So I can talk endlessly, but I hope with this many people in the room, people arrived with some kind of an agenda. With only three brief nights here, we’ll have to cut to the chase. So if anyone came with any particular question in mind, this would probably be the moment to push to the front of the line.

Yeah?

—these extremely exotic fields, solid-state physics, nanotechnology, and gene transplant, and all this stuff—they feel individually that complete breakthrough in their own field lies just eighteen months, two years, three years in the future. They can see their technological and research dreams converging. But this enormous wavefront of knowledge that has risen up out of the context of human civilization, it doesn’t communicate along the front of the wave. None of these people in any of these fields have a very clear grip on what’s going on in the labs down the hall, or two floors up in different departments. So what’s happening is: the human database has taken on a kind of self-organizing quality. It’s no longer entirely being coordinated by political decision-makers or corporate decision-makers. It’s just simply taken on a life of its own.

And I’ve long thought that one way of thinking about what’s going on on this planet is that information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination, using whatever means are necessary. When geology was all there was, that was the medium. When biology was all there was, that was the medium. When chipped flint and ceramic was all there was, that was the medium. And now the electronic information-transfer technology is so all-pervasive that it’s as though information has come into its own. It is now very restless in its relationship with biology as it explores the new world of silicon, into which it seeks to transform itself. Technology has become prosthesis for the human species. It’s our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It’s not our political systems, it’s these extra-sexual children, these mind-children, that we have assembled out of the imagination.

And I find it very promising and very challenging and very interesting. I think that somehow, the way back to the archaic—to the world of ecological balance, and low technology, and retraction of toxic infrastructure, and all of that good stuff—doesn’t lie in some kind of Luddite know-nothingism or some kind of fascist program of limiting population, and this sort of thing. Although I favor limiting population, I just can’t figure out a way to do it that leaves human freedom intact. Instead it has to be a forward escape: a forward escape through technology, but technology that serves an agenda of archaic revivalism.

My brother was just here this weekend, and after we presented publicly, then we spent a long night talking over all of this stuff. Between the spread of the information-transfer technology—the Internet and its promise of virtual reality soon to come—and biotechnology (which is literally taking apart the constituents of the living world and using them to produce all the drugs, all the foods, all the vitamins, all the nutritional supplements, and then many other solid-state materials), between those two factors, and then nanotechnology—the technology of producing tiny machines made of diamond by the trillions, designed to do everything that nature does, so that cities can be grown like forests, and China can be fed out of matter compilers, and there is a complete break with the agricultural cycle, so that the Earth need no longer sustain the human population, and so then the human population, by breaking its reliance on the agricultural cycle, gains some political breathing room—all of this is coming very, very fast, and is largely unanticipated by the political, managerial types.

What it means to me personally, I think, in terms of my own ideas about the future, is that I can now see without too much sweat from here to the eschaton in ten easy steps. It’s perfectly clear that if novelty is intensifying and locally concentrating, that where it’s probably headed is into cyberspace or some kind of virtual space. So that, long before 2012, the various ontologies of world religions will be peddled as theme parks in virtual space. You’ll be hard pressed to know whether you’re in heaven or simply in Heaven Land, which is a preview of heaven attainable by paying a fifty dollar entrance fee at the turnstile. This is going to make it very difficult for all my predictions to be put in context, because they will be both true and untrue. Everything will come true in cyberspace; that’s the whole idea.

What cyberspace is, on one level, it’s simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired. What we’re doing furiously, as fast as we can, is exteriorizing the human nervous system into a global organism of some sort, which has a weird kind of Husserlian intersubjectivity about it. It is neither subjective nor objective: we are subjective nodes embedded in this domain of technologically created intersubjectivity between other human beings and machines. And what’s happening is: a lot of people are being left behind, or without even realizing it are just opting out and saying, “I can’t handle it. It’s too much to think about. I think I’ll see what’s on daytime TV,” or “I’ll buy a newspaper,” or “I’ll walk in the park,” to attempt to maintain the illusion that things are as they are. Things aren’t as they are. Things have already become as they will be. The future is now not ahead of us. We’re there. We’re there. And the only question is: where do you position yourself now in this multidimensional matrix? You can deny it, which is to become a conservative or (even more reactive to it) you can become a reprobate if you wish. Or you can move toward the front of knowledge, position yourself close to these unfolding and empowering technologies.

