00:00

McKenna

We want to call your attention this morning to a very circumscribed place in organic nature that has, I think, an implication for what’s been discussed here—not in the general sense of some of the theories that we’ve heard, but in the more particular and experiential sense. And that area is a family of hallucinogenic drugs that have not been mentioned particularly, which are the tryptophan-derived hallucinogens: dimethyltryptamine, psilocybin, and a hybrid drug (which is an aboriginal drug used in the rainforest of South America) called ayahuasca, which is dimethyltryptamine that made orally active by being taken in the presence of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

And the reason it seems to me appropriate to talk about these drugs in a conference devoted not only to consciousness—where it’s appropriate and this is obvious—but devoted to quantum physics is because it’s my interpretation that the major quantum-mechanical phenomenon that we all experience aside from life itself is dream and hallucination. Because these states—at least in the restricted sense that I’m using it—take place when the large amounts of radiation of various sorts that are conveyed into the body by the senses are restricted, and instead we see interior images, interior processes, which are mental. And these things definitely arise at the quantum-mechanical level. It’s been shown by John Smileys [?] and others that there are quantum-mechanical correlates to the hallucinogenesis of one atom. In other words: a compound will be inactive, and one atom is moved on the ring, and then the compound becomes highly active. To me, this is a perfect proof of the dynamic linkage at the formative level between matter, quantum-mechanically described, and mind as experienced.

So far, what I’ve said is true generally of hallucinogens, and of the anesthetics that John is interested in, and of other drugs and experiences as well. In other words, ordeals, dieting, this sort of thing, can elicit hallucination. But what makes this tryptamine family of drugs interesting is the intensity of the hallucination and the concentration in the visual cortex of the activity, so that there is an immense vividness to these interiorized landscapes. It is as if information was being presented three-dimensionally and fourth-dimensionally deployed as light, as surfaces which have information coded into them. And when you confront these dimensions, the dynamic relationship that is evolved is one of you relating to it, trying to decode what it is saying.

This phenomenon is not new. People have been talking to gods and demons for millennia. In fact, people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. It is only the conceit of post-industrial societies, science and technology, that allows us to even propound some of the questions that we take to be so important. For instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a complete red herring, because it is hedged about with a number of assumptions which a moment’s reflection will tell you are completely false. In other words, the search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. That is just not going to happen. And yet, this has been ruled as the means by which it is going to happen. Meanwhile, people all over the world—psychics, shaman, mystics, schizophrenics—their heads are filled with information. But it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is consensually validated through these certain instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal.

The other problem is that we are actually so inundated by these signals from these other dimensions that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit. This is what I would say to John if you were here: that it is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure that it’s telling you the truth. Because the demons are of many kinds: some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind. And of all the others I might say as well: it is not that you kneel in genuflection before a god, because you will be like Dorothy before Oz. There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things on your feet. And that means that you have an I–thou relationship, and you say, “Okay, well, you say you’re omniscient, omnipresent,” or you say, “You’re from Zeta Reticuli,” or you say, “You’re long on talk, but what can you show me?” And magicians, people who invoke these things, have always understood that you go into it with your wits about you.

Well, what does all this have to do with this family of drugs that I was talking about? Simply this: that this family of drugs has been overlooked. Whenever you—psilocybin is the one that most people have some experience with. Psilocybin (legally, and in people’s assumptions about it) is lumped with LSD. You say: psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, dah-dah-dah. Each one of these things is a phenomenologically defined universe unto itself. And psilocybin and DMT—although DMT is more intense and briefer in its action—these things invoke the lógos, which means they work directly on the language centers, so that the important aspect of the experience is the dialogue. And as soon as you discover this about psilocybin, about tryptamines, you have to decide whether or not to enter into the dialogue to try and make sense of the incoming signal.

And this is what I’ve done. I don’t call myself a scientist, I call myself an explorer. Because the area that I’m looking at, there is not enough data to dream of a science. We’re at the stage where people map one river and indicate other rivers flowed into it, but they didn’t ascend those rivers, and so nothing is known about that. And this Baconian collecting of data with no assumptions about what it will yield has pushed me to a number of conclusions that I didn’t anticipate. Maybe, by chronologically going through it, I can explain to you what I mean. And describing these trips raises all of the issues.

I first took DMT in 1965, and a friend of mine came to me with this substance. How many of you have smoked DMT?

