01:12

McKenna

[???] It’s too bad we don’t have more time.

01:28

McKenna

Oh, I finished the house about two and a half years ago, and was here about two and a half years building it. So, yeah. Let me get Christy and…

02:07

McKenna

Well, I think a social system is the product of, a process of, you could call it social natural selection—that a civilization produces various religious ideas, political ideas. Some survive and some don’t. And it’s because the social system is applying selective pressure and saying: universal medical care for all? We don’t need that. Sexual flexibility among teenagers? Well, we don’t need that. So, over time, a social system is built out of what is saved and what is thrown away. And so when you start putting drugs into a social system that actually promote unusual ideas, you’re pushing the most important buttons that a society has: the buttons that shape what it believes about life and death and value and marriage and childbearing and all these things. And so that’s very sensitive stuff, and inevitably becomes a point of contention. And societies will arm wrestle over that, up to and including putting you away for twenty or thirty years for a half a gram of grass or something.

03:44

McKenna

Well, wasn’t the struggle against communism a kind of struggle against ideas, and who thinks what, and who is permitted to believe that people should be paid more than $3.80 an hour for whatever labor they’re asked to do, and some of this other stuff? So capitalism, if it doesn’t have enemies, it will create enemies. It will point out these people or these people. And so I think it’s a thing like that: that it’s a struggle to control the political agenda. And I’m not a Marxist. I don’t have much patience with that. But I do think how Marxism has talked about the value of work and worth, and the productivity of the masses, and all that, all that rhetoric carries right over into the so-called war on drugs, which is really a war against other people’s values. It’s a continuation of the Holocaust, and cultural genocide, and all the other efforts made by the phenomenal success of capitalism to shove its agenda down other people’s throats.

05:08

McKenna

Well, it’s a disturbing tendency. I mean, it means that at least the US government has made a decision somewhere to push hard against this—which is always the first strategy. The first strategy is push hard against some trivial thing—cannabis or LSD or something like that. And then, once defeated in that strategy, then there is usually a period of negotiated… an effort to create some kind of negotiated settlement. And then, once that fails, there’s usually a squaring off, and the issue is minimized, and translated into something trivial, and we move on to the next great social issue. It’s crazy!

06:19

McKenna

Well, it’s not so much that the ritual is lost as that the people who are doing the making and the taking and the shaking may not really understand what they’re getting into. A drug like synthetic ayahuasca, pharmahuasca—do people realize this is the same thing as has been taken for thousands of years down there? Do they realize its role in shamanic healing and all this? It’s just one more example of how everything is de-sacralized and corrupted. Because first, ayahuasca has never been heard of, and the next thing you know, everybody wants it because it’s all anybody’s talking about. So it goes from this mystery to being a kind of a fad or a rage. And then it becomes an income source. And once it becomes an income source, it’s a commodity like journalism, sex, aluminum, whatever is being peddled on the open market.

I would prefer to see ayahuasca remain at the status, let’s say, of peyote, you know, where the native peoples who are into it sort of keep the faith, understand how to make it, and talk about it. And when there’s a question as to what it all means, then you go back to those native people and listen to their myth and all that.

There is data to show that ayahuasca is medically effective against malaria and intestinal parasites and things like that. So really, it’s a basic part of this native medical system. And if, instead of trying to put everybody in prison, we actually try to do research on this stuff and find out how it works and how it affects various conditions, we would probably extract its benefit much more quickly.

09:10

McKenna

Well, it involves the interrelationship between a brain–mind system that has had all the monoamine oxidase taken out of it pharmacologically. And all these psychoactive drugs seem to have a bigger, more dramatic impact in the presence of a lowered MAO threshold. And how this was discovered by Amazonian Indians millennia ago and not discovered by Western science until 1956 or something is just one of those peculiar facts about ethnobotany and ethnomedicine. But it’s certainly true that you have a much more dramatic effect with the two in combination.

And how many of these kinds of facts of folk science are out there to be discovered? We don’t really know yet, but slowly it’s all being unraveled. It’s never been explained, you know, why there are so many plant psychedelics in the New World. The cohoba snuffs, the ayahuasca, the mushrooms in the New World, Salvia divinorum—all of these things are New World, and this has been a social phenomenon, the exploration of which has been pretty much pushed by New World anthropologists and philosophers. If we’d had to depend on European philosophy for the content of the century, we’d all be reading Jacques Derrida and, you know, those kind of people. So it’s a local phenomenon that’s become global.

The way we value the Earth, the way we value commodities, the way we extract them and manufacture them into saleable goods, this will all be seen in a different way, I think. And again, it’s an issue of capital and labor, and how you value what you put your life into, and that sort of thing.

