My name is Terence McKenna, and I’m a philosophical gadfly and shamanologist, writer, and lecturer. Ruth assured me that you were so familiar with my work that probably we could handle this meeting as a dialogue after a short introduction to some of the things that I’m interested in. So we’ll attempt that. I’ll talk for a few minutes, and then [???] conversation about the aspects of these things that interest you.

If any of you have read The Invisible Landscape, which I am the co-author of with my brother, you know that it ranges over fairly hardcore chemistry and neurophysiology, through the phenomenology of shamanism, and on into a fairly extensive discussion of principles of ordering in the I Ching. But what I tend to find myself publicly lecturing about is the relationship of hallucinogens, especially plant hallucinogens, to shamanic healing in the context where use of hallucinogens is associated with shamanism.

If you look at the worldwide distribution of hallucinogens, you immediately notice that there are several unexplained anomalies. Why is it that fully 80% of the world’s known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin, even though the flora of the old world jungle of Indonesia is equally rich? And Weston La Barre and a number of people have written about this, trying to say that perhaps it is because the people of the Amazon are closer to the hunting and gathering pre-agricultural mode than anywhere else in the world. But, for whatever reason, the peoples of the Amazon have developed the use of hallucinogens in curing and shamanism to a very high degree.

And while a number of plant species are involved in the production of these various drugs, the chemistry of them is more simple than the botany. In other words, almost all of the hallucinogens in use in the Amazon rely on a monoamine oxidase inhibition to potentiate dimethyltryptamine. Now, in other words, monoamine oxidase is the enzyme system in the body which degrades monoamine, which would be serotonin, but also any introduced monoamines, which would be all alkaloids and many drugs. When the monoamine oxidase is inhibited chemically, it can no longer do its job of deactivating these compounds, and consequently you get an accumulation of them at the synapse. And this is thought to be the mechanic by which the hallucinogenic experience is induced with these drugs.

Since so many people here seem interested in curing, I think this morning I will, in these brief remarks, concentrate on one ethnomedical system, and then if your questions range out beyond that, that’s fine. But I want to concentrate on this one ethnomedical system because part of what I am trying to do is to get researchers like yourselves to look more closely at this. There are a number of unanswered questions. In fact, I would say more is not known than known. The system that I refer to is the endemic use of ayahuasca throughout Bolivia, Peru, Southern Colombia, portions of Ecuador, and Brazil.

Very briefly, ayahuasca is a combinatory drug made out of the boiled leaves and stems of a malpighiaceous woody climber called Banisteriopsis caapi, a huge woody vine that sometimes reaches 200 meters in length in the jungle. And it is boiled to make a hot water infusion, and then to this is added a small amount of the DMT-containing leaves of some other plant, either Diplopterys cabrerana or Psychotria viridis.

Now, my brother has just finished his work toward the PhD at the University of British Columbia, and much of what his thesis consisted of was looking at drug and plant samples that we collected in the Amazon in 1982 when we went down there. For over ten years, Schultes and Bo Holmstedt of the Karolinska Institutet had published theories of the activity of ayahuasca, which stated that they believed it worked through monoamine oxidase inhibition, but this had never really been tested. Now it has been looked at in the laboratory, and essentially confirmed that this is precisely what’s happening. And it’s a very interesting comment on ethnomedicine, because unlike peyote or Amanita muscaria or the psilocybin mushrooms of Mexico, ayahuasca is a combinatory drug. It is prepared. It is not simply picked and eaten. So as a consequence of this, it can be made either well or badly. And as a consequence of that, the personality of the shaman becomes far more important in the ayahuasca cult than in the cults that revolve around the use of plant drugs where no preparation is involved.

Now, at the beginning of this I mentioned that all the hallucinogenic drugs of the Amazon are based on this tryptamine beta-carboline interaction. What we were doing in 1982 was looking at a much more endemic and restricted drug complex, which is: for over thirty years there have been persistent reports in the ethnographic literature that there was an orally active DMT drug, which was very interesting to pharmacologists because there’s large amounts of monoamine oxidase in the human gut—assumed by evolutionary biologists to be there to degrade potentially dangerous or toxic monoamines that might be taken in through the diet. So it’s very interesting to pharmacologists to hear that there is an orally active DMT drug, because it flies in the face of pharmacological theory. It should be impossible. And the pharmacologists said that if there was an orally active DMT drug, then it must be complexed with an MAO inhibitor to make it work.

So what we were doing was going down there and visiting various shamans in various places, persuading them to make the paste for us, making voucher specimens of the plants that went into it, and then taking the voucher specimens—the pickled material, the air-dried material, all of this stuff—back to Canada. And our assumption was that we would pretty much confirm Holmstedt and Schultes’ assertion that this drug also worked by monoamine oxidase inhibition. It now appears not to be so. It also appears to be—there are questions about the composition of the drug. The people who used this drug were disrupted in the 1930s. There was a dispute between Colombia and Peru, and when the new boundary was drawn, these people felt they were in the wrong country. They felt Peruvian, but they ended up on the Colombian side of the line. The Putumayo River was set as the new border. And they undertook then a kind of exodus in which 10,000 to 15,000 of them moved about a hundred miles across the Putumayo River to the present day center where they’re located. And in that process we believe that the knowledge of the drug was severely compromised. The reason for this is because samples of the drug that we collected north of the Putumayo River in 1971 actually did show the presence of beta-carbolines in them. But samples prepared below the Putumayo River had no trace of beta-carbolines in them and, in fact, in bioassay—that means when we took it—seemed either inactive or toxic. And it’s well known that the tree from which this drug is prepared is also the source of an arrow poison. And, in fact, among the Yanomamo, if the men are on a hunting expedition and they run out of the supply of the drug, they are persistently reported to scrape the arrow poison off their quill arrows and to sniff that. So what exactly is going on is not clear.

I think we took turns doing the bioassays with the drugs in Peru, and I think my brother got the most powerful and frightening sample. And it sounded, from his account, like a paralytic poison. He felt numbing which began around the lips and proceeded down his throat. His breathing became very shallow and labored. His mind was racing, but he couldn’t move. There was no eidetic or hypnagogic imagery. There was simply a massive sense of respiratory depression. And when he recovered from this and questioned the shaman who had made the drug, his only comment was that it does take getting used to—but I’m not sure that we’ll repeat the experiment.

So I mention that because here is an unsolved problem. We took the best suggestion of the generation of researchers ahead of us, and went to the Amazon, and ran their suggestion to ground, and it appears the conjecture was incorrect. These valproate drugs don’t work through MAO inhibition. So here is the continuing unsolved pharmacological problem—which, if any of you find yourselves doing fieldwork in the Amazon, this is one to bear in mind.

The ayahuasca complex that I mentioned earlier is much more accessible and, in fact, is perhaps the most widely distributed psychedelic drug-taking complex in the world. It involves millions and millions of people who, on a regular basis—approximately weekly—gather together, usually in windowless, corrugated roofed sheds, and the local ayahuasquero (and in these areas ayahuasquero and shaman mean the same thing), he leads the group in the taking of this drug. And a number of people come to these sessions because they have medical or psychological problems. Either; there is no distinction made. Many people come to these sessions out of curiosity. A certain percentage come with the attitude that they’re going to take a psychedelic drug—in other words: that this is a visionary experience. And this phenomenon of taking the drug is completely embedded in the people’s lives, and very, very efficaciously so. They call it la purga, and, in fact, harmine—the main monoamine oxidase inhibiting constituent of ayahuasca—actually is a strong anti-worm remedy. And this is important and definitely gives the people taking ayahuasca an adaptive leg up on everybody else, because intestinal worms are an endemic problem in these areas. And I believe there’s no question that, if you’re taking ayahuasca every couple of weeks, you’re probably feeling fairly free of this.

The curing scenario of the ayahuasquero is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans worldwide. In other words, it consists of magical songs, the blowing of tobacco smoke over the body of the patient, the laying on of hands, the sucking on the afflicted part of the body to remove a magical object which may or may not be visible, the interpreting of visions, and this sort of thing. The ayahuasquero really functions as the hierophant for these groups of country people.

And I must say a word about the context in which all this is happening. Though ayahuasca is used by deep forest Indians, and they have their own folk ways about it, it’s really a mass phenomenon of displaced Indian and mixed Mestizo population. What you have in the Amazon are relatively new cities—new if we mean by new built within this century. Iquitos in Peru arose first as a consequence of the rubber boom. Any of you who saw Herzog’s film Burden of Dreams about Fitzcarraldo got a good idea of what Iquitos is like. Pucallpa is a much newer city in the south of Peru, and it’s essentially 50,000 Indians have come out of the jungle to work in the sawmills, and to create a tremendous pocket of syncretic foment where folk beliefs, shamanistic practices, languages are all in a state of homogenization, and very rich, very rich for those people to live in, very rich to do research in. And it was there that we found the ayahuasquero who came to us to have the most—as they say in Hebrew, he was mimosh, he was real, he had a sense of existential authenticity about him. And then in the laboratory we backed that up. His stuff was consistently stronger and better made than anyone else’s.

So Kat and I spent six or seven weeks with these people. We just moved in with them, and we took ayahuasca as often as we could arrange to do—which was at least once a week and sometimes twice a week. And we can attest to its curative powers because the peaks of ayahuasca-taking were interspersed with the trenches of salmonella infection, and each time we got salmonella we would ask the shaman to move up the next ayahuasca-taking date, and that would give us about three days’ grace before the next bout of salmonella. It was a terrific problem. If you know what it is, you know what I mean. If you don’t, you’re lucky.