09:29

McKenna

By injection. Yeah. Well, it’s surprising so few have, because we live in a society that is absolutely obsessed with sensation. Every kind of thing you can imagine—every therapy, every drug, every sexual configuration, all forms of media overload—all of these things are adored in this society. And yet, here is something that actually—hedonists that we are, pursuers of the bizarre that we are—this thing is too much, or at least as they say in Spanish: bastante. It’s enough; so much enough that it’s too much.

You smoke it and it comes on in about fifteens seconds. You essentially fall back unconscious. Your eyes are closed, and you hear a sound like ripping cellophane, like someone crumbling up saran wrap or something like that and throwing it away. A friend of mine says this is your radio entelechy ripping out of the organic matrix. And you hear a tone: one of these ascending woooooo, this kind of thing. And then there is the normal hallucinogenic drug modality, which is a shifting geometric surface of migrating and changing colored forms.

And then you come up against this—it’s like the… well, there must be some analogy at the site of activity. All the bond sites are being occupied, and you’re actually seeing the state begin to come into being over a period of about thirty seconds. And then you are in a place which is—well, I haven’t taken all drugs. I think if someone tells you they’ve taken every drug, you know they’re confessing they’re a dilettante. It’s much better to lean hard on a few. But I’ve taken most of the ones that would reflect or give a measure against this experience. And you find yourself in a space. It has a feeling of being underground, or somehow insulated and domed. It’s what in Finnegan’s Wake is called the Merry-Go-Raum, from the German word Raum for “space.” And actually, the room is going around.

And in that space you feel—and Amit brushed this this morning—you feel like a child. You feel that you have come out somewhere in eternity, and it always reminds me of the 53rd fragment of Heraclitus, which is: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.” And you not only become the Aeon at play with colored balls, but there are entities which are—in my book The Invisible Landscape I describe them as self-transforming machine elves. And this is sort of what they are. They’re dynamically contorting topological modules that are somehow distinct from the surrounding background, which is itself undergoing this continuous transformation.

I always think of the scene in The Wizard of Oz, after the house knocks the witch down and she’s in munchkin land, and the head of the munchkins comes with a scroll, and they all have very squeaky voices, and they sing a little song about, “You are absolutely and completely dead.” And they’re marching around. So the munchkins come—these hyper-dimensional machine elf entities—and they bathe you in luv, which is spelled L-U-V. It’s a kind of.… well, it’s not erotic and it’s not heartful, but it sure feels good. And what they are saying is: “Don’t be alarmed. Remember. And do what we are doing.”

Now, another—and one of the interesting characteristics of DMT, and another reason that I would prefer it over something like ketamine: with ketamine you are not afraid. You go unafraid. I think one of the interesting things about judging a drug is to see how eager people are to do it the second time. If they’re eager to do it the second time, it’s probably not worth bothering about. Because what is necessary to have validity in these experiences is the terror. The terror is the stamp of validity on the experience because it means, you know: this is real. We are in the balance. And in these states with these tryptamine drugs—we read the literature, we know what the maximum doses are, the LD50, this and that—but so great is one’s faith in mind that, when you are out there, you know that the rules of pharmacology do not really apply, and that control of existence on the plane is a matter of decision and luck and the roll of the dice. With ketamine you don’t get this.

So they are reassuring, these little entities, and saying, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Do this! Look at this!” Meanwhile, you are completely there. Your ego is intact, your fear reflexes are intact, you are not fuzzed out at all, and consequently your reaction is this [displays astonishment]. You know? And it persists, and it persists, and you breathe, and it persists, and they’re saying, you know, “Don’t get some loop of wonder going that quenches your ability to understand. Just try not to be so amazed. Try to hang in and look at what we’re doing.”

And what they’re doing is emitting sounds like music, like language. And these sounds pass—as Philo Judaeus said that the lógos would, when it became perfect—pass from being heard, without ever going over a quantized moment of distinction, into things beheld. And so you hear and behold a language of alien meaning which is taking place right in front of you, and it is conveying alien information which cannot be Englished.

Now, being a monkey, there is a kind of cognitive dissonance that is set up in your hindbrain when you encounter an un-Englishable object, because you try to pour mind over it, and it just sheds it like water off a duck’s back. And then you try again, and you are looking at it, and this cognitive dissonance—this “wow” or flutter that is building off this object—causes wonder or awe; awe at the brink of terror. So you have to keep controlling that. And the way to control it is to do what they’re telling you to do, which is: “Do what we are doing.” And then you begin to experiment with your voice. And I’ve… a phenomenon is possible.

