Very nice to see you all. Well, I never… I always imagined there was this scene in the story, the scene of coming back to Esalen, and seeing all the—not all the people I know here, but some of the people who, over the years, made it such a different place. I’m not… you see me less certain of what I’m going to say than you’ve ever seen me.

It’s a very interesting experience to be told that you have a very short time of life, and try to take that on board and live it through, and then some months later to have that pulled back and told, “No, no, you may make it.” It’s a process of evaluation that’s very, very interesting, and I would never have thought that it would move me so deeply and quickly to understand things differently. I don’t know how many of you people have had this experience. It turns out they’re out there by the tens of millions, I assume.

And I don’t know exactly what to say about it. When I first got this diagnosis, the doctors just simply said: no one escapes. This was their direct words to me: no one escapes. And that’s pretty hard to hear when you’re planning in life, and trying to work with ideas, and modeling culture through ideas, and this sort of thing. And it turns on all the lights in terms of showing you values. I mean, what matters (as far as I can tell) is quality of life and quality of the love in your life. And if you have these two things going, you have all the wind beneath your wings that you probably need to lift you anywhere you have to go. And, well, what else can I say? There’s the man right there.

So, quality—well, one of the things I had to take on board with all of this is that baby boomers, people my age (I’m 50, soon to be 53, God willing), have been through the most toxic period of exposure to a culture that anybody’s ever had through the forties, late forties, fifties, early sixties: radioactive waste, food preservatives, all of this stuff was just part of life. And this is why there are epidemics of cancer and of immune breakdown disease. Well, so then my response to it was to sort of go back on these Esalen type of reflexes—to some degree. I mean, everybody has to make their own choices. But if you get anywhere near a situation like this, then what you have to look at is: what kind of an intervention are you going to make? A lot of people are fatalists. And this needs to be looked at very hard because on one level, fatalism is casting yourself on the breast of nature and just saying, you know, “Take me to shore.” On the other hand, fatalism is saying, “I haven’t a clue. Take me to shore.” Where do we go from here?

And my great good fortune in terms of my personal fate was that my brother is a professional pharmacologist. So he could look at drugs one by one. And when you get into a situation like this, drugs become one third of everything. It’s food, it’s surgery and radiation, and it’s drugs. And each of these things has to be evaluated. And what you discover is that every university, every medical research center, every doctor has drugs and a box of mice in the back of his office where he’s hoping, dreaming that there’s something there. And they want you to join. They want to give you something. And they have always a theory that sounds great. And some of these drugs can be taken with other drugs, so that’s fine. Others can’t. So you’re making absolute choices, being told, “Okay, do this and you can’t do anything else. What are you going to do?” And you say, “Well, what does this drug do if it is effective?” They say, “Well, if it’s effective, it’s complete recovery.” CR: complete recovery. You say, “Well, what if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do?” “Well, incontinence, madness, destruction of libido, loss of memory, and you can’t balance your checkbook.” You say, “Great! Are there options?” “No.”

So what I did for my situation, which was somewhat unconventional, was: I had very severe brain seizures on the 22nd of May. And Christy, my partner, pushed me into our white truck and got me down to the road for CPR, and the ambulance came, and so forth and so on. Within 48 hours or so, we knew from CAT scans that I had this right frontal GBM; glioblastoma. Stage four in the right frontal lobe; the worst. I mean, the worst. And so the brain surgeon proposed gamma knife surgery, which is basically 202 sources of cobalt-60. This junk from the fifties, from the bomb making. And they can open these little holes one by one, and they’re like nuclear acupuncture, just one nuclear needle after another brought together in the center of your head somewhere. This is the tricky part. Somewhere in the center of your head. Who decides? These guys stay up all night with their blackboards and their computer software, figuring out how to target this stuff.