So I can answer questions about this from many different levels. I guess, before I open it for discussion, since so many of you seem to be interested in curing, I should describe—and maybe Kat can help us with our impression—of what is going on in the curing. Naturally—well, we have to talk about psychedelic drugs. I think the word “psychedelic” is maybe too broad, because it includes things which are very different from each other. It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline. And certainly the tryptamine intoxication, if we can use that word advisedly, is very distinct from the intoxication or the immersion in the phenomenology of LSD or mescaline, something like that. In our cultural context, DMT is almost never encountered, and when it is encountered, it is usually smoked and it’s very, very brief. It onsets in about 45 seconds. It lasts 100 to 300 seconds, and then it fades in a few minutes. And it’s this tremendously intense visual hallucinogen. Very difficult, in fact, to imagine anything more intense than that.

Now, psilocybin, which is the active hallucinogen in mushrooms, is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. It’s well understood that the phosphoryl group is removed as it crosses the blood-brain barrier. This turns it into psilocin, 4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, and this is very close to serotonin—so close that it’s reasonable to assume that these compounds are competing for the same types of activity at the synapse. Now, though psilocybin cannot be directly changed into DMT, it’s a two-step process. The structural affinities of them are very clear. What seems to be happening in ayahuasca is: a very small amount of DMT and a lot of MAO inhibitors being used to activate it.

And I should talk about these MAO inhibitors in ayahuasca. They are harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharman—the family of compounds known as beta-carbolines. Now, beta-carbolines are psychoactive in their own right, but not hallucinogenic. Some of you may know the work of Claudio Naranjo, who used harmine and harmaline in therapy. But if you study his work on the subject very carefully, it becomes clear that fully half of all the human descriptions of the psychoactivity of beta-carbolines come from one subject, and massive doses had to be given. They were given ten milligrams per kilogram in some cases to elicit even low eidetic activity behind closed eyelids. So to call it a hallucinogen is perhaps a misnomer.

One of the things that my brother discovered that seems fascinating to me is that, in in-vitro systems (meaning in test tubes), ayahuasca brews that we brought from the Amazon were found to be a million times stronger for MAO inhibition than they needed to be. When he diluted these things to one millionth the strength that the people were taking them in the Amazon, he was still getting 80% MAO inhibition. So what seems to be happening, if we can extrapolate from in-vitro to in-vivo, is that they are way overdoing the amount of MAO inhibitor you need, and just barely sidling up to enough tryptamine to potentiate the hallucinogenic activity.

When you take ayahuasca, first, after about thirty minutes, you feel a kind of calmative effect, which, if you’ve taken a large amount of it, can actually become almost the beginnings of a light anesthesia. And then, in darkness, under the influence of these icaros, these magical songs, the hypnagogia begins to weave itself. And it is not sharp edged, bright, geometric kinds of hallucinations. It’s much more, as he says in his thesis, the colors of the forest floor: rich ochres, olive drabs, warm browns, dusty oranges. All very impressionistically put together and very much subject to audio control.

The icaros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination. And this is very interesting to me because, as some of you may know who have heard me lecture before, I’m interested in the effect of these things on the language centers and the relationship of visual modalities to spoken modalities. And definitely, this is what’s happening in ayahuasca. The songs are being used to control the visions. Perhaps this is what’s happening in peyote circles as well. I don’t have great familiarity with that, but I do know that there’s great stress on attaining these magical songs—which are not produced from the ego, they are spontaneous outbursts of linguistic order that affect the visual cortex and control the fabric of the hallucinations. And the shaman can use this to, in his own language, to look into the body. He can see into the body.

And I would say of ayahuasca: it’s the most—I don’t want to say health-oriented, but it’s definitely somatically oriented. You feel how you feel on it, and you see into yourself, and you can actually direct energy in a visual way that is way more intense than mere metaphor. And if a person such as myself can do this, you can imagine someone who’s given their life to manipulating these states, how intense it must be. And they see into the body, and they direct sound into the body, and by this means energy blockages can be broken up, diseases diagnosed, psychological conditions addressed, all kinds of things go on.

And our attitude in looking at this was not the attitude of representatives of a superior culture studying the quaint folkways of preliterate peoples. It seems very clear that this health care delivery system is very effective—perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of psychological disorders, of which there are a number in Peru that only these populations are subject to. I am not an anthropologist or a sociologist. I’m not particularly interested in phenomenological descriptions of these things. I really believe that there is a potential impact on our own society from all of this; that if we could understand what was happening, we would have a much better chance of being able to orient our own healthcare delivery system to be more effective.

A friend of ours—an anthropologist who lives in Finland, Luis Luna, who showed this film in Vancouver last year—he is completely convinced that the real mastery of ayahuasca lays in following a very rigorous diet which the deep-forest ayahuasqueros use. And this may be true. I mean, definitely, beta-carbolines are endogenously produced in human metabolism, and so are tryptamines. And the peculiar diet in the Amazon anyway—which is high starch, low protein, high sugar, very few green vegetables kind of diet—may predispose these people to accessing ayahuasca more easily. Kat had no trouble getting off when we were being dosed down there. I had more trouble, and I think it was simply a matter of the ratio of the compound to body weight. I was definitely the largest person in any of these sessions, and the same amount is doled out to each person, and not in a context where you can say, “I’d like to take more, please.” You just have to go with what’s going on. But we also—our informants prepared several bottles of ayahuasca for us, and in a series of experiments in the United States when we got back, we verified that it is not only a hallucinogen, but it can be a terrifyingly intense hallucinogen if errors in dosage are made. It can be—well, I said after I made my error of dosage, I never hoped to be more stoned than that.

So that’s what I offer to you as interesting, perhaps to you in your own field. You must be aware that I have other wrinkles: the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things. But all of these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us. I mean, we are at the very beginning of exploring the unconscious. The Freudian and Jungian models—which you can think of the Freudian model as embedded like a black dot in the center of the Jungian bullseye—each theory of the unconscious claims more and more territory as its own. But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings. It is simply a modality, an interior landscape, and large portions of it are not human.

You could almost make the cybernetic metaphor of ROM portions of the unconscious—ROM stands for “read-only memory.” This means that if you have a computer with read-only memory, you can read what is in that section of memory, but you cannot change it or input into it. And I believe there are read-only portions of memory that no human being has ever inputted into, so they bear no trace of humanness. But they can be contemplated, and this is the idea of the alien other: a tension that appears in modern society. It has appeared before, for instance, in Hellenistic society.

As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness, these transhuman, non-human dimensions slowly come into view. It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity which our cultural and linguistic programming has bonded us to rather severely. Now, of course, we’re returning to look at it again in the larger context of the entire intellectual thrust of the twentieth century being an effort to recapture and understand archaic forms of thought. This is why our fascination with the unconscious, with drugs, with shamanism, with the forms of art like Cubism and this sort of thing: because we are trying to give ourselves cultural balance by harking back to a time, in illo tempore, a sacral time, a time before history, and these drugs are the means to do that, properly understood. Our problems on this end are simply the baggage of cultural and legal and conventional assumptions about what these things are. I think there’s a great deal to be learned from these shamanic societies and conventions.

However, I’m not a… I call myself a shamanologist to set myself aside from the people who claim to be shaman. I think that there’s a great deal to be learned from shamanism, but that there is a great deal that can be extrapolated from it; that we need to create our own shamanism, and that we will. When you’re sitting in these cult huts in utter darkness with people vomiting and singing and undergoing these things, and you are still trying to perform the eidetic reduction, still thinking about Husserl and Heidegger, you realize that your mental insides are too different to ever stand in their shoes. You have to make your own shoes. So let’s talk about all this.

33:05

McKenna

No, either I wasn’t clear or you misunderstood me. Mescaline, which is the active constituent of peyote, is not a tryptamine. It’s a kind of amphetamine.

33:18

McKenna

Mushrooms—psilocybin is an interesting compound. It is the only four-substituted indoleamine that occurs in nature. So it’s unique. And, in another context, this is one of the reasons we were led to suggest that it might be an extraterrestrial gene inserted from the outside, because you just don’t get single instances of a compound occurring in organic nature. Serotonin, for instance, which is very closely related to psilocybin, occurs in everything from planaria to man. It occurs virtually in all known living systems. Psilocybin only is known to occur in a very limited number of fungi. It is a phosphorylated tryptamine.

The tryptamines, then, that occur in the virolas, in these trees used to make the paste, or in the admixture plants of ayahuasca, these are not phosphorylated tryptamines. These are things like N,N-dimethyltryptamine itself and 5-methoxy MeO.

34:34

McKenna

No, it was never there in those cases.

34:36

McKenna

In the case of psilocybin? Yes.

34:45

McKenna

Yes, they are very, very similar—with one exception, I think. Maybe more? The major difference is that, unlike psilocybin—psilocybin has one very curious property, which is that it seems animate. You contact an organized entelechy of some sort very easily. It speaks to you. I’ve compared it to the lógos of Hellenistic syncretism. It seems to be a psychic component not under the control of the ego. And this is very curious, frightening to some people. When I was with Albert Hofmann at that entheogen conference in Santa Barbara, I asked him—you know, he discovered LSD and he characterized psilocybin—and I asked him which he preferred to take. And he said he preferred LSD. And I said: why? And he said: there’s something too animate about psilocybin. And closer questioning showed that this was unsettling to him. It’s too much like the orthodox notion of madness: having a dialogue with an independent voice in your head is quite unsettling to a certain sort of person, I think.

36:14

McKenna

It teaches. Do you want to say something?