And, by the way, I give this lecture in this way to invite the attention of experimentalists—whether they be shaman or laboratory people or tank people or whatever—because I’m telling you: there’s something going on with these drugs that is not part of the normal spectrum of hallucinogenic drug experience as it’s known to be.

So you begin this glossolalia-like phenomenon—although it isn’t classical glossolalia, which has been studied. In classical glossolalia, pools of saliva eighteen inches across have been measured on the floors of these South American churches where people have been kneeling. And people always ask after the glossolalia has happened, they turn to the people next to them and say, “Did I do it? Did I do it? Did I speak in tongues?” This isn’t like that.

This is simply a brain state which allows either the assembly language, which lies behind language, or a primal language of the sort that Robert Graves was talking about in The White Goddess, or a Kabbalistic language of the sort that is described in the Zohar: a primitive primal proto-Ursprache that comes out of you, and you discover you can make the extraterrestrial objects, the feeling-toned, meaning-toned, three-dimensional, rotating complexes of light and color and transformation. And you feel like a child, and you are playing with colored balls. You have become the Aeon.

So this happened to me twenty seconds after I did this drug on this day in 1965, and I was appalled. I mean, I thought that I had my ontological categories intact. And I had taken LSD, and it was all going forward, and this thing came upon me like a bolt from the blue. And I came down, and I said—and I said it many times while I was coming down—“I cannot believe it! This is impossible! This is completely impossible!” Because it was not, you know, that I was kneeling at the feet of some Rishi, or Roshi, or Geisha, or one of those guys. It was not that there was a declension of gnosis. It was that, friends, right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyper-dimensional, and extremely alien.

The God that John Lilly talks to—that they play these games with about moral values and to setting the constraints of the universe—is not like this God at all. The chief thing about the God of tryptamine, if we can use that—I call it the lógos. That’s what I think it is. And I make no judgments about it. I constantly engage it in dialogue, saying, you know, “Well, what are you? Are you some kind of diffuse consciousness which is in the ecosystem of the Earth? Are you…?” And the problem with it is that it is just full of answers to these questions, you know? The true history of the galaxy over the last four and a half billion years is trivial to it, and it can show you. You know, you can tune these images.

And of course the question always is: independent validation—or at least for a time, for me, the question was. But as I attended more and more conferences like this and realized that the structure of the western intellectual enterprise is so flimsy at the center that apparently no one knows anything, I became less reluctant to talk about these experiences, because they are experiences. They are primary datum for being. This is not remote, and yet it is so unspeakably bizarre that it casts into doubt all of Man’s historical assumptions. And any of you who are familiar with the books I’ve written, I’ve entertained various ideas about it.

When we first discovered the mushroom in South America—and it does these same things that DMT does, although it builds up over an hour, and is sustained for a couple of hours and then comes down—but there is the same confrontation with an alien intelligence, and these extremely bizarre and un-Englishable information complexes, and the hint—the hint—that these drugs suggest that there is something that you can do with your body that you have never done, that no one has ever done, and that yet, once it is done, it will be so obvious that it will fall right into the mainstream of cultural evolution. And I suggest that language either is the shadow of what I’m talking about, or that what I’m talking about is a further extension of language. I mean, perhaps a human language is possible where actually the intent of meaning is beheld in three-dimensional space. If this can happen on DMT, it means it is at least under some circumstances accessible to human beings. Well, given 10,000 years and the high-pressure technology looking at that, does anyone doubt for a moment that it could become just a cultural convenience in the same way that mathematics has become a cultural convenience, or language has become a cultural convenience?

But anyway, in confrontation with this organized entelechy on the other side, many theories were elaborated. The theory that we wrote about in the book on psilocybin that teaches you how to grow it was that it was in fact an extraterrestrial; that in fact the physical body of the mushroom was the flesh of a species that did not evolve on Earth. And it said this, it had a whole rap. It said, “Yes, well, once the culture takes control of and has complete understanding of its genetic information, it re-engineers itself for survival. And our version of that is a mycelial network strategy when in contact with a planetary surface, and a spore dispersion strategy as a means of radiating throughout the galaxy. And though I am troubled with how freely Bell’s non-locality theorem is thrown around, nevertheless, my friends on the other side do seem to be in possession of a huge body of information drawn from the history of the galaxy. And they say that there is nothing unusual about this; that Man’s conceptions of organized intelligence, and the dispersion of life in the galaxy, and this sort of thing, are just hopelessly culture-bound, and that the galaxy has been an organized system for billions of years, and that life evolves under so many different regiments of temperature and pressure that searching for an extraterrestrial who will sit down and have a conversation with you is like searching for a good Italian restaurant out in the galaxy.

