I’m very grateful for the publicity that we got from the Village Voice. They compared my voice to a cross between George Bush and a leprechaun. My impression is that when you cross Bush with a leprechaun, what you actually get is a Buchanan, but…! There’s good Irish and bad Irish, just like every other kind of strife.
Yes, well, I do have many people to thank this evening. This is sort of a unique moment in my personal life, because how many times in your life do you have a first hardcore book out from a major publisher with all the attendance, hoopla, and care that goes into making it a success? And I want to thank Bantam for the job they did on that book. There were many moments along the way when people not associated with Bantam assured me they would never let this thing go through in the form that I had it in. And nothing essential was ever messed with. They stood back and let me exercise my First Amendment rights—to the great detriment of my personal safety, probably.
And I also want to thank the Open Center. The institution has repeatedly invited me back here through staff changes and different kinds of ideological upheavals. And they’ve held the course. There are few enough of these kinds of institutions in the country, and your patronage makes their continued existence possible. So bear that in mind as you spend your infotainment dollar downstream.
Okay, enough of that kind of malarkey. I thought that it would be interesting this evening to discuss the limits of art and the edges of science, which is sort of a topic which is implicit in the book that has just come out from Bantam, but which sort of goes beyond the confines of that argument. Because I think by thinking about the limits of science and the edges of art, and vice versa, we can sort of define the directions in which we want to go, and the blind spots that haunt our ideology and our worldview.
As a psychedelic person, and as a person interested in the evolution of human institutions, what has come more and more to claim my attention is what I call the “phenomenon of the Other,” or the way in which the Other impinges on ordinary existence and guides or imprints itself upon not only the life of the civilization, but the life of the individuals in it as well.
Now, people may not know exactly what I’m talking about, which would be understandable, because this notion of the Other is not an idea that science is very friendly to. Science’s notion of the Other is the unsolved part of any problem. And what I’m suggesting is that there are interesting domains of mystery in our existence that do not boil themselves down to problems soluble or insoluble. They are in fact alien in and of themselves. You see, nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys should even possess a perfect map of reality. And yet this is the assumption that the civilization runs on: that 95% of what needs to be known is known. Our best people are working on the remaining 5%. We expect a report from them within eighteen months, and that will pretty much put the whole thing to bed. Well, I’m here to tell you that things are stranger than we suppose.
My brother made a wonderful geometric metaphor once. He said, “Have you ever noticed how, as the sphere of understanding expands, necessarily the surface area of ignorance grows ever larger?” This is sort of the—I think this is the true situation that we’re in, which is: as we expand our metaphor, as we integrate more and more data into our model of the world, a sense of humility and a sense of limitation would be the proper response.
In my book I talk a lot about how consciousness was narrowed by a series of events, mistakes, turns of fate over the past 15,000 years, so that we were actually channeled out of a kind of paradisical mode where there was a dynamic balance between human beings and nature, and among human beings. Classism, sexism, male dominance, all of these things were suppressed. And I don’t want to spend too much time on that tonight because I want you to read the book where the case is made. But the conclusions from it are very interesting.
What the conclusion that I’ve been pushed toward is is that history is in fact a kind of fall out of a state of dynamic completion. Male dominance in primates, or the formation of dominance hierarchies, is nothing new. It didn’t begin with human beings, it goes right back into squirrel monkeys and the so-called lower primates. But I believe that, as human beings evolved in the African grassland, they experimented with their diet because they had been forced out of a fruitarian, arboreal niche in the ecology and forced into a situation of predation and gathering in an unfamiliar grassland environment. And in that situation, psilocybin—associated with the dung of wild cattle also in that environment—acted as a kind of flash ignition for cognitive activity of all sorts: a sense of community, appreciation of form, a sense of group dynamics, loyalty. All of these high abstractions which we associate with the essence of being human were actually born as a consequence of a regime of self-medication with psilocybin that came about as a consequence of expanding dietary repertoire.
And in that moment of, essentially, ego-suppression—because behaviorally speaking, what dominance hierarchies mean is a behavioral nexus of ego that is permitted and encouraged within the personality of members of the group. And you can almost say that ego is like a calcareous growth. It forms in the psyche whenever there is an absence of the psychedelic experience—or psilocybin specifically, since that’s the ur-hallucinogen. Well then, history can be seen to be a kind of dysfunctional relationship to nature where a boundary-dissolving ecstatic mode was climatically suppressed, legislated out of existence, forgotten for various reasons, and into the void left by the collapse of this partnership–psychedelic–symbiotic dynamic come all the institutions whose toxic dimensions we are the sad inheritors of. In other words, city building, agriculture with its ability to produce surplus, which then necessitates defending the surplus, which creates classism, the sedentary lifestyle is interrupted because—I’m sorry, the nomadic style is interrupted because people realize that by settling in one place they can produce a larger amount of food off the land.