Well, what the shamans know that we don’t is: which plants, how, and where. And it took a long time to figure this out, you know. They didn’t invent the calculus. They didn’t, you know, sailing vessels of great speed and power—none of that was pursued. What was pursued was these vegetable entities that can be coaxed out of the plant world. And the irony is that Europe—who set out, you know, in the seventeenth century to explore the world, to bring in Christian civilization—may have encountered phenomenon variants on civilization that will ultimately prove more powerful than what we were peddling. This discussion is by no means closed at this point.

12:45

McKenna

I thought I knew a lot about psychedelics before I encountered DMT. It showed me that I knew virtually nothing.

13:00

McKenna

This is Salvia divinorum.

13:02

McKenna

Full flower. Yeah, you rarely see it so dramatically flowering. Salvia divinorum, yes.

13:22

McKenna

You use the leaf, and it has a compound called alpha salvinorin in it, and it’s very easily grown in the right soil.

13:45

McKenna

Very strange.

13:47

McKenna

Very hard to describe. But not really understood or known until ten years ago or so, you know.

14:13

McKenna

It’s completely legal, amazingly enough. Well, let’s see. This is ayahuasca. That’s why it was called banisteriopsis: because the leaves are opposed to each other, like the rungs of a ladder. And it winds up into this.

14:44

McKenna

Oh yeah. Now here, this vine going up so high? That’s ayahuasca.

Well, I think the shaman offers an immense example of courage. The shaman is not afraid of things which modern, postmodern people are afraid of—specifically: madness. A kind of madness. People are afraid of drugs because they associate it with some kind of ultimate unhingement. As we gain shamans who can speak to us in our own vocabulary, this will fade away. This is to some degree the motivation for my career. It’s basically to give people permission; to say it’s safe, it’s scary, it’s weird. But you’re not going to end up in a straight jacket in some back ward. You’ll live through this. It’s no more terrifying than the world’s largest roller coaster or one of those places. So permission is what I find people want from me. They want me to say: yes, I did it. It was very scary. I lived to tell the tale.

16:26

McKenna

I showed you there were more rabbits in the field than you thought, right?

16:45

McKenna

I go to a place where language finds it very hard to pull over and look around. It’s almost as though it takes you to a world that is not Englishable—and I suppose Germanable and so forth. But as a native speaker of English, that’s what it looks to me like is happening. The vehicle of language can only…

17:14

McKenna

Yeah, it breaks down. And no matter how you try and claw the air, it doesn’t quite come over and give itself to you. So that’s fascinating. To me, as a writer and a storyteller, and someone with an interest in narrative and all that, the idea that there would be realities that you couldn’t wrap description around is fascinating. And it grows more fascinating as life moves along. It seems like a miracle, you know? An absolute miracle of some strange sort in the area of cognitive construction is taking place.

18:05

McKenna

Well, some philosophers would say such a thing is impossible; there aren’t unspeakable realities. Somebody else would say: well, it’s this or it’s that. So it sheds light on certain questions of philosophy and heuristics and all that. It seems to me that it gives real answers. I mean, maybe you don’t believe these answers, but I know a convincing argument when I see it. And if anybody, with argument, could do to you what DMT does to you, you’d embrace it in a hurry.

18:57

McKenna

Well, we’re long away from ritual, and I think rituals are what we need—that that’s why we create sports leagues and beauty pageants and all these things: simply to reassure ourselves that, in these ritual-confined spaces, these energies can be held, you know? And it’s the part we are most distant from.

19:37

McKenna

No, the plant is more impressive. If it were a shaman, people would say: well, it’s show business. I mean, I saw a guy cut a woman in half on stage once, or I saw this, or I saw that. But I think the fact that, in the case of DMT, a matchhead-sized piece of orange wax can pull your entire philosophical world out from under you in about fifteen seconds is very, very interesting. I mean, how long did it take you to learn to talk? Two years or a year and a half? How long does it take you to DMT? Oh, about thirty seconds, you know? So it’s very interesting.

We’ve created enough alienation that it seems as though we are going to explore the uses of these shamanic technologies. So the high tech culture, the scientific and materialist culture, seems to have made a choice to explore these things. And the shamanic aboriginal culture seems to have made its choice. But it’s going to integrate while we’re going to have another one of these socially destructive debates about law and order, and obligation, and all the rest of it. That seems to me to be a waste of time.

21:21

McKenna

Well, all boundaries are dissolving. That’s what the end of the millennium means. It means that the tribes of the Amazon basin, the tribes of the New Guinea Islands, the tribes of Oxford and Cambridge—everything is dissolving, and humanity is reaching a kind of plural consensus. I mean, even the most sophisticated capitalist, let us say, is aware now that it won’t do to cut down all the trees; that that’s a mistake. So what’s happening is a single human viewpoint is sort of coming into existence: a viewpoint that values nature, values natural resources, and tries (however, clumsily) to make some kind of peace out of the whole human mess that we’re now mixed up in.

