’re talking about. The only thing I’ve tried to do is to replace mysticism with mathematics and say there is this force, but it can be known, it can be charted in the way that we can predict the weather or predict bond prices.
Rabin
So novelty, the theory actually has some very practical uses of that case?
McKenna
Yes, because what it would tell you (if it were widely accepted) is: it would tell you where to expect unusual events, and where you would be wasting your time to look for unusual events. It doesn’t tell you what will happen (because that is indetermined, I believe), but that there is a kind of landscape over which events flow—sometimes faster, sometimes slower—like water over a terrain. I think that experience makes that seem fairly reasonable.
Rabin
Yeah. You’re just reminding me of a weekend I spent with you a couple of years ago at the Open Center, when you said something about the nature of science and how we’ve been, in a sense, scientifically programmed to value science on a belief system level, you would say, to think that it is really the be all end all. But you’ve made a very important point that’s always really stuck with me, which is that there’s one domain that science does not control for, but acts as though it controls for, and that’s time. That time, you said, had a topography. That it had a shape to it. And that an experiment that is conducted on a Monday will not necessarily yield the same results on a Thursday afternoon.
McKenna
Yes, well, you put your finger on a complex epistemological issue. Science, as we know it, uses probability theory as the fundamental mathematical tool. And how that works is: you gather data, you put all the data together, you add it together, and then you average it. Well, this act of averaging has not been philosophically fully explored in terms of what its implications are. When you average a bunch of measurements, let’s say, you smear out their individuality. And so behind the use of averaging and probability theory is the implicit assumption that it doesn’t matter when the measurement was taken. In other words, in science they say time is not a dependent variable, it’s invariant. But that’s just a guess. We don’t know that it’s invariant. In our own experience, no love affair ever happens the same, no flu is quite like any other, no dinner is quite like any other. Our human world is filled with the unique felt presence of unique experience. But science gives us a world always based on these probabilistic generalities, which I think do great damage to the subtle fine structure of experience.
Rabin
Well, if we just look at a lunar cycle, we see that every single day is actually qualitatively and quantitatively different—that one day is never going to be the same, by definition, as another day.
McKenna
Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days—or bluebirds, or glaciers—and the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique. And so they really represent two ends of a kind of spectrum.
Rabin
Sure, sure. I mean, each has its own value. This isn’t to negate the value of science, but in a sense—
McKenna
But science needs to undergo some pretty serious self-critiquing. Because, over the past 300 years or so, what has happened in science is: by concentrating on picking things apart, the idea of spirit—or a vital unifying entelechy, or a force—that all has been completely discredited by science. And so it leaves you, then, with no basis for any ethic or anything. Basically, people and animals are machines in this view. And if you believe that, you start treating them like machines, and you start putting machine-like politics in place, and it becomes nightmarish fairly quickly. And it’s alright. I think science is coming along in some natural… well, it’s a natural tendency of human beings to hit the easy problems first. And the easy problems are things like: what’s going on when a ball bearing rolls downhill, and what is water made out of? And the tricky problems are—
Rabin
That one we haven’t actually answered fully yet.
McKenna
Well, no, but the really tricky problems are questions like: what is memory? What is language? What is—
Rabin
What is existence?
McKenna
Yeah. And so these questions are eventually going to be—
Rabin
What is a magic mushroom?
McKenna
What is a magic mushroom?
Rabin
You have to answer that now.
McKenna
Well, basically any mushroom with psilocybin in it is pretty magical.
Rabin
Well, you’ve described magic mushrooms as language.
McKenna
They synergize, they catalyze language. They probably—as a footnote to the fact that they catalyze the imagination—they catalyze cognitive process. We don’t know what that exactly means, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that cognitive process is definitely the name of the human game. So anything which catalyzes art, poetry, literature, mathematics, politics, music, da-da-da, has major implications for the human enterprise. Of course, it’s illegal, it’s stigmatized—but these are simply local peculiarities of the folk.
Rabin
It has nothing to do with the great longevity of time!
McKenna
Or the real meaning and implication of these things. I’m sure whatever work they do, they do it whether they’re scheduled or not.