I’m tending to believe that, in a sense, the development of human cognition is the adumbration of models of time, which are always approximations to the unknowable reality of time. And where we got in trouble in the late Paleolithic was when we were able to notice a direct causal connection between a cause and an effect that were separated in time. For men this took the form of noticing that sexual activity led to pregnancy and birth in women. For women it took the form of noticing that, on the kitchen middens that were encountered in the yearly nomadic circumambulation of the territory, food plants would appear in great concentrations as if by magic. Again, the connection of the maturation of the seed. And what this ability to separate cause and effect did was: it laid the groundwork for a psychology that permits history. In a way, it’s what used to be called situationalism. It’s if–then thinking. It’s: if I do this, then X will be a consequent circumstance that will follow.
Now, I think that this preoccupation with the structure of time that haunts our cognitive activity is due to the fact that there is an attractor, I call it. In other words, it’s the idea that the process of history is not pushed by the past, but it actually is a process with an appetite for the future, for a kind of an end point. And I call this appetite for the end point of history the “encounter with the Other.”
The argument that is made in my book is very academic and scholarly, I hope, and designed to convince the orthodox academic doubter. But what I would say to my dear friends here this evening is that there is a hidden agenda, a metaphysics, which lies behind all that, that I’m willing to unburden myself concerning. It has to do with this notion that, because our lives are so short—fifty, seventy years; we’re like mayflies or fruit flies or something—to us, it seems as though the world is static and unchanging. But, in fact, history—in which we are embedded—is an extraordinary kind of instability. It is entirely temporary. Its entire character is its fleeting and ephemeral nature. It lasts for max 20,000 years. That’s very generous. We could say 10,000 years and be on safe ground.
People—human beings anatomically indistinguishable from you and I—have been on this Earth for 100,000–140,000 years by conservative estimates. But something happened about 20,000 years ago that propelled us into an extraordinarily peculiar situation which we call history, and which our dunder-headed ephemerality causes us to be able to accept as no big deal. Yet, in fact, it’s a tremendous big deal.
Seen against the background of ordinary nature—plants, and animals, and rainforests, and glaciation, and the formation of river estuaries, and volcanic eruptions, and this sort of thing—we represent something completely different, of a completely different order. And without going soft-headed on you, I would say if you’re looking for the thumbprint of deities on this planet, it surely must rest in us. We are the anomaly. We are the self-transcending… Ralph Abraham calls it a chaostrophy. It’s not quite a catastrophe, but it certainly scratches the belly of catastrophe as it goes by. We are a chaostrophy. We are caught up in some kind of a kind of narcissistic involution of our coding system.
Language haunts this planet like a ghost. It’s as though the ordinary way in which nature transduces meaning is through the genetic code of DNA. It speaks a language of proteins that are coded into DNA and then expressed through the cellular machinery as three-dimensional objectifications of matter. We—at some point in the past that must have been almost instantaneous—began to articulate interiorized states of mind. Mind. Somehow, mind rode into the world on the back of the spoken lógos and things have never been the same since.
Evolution of the biological sort is halted in mid-tracks, and suddenly all the evolution is going on in the software of the culture. And the software of the culture is stuff like language, song, dance, magical gesture, body painting, you name it. And once this linguistic impulse finds itself, there’s no stopping it. And we become, then, almost a cornucopia species out of which flows an endless number of ideas.
This is the peculiar thing: that our unique function is that we excrete ideas into matter almost the way a coral reef gathers calcium from the seawater and then puts it through a morphogenetic program of interiorized architectonics, and lo and behold, out come coral reefs. But in animal lifeforms, these things are under the rigid control of genetic programming. In our species, we transcend genetic programming and we work with words and we are able to elaborate art endlessly. And this art is not something which we stand off and look at, it’s something which we then proclaim the truest part of ourselves and march off into.
You know, right now there’s a lot of excitement about what is called virtual reality, a technology for producing a simulacrum of three-dimensional space. I’m sure this is coming, but what is not noticed is that culture has always been an engine for producing virtual reality. I mean, look around you: the architecture of this room is derivative of Greek and Renaissance metaphysical prejudices of various sorts. All design processes spring from the sense of an ideal in some kind of hyperspace. And for ordinary folks embedded in un-stoned societies, latching on to a little of this creative juice becomes a matter of education, inspiration, flagellation, any means necessary. For a shamanically grounded society there is free access to and from this domain that in platonic philosophy is called the realm of the eîdos: the realm of the ideas.