As all notions of commodity and scarcity and this sort of thing begin (begin, I say) to break down, it seems to me the sanest place to try and occupy in this whole situation is that of artist-producer. But it’s very, very important to not consume this stuff; that the world is being divided into artists and marks, to people who are somehow initiated into a higher-level maturity about what the society is about and how it works—it’s a kind of street-smarts, actually—and then the poor souls who just take it all for granted, and actually are concerned about those families of Flight 800. The families! The families! The agony of the families! People so harebrained as to buy horseshit like that are going to have a very, very hard time as the crap game of the future unfolds to its full fury. So I think it’s very important for people to define themselves as artists, and learn tools, and understand just how the game is being played in this informational jungle that is being erected. Because you will either have a plan, or you will become part of somebody else’s plan. And there are a million plans out there waiting to ensnare the clueless.

So, more than ever, it becomes necessary for us to have some kind of anchor into a real modality. And it’s too predictable for me to try and draw out the suspense. As far as I can tell, the only place where we can touch the Earth in this evolving situation is through our bodies, into feeling by any means necessary. And that would certainly include psychedelics. There two very interesting books that I’ve read in the past year—and maybe some of you have read them—one is Morris Berman’s Coming to Our Senses, and the other is David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous. And both of these books are about feelings, essentially.

And Whitehead, who I take as my mentor, created a mathematically formal metaphysic in which the primary datum of experience is feelings. I mean, that’s a direct quote from Whitehead. The only thing you can trust at this point—and some of you have heard me say this before—is the felt presence of immediate experience (otherwise known as feelings) and mathematics. And mathematics is something that most of you have been denied in order to keep you marks, so all you have are feelings. And so it’s very important to empower this dimension which Husserl or Merleau-Ponty or somebody called “the felt presence of immediate experience.” Everything proceeds from that. Even thought is subsequent to feeling. And still more removed is any hypothesis of reality and any theory of morality and any theory of action, and so forth and so on.

So psychedelics, which have traditionally, I now think, played the role of de-culturating people—I think the anthropologists got it slightly wrong. When you’re taken out into the bushes and given some drug by the fellow members of your tribe, this is not that you are being made a full member of the society, it’s that you were a full member of the society, and now what you’re being shown is what’s under the board, the tricks of the trade. You’re being turned into, not a full member of the society, but what my brother has called an extra-environmental. You’re coming from outside. And this is a kind of maturity that many people not only never attain, it never enters their mind that such a state even exists. A state not of alienation, exactly, but of ironical, sophisticated insight into the mechanisms of one’s own culture and the cultural games that are being played. And this rap would have been applicable at any time that it made sense—certainly any time in the twentieth century—but with the rise of these technologies and the acceleration of all this novelty it becomes more and more important to anchor it in this archaic value pattern accessible through psychedelics.

And I don’t say this with a sense of urgency. I think it’s happening. I don’t think there’s a problem, I’m just sharing with you how I see it going. The people who are running the Internet at the developmental and cutting-edge level are very psychedelic. The connections are not lost. Whether it’s consciously or unconsciously apprehended, somehow it can be sensed that the whole counter-cultural thrust since the sixties has been coherently one thing: it’s about boundary dissolution and connectivity and strange pictures in your head—whatever that means. So the psychedelic experience, from being a clandestine experience—and now I’m speaking of Western culture in the twentieth century—from being a clandestine experience of an individual, or of a [???], is becoming the general model for the organization of global society, whether anybody realizes it or not. This idea of all information in circulation, of a never-sleeping global mind with all—in a sense, what’s happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.

Well, so that’s my take on it. What’s your take on it? Does anybody want to say anything? Yeah?