37:11

McKenna

And you quake. And they seem to encourage that. For instance, this shed where we would do it had a corrugated roof and no windows, but it was up on short stilts. The shaman would stand up and put his hands in front of him and tremble, and he would transmit this trembling into the floor and shake the entire building. And several times—the protocol is when you feel that you’re going to vomit, you just go outside and vomit. People are coming and going all the time. We didn’t vomit that much, which was very puzzling to them. They really stress vomiting, and they identify the vomiting with the purgative effects of it. And when we would not vomit, they’d say, “Oh, you must live very cleanly. You must be in very good shape.” But actually all that was happening, I think, was that we were following the rules they laid down, and they were not. They would say, you know, “Never eat pork before doing it. Don’t eat anything for six hours before doing it. No salt, no alcohol.” And we would do this and be fine, and they would just be kicking out ten different ways. I’m getting sick.

But the entity in ayahuasca, it teaches by showing; the visions teach. The thing in psilocybin is much more puzzling. I mean, it’s a haranguer. You actually have, you know, psychic arm wrestling with somebody who loves controversy and rhetoric, and is well able to express itself and present itself. That’s a very puzzling thing that could lead one far afield if you sought a reasonable explanation. So those are the major differences, I think.

39:45

McKenna

It’s very Earth-centered. I mean, even taking ayahuasca up where we live in Sonoma County, immediately as it comes on, it’s about sunlight on brown water, huge twining—in other words, it creates the jungle. It is the jungle in some strange way. The psilocybin entity is gnostic. It points to the center of the galaxy. It talks about ending history. It’s full of a sense of crisis and the need for activity, and humor. But this intense desire for change. It is not a drug of acceptance, you know? It wants transformation of a very radical sort. The ayahuasca seems to integrate, especially into that environment.

You know, the major alkaloid fraction of ayahuasca is harmine, which is a beta-carboline, which was first isolated from the giant Syrian rue, Peganum harmala, and that’s why it’s called harmine. Before enough was known about the compound in ayahuasca to realize that it was the same as the compound in Peganum harmala, it was called “telepathine.” Because the early explorers, Villavicencio and Koch-Grünberg in the early years of this century, reported that the people were inducing states of mass telepathy. And there is some reason to think that this might be true in some sense. In other words, these people live in a state of semi-telepathy anyway. If you can imagine a hunting-gathering tribe of thirty people moving through a vast rainforest with their children and their elders, the notion of the super-expressed individual that we take for granted is not really there. There is more a sense of the unity of the group. Then, when the elders get together and take ayahuasca, there is a kind of melding together to attain consensus, and also information impossible to obtain in any other way—for instance, weather information. Shamanism is always related to weather prophecy, and it’s always been assumed that this was just a wing and a prayer, or that they were super sensitized to environmental clues about weather change. But also things like game movement; this is very important to know. And for all of these things, ayahuasca was invoked and used.

43:40

McKenna

Tree daturas, arboreal daturas in the subfamily Brugmansia, are used in certain areas—rarely and not in these public gatherings of people. Tropane alkaloids are notoriously difficult to control, and that would be more within a context of brujería, of real sorcery and witchcraft, and generally tends to be more montane (a phenomenon of the mountains), especially around the valley of the Sibundoy and those places. We never—we grew Brugmansias and have them, of course, but we never combined it with ayahuasca because, knowing just what the tropanes are like on their own, it seemed very dangerous. You know, some tropanes make you sweat and your heart race. Other tropanes make you fall asleep and your body temperature drops and your respiration falls. And it just seemed like a dangerous area. There are a number.

One of the interesting chemical frontiers of all this is these admixtures. In other words, you have the basic ayahuasca—the boiled stems of Banisteriopsis caapi. Normally what’s added to that are the leaves of Psychotria viridis, a rubiaceous bush related to coffee, which has a great deal of DMT in the leaves. In the northern part of the range where this drug is being made, where it is called not ayahuasca but yahé, Brunfelsias—which are also solanaceous plants with very high molecular weight tropanes that have defied characterization—they are sometimes used. But we knew Tim Plowman, and he’s the only non-Indian person ever to take Brunfelsia, and his description of it, it sounded like, you know, his life hung in the balance for 36 hours, and he didn’t know whether he would make it or not. So we didn’t go too deeply into that.

What we did do was: we always asked our informants what other plants are sometimes used in ayahuasca. And they would usually name them. And we would collect vouchers. Of nine unusual admixture plants that we collected, only one, a menisperm—which is this very small family of plants. A menisperm, Abuta grandifolia, was definitely alkaloid positive. And there’s more work to be done there. But this technology of admixtures is very interesting and not well understood. And that kind of thing could be worked out up here in the laboratory, if you could get and grow all these things.

46:53

McKenna

That’s right. That’s right.

47:18

McKenna

Yes. Well, that’s a weaker way of saying what I said. I mean, ayahuasca is not effective without an admixture. It’s an odd experience. But it’s not an effective trance-inducing compound or visionary compound without an admixture. You have to have it.

47:46

McKenna

Amanita muscaria? Well, that’s an entirely different situation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, I’ll review it briefly. Amanita muscaria is a mushroom that has a mycorrhizal relationship to birch trees that is distributed throughout the world at altitudes above 5,000—well, no, actually it occurs at sea level, too. But anyway, it is highly variable, both geographically and seasonally. And in Siberia, in the Amur River Basin, the Yakut shamans and a couple of other tribes have utilized this for a long, long time.

Gordon Wasson wrote a book in which he tried to suggest that Amanita muscaria may have been the basis of the Vedic hallucinogen soma. The problem with Amanita muscaria, which he freely admitted, is: it is very hard to get satisfyingly loaded on it. It is not consistent, and we don’t know—there have been various suggestions made: that you must roast it over a fire to create a change in its chemistry, that it must be pounded with milk curd. Apparently, readings of the Vedas seem to suggest that, whatever soma was, it was pounded with milk curd. People have even come forth with chemical theories to show that the active agent in Amanita muscaria, which is muscamole, is very closely related to the active toxin in Amanita muscaria, muscarine. You can decarboxylate muscarine to muscamole using the enzymes in sour milk. So it might be possible to incubate Amanita muscaria in sour milk and turn the toxin into more of the active agent.

49:48

McKenna

Well, any—I mean, sure, you have with any alkaloid what’s called an LD50, which is the horrifying concept that… I don’t need to go into!

50:31

McKenna

That’s right. There’s a Lepiota species, which if you eat it, it’s perfectly harmless, but if you have very much alcohol in your system, it’s fatal and irreversible. Another thing to bear in mind is that there are a number of monoamine oxidase inhibitors that occur in foods. Certain foods are high in these things. For instance, soft cheeses: bries, and camemberts are just loaded with tyramine, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. This is why certain anti-psychotic drugs, this is an admonition that they must not be given. And I think it would be murder to take ayahuasca on top of a typical diet of camembert and brie. Fortunately, these things are unknown in the Amazon.

51:28

McKenna

Yes, in Berkeley it would be tricky to keep track of yourself. But I definitely felt when we were in the Amazon the diet is so strange and you cannot avoid it. Because everything you carry in goes on your back or on the back of an Indian who you are paying, and it may not seem like much, but over days and days. So there’s always an effort to eat off the land. And my God, you know, if you’ve never been in a tropical jungle, people have the notion about a tropical jungle that it’s just full of food, wonderful things to eat, all these plants and things. But, you see, the Amazon has been above water 220 million years. That’s 220 million years of uninterrupted evolution of a tropical ecosystem with ample water supply. So that means every ecological niche is occupied. Protein is at such a premium, but there is no protein. You could starve to death in the Amazon. There is no protein.

Chambers, who’s the world’s expert on the tropical rainforest, estimates that in the Amazon 96% of all utilizable organic material at any given moment is in a living system. In other words, only 4% of the organic material is not at any one given time in an organic system. What that means in practical terms is that: a leaf falls—ten minutes later, it’s gone. The leaf cutting ants, the this, the that. It just sucks it right up, you know. And minerals in free suspension in rainwater, they estimate the average flow distance of an ion in rainwater is something like a centimeter before it’s uptaken into a living system. So there is no food in the Amazon, and this is one of the reasons why coca is so popular. Coca in the Amazon is not a drug. It’s (one) a food, and (two) an appetite depressant. And this is what they are, you know—and people, no matter how deeply you go into the Amazon, people are outraged at the notion that coca could be thought a drug. A drug is something bad. Coca is wonderful, you know?

So it’s a very tight ecosystem with very little elaboration of protein, and that’s why the search for food plants has been so intense, and perhaps why so many drug plants have been discovered, because every single thing has been tested again and again for its effect as a food, a poison, a hallucinogen. Because everything is to be utilized.

55:01

McKenna

Well, is it possible for a human being to make sounds which do not reflect syntactical deep structure of language? I mean, in other words, we’re so hardwired for language that, in any extended vocalizing, a Chomskyite would be able to come and find the linguistic structure of it. I’m not sure. I think this is a really interesting question, because you have input through the senses—you have one sense perceptor which is geared to transduce audio input and one which is set to transduce visual input, but it’s probably something about the way these perceptual systems have evolved that they divide the incoming input. Actually, all that’s happening is that you’re moving through a multi-leveled wave system of various kinds of inputs, which you are transducing into tactility, vision, and sound.

I think this is a very interesting area for research. Just recently, someone sent me an article which I thought was very, very suggestive. It occurred in no less respectable a place than the amateur scientist column in Scientific American. They were pointing out in there that if you can sustain a hundred Hertz hum with your voice, you can actually make an electric fan appear to slow down and stop. You can also cause roll lines to appear on a TV set. Now, what exactly is happening here? It isn’t that the fan slows down or that the roll lines appear on the TV. The scientific explanation which they put forth was that a well-sustained hundred Hertz hum actually vibrates your eyeballs so that they become like strobes, and you can freeze motion, and you can slow things down and start them up again.