People who don’t take psychedelic drugs, and people who take only small amounts, I think, have a real misconception (at least in the case of the indole hallucinogens) that these are somehow catalysts for a kind of self-directed therapy, or insight into aesthetic issues—if you have a job where this is important—or simply a kind of retinal circus of tiny dancing mice, wrapped candies, distorted coat hangers; the detritus of the Ernstian imagination. But that is a tremendously reductionist view of what these things are. That’s what you get when you give low doses to graduate students and don’t listen carefully to what they tell you.
What is actually going on is much more bewildering. And, as a rationalist, I feel fairly sheepish about going before an audience and discussing the reality of disincarnate entities leering in from other dimensions in the universe. When I started that kind of a rap, I was basically alone. I’ve seen the field move to the place where you couldn’t elbow your way to the front of the crowd, there were so many whispering from the ether. I mean, long dead Atlantean priests, the entire court of Louis Coutours, and all the rest of it clamoring for attention.
The filter which I apply to this—which is probably cruel and unjust, but it simplifies my own intellectual life immensely—is: if you can do this without using drugs, you’re probably mentally ill. But persistently—persistently—in these aboriginal, shamanically-driven societies, there is the assumption of a world of organized intelligence and affection for humanity that is just over yonder, a toke or a swallow away in some societies. And for me this is absolutely confounding.
I mean, my intellectual life—up until I stumbled into these places—was as orthodox as you can imagine. I mean, it went from a Catholic upbringing to an embracing of Sartre, Camus, [???], all those modern people in black leather and darkness who are putting out the European line. And I discovered—and it really is the most powerful method I know—that if you just poke in the unexplored corner of reality, what you discover is that consensus is some kind of match lit in a universe of howling darkness, and nobody actually has a clue as to what is going on—not a clue! I mean, science is a tremendous method for producing product, and that in fact is its raison d’être in our own society.
I mean, if you look around you these days, research and development proceeds nowhere unless it promises product. Science is not telling us anything about reality that we can embrace or need to know. Those of you who follow this sort of thing may know that the current paradigm bequeathed to us by science—which is supposed to secure the bedrock of our knowing—the current paradigm is that the universe sprang from nothingness in a single instant. This is the limit test for credulity. Whatever else it is, that’s what it is. I mean, they pass that by you, and if you don’t blink, my God, they have a bridge over the Hudson that you might want to buy some stock in very reasonably!
So I’ve looked at that, and I think that it’s very disempowering. And recently problems have cropped up with this model where—even if you’re willing to buy in to the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant, and you say, “Yeah, well, quantum physics, I guess I better genuflect to this,” then you say, “So does that give me a universe I can recognize?” They say, “Well, no. There’s some problem. We’ve lost 25 minutes of the tape at the birth of the universe. And frankly, we can’t get you from that infinitely small, hot dot to the universe of stars and galaxies that we see around us.” They can’t get you here from there. So then you say, “Well then, what good is the model?” And they say, “Well, it gives excellent agreement over the first 1016 nanoseconds of the birth of the universe.” “This does me some good. I’m supposed to make sense of this?”
So at the price of inverting cosmology on its head, but being true to the psychedelic experience, I think we have to entertain a much more radical and unsettling notion of how the universe is put together. And what this model does homage to is, first of all, our uniqueness—which is self-evident once noticed, but never dealt with by science. It’s just: we are the observer. They set you up like a camera on a tripod. You’re the observer. So it’s much true to our status as not the observer, but the peculiar nexus through which reality is transiting in order to manifest itself. And it’s also true to the generalized cliché—which I would like to take very seriously and raise to the status of an ontological canon—the idea that reality, time, is somehow accelerating; that history is not a process which wanders aimlessly through time for uncounted millennia while empires rise and fall with no consequence. This is the best model we have coming out of our academy. It’s called the trendlessly fluctuating theory of history. Now, interestingly, if history is trendlessly fluctuating, then it’s the only phenomenon ever observed so to do. And that seems a little fishy, since the order imputed to all other processes arises out of the creature embedded in this very history.