Rabin
Yeah. Right, exactly. They’re not going to be limited by local customs of the United States or European governments at this little point in time, but a blip on the screen. In fact, that’s actually one of your great gifts to us all, Terence, which is—for me—I really feel myself expand when I listen to you speak, because I give up all local notions of time. And it goes far beyond—in each direction, by the way. Not just two, actually. It probably goes more than that.
McKenna
Not only when will it end, but when did we get here?
Rabin
Yeah, really, really! You also talk about this transcendental object at the end of time.
McKenna
Well, in an effort to understand novelty—where it’s leading—if you extrapolate the notion, you have to realize it must lead to the most novel thing there is: that which there cannot be greater novelty than. So that’s the transcendental object at the end of time. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel; a kind of attractor of some sort.
Rabin
So when you speculate according to the software—well, not according to the software, according to the novelty theory and what you have extrapolated from your studies of the I Ching and et cetera—you have selected a date in time at which you postulate will be the end of history. And I always say, subtext: as we know it. Could you say a word—they’re saying that we’re out of time? Is that possible?
McKenna
We are, if not out of time now, soon to be out of time.
Rabin
Soon to be, right. It’s a very bizarre notion, isn’t it? I won’t accept it.
McKenna
It’s like the end of the novel or the end of history. What does it mean? Well, it just means life becomes so complicated that a new dimension is added. And then, therefore, it makes no sense to call it history—the way literacy and writing added a new dimension.
Rabin
So what—is there, do you think, going to be a particular event, or it’s going to be some kind of quantum psychological leap, or shift?
McKenna
I think it’s a knitting together of all these exotic technologies and human beings that are presently in the world; that cultural boundaries, national boundaries, gender boundaries are all dissolving. And the consequence of that is literally inconceivable to people embedded in history. I mean, those of us who try to keep track of all these things are not able to keep track. And the people embedded in the processes or just trying to earn a job and have a career are largely clueless as to the nature of the way in which things are crystallizing.
Rabin
Like what?
McKenna
Well, like what? All kinds of things are happening. Let’s just take the last three months. The human genome has been sequenced. Extraterrestrial planets have been discovered around alien suns.
Rabin
They’ve been discovered?
McKenna
They’ve discovered. 70 Virginis has two Jupiter-mass planets around it, 47 Ursae Majoris has two half-Jupiter-mass planets in orbit around it.
Rabin
Was this written up in something other than the National Enquirer?
McKenna
Oh no, this is—you’re not reading Science News, Scientific American.
Rabin
Yeah, I missed the last issue.
McKenna
Well, see, that’s what I’m saying. The people who are embedded in trying to have a life are not—let’s see, what else? This—
Rabin
But they found alien plan—I mean, what they’re referring to as extraterrestrial planetary systems?
McKenna
Yes, there are now about six stars within forty light years of Earth known to have some kind of object around them. And this has all happened just in the last three months.
Rabin
How novel!
McKenna
Antimatter was created. A few hundred atoms of anti-helium was created at CERN in Switzerland about three months ago. Antimatter converts to energy 100% in the presence of ordinary matter. It’s an ultimate kind of energy source. Let’s see, one other thing. Oh, analysis of this asteroid impact in Canada leads to the conclusion that a huge amount of organic material was delivered to Earth in that impact and wasn’t destroyed by heat. So they’ve established that extraterrestrial biology is arriving on Earth. They’ve sequenced the human genome. They’ve discovered planets around alien stars. They’ve had great success in nanotechnology in the past. This is all in the past ninety days, we’re talking about. So these kinds of things, extrapolated ten years into the future—along with stuff like the internet and pharmacology and teledildonics and all this other stuff—
Rabin
Teledildonics?
McKenna
Don’t ask! All—
Rabin
Can we even look it up in the dictionary?
McKenna
After the show! All lead to the conclusion that we are transcending ourselves faster than we realize. We are becoming unrecognizable. The transformation is not going to happen, the transition is underway. It’s underway.
Rabin
Yeah. This is phenomenal. The transcendent object is approaching quickly.