18:06

McKenna

Oh yeah. Well, it’s a big issue. Yes. I mean, when I talk about psychedelics, I’m basically talking about alkaloids that occur in plant metabolism and have a history of human usage in aboriginal shamanism. So that would be things like peyote, ayahuasca, mushrooms, certain snuffs, cannabis, datura—although daturas are not alkaloids (or maybe they are), but the subfamily is tropane. Anyway, they’re chemically different. The notion here is simply that there are a lot of problems with accessing altered states of consciousness, and many of these problems are artificially induced by frightened governments restricting access. So it’s slowly dawned on people that these chemicals occur in most environments in many plants. And with a little chemical strategy and a little cookery and a little shamanic strategy, out of most environments you can coax some kind of kick-ass consciousness-altering plant or combination of plants without resort to the local criminal syndicalists who may be prowling the streets. So it’s sort of become a—I don’t know, I don’t want to demean it—but a fad, a hobby, an avocation of people to grow these plants.

If you want me to recommend one that might get you off, not kill you, and keep you out of jail, well, the one that we’re all very interested in at the moment is salvia divinorum. Salvia divinorum is a plant that, for years, was carried in the psychedelic literature as possibly hallucinogenic. But nobody could get off on it. It’s a mint that grows in the mountains of Mexico. And then, a few years ago, an anthropologist, Bret Blosser—some of you probably know Bret, he’s been to Esalen—he was studying these Mazatec indians, and finally just put it to them, and they took him off in the bushes and got him so loaded that he was raving about it. So then the chemists moved in. The chemists had visited the situation before, but with a simple alkaloid test. You know, you have this thing called Dragendorff’s reagent, and you mash it up with the plant, and if it turns color it’s got alkaloids. Well, you do this in the field. Well, they had tested salvia divinorum and it was negative for alkaloids, so having never encountered a psychedelic that wasn’t an alkaloid, they felt confident in rejecting it. Once these reports began to come in they went back through. And in fact it was an underground chemist. I’m not sure he wants his name stated. But anyway, again, someone, a frequent visitor to Esalen. And he went back and with quite simple procedures, lo and behold, out comes a crystalline white powder. And he—following the famous example of Albert Hofmann with LSD that you should a hundred times smaller than you think is where the action is—he smoked one milligram. One milligram; a thousand mics. I mean, that’s a grain of salt of this stuff. And, you know, completely lost it.

So then he went back and discovered that, years previously, there had been analysis done on this plant, and another compound called alpha salvinorin had been isolated and characterized but never given to test animals or human beings. So he sent for a chromatographic standard of this compound and immediately smoked it up upon arrival, and it did exactly what the stuff he’d gotten out of the plant had done to him. So then he knew that the compound in the plant was alpha salvinorin, a diterpene, a compound in a chemical family previously unknown to contain psychoactive material.

And the word spread, and people smoke this, roll bombers out of the dried leaves, put quids of the fresh leaves in their mouths. And then, in some vanishingly small few cases of the truly intrepid, people have extracted this stuff to crystal and smoked it. I don’t urge you to do that. I mean, five hundred micrograms of this stuff—this is the first compound found in nature active at that range. I mean, LSD is active at five hundred micrograms, but it was thought for decades to be the only drug active at that range. I mean, somebody once said to me, “You want to know what a human being getting loaded on five hundred micrograms of LSD is like? That’s like one red ant ripping apart the Empire State Building in forty minutes.” You know? I mean, it’s dramatic that such a little bit of material can do what it does.

Well, this stuff in salvia divinorum is in the ballpark, definitely. And DMT test pilots return white-knuckled and ashen from whatever it is that lies on the other side of this front. As a plant, the good news is: it’s easy to grow, it’s easy to grow enough to take. It’s not illegal. It is not illegal to grow, extract, transport, advocate, use in therapy. It’s just simply not illegal in any way. It’ll be very interesting to see how the establishment handles this particular compound, because this is not the 1960s when you can just—the way the drug laws are written, for something to be made illegal at the pleasure of the attorney general or someone like that, it has to be a structural near relative of an already illegal compound. And this isn’t. This isn’t. So the only way this stuff could be made illegal is for scientific evidence to be brought into court that there’s something wrong with it. And causing hallucinations, at this point, I don’t think is enough. There has to be some physical toxicity or some demonstrable public health problem, or this will probably get through.