So I think what we should do to be true to the psychedelic insight—and also true, in fact, to the facts as they are given rather than as they are interpreted—is to suppose that history is a self-limiting process of some sort. It’s like a journey. It’s like the journey of the prodigal son. It is a descent into a lower order of being for a purpose. Which purpose, once accomplished, then there should be high emphasis on hightailing out of that situation, because it is intrinsically toxic. And if you look at the acceleration of themes and trends by even straight observers of historical dynamics, they will draw you all these ascending curves that lead to the conclusion that we are headed toward the impossible. Population, resource mismanagement, acceleration of epidemic diseases, acceleration of distance among classes, acceleration of political discontent in the third world—when you draw out all of these curves, you realize that we may be celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, we will not celebrate the thousandth year. Because by the thousandth year we will have transited into another domain.
We are actually an extraordinary short-term solution to the problem of spirit’s desire to self-metamorphose into some other domain. The monkeys are shedding their bodies. The 25,000-year dash from mushroom-munching on the plains of Africa to stepping through the violet doorway whose other entrance is on Zubenelgenubi or some other exotic point in the universe, this is now completed. And the apocalyptic intuition which has driven monotheism from the very beginning is actually cogent and demands some kind of resolution.
Now, probably most people in this audience are not accustomed to thinking this way, because if you are not just absolutely gung-ho bought in to what these beastly little priesties are peddling, then most people’s intellectual response is just to hold it back. The problem is: all you are left with, then, is sort of existential objectivism or some other bring-down trip like that, which doesn’t leave any room for the felt weirdness of experience. So how can those of us who don’t want to just follow orthodox religion into its conclusions and guilt trips, but also feel the inadequacy of the scientific reductionist model, what can we—can there be a secular apocalypse? Can there be a kind of transcendence without moral retribution? I hope so—for my own sake, if nothing else.
I mean, I would like to believe that you get into heaven by figuring out reality—rather than, you know, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. I mean, I think that’s all very fine, but eventually reality is some kind of a conundrum. It’s a puzzle. The filter is very narrow. Of course, this is just a playground intellectual plotting cosmic revenge on all the idiots who used to lean on me. My technique—which you see the full fruits of it before you this evening—is: recess that my school lasted fifteen minutes, and I would launch these raves in the hope that I could hold them at bay without having them beat the shit out of me till the bell rang, and then the whole thing could be recreated three hours later once again. I did this for eight solid years, and nobody ever laid a glove on me.
Well, see, the consequences of accepting the idea that history is not being pushed by the errors of the past, but is actually being drawn toward an attractor, is that it empowers the human experience. The scientific model of what we’re about is that we’re about zip. I mean, we’re lucky to have gotten an observer’s chair on the cosmic drama in the scientific story of things, and yet it denies our uniqueness.
Now, the problem here is, you see, that evolutionary biology is so traumatized by the attacks of religious fundamentalism that nobody dare break rank with neo-Darwinism and say, “Well, you know, we’re not Christers. But, on the other hand, there are a few problems with this evolutionary model. Maybe we should just close the doors and talk about it among ourselves.” No orthodox theory of evolution can account for the explosion of the human brain to double of its size in less than a couple of million years. I mean, this is the single most dramatic transformation of a major organ in the entire evolutionary history of life. And it was it’s hard to believe that it didn’t happen in order to accommodate language.
Well then, what exactly is language? William Burroughs said it’s a virus from outer space. Yes, but what does it want with us? You know, what is it trying to do? I mean, is Madonna the goal? Is Bill Clinton the goal? What does it all feed into? What is it for? Well, it seems to me it’s a kind of bootstrapping process toward self-reflection: that actually, the flesh is heir to an alien indwelling. This is pure Gnosticism—which I embrace reluctantly, but it seems to fit the facts. Our protoplasm is being used as some kind of stepladder to the infinite. And whatever the force is behind this, it doesn’t care if it cracks the planet like a broken egg in order to bring this off. This is some kind of birthing process. And, you know, Joyce said man will be dirigible. Well, that was because the limit on oblate oval flying machines in 1939 was the dirigible.
Really, what is happening is: we are being drawn toward a kind of concrescence of the alien expectation. These secular religions that are built around flying saucers are nothing more than intuitively felt relationships with the transcendental object that is outside of time and space, but which haunts history like a ghost. Wherever it touches, there is a concrescence of totality. Every mystic, every synthetic system of thought, every work of art that has ever been created, is a facet—an adumbration, in Wittgenstein’s phrase—of this transcendental object. It glitters demonically, transcendentally, at the end of time: an enormous basin of attraction that has somehow been able to reach into the organic world of evolving life on this planet, reach into the dynamics of a single species, and begin to draw it toward it, begin to cause the decisions to be made which move us ever deeper into a realm of self-generated, lógos-like abstraction. And so we create these societies which are always approximations of some divinely intuited image or model. I mean, we are haunted—every one of us, every civilization, every moment—with the possibility of the transcendent. And this process of coming to meet, of encounter, with this transcendent Other is accelerating faster and faster in our own time.