McKenna
It’s emerging. Well, to take one example fairly close to home to most people: the internet. I mean, the internet is the most powerful and advanced technology ever put in place. It’s arisen virtually in the last five years. The world doesn’t look substantially different. We didn’t have to make highways or any of the things that other technologies have demanded. And yet, really, the nation-state is now obsolete—so probably is the office as we know it. Corporations and nations haven’t yet realized. But when they begin to understand how much money they can save through telecommuting and this sort of thing, the whole raison d’être for clustering into enormous cities may just disappear.
The other thing is, you know: the internet is a tremendous force for empowering the margins. All sexual minorities, all political minorities, all artistic minorities now can build very powerful communities on the internet, and push their vision (whatever it is) forward. So traditionally, power to communicate and to control communication has been one of the most closely held prerogatives of the powerful, and now it’s just been given unto our hands. So I find that very exciting. I think that I haven’t felt this kind of excitement with a new technology since the introduction of LSD. And there are similarities, to be sure.
Rabin
Such as?
McKenna
Well, both empower community. And the internet was largely created by people who were very much formed by that earlier revolution. I mean, the people who write VRML, the people who are putting Netscape and the new search engines and all this stuff out, are freaks. I don’t think they would balk at that label at all. They’re people who love working in these areas because they represent the same kind of feeling of unlimited possibility that the psychedelic community had in the sixties.
Rabin
Yeah. I’m just wondering about the internet. I’ve just been thinking about it and just getting involved in it myself, and would like to hear what you have to say about this because the powerful have always, as you said, held a very close hand over media. And that’s one of the ways they maintain their (even if somewhat false) power; they still have that position. Is there a way of propagandizing the internet where a the powerful, power-possessing beings, as they refer to, can usurp the general community feeling or community access?
McKenna
I don’t really think so. I mean, I think that the internet is so fundamentally a different beast, and here’s the distinction that I would make. For at least 200, maybe 300 years, Western civilization has been largely shaped by what is called mass media. That means, first of all, newspapers and then all the electronic mass media. The nature of mass media is what’s called one-to-many communication, where a letterman or somebody speaks and millions listen and emulate. The internet is what’s called any-to-any communication. You and I can have an email exchange, or I can send email to a thousand people, or I can join a chat group of several hundred.
And I think the changes are more profound than we can even imagine, because the mass media created two things which we cannot imagine living without: the idea of the public and the idea of the citizen. And now we hear a great deal about how society is dissolving into anarchy. What it means is: there is no more public consensus. And that is because the post-electronic media personality isn’t interested in following fads dictated from above in quite the same way. So instead, what we have is an incredibly heterogeneous and complex society that’s all niches. There’s no public anymore. There’s just niches. The Latino niche, the lesbian niche, the this niche, the that niche. And there is no cohesion anymore.
Well, some people think this is a terrible thing. I happen to think it’s a very good thing, because I think it makes us much more difficult to coerce and to control. So the ending of the age of mass media is something that the world corporate state has not really braced itself for, because it has so much money invested in these now dinosaur forms of media. So I think of the internet really as a 60 million television channel—you know, a 60-million-channel TV. And naturally that creates—and it’s a two-way deal.
Rabin
Yeah, right. It’s interactive.
McKenna
I think the only way to deal with media and keep your wits about you is to produce it. Produce it, not consume it. God forbid, do not consume it. And then, do not flee it. That doesn’t work either. People say, “Well, I didn’t, I never, I don’t.” Well, they’re just—yeah, their know-nothingism is even more easily manipulated. The key is to produce. And things like Photoshop, and Macromind Director, and—I don’t work for any of these people, but I use their products—are incredibly empowering. You know, what used to require $50,000 worth of production equipment can now be done with $3,000, and the cost is falling. That’s got to be good for the spreading of counter-cultural and minority viewpoints and opinions.
Rabin
Sure. It’s a very, very good point. In fact, I was thinking about the internet in this respect a little bit very recently. And I was realizing, in many ways, another way of putting it is: it’s a great equalizer from a socioeconomic point of view. People who would never have anything to do with each other, necessarily, would never cross paths or be given an opportunity to meet via the net.
McKenna
And it’s safe. Yeah, it’s safe. Yes, it creates a community.
Rabin
People in absolutely distinct economic strata can come together.