So, believe it or not, this is an outpatient procedure. You know, you go in at 10 a.m. and you leave at 4 p.m. and they’ve given you so much radiation, you might as well have watched Los Angeles turn to ash. And so that was done. And then a week of waiting, calculating, watching. Then, soft focus radiation to the head—because the trick is to get the margin of the tumor. The margin of the tumor is fractal, it’s not smooth. It’s branching. And one of the ironies of all this for me was the vocabulary of mushroom cultivation emerges. Fruiting bodies, terminal margin, mycelial growth, density of fruiting body. All of these words, long ago associated to growing mushrooms, suddenly emerge, but now it’s your life and your head.

So, went through that. Seven weeks of radiation. We lived in Honolulu on the eleventh floor of a high-rise building that threw an enormous square shadow out into Waikiki Bay. Every morning at 10:10 in the morning, we were at the cancer center for radiation. This, by the way, is where they’re storing the world’s heroes, is in these cancer centers. When you go into these places, these—you know, because of the Asian population of Honolulu, they’re 72-pound little old ladies over ninety walking around in their walkers who have been through stuff you can’t even imagine. I mean, essentially battlefield combat kind of situations. So these people are there.

So we finish that up and go back to the Big Island. And of course, you’re never done, because what I was told when I was leaving Honolulu was four to six months. Absolutely not a day more. Four to six months. So you look at it. What do you want to do? Well, there’s Dr. Brizinski in Houston. There’s Poly-ICLC, which is a drug in Los Angeles and other places. There’s cell-specific cancer management. You fly to the Dominican Republic. There are phone calls in the middle of the night. Bring $20,000 to this address in Shanghai and we’ll cure you right up. And endless stuff. Fly to the arms of John of God and São Paulo, Brazil, where psychic surgery is being done. All these things.

Well, after a long time, it seemed to emerge that UCSF in San Francisco is a great experimental research center for cancer. Experimental doesn’t mean they save you, it means they plant a lot of people with these experiments. But they are not holding back, you know? And there’s a surgeon there, Dr. Mitchell Berger, who has an incredible reputation, has done over a thousand of these GBA things. And so eventually we got all this data in front of them, and they said they would take a harder look—PET scans, they want all this imaging. It’s all about imaging data. You can feed the brain glucose, and it will uptake this radioactive glucose, and then you can see whether the tumor is active. And if it’s active, you have to do something. So we did all this in the past six weeks, and they said, “Yes, there is a slight… it’s happening. So come.”

And the other thing was, remember I said every lab has its own protocol? Well, so what UCSF has is this thing called the P53 gene therapy. P53 is a gene on chromosome 17 of the human chromosome that suppresses tumor, if you can boost it. So they have a theory as to how you do this. What you do is: you combine the gene with a cold virus, with an adenovirus, and then you inject it in the course of removing the tumor. You just don’t leave a hole in the person’s head, you actually inject them with this adenovirus saturated with gene P53. And if it works, the tumor retracts and dies and disappears. And again, complete recovery. These magical initials: CR.

So it’s been—well, so then what I should say is: we came to San Francisco. And I feared the craniotomy. I always knew the craniotomy was scary, because they essentially take off the top of your head, cut a drawer four inches deep into your brain, pull it all out, arrange your socks, and close the drawer, and that’s what they do. And I sort of wrote it off. I mean, people told me this is the one where you don’t make it. And the concern is not that you die flat on the operating table, the concern is that they hit something—your motor strip, your vision strip, something which controls your digestion. And, of course, there’s always the question: what have they gotten already? I mean, when they did the gamma knife, what did they take? And I can tell some of what they took. They didn’t leave it alone. I mean, trying to solve a chess problem or arrange a dinner appointment 24 hours in the future is like crazy-making. I mean, you can’t even wrap your mind around it. It’s like partial differential calculus or something.

It hasn’t been boring. Spiritually, it’s not boring at all. It’s been extremely interesting. I was just saying to Christy: I can see how old age is an exploration of youth, of early childhood. Because they give me amazing drugs to work through, just very quietly, sitting there, bringing it all together, gently clashing these drugs in sleep, on the edge of sleep. And bottom line, we did the craniotomy. And I am, as you see—we did it less than a week ago. And so suddenly, instead of, “Four to six months,” there’s a new song, which is—you know, they hand you your life on one plate, a bunch of brain slop on another plate, and tell you, “You might have some time. You might actually have some time.”