Now, remember: this model that I’m giving you is a counter-poise to this impossible scientific model about the universe springing into being in a single moment. What the bridge between these two theories is, is that, apparently, when you aspire to this cosmic scale of explanation, the logical necessity of the situation forces you toward a singularity. A singularity is like your umbilical knot: it’s the place where everything is necessarily tied together that’s different from everything else, but if it weren’t there everything would fall apart.
You want to be careful with singularities. You know, one of the errors that haunts recent science is that there is apparently a singularity at the center of every black hole in the universe. Well, when you start asking these guys, “Well, how many black holes are there in the universe?” Well, it turns out there are maybe 1011. Well, that’s a lot of singularities. You call this a theory? And it allows 1011 exceptions to any statement it makes? This is not a theory it’s barely an informed speculation at that level.
So how about just one singularity—not a singularity which springs from utter nothingness, but a singularity which is an emergent property of concrescing complexity? In other words, not a singularity which springs from high vacuum, but a singularity which springs from a confluence of historical necessity, human dreaming, artistic hope, emotional yearning, of human frustration? In other words, enough impinging factors that maybe something was overlooked, maybe something is trying to reach us.
You know, the confounding exhibit in this whole argument is this domain of inhabited, affection-riddled, transcendental mindedness which exists just over the edge of some kind of neurological threshold. I mean, granted, we have to take psychedelic drugs to encounter this, but the psychedelic drugs that we have to take are the ones paradoxically most like the structure of our own nervous system. It’s as though something has been culturally suppressed, and in its absence we grow extremely neurotic. But it isn’t something that has receded into some gnostic domain beyond the pleroma of appearances. It is, in fact, incredibly immediate. I mean, it may be that when the dynamics of dreaming are fully understood, that we actually plunge into the presence of this transcendental mystery once every twenty-four hours. Nevertheless, apparently it’s only the shamans who bring the word, but the word that they bring is of such oddness that our frail bark of conceptual notions is in serious danger of being swamped. I mean, it is an emotional experience of great death.
I don’t know how many of you have ever bothered to smoke DMT, but considering that, you know, it is remarkable in its brevity, that the restoration of the baseline of consciousness occurs in under twenty minutes, the only excuse anyone has for not doing it is that it’s illegal. And, you know, Henry David Thoreau had something to say on that subject, and he was right in the mainstream of American transcendentalism.
My experiences of encountering these (what I call) self-transforming elf machines that are gibbering in a visible glossolalia that falls like rain on the carpeted floor of this hyper-dimensional playpen in which, you know, Euclidean theorems are copulating with boolean algebra—I think this is big news. I mean, you know, in these domains you see more art in twenty minutes than the human species has produced in the last thousand years. How can we be in the presence of such inner riches and be, you know, as Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake: we flop on the seamy side? You know, we do flop on the seamy side. It’s very hard for us to bring the ideas through. And yet, they are there. I mean, it’s incredible.
On psilocybin, for example—I mean, as an art historian this always used to amaze me—you can cast a theme. You can say to it, “art deco,” and suddenly there will be millions of candy dishes, cigarette lighters, high-heeled shoes, vanity combs, all of this stuff rotating in black space. And then you can say, well, “Italian baroque.” Instantly! Say, “Well, this is an interesting game. Surprise me!” And then it can present you with integrated aesthetic galaxies of motif that have yet to have their day on the stage of design. But if you could bring it back, you know, you could be a Mies van der Rohe, you could be a Lalique, you could be an Erté. So why aren’t we?
Well, because the local language is so disempowering. You know, the local language has made us terrified of our own unconscious. Tim Leary, God bless him, said once: LSD is a psychedelic drug that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it. Psilocybin is causing psychotic behavior in those who have taken it not. And the whole of human history is summed up in that “not.” We have fallen into a state of deep neurosis. Why are you neurotic if you don’t take psilocybin? What’s so great about it? It connects you up to a totality—and not a cheerful, squeaky clean, Jungian totality, all about how you’re going to mature in middle age. Nothing so cheerfully mundane. It connects you up to (for want of a better word) something which we have to call the Gaian mind. The intentionality of the planet is a real thing. I mean, don’t ask me how this comes to be. I’m just reporting to you on some of the odder items in the neurological bestiary. And what you find in there is organized intelligence on other planes of existence, full of a kind of zany humor and affection for humanity. And yet, here we are in an existential desert, unable to reach out to this because of a pathological set of social programs.