I think really, what salvia means—and then there are others I could talk about, but this isn’t a psychobotany gathering (or maybe it is…)—but I think what all this means is that the dug laws are not going to be repealed, they’re just simply going to become irrelevant. Because there are so many loopholes, chemical exceptions, local sources of every illegal thing. I mean, take DMT, for example: DMT is a schedule one drug, heavily controlled. But since all those laws were passed, it’s come to be realized that every human being has it in them. Well, so you’re holding. You are potentially arrestable for holding and transporting a schedule one drug. Well, then that’s obviously absurd. But on the other hand, the law has never been fought on those grounds. So ayahuasca is a perfect example. In a sense, ayahuasca is not a drug, because everything in it that is working occurs in the human body anyway—just in smaller amounts and in a different ratio. So unless we propose to make human brains illegal—which I’m sure there are some people who would line up for that with great enthusiasm, but I think that’s Buchanan’s seventeen percent that we just have to put up with. Most people realize, I think, that the chemistry of consciousness and the chemistry of nature are co-evolved and equally complex, and the place where one stops and the other begins is a fool’s game.

So if any of you are interested, salvia—I mean, talking about psychedelics is very, very, very, very different from taking psychedelics. It’s all very well to listen to me spiel my spiel. But the most important thing you could possibly do is actually somehow contort the contents of this evening to the point where it got you loaded. And that’s probably best approached legally, safely, horticulturally, humbly, through salvia divinorum.

28:18

McKenna

Well, the way I like to do it—people do it different ways—the way I like to do it is: I weigh about 35 grams of it, which is quite a pile. And then I remove the midvein of the leaf with my fingernail, just to drop the volume down. And then, when it’s all done, I have this very nice soft pile of green leaves. And then I roll it up and fold it up and put it in my cheek, and lie down where I can see a digital clock. And what I’m waiting for is minute seventeen or so. And right around then, you know, you get visual streaming: purple and chartreuse blobs of light floating past your eyes. This is not the psychedelic experience, it’s the prodrome of hallucination. You sometimes see this after orgasm. But in the case of the salvia thing, after two or three minutes of this, it doesn’t go away. Instead, it moves on to the next level. And this is extremely peculiar, plastic, stretching, folding, machine-like hallucinations.

It reminds me—some of you may know Salvador Dalí’s painting ode to the Revolution number five, Soft Construction in Baked Beans. Do you know that painting? Well, yes, it’s like that. And you sort of feel like that. And the hallucinations are very bright. They are not—like, what I always think when it’s happening is: “My god, I can’t believe this stuff is legal! It actually is working!” It’s not like it’s almost working or sort of working, or any of these… with any of the other horrible legal things. This one works. It works. And it works enough that you actually reach a place with it where you wonder if it’s not going to work too much, which tells you just how good it is. Of course, at that point you’re probably at the top of the mountain, just as you begin to have anxiety about: “Well, how strange will this be?” you’re probably coming around the corner. And then you come down in about 45 minutes and go to sleep.

30:57

McKenna

An hour.

31:01

McKenna

If it didn’t taste so bad, I could do it three nights a week. In other words, it is—and yet, it’s much… like… I don’t know exactly how to explain it. It is absolutely satisfying and very powerful, but it doesn’t seem (at that dose) like it could become a wild horse. At higher doses the stories begin to get harder to map. And people who fiddle with the pure compound are obviously really intrepid. It seems to be about some kind of—my brother described it very well the other night. He seems to be susceptible to it. Some people are and some aren’t. And he was at a conference somewhere, and there was just dried material rolled. And he just took a big hit basically to see how it tasted, to sort of get the feeling for how it tasted. And it folded him. I mean, he came apart. He twitched on the ground. And his description of it was, he said it was like being rotated to the left. There was this strange counter-clockwise twist. And then you’re like in this other dimension. You’ve just been hyper-dextr-rotary-homogenized, and now you’re in a previously unsuspected domain of space and time that is immediately contingent to this dimension, but only by that means. And people talk about something folds, something twists or untwists. There’s definitely a sense of being moved. And the come-on is faster than DMT—which is hard to imagine. I mean, the come-on, in fact, is so fast that you sort of discover yourself there, you know? You’re waiting for it to come on, and then you realize that for some time it has actually been on, and it was your perceptions that were lagging.