McKenna
Well, and no matter how minority your position, no matter how bizarre your interest, you can find a community of people on the internet absolutely who share your views and who are furiously advancing that agenda.
The other thing is: what the internet was designed for was research. And if you believe that information is power, then the information gathering research tool that has been given to the ordinary person to actually find out what the hell is really going on. I feel with my internet connection I have better intelligence than Stansfield Turner had when he ran the CIA for Jimmy Carter. That’s how fast these technologies—it’s gone from what only the CIA director could have, that now sits on the desktop of millions of American homes. And what’s that? 12 years or something like that.
Rabin
God. So there’s an incredible dispersion of information.
McKenna
And acceleration of connectivity. Everybody’s getting connected the way they wish. And of course some, of it is perverse and some of it is silly and trivial. But we had silly and perverse and trivial long before we had the internet.
Rabin
It didn’t just all of a sudden arise. Because people had a little desktop publishing, computer on their desks. Absolutely. Talking about being connected—there’s something that’s always puzzled me, and maybe you can speak to this, which is: you’ve spoken about a time before history when men and women did something very novel—got along. And do you remember that?
McKenna
Oh yeah. You want me to run that riff?
Rabin
Okay. Would you? But I have a question that’s embedded in that, which—why don’t you do the riff, and then I’ll ask the—
McKenna
The riff has to do with—I’ve done a lot of thinking about early human evolution, and how did we make the leap so suddenly from an advanced monkey to a poetry-spouting, dreaming thing we are? And the hidden factor, I think, is chemical acceleration agents in the environment—specifically psilocybin and other things. I’m now giving you the lightspeed version.
Rabin
Sure, exactly.
McKenna
But what I said about the relationship between men and women is: I think that psilocybin dissolves ego, and that the ordinary dominance hierarchies in primates—which are male dominance hierarchies—dissolved for about 100,000 years in human beings because of an item in the diet. Essentially, they were self-medicating themselves into a slightly different relationship to their psycho-sexuality. And instead of an ego-enforced male hegemony expressing itself as monogamy, there was some kind of polygamous, orgiastic, more egalitarian kind of organization. The reasons for thinking these kinds of things when looking at primates is: we have bonobos, which are a kind of chimpanzee. And chimpanzees, genetically they’re 98% similar, but their sexual behaviors could hardly be more different. One is very male-dominant, and a lot of aggression, and anxiety about female behavior. The bonobos, on the other hand, are extremely loose, many kinds of sexual activity are tolerated, and so forth and so on.
So it looks like in human beings, though how we express ourselves sexually is hugely important to us, it is not very tightly bound into genetics. It’s more like a cultural choice. You’re free to be monogamous, polygamous, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual. This is not usually the case in an animal species. And I think this flexibility about our sexual expression was an effect of the different relationship to libido that experimenting with hallucinogenic plants in the Paleolithic period induced. And it’s a fun idea to play with. It sort of explains our nostalgia for the time of goddess worship, orgy, nomadism, all children and whatever minimal property there was held in common. It’s a kind of anarchy, ecstasy, freedom. And it may be a myth, or it may in fact be a memory of a time. And then, of course, once the mushroom—
Rabin
Paradisal beginnings.
McKenna
Once the mushroom is taken out of the picture, those old bad habits—male dominance and so forth—returned with a vengeance. And that’s the point in history where you get history. Wall City, standing armies, kingships, slavery, enforced role models, subjugation of women, the whole bit. So in a sense, I think, the Western phobia about drugs, about hallucinogens, about these experiences, has to do with the fact that the ego is very uncertain of its role. It’s not strong. It’s full of fear and paranoia that it could easily be unseated. And of course, take five grams of psilocybin in silent darkness, and your ego will be unseated.
Rabin
That’s right. We would like to say once and for all, but it doesn’t seem to go quite that way. But okay, well thank you for that riff. I appreciate it. The question is: what I’ve wondered about, in listening to you over the years—and they’ve been wonderful years, I’ll have you know. In fact, we met originally in 1988. I was at a seminar on the subject of physical immortality, where Terence was giving a talk. We were just reminiscing about that just before. What was that famous line you had for…?
McKenna
You’re immortal as long as you live.