So, my hope—somebody asked me recently in an interview: what was my hope for the Bantam book? And it seemed to me so obvious that I could barely articulate it. I mean, it’s simply that if we can insinuate into our theories of human nature the idea that we are codependent for our humanness on symbiosis with other minds spread through nature, then the argument against hallucinogenic exploration and hallucinogenic plant shamanism will be severely undercut. And I think it’s happening. People sometimes ask me, “Don’t you think your phone is tapped? Aren’t you terribly worried that they’re watching you?” I really am not. I think that within the confines of the citadels of dominator control freaks, there’s a lot of head-scratching going on. They have better data than we do, and they’re in charge of this situation. Can you imagine trying to think your way through this? Trying to manage, let’s say, a four- or five-billion dollar international corporation through the forces that are going to buffet you as we approach the millennium? So I think that the establishment—not for any good reason, but out of a basic sense of rising panic and desperation—is willing to entertain the notion that outside the culture there may be answers.
I call this the archaic revival. I think that when societies get in trouble, there’s a kind of natural impulse to reach back into time and revivify a former model. This happened in the Renaissance with classicism. I mean, the reason we are in a building like this with the thoughts that we think and the clothes that we wear is because these Renaissance city-state capitalists dug up Greece and Rome. It had been 1,500 years in the ground when they decided that Roman law, Greek aesthetics, Greek metaphysics would be the basis of their civilization. We, in order to do the same thing, have to reach much further back in time: 25,000 years. And then the ouroboric cycle can be closed.
This is what all the shouting and dancing about the end of history refers to. It refers to a kind of closure. The prodigal son can return now to the family farm, and the fatted calf can be slaughtered. The goal of history has been won. It’s a kind of telepathic completedness in a domain of meaning. But if we don’t now get out of this mode, the looting of the planet, the looting of our children’s future, all of these things will continue unto death.
So I think that, though the shamanic dimension has been there for millennia—and people have been coming and going, and making pacts, and healing, and finding lost objects through the intercession of this disincarnate intelligence—nevertheless it has a historic dimension. The intuition of these Western religions that God would come tangential to history is actually right on. It’s going to happen. And it will be the ruin of rationalism when it occurs, because rationalism (as we see) is being shown more and more to be utterly inadequate to the situation. So there has to be a kind of boundary dissolution. And this, I think, is what is happening on all levels, and this is what the psychedelics catalyze. It’s very simple: boundary dissolution. The dissolution of the differences between men and women, between rich and poor, between have and have not. Obviously all of those things, but yet more shocking possibilities seem within reach.
If you ask a shaman, “What’s the deal with these little self-transforming elf machine dillies in the other?” they don’t bat an eye. They say, “Oh well, yes, these are ancestor spirits. These are ancestors.” Well, hey, I’m telling you: if the conclusion that we’re being pushed toward is that history is some kind of process which ends by dissolving the distinction between the living and the dead, then it’s more of an ontological transformation than even my metaphysics was set up to handle. And the more I see of these domains, the more I think that this must be what’s happening.
I was talking with someone yesterday, and they said, “Well, you know, in terms of these strange visitations and otherworldly intelligences, the conservative position has to be that they are friendly extraterrestrials who arrived here in a machine from a nearby star.” And I said, “No, this is nonsense. That’s not the most conservative hypothesis. Given that we have living people, given that we have the persistent mythology of life after death, then the most conservative rendering of what is going on is that rationalism has completely failed, and that in fact death has no sting. And the boundary dissolution that we’re really talking about is the dissolution of the distinction between organic and inorganic existence entirely.” It may be that what appears to be happening is actually what is happening, and that we are to be birthed into death in a certain sense.
I’ve had (very strongly at times) the intuition that this is in fact the veil of tears, this is the domain of limitation and restriction. It doesn’t get any worse than this. This is as low as you can possibly go. And that what human history ends in is a kind of mass extinction—not thermonuclear, not toxic, but actually more a collapse of the laws of nature. I think—and we can talk more about this during the question period, if you like—that we announce the end of nature. This is the big news that is stamped all over us: human history is a millisecond of geological time that precedes the full emergence of the transcendental object. And the transcendental object is both object and organism, being and idea. I mean, we have to run back to these Jesuits to get a full picture of what this is. It is the union of spirit and matter that has haunted alchemical dreaming since at least the sixteenth century. We are migrating toward each other, toward union with the planet, toward dissolution of boundary, toward an ending of this sojourn in this domain of limited existence.