I think what it brings is an empathy to the destruction of the planet. You know, the cutting of a rainforest is suddenly no longer completely abstract, it’s actually something you can feel and relate to. And all political change begins with a change of feeling and value. So, you know, if we begin to see the aboriginal people of every continent as the holders of this knowledge, they will begin to look not so naïve, not so foolish, or something like that, but actually as sophisticated people who have developed a working relationship with these powers and things. And that’s the only way you’re going to get real political change on some of these issues.

If we were having this discussion thirty years ago, we would not be talking about ayahuasca. We’d be talking about mushrooms and their potential, and the… you know? So I think the plants change, the drugs change, but the challenge stays the same. And the challenge is to build a humane and human world without doing damage to the humanity that’s already in it.

24:07

McKenna

It requires dedication and intelligence—not so much among our shaman and our inner voyagers, but among the legislators and the people who actually are going to have to make the social change. That’s why what goes on in the Netherlands is so important. These are the most liberal people in the world. Well, are they liberal enough to actually change the basic structure of their society? I mean, talk is easy, but can they actually make the change?

What they’re trying to do is establish the notion of a thought crime: you know, that it’s a crime to consider restructuring the state this way or this way. And that will, you know—if we have not learned anything from the twentieth century, we should have learned that wars of ideology are hopeless and just bring incredible grief and loss of life. So I’m hoping that what the twenty-first century can mean is movement beyond ideology, and an actual rational—and I think it is—rational approach to integrating the irrational into how we think about society, city planning, social management, and all the rest of it.

25:44

McKenna

Well, some years ago, a dozen years ago or more, a fellow patented ayahuasca. Somehow this happened. It’s not supposed to be possible with plants. And then a group of several South American tribes put a lawsuit on him, and it took a lot of money, and years and years, to work this to the Supreme Court. And about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t patent a plant; that a plant is not an invention. It’s not made by human genius. It is a product of nature. So no plants can be patented, and that patent was declared void. So that’s a good thing.

There is a thing called the UN Convention on Narcotics, which was something that, when the US and NATO and all that completely controlled the UN, they produced this document, which, if you signed it, you were basically joining this club which said you would commit resources, time, manpower to eradicating all these drugs. And that was pretty much done through the late fifties and then on into the sixties. And then, of course, LSD was very threatening, because you can get, you know, 100,000 hits under one postage stamp. Well, for somebody who’s trying to control something that they look upon like nerve gas or something, a “weapon,” with that kind of a description, makes people very nervous indeed. And so it came out of that.

27:53

McKenna

Because they produce unexpected ideas and conclusions. That’s what strange politics does. You know, you go in a Freemason and a Republican, and you come out—God knows what! A polyamorist and an anarchist, or something like that!

28:33

McKenna

Yeah, because they nibble away at the edges of orthodoxy. I mean, once you get the idea that a mushroom can talk to you in your native language and propose various things, life never looks quite the same again. I mean, in a sense, you could say civilization was the journey from fairyland to scientific materialism. Well then, there you are. You think you’ve conquered scientific materialism. But here’s a mushroom, here’s a vine, here’s a morning glory—and they all give you a message back that is just so peculiar you don’t know what to do with it.

Well, there’s a lot of evidence and discussion about whether or not it gives you telepathic powers, or science fiction-like powers. This could be. I mean, two brains six feet apart are both biochemical oscillators. I wouldn’t consider it a miracle if it were found that brains floating in ayahuasca have a kind of supernatural connection. And if the tendencies of past history are to continue, that’s what it would have to be: that we’re on the brink of designing drugs, of moving our technological design process, to a point where we can actually design drugs that extract power from them that we never had or dreamed of before. And that would carry us well beyond the industrial revolution. I mean, that would be the new world.

30:40

McKenna

You mean, you’re referring to the fact that I have glioblastoma multiforma, which is a form of brain cancer. Well, I wish I could say I’d had more insight into death. I’ve had a fair amount of insight into dying, which I find a very alarming prospect. It doesn’t—death itself is so far beyond ordinary experience, the threat of dying doesn’t really move you toward understanding it. Death is the great mystery around which religions are built. And being able to say, “I know what it is, I know how it works” is the way you start a congregation and get a little community going.

I would say the big surprise for me was: I’m not afraid of death the way I thought I would be. It’s just such an intellectual question mark that you just move to the next page, because there’s nothing to be said about death except that it seems to last rather a long time.

32:16

McKenna

That following your own curiosity is a better method for exploring the world than any of the methods offered. Sheer curiosity is the thing that I’ve always let carry me along, and I have no regrets about any of this. I think it’s worth a life to put these issues in front of people.