33:33

McKenna

No. I mean, the taste—if you do the fresh leaf in the mouth—it tastes very much like a very large mouthful of very leafy leaf. It’s bitter. It’s bitter, but it’s not appalling. It’s just bitter. One could probably get used to it, you know?

33:56

McKenna

Well, I used to tell people to spit it out at minute seventeen, and then some people couldn’t—there were complaints. And so now what I tell people is: keep it in your mouth until it works. But unless you’re a hard case, somewhere between fifteen and twenty minutes it’s going to find you.

Yeah?

35:05

McKenna

Well, first of all, how technology relates to altered states on a trivial level—I mean, not trivial, but on an obvious level, I guess—it’s really knitted the community together. I mean, the Internet empowers all marginalia. And god knows, we’re marginal. So the fact that there are these conferences and email lists where people feel free to say anything and to pass on all kinds of botanical, chemical, shamanic information means nobody need now get into trouble through ignorance. Because there are vast FAQ files on the net, and if you’ve gotten some DMT and you’re wondering what it does, there’s an afternoon’s worth of reading on the Internet, you know? “Gracie and Zarkov, take a trip,” “McKenna meets the basketballs,” and on and on and on. So that’s very important but, as I said, somewhat pedestrian.

The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is: I think we’re going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads, and that this has never been possible. I mean, we know each other by our surfaces and our symbols. We make small mouth noises and we assume we share the same dictionary. And by such rickety infrastructure as this we build community and understanding. But if everybody worked on the mansion of their soul in cyberspace, and you could invite people in and say, “You want to know who I am? I’m not this; this six-foot-two-inch piece of meat. That’s not it. Here’s what it is: here’s my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my past accomplishments, my unfinished projects, my catastrophes.” An incredible amount of intimacy, and hence mutual appreciation and empathy.

So I think that the whole thing is bandwidth. Bandwidth simply means, on one level, the speed at which information is moved from one point to another, but in experiential terms what bandwidth means is how deep the image is. You know, a telephone call is very low bandwidth, a television-assisted telephone call is higher bandwidth. And as we expand bandwidth between each other we will dissolve our differences. I mean, this is my faith. I think it’s amazing that we’ve built a global civilization in an environment of four thousand languages, and no better mode of communication than small mouth noises and their electronic equivalents. And so we’re about to take an enormous leap toward understanding each other.

What we will understand—I don’t know. A friend of mine (who was somewhat speaking ironically, but I think he meant it) said: “All decadence is, is finding out what the neighbors are really doing.” You know? That what society is, is an elaborate structure to keep us believing certain things about each other which are in fact not true, and that when we find out they’re not true, then we’re going to have to deal with that. Imagining what these truths might be is food for thought, certainly.

So virtual reality—you know, we’ll show each other the inside of our heads, and our dreams, and then, my own private obsession: I hope we can see simulations of psychedelic states. I mean, this is where all this graphics, creativity, and three-dimensional graphics power—because anybody who has taken psychedelics much at all knows that there are realms of beauty in there more astonishing than the Sistine Chapel or… I don’t know… Angel Falls, for that matter. The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind. And I was trained at one point as an art historian, and if art is the effort to get those mental objects into the shared world of social space, then art has a lot of catching up to do. I mean, the very best art has been a very halting… you know? You discover more art in your own head than the entire canon of western art since the Renaissance. And who are we? Just ordinary people. So it will be immensely empowering.

The question about superstring theory—I don’t claim to understand it. I also suspect that fashion now rules the physics department, and it’s all changing so quickly. You know, physics, for 200 or 150 years, was the paradigmatic science. All sciences aspired to be as scientific as physics. Because often in physics, theory and experimentally derived values will agree with each other out to five or six decimal points of measurement. Well, god, in sociology, if you get within ten percent you hail yourself as rigorous. And biology sort of falls in between there, but is very sloppy compared to physics. But physics is—once they pushed beyond the Hamiltonian model of the atom and into the domain of the quanta, the phenomena that are encountered are so counter-intuitive that nobody knows exactly how to interpret it. The people who actually do the work of quantum physics on a daily basis work in a pure mathematical language and actually make a considerable effort not to try and think about what does this mean in English, because it means stuff so crazy that it’s just so counter-intuitive.