And somehow the psychedelics were always there as the touchstone to return to eternity. That there is always, within any human life—as you would expect if you think the universe is fractally organized—each human life has within it a potential doorway that leads to an experiencing of the general apotheosis that hangs over our species. Well then, so, a working definition of shamanism is: a shaman is someone who has seen the end. And once you’ve seen the end—you know: the end, yeah, I’ve been there, the end—once you’ve been to the end, then you get to come back and take your place in the drama with a complete absence of anxiety. You have gotten in on the cosmic giggle. You don’t have to be enchained within the linguistic structures of the dominator society, or, you know, like Charlie Chaplin in that wonderful movie, impaled on the turning gears of mechanism and history. Instead, you know, for you it becomes a joke, a puzzle.
Thank God we’re able to reason our way to this conclusion, because if we had only the inertia of casuistry behind us, I think you just have to throw in the towel. But fortunately, outside the confines of the reality sanctioned by the tribe, there is a tremendous dimension of transcendental affection for humanity. And my supposition is that soon we will meet there. Soon we will be subsumed into this, and it will have a paradoxical effect of putting the imprimatur of truth on both the most extravagant religious conceptions of what is going on, and a more reason than rational reading of what is happening. It’s simply that we invert our cosmology so that, instead of the big bang, what we have is the big surprise. And the big surprise comes soon. The end is always, I hope, a surprise.
There, it just went by. That was it. Thank you very much!
I’m feeling immense relief flood over me already. Now for the fun part, which is Q & A—which, don’t feel constrained by the narrow focus of the lecture. You can considerably broaden the topic if you’re of a mind to. Is there anybody burning to…?
Audience
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McKenna
Yes. How confident am I that electronic media will play a part in this? Could play a part? Well, what’s happening is: all definitions are being dissolved. Drugs are becoming more like computers, computers are becoming more drug-like. Probably the computers of the future may well be injected and the drugs of the future—if materialist psychopharmacology makes good on its promise—we ought to be able to design drugs which cause you to whistle the first eight bars of Dixie and that’s it, you see. Virtual reality is exciting because it’s a technology for showing each other our dreams.
It’s interesting. I’m not anti-technological Mircea Eliade, the great commentator on shamanism, defined it as the archaic techniques of ecstasy. And of course Eliade wrote in French, so “technique” has an Aristotelian reality to it that we don’t have in the English use of the word. But, you know, one technological denouement that would satisfy the transcendental yearning that I’ve laid out for you here this evening, and still not require angelic intervention, is: it’s possible we’re moving toward a technology of time travel, and that that is why linear history ends. It just simply ends. Of course, people say, “Well, if time travel is going to be discovered, why haven’t we seen time travelers shooting through to various high points of human history?” I think the answer to that is fairly obvious. It’s, you know, why don’t we see Maseratis in Antarctica? It’s because there are no roads there. Obviously you can’t take a time machine further back into time than the moment of the invention of the first time machine. Of course, now the consequences of that are that when we invent a time machine, the moment we do it, thousands of time machines will appear from all points in the future, having come back to witness this great moment in the evolution of technology. So that would effectively end history, you see, because they would be bearing information from all points in the future. Hey, who knows? The key concept is weirder than you can suppose. That permits wild orgies of suppositional activity.
Oh… yeah?
Audience
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McKenna
Well, you know, one of my favorite quotes comes out of Plato: “time is the moving image of eternity.” Somebody said time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. That’s sort of the humorous approach to that same perception. Time is the moving image of eternity. Somehow, without abandoning ourselves to predestination—which is philosophically a stupid move, because, you see, if the universe is predestined, then thought is meaningless. We just think what we think because we couldn’t think anything else. But without abandoning ourselves to predestination, it is true that, in some sense, there is a completedness to reality. It does exist, finished, in some higher dimension. And in trying to figure out how that works, I’ve sort of come to this notion—which I’ll actually teach in my workshop on Saturday—that there is a form which stands outside of ordinary three-dimensional space and time, and that that cosmic form (which could be called the body of God or the sephiroth and the shekinah, depending on how you butter your bread) is in the act of being realized. So I’m very friendly to these notions. I mean, it’s hard not to be a Platonist. I think we should leaven it with a certain amount of positivism, but not much.
Sure. In the back.
Audience
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McKenna
Well, I think that this new idea of attractors is very powerful. Science—until very recently, until dynamics in the seventies—made the strides that allow us to talk about the endpoint of a process without talking about some kind of predeterminism. So this is really a major—God forbid that the words should pass my lips—but a paradigm shift. How about: it’s not a major paradigm shift, it’s kind of a penny ante paradigm shift. But in the house of science it’s major. And many things are drawn by basins of attraction. And it permits us to have télos, purpose, in science.