57:17

McKenna

No, other people don’t perceive it, but you perceive it. There were anecdotes about airplane mechanics who can look at a spinning propeller and tell if it’s flawed by jerking their head back and forth very quickly. And this is very interesting, because here is a way to use your voice to control your visual input and to actually gain secret information. If we had written a secret word on that propeller, you could win bets in a bar. So I think this needs to be looked into. What can we learn about the world by subjecting our bodies to different kinds of self-generated vibrations? And without the backup of someone like Martin Gardner, I’m sure people would dismiss a rap like that as pure fancy; utterly preposterous. The guy who wrote the article said it was very hard for him. He didn’t have perfect pitch. It’s very hard for him to maintain this hundred-Hertz hum. So what he did was: he got a wave generator which would perfectly generate the hum, and then he modified a football helmet so that he could strap it to his stereo speaker. So he would rest his chin on his speaker and run this thing up to a hundred Hertz, and then [???] the motion of the fan.

Well, this is just an example of peripheral human abilities that we have not explored. I’m sure you all on LSD have experienced the time-smearing effect of motion, where you move your hand and it just leaves it hanging there in all of its stages, and people will say, “Well, your retinas are simply not quenching. The previous image is some problem in the something or other.” But the effect is to smear the psyche in time, because the psyche is defined largely by the way the sensory inputs are interpreted. So I think these linguistic phenomena are very suggestive of special abilities.

I’ve said many times before (and you all heard me say it), Philo Judaeus, who was an exact contemporary of Christ—born before, died after—was on a bug about what he called the more perfect lógos. And he said the more perfect lógos will be beheld rather than heard, but it will go from being heard to being seen without ever crossing over a quantized point of division. Now, that suggests that hearing and seeing are just two ends of a continuum, and that your eyes slot you into part of that spectrum, your ears slot you into another, but that it’s really a continuing spectrum. And the evolution of this more perfect lógos is my hope for psilocybin; that this can become an experience for people, a kind of Ursprache.

You may be aware of Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess, where he talks about a perfect poetic language that predates history, a language of poetry so intense that to hear it was to understand it. It required no conventionalizing of cultural context and dictionary. It was so laden with existential validity that to hear it was to understand it. We have very few articulations like that left. Perhaps moans, screams, and howls are the only words. The icaros.

1:04:05

McKenna

By psychedelic synesthesia you mean fusing of the sensorium under psychedelic drugs?

1:04:18

McKenna

You mean: do I think that happens on LSD?

1:04:24

McKenna

Yes, pretty much. Except that it’s controllable, you know. And, in fact, that’s almost too restrictive a term. It isn’t that the sound controls the visions, it’s that the sound is the vision, and if you want to change the vision, you must change the sound. And so you actually can take control.

Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these other things sometimes can’t be. For instance, one of the most puzzling things that it can do is that you can suggest a motif, for instance Art Deco, and it will just go to that and flood you with millions and millions and millions of objects, all perfectly exemplifying this very constrained artistic style. And then you can say, “No, Adis vases. Let’s do Adis vases.”—thousands of them, more than there must be, you know. And then you can say, “Okay, now do one that—now surprised me.” And it will produce an equally aesthetically coherent stream of images that are not referent to any historical period.

So then this raises questions, you know: what is fashion? What is style? What are these collective image systems which come out of nowhere, gain great power, and then fade away? And how is it that a drug can command them out of the single human mind? What does it mean that on a psychedelic drug one person can see more art in an hour than the species has produced in 10,000 years? What does that say about how effectively we are accessing our souls? I mean, the potential, then, is so great. I mean, you prove it to yourself, you know? I mean, it’s very frustrating to imagine that that kind of beauty, those depths of ecstatic revelation, are that accessible to the individual, and so totally hidden from us as a group.

1:06:52

McKenna

By evolving language. By recognizing that reality is created by language and no longer accepting the natural evolution of language, but actually going to work to evolve language ever more rapidly so that we can communicate these modalities.

1:07:25

McKenna

It’s a very long process, creating a new language.

1:08:03

McKenna

Transcending the ego and its expectation and its linguistic set, mainly.

1:08:12

McKenna

Yes, language has not been examined enough, it seems to me. All the argument over man’s place in nature and that sort of thing doesn’t take cognizance of the fact that, if you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at. Because we know that our genetic component is only 3% or something removed from chimpanzees, and this and that, but this thing that we do with sound and meaning is of an ontologically different order. And I am not sympathetic with the people who want to blur the distinctions and say that dolphins talk, ants talk, bees talk. They may communicate, but this is a very different thing; what man is able to do. Because for 50,000 years or so the species has not been evolving in the somatotype. Somatotype is relatively steady. What is evolving is culture. And what culture is, really, is language. Culture is merely the epiphenomenal accompaniment of language.

So it is the evolution of language that is changing. And all our religious ontologies in the Western tradition—the insistence on the coming of the Word into the world, the Word becoming flesh—in a sense, man is the Word become flesh. And what all this leads to, I’m not sure. I often like to think that our map of the world is so wrong that where we have centered physics we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. And I don’t think very many people have thought of it in those—

1:10:31

McKenna

Well, in the sense that a book is life with one dimension pulled out of it, and life is something which lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination—in the sense that, for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom. And this is why people like James Joyce, though arcane and difficult to pierce, seem to me central to understanding this, because they’re saying something about the relationship of books, reality, and death; that this is a cycle of expansion and understanding that is happening through language. At one time there were no books.

1:12:08

McKenna

Well, see, what you want is a theory of being true to experience. And what we have by centering physics is a theory of being true to itself—meaning physics doesn’t contradict itself. They go to great pains to make sure that doesn’t happen. On the other hand, the models that it offers bear no relationship to anything anybody can see, experience, know, or understand. So somehow an explanatory vehicle was chosen which explains something, but nothing with any immediacy.

1:13:01

McKenna

Yes, but you want it to be true to experience. And the entire set of objects manipulated by physics are unseen, unknown—I mean, to take as simple an object in physics as the electron: it seems more remote than the resurrected Christ to me.

1:13:28

McKenna

We created them; that’s right. But do these new creations then reflect back on experience? Do we learn, then, to be better people, or more at ease with ourselves? And it seems the answer is no. We just unlock more and more demonic levels of power.

1:13:56

McKenna

But what we need is a unified social theory so that we don’t cause our extinction.

1:14:09

McKenna

Yeah, I don’t regard—I’m not one of the noble savage people. I mean, I’ve spent too much time in the Amazon, and things go on that would curl your hair. There are people whose idea of a hilarious joke is to toss a dog in the fire. But I think there’s something to be learned. You know, I mean, you can stand off and watch somebody tossing a dog in the fire for their own amusement and say, “Well, these people are barbarians.” On the other hand, we carpet bomb Asian cities from 30,000 feet in the air in the name of policy. We don’t even call it fun, we’re so alienated from what we’re doing. So, you know, what’s to make of it?

1:15:35

McKenna

Well, without trying to solve the problem once and forever, let’s just say man has a very strong Gnostic bent. And, you know, Gnosticism, dualism—the idea that you don’t belong where you are, you belong somewhere else, that this is not your world, that you’re a stranger in it—is symptomatic in modern parlance of what’s called alienation. You’re supposed to like where you are. You’re supposed to see yourself as part of the seamless fabric of being, and that sort of thing. However, the people who take that position (that alienation as symptomatic of neurosis) don’t realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet, and the only way that both parties can save themselves is by a separation. And this, on one level, is the greatest crisis that biology has faced since animals left the ocean for the land. On another level, it appears inevitable in the present social context that we are going to go to space. But the birth pangs of doing this are very destructive.

For instance—and I’m sure you’ve heard me say this—that civilization is a 10,000-year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars. But it takes 10,000 to 15,000 years—a moment of biological and geological time. But in that 10,000 to 15,000-year period, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be born somewhere in there, it’s going to look like it’s all up for grabs. We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don’t look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time. We are—humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own.

In other words, we, since the early 1950s, have had a notion of the structure of DNA and this sort of thing. Well, it’s perfectly obvious that, within a century of the discovery of DNA, any species which makes that discovery takes possession of its own form. And we are going to do that in the next fifty years. We are going to design the kind of people that we want to be. And if we don’t want to be people, we will design that out of the picture.

The picture that the mushroom has of the human species is much more like a coral reef. In other words, it sees our artifacture as contiguous with our flesh. We make a distinction. But what it sees is an animal which takes in raw material and excretes it in ideological moles. That’s what we do. We turn ideas into facts on all levels. And this cannot go on any longer on the surface of the planet with the levels of energy and control that we have brought to bear, because we are now in a position to destroy the whole Earth, or to sculpt, to turn it into a Disneyland—which is a kind of destroying of the Earth. So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it and the planet feels it.

What must happen is: there has to be a cleavage. And a birth is a good metaphor, because an infant being born can hardly face the experience with anything other than trepidation. The weightless state, the effortless nurturing, the complete immersion in a support system—all that is ending in earthquakes and spasms and pain and anguish, which must look like a death process. And yet it’s a life process. It is necessary for the mother and the child that this cleavage take place. And this is now happening on a mass cultural level for us. To be who we want to be, we have to leave the planet. As Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake, “up n’ent, prospector, you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings.”

1:21:00

McKenna

Yes, what’s the word for that? Implicate. They are implicate in the lower forms. That’s right. But I don’t know. It’s a great challenge to us to fulfill the things that we can imagine we are capable of. Our imagination is really the sail of the soul. And the question is, you know: where will that sail take us if we will but let it?