The main problem with extraterrestrials is to recognize them, because time is so vast, and evolutionary strategies so varied, and environments so varied that the trick is to know the contact is being made at all. The mushroom (if you can believe what it says in one of its moods) is a symbiote, and it desires symbiosis with the human species. It achieved it early by associating itself with the domesticated cattle that people keep. In other words, like the plants Man grows and the animals he husbands, the mushroom thought to inculcate itself into that family. Because it’s very clear that where human genes go, those genes will be carried. It’s the old “develop burrs so you can attach yourself to the fur of an animal, and it will carry you with it wherever it goes.”

The mushroom, by being domesticated by human beings, has become a part of the human family. But this is all just beginning. Speaking for a moment in terms of the classic mushroom cults in Mexico, they were destroyed by the coming of the Conquest. The Franciscans had an absolute monopoly on theophagia (which is eating God), and when they came upon these people calling a mushroom Teonanacatl—“the flesh of the gods”—they set to work. The Inquisition were able to push this thing into the mountains of Oaxaca, so that it only survived in a few villages until Valentina and Gordon Wasson went in the 1950s and found it there.

The metaphor I like for that, another metaphor—you see, you balance these explanations. Now I’m going to sound like I don’t think it’s an extraterrestrial. It may be, it may not be. It may be what I’ve come recently to suspect that the human soul is so alienated from us in our present culture that we treat it as an extraterrestrial. The most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul. That’s why these movies like E.T.—or even Alien—those guys could come tomorrow, and the DMT trance is weirder and holds more promise for information for the human future. It is that intense a kind of thing.

But what I was saying was: they burned the mushroom cult, they forced it into repression, they burned the libraries of Greece at an earlier period, they dispersed the ancient knowledge, they shattered the stellar and astrological machinery that had been built—and by “they” I mean the Greco-Hellenistic Christian-Judaic tradition—and they built a triumph of mechanism, they realized the alchemical dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth century and the twentieth century with the transformation of elements, the discovery of gene transplant and this kind of thing. But then—having conquered the new world, having driven its people into cultural fragmentation and diaspora—in the mountains of Mexico they came upon the body of Osiris, the condensed body of Eros where it had retreated at the coming of the Christos, and this thing is now unleashed.

If any of you read Philip K. Dick’s, one of his last novels, Valis—where he talks about the lógos, how it went into the ground—it was a creature of pure information and it went into the ground of Nag Hammadi at the very end of the Chenoboskion library in 270. But it was information, and it existed there until 1947. And then the texts were translated, people read them, and as soon as people had the information in their minds, the symbiote came alive because it is a thing of pure information.

And this is the same sort of thing. The mushroom consciousness is the consciousness of the Other, both in hyperspace (which means in dream and in the drug trance), at the quantum foundation of being, and in the human future, and after death. And all of these places which were thought to be discrete and separate parts are seen to be part of a single continuum. What history is is the dash over 10,000–15,000 years from monkeyhood to flying saucer without ripping the envelope of the species so badly that the birth is aborted and fails, and we remain in [???].

And history essentially, then, is the shock wave of eschatology. Something is at the end of time, and it is casting an enormous shadow over human becoming, and it is drawing all human becoming toward it so that all the wars of history—the philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations—all of this is occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the monkeys react to the symbiote which is in the environment, which is feeding the information about the historical situation in the galaxy.

And it is not—I don’t belong to the school of people who say, “Well, we couldn’t’ve done it if they hadn’t taught us writing and that sort of thing, because they came from the stars and taught us to measure” rap. What I’m saying is: I hope it’s something much more profound than that. It’s that, as nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism—an organization of active intelligence—that is on a galactic scale. And science may be culture-bound, mathematics may be culture-bound—people can argue about these things, but no one knows, because we have never dealt with an alien mathematics or an alien culture, except in this limited area that is ruled out of bounds by the guardians of the truth.

In other words, shamanic experience, drug experience—this is ruled out of bounds, and it is because it is the source of novelty: the cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being is happening there. I mean, think about it for a moment: if the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us? The people who worry about getting the epistemological and ontological bases of these things nailed down say that the mathematics is in good order. What the problem is is that the mathematics does not map well into English or any other natural language. And so people have violent disagreements in English when they are completely in agreement over the mathematical foundation of it.