You see, in the nineteenth century there was a fantastic intellectual exertion to eliminate what was called deism from any so-called scientific explanation. And deism meant any kind of télos. Like: you’re not supposed to say that evolution has a purpose. You’re never supposed to say that. It’s random mutation, meaning: natural selection ushers into a—they don’t say “higher” form, they say “advancement” of form, and they don’t even like saying “advancement.” But clearly, processes are selected for a kind of idealized goal. So I think the idea of an attractor is very powerful, and it gives historiography and theories of history a whole new lease on life.
We are being sucked toward the unimaginable. I mean, life—we will not exist in a hundred years. You can say that we’re going to recognize what we’re doing, and create a human-generated revolution of ecological caring and limited population and sharing of wealth and so forth, and that it’s all going to arise out of the schemes of rational managerial types. But I don’t think so. I think it’s built into the atoms themselves; that it’s too late now. We’ve sunk below the event horizon of the attractor. There’s no way to scramble out of this now. The only way out is what’s called a forward escape. That means: hang on Hannah!
Yeah?
Audience
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McKenna
Yes. Well, there are all kinds of methods for dissolving boundary. Classic ones are fasting, flagellation, ecstatic dance, or deals of various sorts. Of all of those, only ecstatic dance sounds marketable in our society. The flagellation had a brief flowering in the fourteenth century, but it was quickly self-limiting.
The reason I am so adamant about the need for the psychedelics is: I see us as in a situation of considerable urgency. I mean, you know, perhaps the reading of Rumi or Kierkegaard will eventually lead you to these places, but we haven’t got forever. We have to move quickly. And so far, the only thing I have seen which changes people’s minds as fast as we have to change our minds are psychedelics. So, you know, a cure for mental constipation has been found. It’s like a cure for polio or AIDS. Let’s manufacture it and distribute it to everyone before this pathological condition just starts any more lives. And so forth and so on.
Audience
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McKenna
Well, I think the problem with all other methods is, you know, there’s a beady-eyed class of people among us called priests who are always trying to grab this stuff and peddle it to the rest of us. And the important thing about psychedelics is: it speaks for itself. It requires no leaders. It requires no interpretation. No theological colleges have to be set up to tell the peasants what’s really going on. And I see all other forms of spiritual transcendence so compromised by the marketing strategies that surround them that they’re nearly worthless.
I mean, I went to India and poked around a little bit, and basically, you know, they want you to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years before they cut you the good stuff. And when I went to South America, people were on an equal footing. There was no mumbo-jumbo. I said, you know, “What can you show me? I’ve been in India. They weren’t into showing me anything. What can you show me?” And the guy said, “Well, let’s sharpen our machetes and walk out here into the woods half a mile, and we’ll brew up this stuff and see what we can see.” And, you know, it knocks your socks off!
Yeah?
Audience
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McKenna
This may be a consequence of the dimensionality of what’s going on. The real need of this is elusive to me. And it always frustrates me to talk to an audience, because I have the faith that under the influence of some drug or some major D or something, potentially we could have a conversation where we could deconstruct the whole thing. What wants to happen is something with our language. When it’s all said and done, it’s going to simultaneously be as bizarre and wonderful as I said it will be. And it’s also going to be: F***! You know? And understanding how you get the transcendental and the mundane fused together in that way requires a leap of linguistic legerdemain that I have not yet been able to achieve.
Maybe what it is is that these psychedelics are like catalysts for language; that we can’t seem to move in any direction any faster than our language. So any social reform, any scientific reform, any anything depends, first of all, on the tailoring and transforming of language. Well, language is an aspect of us that we have never managed. There have been a few quite unhappy efforts—for instance, the French Revolution, throughout a lot of old French. But, you know, some people think this is why you can’t understand people like Derrida at this moment because, you know, you can’t understand the dude with the language that he’s trying to use.
So somehow we need a rational strategy for the forced evolution of language. It began to happen in the sixties, but there the establishment was just too frightened by the speed with which things unfolded, and they clamped the lid back on. That’s not a good response either because, you know, we’re going to have to do some pretty fancy footwork to avoid the collapse of historical civilization—if we want to avoid the collapse of it.
I mean, one thing that bothers me is that sometimes my rap is interpreted to be permission for an absence of political obligation. Like you’re saying, “Well, it’s just all going to go up the Kali’s kazoo in 2012 or something, so why bother?” You know, “What am I supposed to do?” But it’s somehow an act of collective understanding. And the paradox is that it’s going to be alright whether you cooperate or not. Nevertheless, it’s somehow tremendously important that you cooperate. You know?
In the back there.
Audience
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