1:21:39

McKenna

Well, its relationship to the unconscious, I suppose it is the unconscious made conscious. In other words, all the mythologies—I think it’s Mircea Eliade in Dreams and Mysteries, he talks about the evolution of human flight and says… he talks first about shamanic flight, and then the notion of the dirigible and the Wright Flyer and the spaceship, and he says these ontologically self-transforming images of flight say far more about the nature of the human soul than they do about technology. This is again this idea of James Joyce’s that man would become dirigible.

I haven’t mentioned the flying saucer here this morning, but this is one of the things that I think is very interesting. I think flying saucers have been the province of very dubious intellectual cadres for probably long enough, and that it really should be looked at as a totality symbol which haunts human history in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead thought that the color dove gray haunted human history. In other words, it’s a thing always present. It is the symbol of the ontological transformation of the human species, and always takes upon itself the accoutrements of the current cultural myth so that it can be seen as the intercession of the immaculate conception, or the descent of an angel, or the current myth is that there are probably advanced civilizations somewhere in the universe, and so that this is what it is. It’s really nothing so trivial, you know? It is the alchemical object. It is the blind spot in the consciousness of the race. And it has to be the blind spot because it is a mystery. All appetition for the future is an appetition for this modality of super freedom that comes from transcending the limitations of dimension.

That’s why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology: because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tendencies does not give a true picture of the future; that the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty, and that we have never yet created a method for integrating that uncertainty and planning for it. Novelty is the thing that continually overturns all efforts to project toward a given end state.

1:24:59

McKenna

Yes, absolutely. That’s what it is. That is our world. Our world is in our minds. The kingdom of God is within you. That’s the rap! But the point is, then, to get a lease nailed down somewhere in the world of the imagination so that you can be part of it. Yes, the planet is simply a precursor of what we will project outward when we have the ability to do so. And this is coming soon.

1:25:43

McKenna

I think that we have to make a very reasoned case to the establishment that the psychedelic drugs have to be looked at in a non-hysterical manner by experts. And we don’t know who the experts are. They may not be pharmacologists. They may turn out to be linguists, or they may turn out to be jugglers. But we have to recognize that what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the advancement of human evolution is the evolution of the human mind and these drugs. And before the argument was whether it should be called a hallucinogen or a psychedelic or an entheogen, they were just called “consciousness-expanding drugs.” And that really, as a phenomenological description, is more useful than these other things. They expand consciousness. Well, therefore, we should be really bearing down on them, because the problem is we don’t have enough consciousness, and we don’t know how to direct it and sculpt it and orient it toward our own salvation. So we can’t just take our mental states as given and somehow sacrosanct, and therefore not to be tampered with. We have to actually begin to engineer them. And Arthur Koestler has made this point; this is not big news. But there’s some resistance to it. Again, I think a recursion of dualism in a more dangerous form—the dualism of the natural and the unnatural: yoga is natural, drugs are unnatural—all these dichotomies, I mean, who can argue with the notion that dualism is the root of all evil? How could it be otherwise?

1:28:16

McKenna

You mean the thing which is leading?

1:28:19

McKenna

Well, we need to open a more coherent dialogue with the thing which is leading. Again, the reason I don’t—I am somewhat immune to political anxiety and that sort of thing—is because I really do believe there is a control system that is larger than any human institution. I don’t believe that the evolution of faith on this planet is in the hands of the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, the Jews, Wall Street. No one is in charge. What is in charge is the most intelligent life form on the planet, which happens to be transhuman, not human.

We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious. But we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive. It’s not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing, it is more like an entelechy. It guides, it opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices. You know, I think it was in Mysterium Coniunctionis that Jung said that “the unconscious has a thousand ways of terminating a life that has become meaningless.” A chilling notion! And what he meant was, you know: you’ll step off a curb and be hit by a bus because you didn’t look. But the real analysis is that a decision had been made at a higher control level to just fling you away. Well, how much more disturbing it is to think that that could be possible on a global level.

So we have to open a dialogue and no longer—you know, all these words (intuition, artistic vision, trance, memes like poetry), these are all ways of trying to have a dialogue with the control mechanism. And the psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, I think lay that open. We need to have professional facilitators of dialogue. We need to understand who is speaking. We only now have possibilities, you know, that the voice that speaks on psilocybin is now extraterrestrial, you know, with its own history, its own evolutionary standards, et cetera. That it is what Jung would call an autonomous portion of the psyche that has slipped beyond the ego’s control—meaning that you’re crazy, or at least that you are experiencing a form of consciousness that’s not validated by this society.

1:31:28

McKenna

Well, this is the question: is God mad? You know? Are we living in a universe run by a mad god where the choice for death could be made as easily as the choice for life? This is what the Gnostics of the Hellenistic era feared.

1:31:54

McKenna

Well, is it a bottom up thing or a top down thing?

1:32:22

McKenna

Yes, that’s right. Yes, I see what you’re saying.

1:32:33

McKenna

Well, I’ll tell you. A few years ago, we bought ten acres in Hawaiʻi and moved as many of these Peruvian drug plants as we could get in there. So that was four or five years ago. Now those plants are grown, and hopefully the next time we go back to Hawaiʻi, we’ll be able to produce ayahuasca. We’re calling it Hawaiʻiahuasca. Other than that, I don’t know what to tell you. Botanists don’t think in terms of live plants. They always make voucher specimens. So we were—in 1982 or 1981, whenever it was—we were really the first expedition looking at Amazonian psychobotany that really put emphasis on live plants, and we got out hundreds of them, you know. But then, growing them, they can only be grown in greenhouses or in a subtropical environment. But eventually we’re hoping that researchers who need, who want to grow the plants can buy stock from a place like that and not have the expense of having to send an expedition to the Amazon.

1:34:10

McKenna

Well, when we originally conceived this idea of a psychobotanical farm, we bought land near Florencia in the state of Caquetá in Colombia, and then it became politically unfriendly to foreign scientists, and so we stayed away for years. And then I just read last week thirteen tons of cocaine was busted in Colombia, and it was all in Caquetá. So I assume it’ll be years before it’s cooled down enough to do it there. And I like the idea of doing it in Hawaiʻi. The Amazon is so difficult an environment to carry out even minimal field studies in that it’s very hard to do much other than interview the informants, collect the vouchers, collect the drugs, and get out. Because after two or three weeks you’re really beginning to show the strain. I mean, it’s hard to sleep in hammocks, so you go into a kind of never asleep, never awake, and the strange diet, and the intestinal problems, insect toxins. People are not always 100% cooperative and honest. Numerous problems. And since we were not ethnographers or anthropologists per se, our real focus was on the plants and the drugs. So hopefully, in Hawaiʻi, a more commodious and low-key atmosphere can be created for experimenting with these things.

This relates to your question, which is: how can a group of people create an experimental context for doing these drugs with an eye toward making some kind of progress, or getting something out of it? And it’s a real challenge. We were amazed. When we went to Peru and began taking ayahuasca, we had never taken drugs with groups of thirty people, you know. We had either taken them alone, or one or two people, or occasionally with 100,000 other people at a rock concert. But the notion of thirty or forty, it’s very intense. And without a tradition it will be even more demanding.

But it’s important to do. The whole problem in psychedelic research is the reluctance to have human subjects in the picture, you know. As soon as that begins happening, the institutions and the government and people’s wish to make careers rather than to actually do original work, a whole bunch of factors come into play that make it very, very frustrating. And yet the LD50 in rats, the absolute structural determinations, the botany, the chemistry, the linguistic studies, you can only go so far with this stuff. The real thing is: what does it do?

1:37:38

McKenna

That’s right.

1:37:43

McKenna

Well, I think this is Dennis’ notion. What he wants to do, really—and I think he has Frank Barr interested and some other people—is return one more time at least to the Amazon and study them taking it, and actually take blood samples, and study diet, and get a full biomedical study of what’s going on. And that should be sufficient data, then, that you could get a grant for human experimentation in this country. All this remains to be done. The work is just beginning to be done on psychedelics. Essentially, the botany is now well in hand. There are only botanical details now. But the chemistry, the pharmacology, the neurophysiology, the psychology, these are just wide open areas.

1:38:51

McKenna

Oh, thank you very much.

1:38:54

McKenna

I would like to hear from some of you who have been so silent. People who are either appalled that we’re this deep into this, or…!

1:40:18

McKenna

Oh yeah, for sure. Yes, it doesn’t call itself that, it calls itself trance. But trance is not a state of unconsciousness, it’s in fact a state of full alertness, but you can’t move. And you don’t experience this as paralysis because you don’t care to move. But yes, I think that there must be stillness for these things to manifest. One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality. People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them they will work. And this is not true at all, especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you’re attempting to conjure. So that, you know, a drug will potentiate you for a vision state, but a number of other things have to be present. Energy and stillness being, I think, the two most important ones. And then a third factor, which is the invocation. You must invoke it in some way. And it’s hard to explain what that is. It’s sort of like, you know, the difference between being alone and with someone. Though you are alone taking the drug, you have to assume the I–Thou tension. And then you will discover the Thou on the other end of the equation. And so the stilling will allow this. It’s almost—sensory deprivation is what’s required. Not in the formal sense of a tank or anything like that, but you must sit still in darkness, and you must look at your closed eyelids with the expectation of seeing something. And then you will.

1:42:40

McKenna

I think that the context is isolation. That’s what they would say about this. They say, “Well, we go into isolation. We put ourselves away. We put ourselves into a tree or a cult hut or something like that, and do not move around a lot.”

1:43:07

McKenna

Well, this question, though, of the role of hallucinogens in Taoist practice is not well understood. If you know James Ware’s book, the attention given to fungi is out of all proportion. I mean, their pharmacopoeia was largely fungal. There are no known psilocybin mushrooms from China reported. However, this is a place for somebody to make a quick reputation, I bet. If you chose carefully where you went to look, I’ll bet you would find it. Because we know Stropharia cubensis is in Thailand, Laos, and there is no reason at all that it shouldn’t be in southern China. And it was in southern China that the Taoist pharmacopoeia was evolved and elaborated.