So suddenly, from preparing to die for four months—minute by minute, waking with it, sleeping with it, everything with it—you get your life back in this funny “but if” form. And that’s what I’m dealing with now, is asking the question: if this is true, if this thing has been lifted, what is to be learned from it? By me personally, by me as a communicator talking to people like yourselves? And I’m sure there have been people who’ve cut their way through this underbrush ahead of me—probably in this room. When I was told I was dying, it was very simple. I was amazed. In fact, this is some good news, I think. Death is not very scary. It’s so huge that you just sort of take it on. My concern became immediately: what is it like to die? Death I think I can handle. But what is it like to die? That sounds pretty unpleasant. And we talked to doctors out there, and I said, you know, I don’t want to be invalid-ized. I don’t want to lie in bed for six months, cutting down very low, skimming off morphine, sinking lower and lower into death , either. So, it’s something to think about.

But, as I was saying, when I first got the diagnosis, I felt like William Blake’s Light of Eternity or something was just shining through. And people always want to ask, and so I’ll spare you the embarrassment of asking: do you learn anything—in the sense of do you know more about death? Do you see deeper into it? It certainly is nice to be alive. I would not fling that away lightly. Whether you’re, you know, thirty or ninety, if you’re not alive, you’re certainly in a different place than the rest of us. And I keep wondering what to make out of all of this. I don’t know quite what to make out of all of it. There are ironies. Let’s see.

Well, just to be a head person—a thinker, a drug-taker, a philosopher, a talker—and then to get brain cancer for crying out loud! What does that say about the irony of the universe? I don’t see how we could have lived it any other. The other issue, of course, is recreational drugs. What does that say about it? A lifetime of cannabis and psychedelics and this and that? Does that mean anything? When I offered it to these doctors in Honolulu, they just were totally dismissive. They said, “That’s crazy. What kind of thinking is that?” And then I got onto the idea that this must have happened to me because of something about how I am. Either my attitude toward women’s starch, sunshine, ocean swimming, something. And my manager convinced me, he said, “Your life is not a story. You don’t go back into your life to look for the plot elements that explain your fate. It doesn’t work like that.” It could be so. I want it to be a story. I want to think, if you live by principle and coherently, that some kind of pattern would emerge. Because the longer you live, the longer these patterns that you are are going to be extended out into time.

In a sense, what he was saying was: there is no such thing as karma. That, looking back twenty years, thirty years into your life doesn’t reveal the dynamics of what’s happening to you. But I like to believe differently. I haven’t changed. Now I take it all on board. Now I listen much more carefully to what people have to say. And I notice that what I had missing in my life was, I guess, something you’d call contextual immediacy, or something like that. In other words, the quality of the air you’re breathing at that moment, the quality of the food that you’re eating, the quality of your sleep, quality of your sexual behavior, and the quality of your interaction among the people that you deal with. I think it’s very hard to die completely happy. So if you get these inputs tuned right at the membrane, right where it’s coming into your body, it’s very hard, then, to go in that state.

And I thought—and I’m not sure why I’m still thinking about it—a great deal about Esalen throughout all of this. Because one of my agenda points was just to come and see you people, and say, you know, this is my story. This is what happened to me. It’s not a story over yet. But just the thought of facing you all composed my mind. Because I know each of you in different ways. And I know what you’re interested in, and what you’ve put years of study and thought into. And I’m thinking, you know, what is Esalen? And Paul and I were talking about this today. Is it an exhibit about a possible, perfect relationship between the human body and the world? Is it an exhibit? Or is it an argument? In other words, does it push? Is it saying, “Look at how we do it. Study this. Do it this way.” And I think it’s changing. And I think the world is changing. That the idea of alternative healthcare, and the natural world as a source of very complicated pharmacology and chemistry. And the fact that all these shamans and aboriginal people, Tibetans and other people, have been brought here. This is very important stuff.