Rabin
Voila! There we have it. What is the role—and especially since you have gotten so very involved in the I Ching, which touches so many precious elements of human life—what is the role of character, and you could say character development, in the shamanic and the psychedelic experience?
McKenna
Well, it’s an interesting question. I think sort of we touched on this a little bit earlier in our talk, where I talked about developing the observer of attention, that there is a developing of a sense of—
Rabin
So a cybernetic position, actually.
McKenna
Well, and a sense of proper relationship. I mean, a shaman is neither inflated nor deflated, neither excessively humble nor excessively pretentious. And humor: if someone claims to be some kind of shaman and they do not take themselves lightly, then they’re probably some beetle-browed maniac of some sort going for your wallet or worse. So a sense of relative proportion and humor, and a sense of, not the inevitability, but sort of just the power in things to unfold themselves along their own pathways.
I’ve met a lot of shamans because I’ve spent time in the Amazon basin, and invariably the signifying characteristic is simply a feeling of being at ease in their presence, and a feeling of penetrating intelligence. It isn’t that different from talking about Tibetan Lamas or anyone like that. I mean, penetrating intelligence. Some people differ with me, but I really believe salvation has something to do with intelligence. It may not be the whole story.
Rabin
It’s not just a passing acquaintance.
McKenna
I was quoting—I don’t know if I can get this right—but I was quoting last night John Stuart Mill to a friend of mine. John Stuart Mill said: “Not all conservative people are stupid, but most stupid people are conservative.” I thought: amazing!
Rabin
That’s great! I hear what you’re saying. So in terms of character development, one of the main things that you were focusing on is humor—which actually preempted one of my other questions when I told you I was sitting down and doing something very novel, I’ll have you know, which was thinking of questions that I would like to ask Terence. One of the questions was: what is the role of humor in—well, not the psychedelic experience, I think that’s kind of obvious—but in the shamanic experience? With that purview on life (which is pre-religious, so to speak; institutional religious) what is the flavor of the life when people are so close to the earth and the plants? And is that something that you are inviting people to consider these days in 1996 now, as a way for us to open up toward the transcendental object?
McKenna
Well I’m not sure I follow the entire question, but I’ll try a yes.
Rabin
Okay. Alright. Do you want me to rephrase it, or do you want to just take a stab?
McKenna
No, let me take a stab at it. Two human activities seem to me pretty much to be outside of history. I mean, one is orgasm and the other is laughter. And they are physiological responses to circumstance that are universal. We do it no differently if we’re French or Armenian or whatever, and it breaks us out of culture for a moment. And so laughter, I think, is really the shaman’s greatest tool. That’s why the shaman is always associated with the trickster. And in the clinches—meaning when somebody’s dying, or childbirth, or snakebite, or something—the shaman is a very serious and highly functional caregiver and technician. But how the shaman lives with his people is as a clown and a gadfly and a critic, and the guy who always says, “Well, don’t you think we should think again?” Or, “How about this?” Or, “How about that?” And I think that—
Rabin
It’s a playful spirit.
McKenna
It’s a playful spirit, and it’s a spirit that isn’t dogmatic. And that’s really important. These cultures are hideously dogmatic. But the shaman is the one person in the culture who is deputized to make fun of it. And so I see ourselves as bohemians, as freaks, as natural critics of the society we live in—as, in that sense, performing a shamanic function.
Rabin
Right. Okay, good. That answers the many-pronged question that that one’s with. And actually, to go a step further with that is, I remember reading something that you were writing about: transpersonally oriented psychotherapists, and the role that you see them playing in today’s society as really being very instrumental.
McKenna
Well now there are—I don’t know, thousands probably—people who I would consider shamans who don’t live in the rainforest and don’t administer their skills to some tiny language group up some river, but who are fully embedded citizens of high electronic culture. And this is a new shamanism that is coming into being. We need it. Psychotherapy has been very reluctant to get its feet wet. You know, the talking therapies, and then finally the touching therapies. But very little of the taking it and going with the patient into the space kinds of therapies. Because that is incredibly dangerous and demanding work. But it’s what people must do if they want to work their way out of the modern dilemma.