1:44:03

McKenna

Strickman.

1:44:05

McKenna

Yes. Oh yes. Yes, he’s doing very interesting work in all of this.

1:44:13

McKenna

I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been. You know, Carl Ruck and Wasson wrote a very convincing book to show that the Eleusinian Mysteries were a cult of ergot intoxication. I thought that sounded totally crazy before I read the book. I thought that it was going to be some flung-together case that would convince nobody. Actually, I can’t believe that it’s anything else. Having read the book, the evidence is overwhelming. Well, Eleusis was the central wellspring of mystery for the Western mind for 2,000 years. Everybody who was anybody went to Eleusis and had the experience. And there were times when the mystery was profane to the point that writers can speak of wealthy Athenians who had the mystery in their house, were able to offer it to their guests after dinner. Well, what kind of mystery is this?

And John Allegro wrote a much less convincing book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, trying to say that Christianity itself was a mushroom cult—in fact, going much further than that, saying that Christ himself was, in fact, no person at all, but a system of coded epigrams for a mushroom. His case is harder to judge because it depends on a knowledge of Aramaic philology.

But my brother has suggested to me and, in fact, has set an outline for a book. He believes that consciousness itself arose in the higher primates in a feedback relationship with hallucinogenic plants. In other words, he would go much further than Wasson, who’s saying religion was caused by all that. He’s saying thought itself was caused by monkeys relating to these plants. And we know from laboratory experiments that, if you set monkeys in a situation where they can smoke DMT by just walking up to a pipette and taking a hit, that 20% of the monkeys will refuse food and water in preference to that. Well, now… so yes, that’s us! We’d rather be stoned. And so having this predilection, apparently it’s simply the shift is what they like. They like the thrill, the shift of modality from down to up and up to down. But you stretch that out over a hundred thousand years, and the next thing you know, you have the integral calculus, and the 384-byte chip, and all the rest of it.

So it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship between certain plants and certain monkeys, and that you don’t have humanness unless you have the plants and the monkeys together. This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture. In Colombia once I saw a graffiti—and my Spanish; I can’t get it right—but there was a picture of a mushroom and it said, “Without this you are not yourself.” So this is—you know, Arthur Koestler, I think it was in The Ghost in the Machine, said very clearly that he felt there was no hope for the human species without chemical intervention; that we cannot be the sharp-fanged monkey and the possessor of atomic weapons, and that we are going to have to chemically intervene to mute the monkey proclivities. And it may be true that the depth of their influence upon us, our thought systems—language!

I hold the peculiar opinion that language preceded meaning by millennia; that long before people could communicate, they discovered how interesting the small mouth noises were, and made them for each other as a form of entertainment, which then bifurcated into chanting and singing. But it was very late in this experimenting with small mouth noises that someone got the idea that you could assign a meaning to a certain mouth noise, and everybody would agree that that’s what that noise meant, and then you could discuss things. So, you know, we are creatures of language and thought, and probably because these drugs, these plants, first kicked that over in us.

1:50:39

McKenna

Well, the way I think of it is a third possibility, a kind of a geometric model, which is just to say: here you have a grid called “experience of the world,” and then we have “waking,” so that’s a dot on the grid. Then we have “dreaming,” that’s another dot on the grid. But you can’t construct a three-dimensional reality until you have a third dot. And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing. It’s providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor, so that it isn’t really—you really notice this with acid. It isn’t the taking of LSD that’s so important, it’s the talking about it. But having, in other words, a reference point. Remember when we were all freaks, and all we talked about was how in the light of acid everything was thus and so, and thus and so, and thus and so? And it took about five years—longer for some of us—to assimilate that so we no longer had to run around saying how everything was in the light of LSD. We had integrated that point on the grid. And I think that’s what it is, is: we tap into worlds of experience. And each world of experience stretches our metaphors, is a boot in the tail for further evolution of language. And that’s all the evolution we have now.

I said this earlier, but it’s a point worth making again. It isn’t culture that’s changing and carrying everything with it. It’s language that’s changing, and it carries culture with it. Culture lags far behind. But the evolution of language is the evolution of reality. This is a cliché, but the challenge of the cliché is to make it operational so that, like God, when you utter a word, it becomes so, you know?

1:53:04

McKenna

Well, the only answer I can give is probably not a very good one. The forces of—let me put it a different way. The government gets to everything first, and they have been at the problem, you ask, for twenty years with an amazing little success.

1:53:35

McKenna

Well, there are many reasons why. But it doesn’t seem very pervertable. They were very excited at first, you know. But then—and I think what they got into (although perhaps you can say more about this, because you probably follow the literature), they like to give psychedelic drugs to people and then hypnotize them, and then get them to do terrible things which they wouldn’t remember later. And claims were made that this was possible or being done, but it certainly didn’t seem to come into wide application. They also looked at, during the Vietnam War, they built artillery shells which would deliver aerosol DMT. They even envisioned dropping one of these aerosol DMT bombs on a Vietnamese town, everyone falling into this intense hallucinogenic state, and they could just roll right in. But like plans in the 1960s radicals had, there was the fantasy of poisoning water supplies with LSD. Well, it just turns out that there are chemical factors, and buffering problems, and it just is not very easy to do these things.

I suppose maybe I’m too sanguine about, it and irrationally so, because when I asked this question of the mushroom entity, the perversion of this, I was told that it was good in such a platonic sense that you could only approach it if you were good. So that it was like ethical mercury: the grasping hand would find that it flowed right through it and there was nothing left. But I may be God’s fool, you know. That may be—certainly we know the Nazis used scopolamine as a truth serum. Although now, when you look at the data on scopolamine, it’s not very impressive. People lie as much as they tell the truth, so it’s a little puzzling as to why. But definitely—

1:55:53

McKenna

That’s right. That’s right.

1:56:04

McKenna

That’s right.

1:56:16

McKenna

And also technology is the production—you could think of it as the residue of the workings of the imagination. And the imagination is under the control of the superego, or the overmind. So that I think technology has a weird way of always escaping the intentions of those who are working with it. A perfect example would be the chip which makes possible the personal computer. That thing was developed under contract to the Air Force by, I think, Sperry Rand, and when it was finally finished it didn’t work right. It was far too slow. They wanted it for guidance systems of missiles and this kind of thing. So this thing is a thousand times too slow. It’s just baloney. It’s worthless. Toss it in the wastebasket. But somebody said, “But, wait a minute, you know what you could do with this?” And created an information revolution that must be absolutely appalling to the forces that wish to control.

I have an Apple II computer and a 350-dollar modem, and I can access the Defense Department databases, I can access the complete shelf list of the Library of Congress, all chemical abstracts. In short, all information in the world I can access from my living room in Sonoma County—and so can anyone else who buys a thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. This was not part of the plan. This is, in fact, a terrifying thing.

And, my God, these computer networks where, as an example, a few years ago someone invented a device—this is an anecdote that will give you the idea—someone invented a little device which looked like a ballpoint pen, and it was a small cybernetic device that could be programmed with a category (like, let’s say, stamp collector or sadomasochist), and when you wore this pen, if you got near anyone else who was wearing a similar device programmed with the same word, your palm would begin flashing a little light. The notion was that these things could be sold to people who hang out in singles bars and would create a dimension neither public nor private, a new dimension where people of similar interests could get together completely. So isn’t that interesting? And this thing had a range of twenty feet, okay? So now comes the a thousand dollars’ worth of cybernetic equipment and the telephone, and it’s the same device—it doesn’t clip into your shirt pocket, but we’ve extended the range to include the entire planet.

1:59:29

McKenna

Oh, you do. You go into these computer networks and you say, you know, who listed that they were interested in mushrooms, psychedelics, psilocybin, consciousness-altering drugs, hallucinogens? And then, out of 70,000 users on the network, in four and a half seconds, it tells you that twelve people listed one or some of those words. You immediately type a little letter to each one, shoot it off through the system, and you’re in contact with those people. This makes conspiracy on a level almost impossible to conceive; a form of liberation.

And these kinds of hardwired technologies are simply patriarchal follow-ons to the feminizing of consciousness that is happening in drugs. In other words, you can almost think of drugs as the software and cybernetics as the hardware of what is being done. But vast areas are being opened up for human interaction, completely unregulated by any kind of institution. And these will create new kinds of social realities.

2:00:45

McKenna

It is a psychedelic. It’s a hardwired psychedelic experience. People tend to think of computers as masculine, I guess, because the first generation of people who built them were male. But what they actually are are the mysterious mama matrix of information. It is like the unconscious made conscious. The unconscious is ceasing to be unconscious: all information is rising into this dimension of accessibility, so that you need not wonder how many people died of tuberculosis in western Nepal last year, you just key into the biomedical index and you find out.

And this seems to me—you know, the word “psychedelic” has been attached to the drugs and confined, but many things are psychedelic. Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids, and supports consciousness is psychedelic if we take the word down to its Greek roots [ψυχή, psychḗ: “soul” or “mind;” δηλείν, dēleín: “to manifest”]. So this is very exciting.

2:02:01

McKenna

Such a question so late in the game! Well, the I Ching—you asked about stillness concepts. The I Ching is a very old system of something that was created out of a combination of Taoist yoga techniques and mathematical curiosity. What was happening, I think, was that in states of deep meditation modalities were observed. You know, it says in the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra that when the Buddha attained enlightenment, through the night he watched the causal uprising and downflowing. And this is what you see in these deep states. It’s called stilling the heart meditations. You see the passage of modalities of some kind, their elements. And the Chinese noted that there seemed to be 64 of them, or you only needed 64 terms to describe them. And they sensed that it was something about time. But their linguistical and categorical imperatives were such that they didn’t see it the way we would. They assumed these things to be like archetypes.