There’s no way that diseases like cancer will not continue to grow and spread without some kind of rational response, you know? And we need some kind of—I don’t know how it would work exactly—but some kind of database which coordinates all this experience and brings it together. Because the experience of most people, the second half of their life will be the experience of approaching death. It just can’t be otherwise. I mean, once you hit sixty, if you’re not having serious health problems, you are in the right part of the bell curve, you know? And it only becomes more complicated. And one of the things I really hated about what I went through was the sudden need for stoic heroism. You say, “Yes, well, tomorrow we’re going to take the top of your head off. There’s a one in five chance you might die. Would you like to sit with it for a minute?” You say, “Sit with it for a minute?”

So I have no idea what you guys had in mind. That’s what I did at my summer camp.

28:39

McKenna

No, I get funny gurglings and bubblings, and… I do have these—I should say, is there an upside to all of this? There are these funny little things called auras, which are not quite epileptic seizures, but which are little things which come along every once in a while. They are so psychologically compelling and strange. And I don’t know what causes them. They come—this would be a perfect situation in which to have one. And they transform taste. That’s the first thing. Spectacular hallucinogenic transformations of taste, followed by hallucinations, followed by fainting. And then everybody gets all excited, and we have to call 911, and it’s a huge social drag on the party.

And as to the question—if anybody’s interested; I certainly am—I’ll lead the discussion as to the question: am I going to make it? I’m not sure. I don’t think it should be called off. It’s too emotionally enriching. It makes you a better person to live in the shadow of this. And you can take it anywhere. Like, I wonder: at what risk are my children for this? My brother? His child? Every family has a genetic relationship to cancer. And if you don’t know yours, it would be a fine idea to find it out. And if, for any reason, for example, if you should have brain trauma and be in a car accident or something and have to be looked into, they must save any of this tissue that they get, because they can challenge it with drugs and try to, in the lab, create a drug for you that is cell specific. And if you have that data, and you get into this kind of trouble, you definitely have a leg up. But how often do you get a chunk of your—and I heard wild stories. I heard stories of mastectomies where the biopsy tissue was dropped on the floor, and so it was ruined, and so they either had to give up or go get another piece. And it was not good.

If you start reading the newspaper with open eyes, you’ll see that, nearly every day, there are long, long articles about cancer—progress, theories, drugs, projects, data. It’s because, well, frankly, I think it’s where the money is, to some degree. I mean, you can imagine what this is worth to these insurance companies. If they could cure cancer, they’d have all the money. That’s what they’re paying for.

So if anybody has any question or comment, or anything else, I’m here to hear.

32:57

McKenna

Thank you. I didn’t think I was going to make it, frankly. I really didn’t think I was going to make it. It was surprising how painful that was. I didn’t think of myself as an emotional type character. I figured they could run this place probably without me without dropping a beat. Probably still can!

33:46

McKenna

You mean: what made this happen?

33:51

McKenna

No, I have theories. It’s just, every theory I have, doctors have told me we’re wrong. I mean—well, like, here’s a theory. For 22 years I’ve had a plantar wart on the bottom of my foot, a big one, and it wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t yield to anything. And I’ve always felt this thing was some kind of invasive, unwelcome thing. And the other thing is—and this is again just theory—since I was 18, I’ve had very bad episodes of cluster migraine, terrible migraines, treated with whatever the best drug they had at any given time. And I always felt that that condition somehow could develop into something. And I was talking with Ray Swartley earlier today, and he said: any situation which the body feels as severe stress is going to turn into a more problematic situation. So migraine is episodic high stress, and the plantar wart is continuous high stress. Viral infection of the body can be cultivated out of the body, like herpes, like anything else, you know.