So I am saying: we are at the beginning of human thought. This is the birth crisis of intelligence. And intelligence is something which is moving through the higher primates now at greater and greater speed. We know that there were primate species that were not human that chipped tools and made fire and drilled beads, so the question “Are we unique?” has already been answered by the physical anthropologists. There have been other intelligent monkeys walking this planet. We exterminated them, and so now we are unique.

But what is loose on this planet is language; self-replicating information systems. It may be a further rarefaction or a further hypothetization of what is happening in DNA—in other words: learning, coding, templating, recoding, testing, retesting, recoding (and the immune system does that, too)—it may be an extension of that, or it may be a quality of an entirely different order. But whatever it is, it is in the monkeys now, and moving through them, and moving out their hands and into the techne with which we have surrounded ourselves.

The end state that this pushes toward—and the tryptamine state seems to me to be in that sense trans-temporal—it is in anticipation of the future. It’s as though Plato’s metaphor were true. Plato said, “Time is the moving image of eternity.” The tryptamine state is as though you step out of the moving image and into eternity; into the [???], the standing now, the standing waveform of Thomas Aquinas and in the modern parlance of holographic transforms.

And in that state, then, all of human history is seen to lead toward this culminating moment. And I take the acceleration that we see in the processes around us—the fact that fire (50,000 years ago, or whatever it was), language (35,000-whatever), then measurement (5,000), then Galileo (400), then Heisenberg—what is obviously happening is that everything is being drawn together.

The description our physicists are giving us of the universe (which is that it lasted billions of years, will last billions of years) is a dualistic conception; an inductive projection that is very unsophisticated when it comes to the nature of consciousness and language. What Amit has gotten at in this conference—that consciousness collapses the state vector and causes the stuff to undergo what Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring—is the beginning of the understanding of the centrality of Man. We have been on a decentralizing bender for 500 years, saying that, you know, “No, the Earth is not the center of the universe,” “Man is not the beloved of God,” moving ourselves out toward the edge of the galaxy. The fact is that the densest organizational material in the universe is the human cortex, and the densest and richest experience in the universe is the experience you’re having right now. Everything in the cosmos should be constellated outward from the perceiving self. That is the primary datum. And the perceiving self under the influence of these drugs gives information that is totally at variance with the models that we inherit in this society.

So what I’m saying is, first of all, that this dimension exists; second of all, on one level, it ain’t no big deal. People have been into this for millennia, it’s just that we are so grotesquely alienated and taken out of what life is about, that to us it comes as a revelation because the closest we can get to it is to try and feel in some dilettante-esque mode the power of myth or something, you know, and it’s this grasping after, and very over-intellectualized sort of process.

Well, I think that’s the idea. I see it’s noon. They say if you don’t strike oil in half an hour, you should stop boring. Let me see if there’s anything to sum up about this.

40:49

McKenna

The two things that I want to leave you with is, first of all: always in these kind of discussions where you present yourself as an explorer, not a scientist, yada, yada, it’s always that testimonials are what’s being given. I do not believe that I am unique. Because if I believe that I were unique, none of my conclusions would have any meaning, because they would be of worth only to me. So everything I’ve described this morning has got to be more or less a part of the human condition—meaning, of course, maybe I have some facility for it, maybe somebody else, it’s very difficult to achieve. But it is part of the human condition.

When I first smoked the DMT, I was an art history major. And I have a very (for a non-professional) thorough knowledge of art history, and really religious art in particular. And what blew me away was that there is nothing—and I was a Jungian very much into that. And there was no clue; no clue that these places exist. And I could not understand that. I said, “Well, surely, art is about carrying images out of the Other, from the lógos to the world, drawing ideas down into matter. Why is human art history so devoid of what I experienced so totally?” And I don’t really know the answer to that.

The alienness is very important, and I think—I haven’t spoken at all today about flying saucers, or only my implication, but this is a favorite subject of mine because I think the flying saucer is the central motif to be understood in order to get a handle on reality here and now. We are alienated. So alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order to not alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses. And if any of you saw the movie E.T., the whole point of that movie was for to get the kid and the audience and everybody jacked around to the place where the kid, with tears of joy streaming down his face, could look out into the cool of the purple evening and say, “E.T., I love you.”

And this is a great thing. It is a healing of the psychic discontinuity that we have been on since at least the sixteenth century, possibly earlier. The testimony that I want to give today is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you don’t have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that, except form a relationship with these plant drugs. And that’s the first time I think I’ve used the word “plant.” But that, for me, is the defining characteristic. Remember my little ditty about the demons that are of many kinds, made of ions, made of mind? There is some surety that you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant. But the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully.