What I suggested was that they were actually varieties of time. And actually there was a sixteenth-century Chinese philosopher who pulled this all together out of the ancient sources and said, you know, the hexagrams are descriptive of time. They’re hierarchically structured at many levels, so that on one level hexagrams are influencing a situation and passing away at a rate of many a second, and on another level at a rate of many a minute, and on another level at a rate of many an hour, and on another level at a rate of a few per century. And it is the interpenetration of these modalities on various levels that finally issues into what we call the here and now situation. And it’s too complicated to go into here, but there is a way of looking at the sequence and structuring it that allows you then to draw maps of novelty and its ingression into time; to create a completely non-scientific theory of time that is nevertheless not a cult—meaning has no hidden elements—and is completely mathematical and predictable and self consistent.

2:05:21

McKenna

Well, like DNA. These very large systems with very large numbers of elements can have irrational inputs and still have everything end up in the right place at the end. I mean, if you read Prigogine’s work, where you discover that global rules govern situations which, when analyzed very locally, appear highly chaotic. And this is what the I Ching is saying. I mean, here we have a world which appears highly chaotic, but which, when analyzed at higher levels, turns out to be describable by very rigorous methods.

2:06:12

McKenna

That’s right. This problem of order and constraint is a very difficult one. For instance, a sociologist can tell you that in the next twelve months, I don’t know what the number would be, but let’s say thirty people are going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Well now, does that—so then someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge, maybe because they’re despondent, they’ve lost their job, they just don’t want to live any longer. Are they free? How free are they if, at the end of the year, we look at the record and say, yes, it certainly is true, thirty people jumped off the bridge just like you said they would. So apparently there was almost no freedom in the total system. It came in right on the dot. Yet every one of the people who jumped off the bridge felt they were making a completely independent choice, exercising free will. Were they free?

2:07:18

McKenna

Perhaps, or it may be something else. It may have something to do with how probability works. It’s not clear that probability is a good way of describing nature. The only time we get randomness is when you examine the output of a random number generator. There is no other process in nature that can be relied upon to produce random numbers, yet we use the notion of randomness. Our entire physics is probabilistic and statistical with the notion of randomness—a very unexamined philosophically notion centered right in the middle of things. And it may be a kind of fudging. What we think is an explanation that things are probabilistic is actually a statement of complete ignorance: that we don’t know how things work, so we say they’re probabilistic.

2:08:43

McKenna

But it’s created all kinds of consequences that were not expected, like the notion of the citizen, and the way democracy is, and the way power is apportioned. Because we have these probabilistic and statistical notions about human beings. Politically we atomize ourselves. We say, you know—we live in the fiction that all citizens are equal, which is absolute poppycock. It’s simply that, how else can we have the kind of social system we have, and have it function? So the tools, you have to be aware of the tool, of what the tool does to you, as well as—yes.

McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered vis-à-vis the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and crimp and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definitions. And the drugs have done that to a great extent.

2:10:16

McKenna

Although this abolition of the future is a controversial thing. For instance, I try to produce maps of the future with the I Ching on my computer, and people say: “You want to destroy the future! You want to take the surprise out of being.” Well, that seems to me rather silly. I mean, if you tell me you’re going to South America, and I give you a National Geographic map of South America, have I destroyed the trip for you? Now there’s no point in going? You know where every capital city is, where the rivers run, how the mountains lay. It’s that I just ruined it for you, you know? I don’t think so. Because what we are interested in is the details. Maps don’t make it unnecessary to go to the places they portray.

2:11:20

McKenna

Yes. People don’t want to feel that freedom has been compromised, you know. But my theory of time is not a predictive theory of events. I’ve just quantified one quality, which I call novelty—following Alfred North Whitehead—and talk about how history is the career of novelty ingressing into time. And sometimes novelty comes fast, and sometimes it comes slow. Consequently, its ingression rate can be portrayed as a line graph. And in some periods there’s very little novelty. There is disorganization and compromise of connection. And then in other periods of history—we’ll say Periclean Athens, or Mughal Delhi, or the twentieth century, or the Nara period in Japan—there is great cohesiveness. But then there is this ebb and flow of something which physics will not be found to describe. In other words, I like to make the analogy that science describes what is possible. What is possible? And what we need is a theory that tells us, out of what is possible, what is it that will undergo the formality of actually occurring? We have no theory of what, out of possible set of things, why certain things will undergo the formality of occurring. And this is what we need.

2:13:16

McKenna

But science only describes the most trivial kinds of event systems.

2:13:26

McKenna

Well, it’s a good first try, because it’s the simplest case. What science is interested in is those situations where, if the initial conditions are reestablished exactly, the process will occur exactly as it occurred every other time. The initial conditions are the same, the end state will be the same. But in all experience this isn’t true. I mean, if I say that I’m falling in love, and you once fell in love, it doesn’t mean that the way your love affair ended is how mine will end. And so there is no guidance for understanding by extrapolation of past cases. And this is where we need help, because this is where we feel and bleed, is in the realm of these processes where initial conditions are no guarantee of final end state.

2:14:41

McKenna

You mean we would fear to be victims?

2:14:55

McKenna

Well, presumably, if you have a theory which will tell you how a situation will evolve, then you steer it the way you want it. You know, it isn’t rote. It isn’t like a ball rolling downhill.

2:15:12

McKenna

Well, there’s no escaping the input of the fact that there is a hand on the tiller. The uncertainty principle has to be expanded to include everything. And to actually—the notion of certainty is a culturally naïve and unexamined notion.

See, the problem with Western thinking, and science especially, is that it’s a historical phenomenon. The oldest scientists were people like Thales and these people 2,000 years in the past. This means that the most epistemologically fundamental assumptions of science are the least examined for flaws in their sophistication in the light of experience. The fact that we rely on an intellectual method 2,000 years old almost precludes our understanding anything interesting. That’s why people like Ralph Abraham (with his theory of dynamics) and Ilya Prigogine (with his non-equilibrium thermodynamics) and Manfred Eigen (with his autocatalytic hypercycles), these are interesting new approaches because they don’t predict end states from initial conditions. They only predict broad target areas where processes can be expected to come to rest.

I think a great deal of anxiety would leave human society if we had this grip on the future. You can make a biological argument that what life does—leaving aside what it is—what it does is it conquers dimensionality. The earliest lifeforms had no impression of the world except that portion of the world which physically impinged upon them. In other words, they had a tactile sense. And then, very slowly, light-sensitive melanin chemistries were entrapped, and light-sensitive cells arose, so that light and darkness could be distinguished. And then, following upon that, motility, so that a third dimension was claimed: the dimension of space. And then, as higher animals evolved with binocular vision and the ability to walk into the space perceived, three dimensions were gained. Intelligence—the unique human property of being able to command past experience as though it were present through memory—is like extending this dimension-conquering faculty to time. And I think that the psychedelic drug shows that that’s the way the evolutionary arrow is pointing in man.

Again, Mircea Eliade’s statement about how the images of flight spoke volumes about the internal aspirations of the human psyche: we want to conquer dimensions. Life wants to conquer dimensions. And first it conquers the tactile, then the immediate two-dimensional space, then the immediate three-dimensional space, and finally, through memory, the dimension of time is added in. And theories of the sort that the I Ching represents, and that my own ideas represent—whether or not they’re true—they represent an effort to do for the future what the faculty called memory does for the past.

2:19:49

McKenna

Yes, well, sometimes you’re trying to understand your own life, and sometimes you’re trying to create a general theory of being. And these things will issue into different sorts of stances.

2:20:10

McKenna

Essentially, yes. I mean, I believe that eschatological objects—if you want to put it that way—cast shadows backwards over the landscape of history, and that we are drawn towards these things. They are what C. H. Waddington called creodes: they are narrow, canalized pathways of development that it would take an enormous amount of energy to lift you out of that channel and drop you somewhere else. It isn’t impossible, but it’s highly improbable.

This is why religion cannot be dismissed, because religions like the mass intuition about fate. And the religious ontology for the human species is generally eschatological—not always; not in Buddhism. Or, well, there are exceptions. But it generally is eschatological, in that we are seen to be in the grip of a backward-flowing casuistry; that there is something pulling us forward: the telos, so unwelcome in science. Science insists on operating without teleology, and so its explanatory power is in proportion to that. But the sense of the telos is very great, and I think that it’s physically there; that what is really happening is that there are forward-moving—meaning from the past to the present—causal chains, and there are causal chains which operate the other way, from the future into the past. The present is the interference pattern caused by the forward- and backward-flowing casuistries inherent in time. Where they meet, they form an interference pattern, a standing wave, if you will—which is what a hologram is. And it’s that which is experienced as the now, and it is half of the past and half of the future.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the future—

2:22:56

McKenna

But in that sense the past is a part of the present. It was Proust who said the past can never be understood until it is remembered. And it’s that idea.

2:23:11

McKenna

Yes, nothing is fixed. This is for sure.

2:23:29

McKenna

Well, the past is constantly changing. I mean, one could study the changing past. Did you know that the Renaissance was invented in the 1850s? It didn’t exist before a German historian decided that’s what had happened. And now we live in the light of the Renaissance, you know? It’s just we don’t question. Nobody was running around Florence talking about how great it is that we’re living in the Renaissance now, you know?

2:24:02

McKenna

History is fiction. Or, as Stephen Dedalus said: history is the nightmare I am trying to awaken from.