So I think—and I’ve been saying this to people—is, you know, if you have a medical plan, or are wealthy enough to have a CAT scan once a year, or a PET scan once a year, you should just regard it as flossing your teeth. You know, your brain is the most fragile and sensitive part, and what are you going to do without your brain? You can’t even tell what time it is without your brain. So if you can, stay up on your brain. And if you hit your head, fall down, walk into doors, get belted in bars, or any of these kinds of things, you’ve got to stay on it. You’re not much good without that.

Perfect time in Q & A again. Where’s the band?

37:30

McKenna

Well, if we take on board what these guys say that I might make it, then the question is: what do you do next? It seems to me there are two choices. It’s very interesting. One is: you go back. You figure you knew something before, so you go home—whatever that means—and then try to make home work, you know, as comfortable, as pleasant, as whatever. Or the other possibility is to assume that this was no joke, and that life is somehow limited now; that you’ve pulled up at this red light, and you don’t know when it’s going to come back on. And so should you do everything you ever wanted to do, go everywhere you ever wanted to go? The strangest ideas occur to me. I mean, I was lying in bed this morning, I said to myself, “Lake Maracaibo, that’s it! Lake Maracaibo.” And they said, “Why am I thinking this?” And they said, “No, no. Venice. Venice.”

But I think the first thing to do is assume you knew something, and go back and try and eat well. But the real cure, I’m sure—I mean, I’m absolutely convinced—is vegetable enzymes, raw vegetables, fresh fruit, clean, clean, deep water fish and food. And that if you do that—and the other thing to be aware of, which I never knew; I mean, maybe you all know this, but I certainly never knew—there’s a whole industry of medical technology: blood pressure testers, urine testers, sodium concentration testers, all of this stuff. 90% of what these expensive doctors are doing for you, you can do for yourself, you know, and do for your children and your lovers and significant others. Because this technology is there.

The problem, see—and you could even probably write a book about it like this—it’s some tension between industrial capitalism and good sense. Eating clean food does not further the market economy, it furthers some poor pumpkin farmer in the hills, and so people are not probably doing the very best thing they should do for themselves. And the other thing is supplements. You know, supplements have become a science. I take like probably fifty different pills a day, and these address everything from hair softness to digestion to eye color to every other thing, and can be played with. I’ve gained weight since this whole thing began. I mean, I weigh more right now than I’ve ever weighed in my life. I’m healthier now—except for maybe five or ten grams of tumor, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life. This is Christy’s accomplishment; raising the dead, so to speak. Yeah.

But then another thing I should talk about, obviously, being here, I think, is: I don’t think I would have made this without the support of other people. Thousands of people have held benefits, dances, mojo-raisings, and the various things for me. And that—you know, Art Bell has 13 million people. He pulled that tribe together. And while that was happening, I felt I could actually feel that that was the… right before the gamma knife procedure. And this issue of collective healing, if you could prove it for one person, you could save suffering mankind, you know? By… we should just have the… well, you know that piece of music by Aaron Copland called Fanfare for the Common Man? Once a year, if you had the global fanfare for the Common Man, lift the Common Man one step up the evolutionary ladder, what would we be in ten or fifteen years, I think? So…

43:30

McKenna

Right.

43:42

McKenna

Is that a request?

43:52

McKenna

Yes, well, I thought then that we were meditating our way back beyond life, and that some trans-embodied state was going to take place. But it seemed to be necessary to apologize to all these insects that had been collected throughout Indonesia. So I just visualized myself going back through opening these specimen boxes and letting these things flutter away, and then later they came back and settled around me. Yes, embodiment: it’s somehow the difference between a pile of cells that’s alive and a pile of cells that’s alive but not thinking, is the key Buddhist distinction. I mean, that is what it’s all about, is staying in touch with the thinking flesh while it exists. And not only staying in touch, but somehow glorifying it. Because it is minded.