Rabin
And do you think that through ingestion still, at this point, this can help us? I mean, it doesn’t mean that it has to be for everyone.
McKenna
Oh no, most definitely it’s not for everyone, but it’s an enormous boon to our culture to revivify these shamanic hallucinogens, and to bring them into the developing mix of technology and pluralism and new therapies and so forth and so on. I think it’s one of the most important tools. I mean, as you well know, there is just simply nothing that effective and that dramatic for pushing you into a new world, whether you like it or not.
Rabin
Sure, sure.
McKenna
And that’s where we’re going, whether we like it or not. Yeah.
Rabin
That’s true, too. And from that point of view, you know, you use the word to make reference to the idea of evolution. And the more I think about it, the more I think that that’s a very overused and under-defined term. I’m not even sure anymore what it really is.
McKenna
Well, evolution in biological terms is not in the picture anymore. We are evolving now entirely in the domain of culture, and so rapidly—
Rabin
Culture and consciousness.
McKenna
Well, yes. They mirror each other. One is the byproduct of the other. But we’re not changing physically. We haven’t for 50,000 years.
Rabin
We still have the appendix, et cetera.
McKenna
Yes. But we are mutating our cultural values and our technologies and our institutions at such a rate that, as I say, we will not recognize ourselves in a very few years.
Rabin
And of course that’s not a biological recognition. It’s a psychic recognition.
McKenna
Yes. I mean, imagine someone brought forward to modern New York from a hundred years ago. I mean, I’m sure they would assume that—I don’t know what they would assume had happened in the intervening hundred years. It looks like Armageddon or something. But it’s not. It’s just normal unfolding of historical processes and technology. The mushroom once said to me, “This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. Not to worry.”
Rabin
Well, I’ve been speaking to you for a while. We are being signaled that the end of time is really not in 2012 December 23, or something like that. It’s really in about four minutes.
McKenna
See? It overtook even my expectations!
Rabin
Much faster than either of us could have realized in our closing minutes, Terence. Are there any particular points that you would like to make? I mean, here we have this wonderful New York audience that is just loving you and lapping up this show. And I’m just wondering if there’s any particular central points that you would like to make that you would like to communicate to the folks that are listening?
McKenna
I think people should put the art pedal to the floor. I think our salvation is in producing as much beauty and as much communication as fast as possible. That what will make this white-knuckle ride to the end of history slightly easier is if we communicate our dreams, our fears, our experience of what it’s like to go through this. We’ve never been here before. This is a unique moment. And probably the future of the human race depends on how we comport ourselves over the next 25 years. So it’s a privilege, a challenge, an adventure. Everybody should jump in and feel the surf.
Rabin
Take off your seat belt and get ready!
McKenna
That’s right.
Rabin
Absolutely. That’s wonderful. In fact, I just realized on a practical note that you are beginning this think-along tour in New York.
McKenna
That’s right.
Rabin
As we speak.
McKenna
Well, this is the most novel place.
Rabin
Really? This is the place to begin? And from here you’re going to Santa Fe?
McKenna
Santa Fe, then Boulder, then Los Angeles, and then we’re at home to Hawaiʻi.
Rabin
Wonderful, wonderful. A great place to have a home in, as a matter of fact. Why don’t we give a way for people to get in touch with Axiom, so if they want to communicate to friends in other parts of the country while you’re dancing around…
McKenna
Yes. Do you have the Axiom email address?
Rabin
Yeah. I have—their phone number is 1-800-76-AXIOM.
McKenna
Oh, well, that’ll do it.
Rabin
Okay, 1-800-76-AXIOM. And there’s Robin Johnson there, so you can feel free to call to get more information on Terence’s think-along tours as he dances across the country. We’re really glad that you danced into the studio.
McKenna
It was a pleasure to talk with you. Lots of fun. Take it easy.
Rabin
Great. Good. Absolutely, I will, Terence. Thanks so much. This is Mitchell J. Rabin for A Better World. Thanks again for joining us. My number is 212-420-0800. Please call and give a couple of suggestions. Where is everybody now when I need you? And share your thoughts, feelings with me. Love to hear from you. The number again is 212-420-0800. And I look forward to seeing you next week.