I mean, for instance, a month ago in Science News they reported a beryllium atom that they were able to excite into this peculiar quantum state where, as far as any test they could tell, it was in two places at one time. Well, was it in two places in one time, or is it that English is simply inadequate to say what it was, and this is some kind of deceiving, lower-dimensional description of it? Non-locality is this phenomenon that was thought so squirrelly and improbable that, in the twenties, when they formulated the quantum theory, they had two quantum theories on the table in front of them, both giving identical predictions mathematically, but using different assumptions. And one of them had non-locality built into it, and the other had uncertainty built into it. And they thought uncertainty was a smaller outrage to reason than non-locality, so they chose the Heisenberg-Bohr model with this uncertainty principle embedded in it. But now, in the last five years, non-locality—which previously was just this sort of joke that these equations predicted non-locality—but some people thought up experiments to actually test this, and non-locality is as experimentally verifiable as any other phenomenon in the quantum world.

And what does it mean? It means that all matter in the universe is somehow connected to all other matter in the universe instantaneously—without subject to the inverse square law or the speed of light. And this essentially vindicates mysticism, which has been at loggerheads with the enterprise of western science since it began. It also may mean—you know, the alchemists like to say, “What is here is everywhere, what is not here is nowhere.” What it implies, potentially, is that all information is immediately available; that we need not go to the Andromeda galaxy or the moons of Jupiter or anywhere else to find out the answer to any question. Somehow, information is holographically and fractally and homogenously distributed through the spacetime matrix. Well, god, if you could get a technology together based on that, it would be the greatest revolution since the birth of human language or something like that.

Yeah?

45:43

McKenna

Yeah, I suspect so too. One of the things I mentioned, and one of the things—

46:18

McKenna

Well, I think technology—the human brain is the god of technological innovation. In other words, we want to do it that way: we want to do it that small, that fast, that neatly. So as technology advances, it’s going to look more and more like biology. Nanotechnology—which, as you all probably know, is this evolving technological field where you work with single atoms. You build up things atom by atom. Well, this is how biology does it. DNA is read by ribosomes that specify the assembly of proteins atom by atom. This is how we will do it. So the technologies of the future will be more and more “natural-appearing.”

And finally, my fantasy is a world where, when you want to contact the Internet, you just walk over and put your hand on a tree, and you immediately have T6 connection to the global bio-cybernetic matrix in cyberspace. Everything that we’re doing—like building the Internet, for example—you can build the Internet, you can lay fiber-optic cable everywhere and put up space satellites or stuff like that, but another way to do it would just recognize that the mycelial network already present in the soil probably has room for you to run your messages through it while it’s doing the business of being alive. So the telephones of the future may look more like mushrooms than they do today.

Nature is obviously the model. And, see, our technology now is a technology of heavy metals, high temperatures. I mean, we weld things, we melt things. And when we build, we assemble pieces of things, and then we bring them together under high pressure and high heat to make automobiles and aircraft and this sort of thing. Notice that nature—meaning organic nature, not volcanoes and hot springs, but organic nature—accomplishes all of her miracles under 115° Fahrenheit. There's no welding of beryllium and this sort of thing. So we could do that, too. And when you use cool temperatures like that, well then you don't generate toxic gases and strange physical byproducts like sulfur dioxide and mercuric dioxide and all of this toxic material. So the machine age as we have known it was simply a very brief episode in human beings' relationship to the construction of prosthesis.

I more and more think of it that way. The touching a tree to get to the Internet, that's pretty far out. I mean, in other words, there are steps to that that we don't know how to take. But I've talked at other times to this group about what I call these black contact lenses, except they're not contact lenses, they're actual implants in the back of your eyelids. So that when you close your eyes there are menus hanging in space. That's not even nanotechnology. That's doable today. It might cost a billion dollars, but if it were a fighter plane we could deliver it in six years. It's easily done.

So what I hope will happen is that we will retract this bulky, toxic, archaic, industrially-based infrastructure and become more and more aboriginal in our presentation to an observer. But, in fact, through implants, prostheses, nanocytes crawling around on the surface of our skin and inside our bodies and in the environment and so forth and so on, we will actually be becoming at the same time we make our peace with nature, we will continue to technologically evolve toward whatever it is that we are evolving toward. I don't understand what it is.