When we were in Honolulu going through these decision making processes, my son and the neurosurgeon got off together, and Finn said to him, he said, “Well, so this tumor.” And then the question was—people said to me stuff like, “Well, everybody’s dying all the time. Everyone’s dying.” Of course they are. But believe it, that’s the trick. Is: carry yourself to the level where you get up and go to bed with it, you know? In a sense, I think that’s all Buddhism is, is: living in the light of transience. Just say, you know: this is transient. It is truly, profoundly transient. If you can do that, the feelings and the values and the places where it will put you will be naturally Mahāyāna in some sense.

47:14

McKenna

Of life. Yeah.

47:49

McKenna

I think that’s what makes the synchronicity. That’s the alignment. All interference patterns are canceled because the pipeline of the chain of being or something is clear. Yeah, that’s how it felt. And the way you experience that is: your mind clears. You can see deep into nature and how it works. But the funniest things become important. I mean, things I never would have thought. For example, for the first six weeks after all this happened, every morning there was what I called the “Tears and Philosophy Hour.” This was as the drugs hit all together. And the Tears and Philosophy Hour was these funny—not regrets, exactly, but meditations on what was important. And one of the things that was most important was history. Twentieth century history. And I couldn’t even really understand it. I mean, I would just, like, say to myself the word “Russia,” and then just dissolve into tears, you know. Somehow the—or “Ireland,” that was a good one that worked. “Mexico.” These great historical tragedies that we are embedded in and find very hard to feel, even though we know, you know, the images of the Holocaust or something like that. But we have—it is a mess. The Earth is a mess. And it’s a mess as a result of historical bad behavior.

The other thing that was interesting to me was: I became sort of obsessive about scientific breakthrough—about every telescope launched, every space probe. I was going on the internet looking for the new to come out of the future, you know? The doorways to hope, metaphors for hope. But I’m an odd person. I mean, when I was a little kid, I used to… one of my—I should probably save this from my shrink, but who knows. Time’s getting late, here. I used to, part of the game of my week was to entice my family away from home on Sunday afternoon between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. so I could watch the twentieth century and weep. That was what I liked to do, was: I liked to watch military documentaries and cry. And I did this for years when I was a kid, you know. Also, then I’d completely forgotten that, until this thing happened, and then I had the same impulse again. Victory at sea is great stuff for the dying. Don’t ask me why.

51:50

McKenna

Weeping at military documentaries?

52:02

McKenna

Feeling. You know, we don’t feel it. No, history is an analytical deconstructive discipline, when what it should be is an emotional Gestalt of some sort.

52:26

McKenna

Right. Yeah, the other thing about that is—it had never struck me until this came along—how incredibly rooted in technology we are. That, as soon as I got in trouble, everybody had cell phones, everybody had micro connections to the internet, everybody was going to these drug trial sites, and you can look at thousands of drugs being experimentally tried out all the time. So if you get in real medical trouble, it’s a real technological dimension that you have to master. And you can become your own doctor to an incredible degree, you know, just searching this stuff. Because scientists aren’t smarter than you are, they just went to different schools, you know. That’s really true.

Alan?

53:52

McKenna

Sure, absolutely. I’m always up visualizing my [???]. Well, let’s see. In a bit, we’re close here. Did anybody come with a…?

54:12

McKenna

Oh, that’s a good question. Well, my brother was very keen, when all this came down, to shamanize it away and felt this could be done. And so he and a friend of ours, who basically makes his living shamanizing with ayahuasca, came out. There were some issues. One was that the nausea response is sort of like a seizure. So you don’t want—if you’re trying to avoid seizure, you don’t want to trigger vomiting. So what we did was we had very pure psilocybin. Not from mushrooms, but actually made from scratch. And we did that. I think we took psychedelics 13 out of 17 evenings after the soft radiation. And there were trips. I can’t tell whether it made a difference. I mean, you can pull up all this image-based, mnemonic childhood material, but it’s hard to tell unless someone is sucking and blowing at your head—which they did plenty of that, and yelling, and tossing your head down the mountainside, and all that. I mean, I haven’t seen my brother that agitated since 1971.