45:00

McKenna

I could have talked about all of that: that DMT is an endogenous hallucinogen, that psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, that serotonin—which is the major neurotransmitter running your brain, found in all life, found most in man—is 5-hydroxytryptamine. The very fact that you can smoke DMT—and I don’t know if I mentioned, but it takes five minutes. You do it, it comes on in 45 seconds, it lasts three minutes, you come down in two, that’s it. The very fact that that can happen means that your brain is absolutely at home with this compound. It just says: “Oh, I know what this is. I know how to dealkylate, deanimate,” you know, and it does it. Where a drug like LSD—it clings, it hangs around. Ketamine as well.

And if I could say one more thing, just a cautionary note, because I always feel odd telling people, you know: verify this thing, it’s out there, and the means is the drug. People should be very careful. I said earlier in this talk that I was addressing experimentalists, psychologists, psychiatrists. I don’t mean to scare anyone off, but you should build up to it. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty, and I don’t believe there’s any set rule for acquiring power to not be overwhelmed, but I think moving carefully, reflecting a great deal, always trying to map it back on the history of the race and the philosophical and religious accomplishments of the species—this should always be done.

If John were here, I would get a debate going with him. All drugs are dangerous. All drugs, at sufficient doses or repeated over a sufficient amount of time, there are risks. The possibility of kindling epileptic effects is well known in ketamine. There’s a stack of literature on that. If anybody is intending to do ketamine who hasn’t done it, the first place you go when you’re going to take a new drug is the library. You know? Read through all this stuff.

47:57

McKenna

And what is your question?

48:07

McKenna

I’m not saying that there is something intrinsically good about terror. I’m saying that, granted, the situation, if you are not terrified, then you must be somewhat un-in-contact with the full dynamics of the situation. The mushroom said—and I’m sure you’ll be horrified at this—the mushroom said to me in the Amazon, when they were revealing all this information and deputizing us to do all these things, that we said, “Why us? Why should we be the ambassador of an alien species into human culture?” And they said, “Because you have never believed anybody. Because you have never given over your belief to anyone.” And this is somehow necessary.

So the sect of the Phoenix, the cult of this experience, is perhaps millennia old, but it has not yet been brought to light where the threads may run. The history of drug-taking on this planet is fairly well understood. Mushroom-taking was confined to the Centralists of Mexico, supposedly—the kind of mushrooms I’m talking about, not Amanita muscaria, which is a different issue and a different compound. But psilocybin was restricted to central Mexico until the Spanish conquest. The Stropharia cubensis, which is the mushroom we wrote our book about, is not known to be inculcated into a shamanic rite anywhere in the world.

DMT is used in the Amazon, and has been for millennia, but by cultures so primitive—I mean, the most primitive cultures use these DMT drugs. The Amazon is a world where you go nowhere except on water. Rivers are everything. Yet, there are people who shun boats, don’t build them, don’t have them, and think it’s a passing thing, not here to stay. And they are into these hallucinogens.

I am baffled. And I am baffled by what I call the black hole effect which seems to surround DMT. You know, a black hole is a curvature of space such that not only light can’t leave it, but no signal can leave it. Therefore, no information can leave it. And whether this is true in practice of spinning black holes, or yada, yada—but as a metaphor, think of it that way. DMT is like an intellectual black hole, in that once you know about it, it’s very hard for anyone to understand you when you’re talking about it. They don’t hear you. And the more you are able to articulate what it is, the less they are able to understand. And this is why I think people who are enlightened (if we may for a moment co-map these two things) are silent: they’re silent because you can’t understand them.

And why this thing has not been looked at by scientists, by thrill seekers, by anybody, I am not sure. But I recommend it to your attention, and I believe we didn’t even touch on the human future that the psychedelic state implies. But the future is bound to the psychedelic because the future belongs to the mind, and we are just beginning to push the buttons on the mind. And once we take a serious engineering approach to this, we’re going to discover the plasticity, the mutability, the eternality of the mind and, I believe, release it from the monkey.

My vision of the final human future is that what history is about (in engineering terms) is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body, so that the exterior soul exists as a superconducting lens of trans-linguistic matter generated out of the forehead of each of us at a critical juncture—our psychedelic bar mitzvah, as it is. And then, from that point on, you are eternal. And somewhere in the solid state matrix of the trans-linguistic lens that you have become, your body image exists as a holographic wave transform, and you are at play in the fields of the Lord. You live in Elysium, Versailles in the morning, and…! So that’s it. That’s it.