2:24:21

McKenna

At the end of time?

2:24:24

McKenna

Yes, I think so. I mean, I’m basically on this issue fairly platonic. I mean, I think that, you know, Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. And that, I think, is probably true: that eternity is all time, and it somehow exists in a higher-dimensional matrix than what we experience, so that we can only section that dimension to create the three- or four-dimensional world that we live in. But that there is this platonic completedness—at least in essence, whatever that means.

And that sort of carries me back to my time maps. They don’t say what will happen, they only say that certain levels of novelty and its lack will be fulfilled at certain points in time by some set of events. You see the difference? So you can’t have an absolute determinism. If you have an absolute determinism you preclude the possibility of thought meaning anything. It just means I’m saying what I’m saying because I have to say it, you’re thinking what you’re thinking because you must think it. So an absolute determinism is hopeless and indefensible, and destroys the intellectual enterprise entirely.

So we have to have a free future. But how free? Looking at the case of the Golden Gate Bridge and the number of people who will jump off it. And certain things are very bound: the time of sunrise tomorrow morning—you wouldn’t feel great trepidation about making a prophecy about that. But nevertheless, forces could be invoked which would make it rise earlier or later. But it is very much embedded in the matrix of inertia. But everything interesting is not, is much more up for grabs.

What psychedelics do—and I begin this as a kind of summation—is: they enrich experience. Which sounds trivial, except that experience is all that we have. One of the things—if my career (or whatever it is) could be said to be about one thing, it’s the notion that your understanding depends upon yourself. In other words, no myth of the tribe will satisfy—these myths like science and religion and politics. They do not satisfy. When I talk about this I usually mention the notion of the flying saucer. People who believe in flying saucers as alien spacecraft nevertheless so undervalue their own identity that they believe that contact will come to the Secretary General of the United Nations, he will assemble Time, Newsweek, and the reporters from The Economist. They will get together with Carl Sagan and whoever, and they will all explain it to all of us, and then we will understand what’s going on. This is a sold out point of view. You have accepted their definition of you as a citizen.

The real fact of the matter is an anarchy of the imagination where each one of us is our own Magellan. We are not living in the age when all frontiers have disappeared when all things have been tamed and made mundane we are living in the most exciting era that has ever been because we are about to turn to the real terra incognito which is the terra incognito in our minds and it is for us to do and this is why the drugs are so controversial because they free you from the myth of the tribe and that single fact the fact that they decondition you they don’t decondition you at the chemical level like make you forget everything you believe so you have to start over they decondition you at the ideological level so you just look around at the society you are in and its contradictions and preposterous assumptions are perfectly visible to you and that frees you then to create a new world through self experience not by taking Heidegger’s word for it or somebody else’s word for it but creating it through your own experience and this is what we should all be involved in and this would carry us to psychological balance its trying to make sense of our intuitions in the light of the enormous pressure to accept prepackaged ideologies that makes neurotics of us all and the only way out of that is to step back from it and to say I will only believe what I know. I will be like someone from Missouri. You know, show me and I’ll believe it. This is why I always, my favorite person in the New Testament is, uh, is Thomas, the doubter. Because if you will recall, uh, Christ, uh, returned to, the apostles were gathered in the upper room, and Christ came to them, I think on the fortieth day, but Thomas was not there. So then, later, and then Christ went away, and so then Thomas came and they said, the master was with us. And he said, you know, you guys have been smoking too many of those little brown cigarettes. The master has gone from the plane. Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it. So then a few days later, Thomas was with them, and Christ came again. And he said to him, Thomas, put your hand into the wound that you might believe. And he did, and he believed. Okay, so what, what conclusion do we draw from this story? The conclusion is, that of all of the people, of all of the disciples, the only person in all of human history recorded to have actually touched the incorporeal body of the risen Christ was Thomas the Doubter. And he was allowed that. He was vouchsafed that unique, uh, um, blessing because he doubted. And that’s, yes, he insisted on experiencing it himself. And so he touched the incorporeal body, the white stone at the end of time. And this is what we are trying to do, because, you know, if you can get your hand on the doorknob, you can turn it and walk through. And the Secretary General of the United Nations need not be at your elbow. Nobody need be at your elbow. And this is what shamans know. They have touched the doorknob, turned it, and walked through. And they are out of time, and out of history. And their immense personal presence, or at least the immense personal presence that I have experienced, uh, among the ones who are genuine, is because they have taken responsibility for their model of the world, and have modeled the world based entirely on their own experience. Yes? One question. I mean, I was never exposed to any drugs, never tried any drugs, nor anything. And the way you’re talking, uh, feels to me like this is the only way to, um, be aware, to become aware, and I saw my own being, my own. To me, the experience that came to me, uh, the near death experience, which, without any drugs, without anything, my life changed after this, because I became aware of a different dimension that I never was aware before. But it was without drugs, without anything. So how do you explain this? No, I don’t think drugs are the only way. I think that they are the most effective way when you’re talking about transforming an entire society, or a planet. But there is, you know, many shamans are not drug users. We’ve here spoken, because we spoke mostly of Amazonian shamanism, as though the use of hallucinogens and shamanism are always co present. Not necessarily true. Uh, I have, often people say, you mean you don’t believe in yoga, you don’t believe in, uh, well, I think that these ways may be efficacious, but I think we are caught in a culture crisis where there is real, uh, immediacy to the notion that we have to get on with it. But yes, near death experiences, uh. .. near death experiences. Because to me it became very, I became very aware of new dimensions, and my own truth came. I didn’t have to learn, nobody taught me my own truth. And the world looked at me like it was supposed to be. And, uh, never changed since then. But I’d like to know, how could you compare the two experiences? Is there any way? Well, I guess you can compare them in their results. You can’t compare them in their content. That’s the thing. Some people think you can compare them in their chemistry. That’s true. So, I think that, um, there might be more similarity, um, for when you first consider the point. I’d like to get back to your, one of your concluding statements on how the use of these psychedelics will, um, decondition a society for its mythology. Now that doesn’t seem to have happened with the Amazonians. It really seems to have reinforced their mythology. Well, based on drug experiences. Yes, that’s right. Well, we have no record. We find them using this drug. We have no notion of what ideological transformations may have brought them to that point. There are tribes in the Amazon, right next door to the people we’re talking about, who don’t use drugs. And so we can’t know what upheavals of ideology they have been through. When there is a tradition which, um, supports the notion of the deconditioned individual, then you get the institution of shamanism. We don’t have any comparable institution. So that there, if you are of a shamanic temperament, you will be selected out and put in that position. Um, but we, we do, but we don’t give a credence. We’re in a total united sort of context. We have sports, for example. There’s ample evidence for athletes entering into all sorts of shamanic experiences, experiencing sin and everything else, and not knowing what in the world is going on with them. You know, and they, it just happens. And marathon runners and droves have these kinds of experiences. Um, distance swimmers, anyone who gets into hyperventilating, tremendous physical activity. We do have that in our culture. It’s a warrior type ethic as opposed to more of a healing one. It does exist. It’s also a question of how much you can decondition yourself in the absence of any other example. In other words, if you’re part of a nomadic Amazonian tribe, there is no model, there is the social model of the tribe, and the only thing you can decondition yourself into is acceptance of the secret non public aspects of the ideology in the men’s societies or something like that. Yeah, and we have, we have pharmacological means for intervening where, and we need them because we’re at such a terminal state with this problem. It’s a personal response to it, but also on a social level we need to have it happen. That’s right. We need to talk about it. And it isn’t necessary for everybody to go out and get loaded. It’s more about participating in a new language of self reflection. This is what we need to do. Some of us should take drugs. It’s a professional kind of obligation. You know, that’s what a shaman is. He’s the guy whose professional obligation is to take drugs. But we all have an obligation to create a language that values us and the people around us. And this begins with a language that values the self and our experiences. Experience, this is the central thing above and beyond all else. I wanted to come back to something that you were saying a while ago and that was the deconditioning of the culture. And I just have a couple of observations and I’d like to know if you have any reaction to this. It’s always been a curious fact to me that during the sixties, as we were beginning to move out into space, we were also taking drugs at a very heavy rate. There was an inner and outer exploration that was going on there simultaneously. Out of that experience, I think we have in some ways reconditioned the society specifically in regards to the psychedelic experience and the ecology movement and beginning to see things in more whole patterns. And I wonder if you have any comments about any of that. Well, I think all of these things, like the ecology movements, the hippies, the dietary sensitivity, all of this stuff arises out of the awareness of the culture crisis, basically traceable back to the bomb. I think the bomb has had a wonderful effect in focusing people’s attention wonderfully on problems that before they just tended to fly off in all directions behind. The thing I might say about space, I don’t believe that we will go to space as we are so that we’re going to create a South Bronx on Mars and to slavery and the moons of Jupiter and this kind of thing. I think space is too much like the imagination, this enfolding velvet darkness that stretches to infinity, that cries out to have artistic objects dropped into it. It’s like going into the mind, going into the unconscious, the same thing that we must do here on Earth before we go to space. We cannot afford the unconscious anymore. This is a concept that has to take its place as the high button shoe. We must be entirely conscious because we have the power to shatter the Earth like a rotten apple with a stick of dynamite inside of it. So there can be no more talk of the unconscious or the fate of the primate body or anything like that. We have to get our act together because nature is very ruthless and you cannot rest on the notion that there’s some kind of deus ex machina denouement which is going to make it all right even though we blundered endlessly. So it’s basically, strangely enough, a call to responsibility which is what is always charged against psychedelic drug use is its flagrant irresponsibility. So it’s a pretty. .. the lines are drawn. Sounds like you’ve got a pretty big job ahead. I think so. Thank you all very, very much for helping me think about all of this.