Do I think you can do it shamanistically? I do. If this had not worked—this coming to San Francisco—what we’ve got backed up on the Big Island are very well-respected cahoons. And they represent different lineages, but they’re definitely folk pharmacologists with a folk chemistry that you could use. But whenever you get off into these plant drugs, they’re more complicated because you don’t know what you actually have. If this had not worked, I would go back to the Big Island, and get with these guys with equal confidence that, as good a surgeon as Dr. Berger is, these guys can do their thing.

It’s an interesting question, this business of folk medicine, and how does it see something like a brain seizure, which looks like epilepsy or looks like demonic possession? I mean, it’s a scary presentation. It always amazes me when I have these seizures. I come out of them feeling like nothing has happened, like thirty seconds has passed. I answer questions sanely, it all worked. But often the people who are present say, “You didn’t make any sense at all. You appeared completely out of it.” So that means it’s more deranging than I had thought.

It’s going to come out of stuff like ayahuasca and psilocybin. Like that, because these are the things which, in a way, the short acting psychedelics are the most seizure-like drugs—DMT, 5-MeO-DMT. These are the ones that hit you—salvia, even. Salvia divinorum is like a short-acting anesthetic of some sort.

The drugs these people have in these hospitals! When I went in for this craniotomy, the anesthesiologist was there, and we were sitting around the bed, and he said, “Here’s something that will make you relax.” And he just reached toward me. And the next words I heard was, “You’re in the surgical recovery area. It’s seven hours later.” Well, how could they just touch you like that, you know, and bring you so…? That’s impressive stuff. It’s like a magic wand.

59:35

McKenna

Yeah, there’s a lot of controversy about that.

59:47

McKenna

It’s—he came by?

59:55

McKenna

Oh, on local radio? Really? Huh.

1:00:12

McKenna

Yeah, well, Lauren Miller is that guy’s name. And, I don’t know. What are these things—I mean, it’s all about drugs and money, you know. And once it’s patented, then none of the money will go to the people who originally developed all this. It’ll just be plantation grown. There’s this whole issue about the Daime. I don’t know how many of you are daimistas, but that’s a genuine Brazilian folk religion that uses ayahuasca curing to maintain a lifestyle. People get together every couple of weeks and do it with a fair amount of intentionality. And this has been going on since the 1920s. And it definitely offers health benefits. They’ve shown that you can kill the trypanosomal phase of malaria on in-glass dishes with exposures to this stuff. Well, if ayahuasca is simply killing intestinal parasites, it’s keeping 25% of those people alive probably ten years longer than they would otherwise live down there.

1:02:08

McKenna

It can certainly be used both ways. Nobody’s done trials. Nobody’s done studies to see. I’d get mice with tumors and rub it on their little noggins, and see how they did with that. That’s how I would do it.

1:02:31

McKenna

Rubbing it on my bald head? Sure, it has to compete with a lot of other stuff. Vitamin E. Yes, what you get out of this is a fashion change. Big time. No more the Dylan Thomas look. Now I transformed into some kind of cyborg type character. But isn’t it funny that that’s the look of the future? I think guys are going to tend to be very smooth as we move forward.

1:03:32

McKenna

Yeah, don’t they like to be rubbed on their little front panels there? I think so. Don’t—

1:03:48

McKenna

Oh no, I think they like that.

1:03:57

McKenna

No, I think Tibetans generally like. It goes with sticking out your tongue. Well, why don’t we sit here for five minutes. I will sound a peculiarly organic gong at the end of six minutes.

[Silence]

Ping. Well, I think that’s it, folks. Thanks so much for showing up.

1:07:50

McKenna

Yeah, I’ll keep showing up. So today was a busy day. I had one of Ray Swartley’s legendary massages. So I think I’ll just pack it in here. And we’re going back to Hawaiʻi. So if you need to communicate, someone you know has my email address if you don’t. And just keep on being the kind of people you’re being. I think we’re all doing just fine. I do believe that.