Terence McKenna--Live from The Fez

Synopsis:

McKenna’s talk was recorded at The Fez in New York City on June 20, 1993 and broadcast live on The Music Faucet, WFMU-FM, East Orange, NJ.

McKenna opens his talk by declaring “that history has failed, and Western civilization has failed, and dominator-primate politics has failed, object-fetish consumerism has failed, the national security government has failed.” McKenna’s solution for dealing with our cultural predicament is to “fall back upon ourselves, stop waiting for the revelation to come from CNN or Time Magazine, and start ignoring the idiotic laws that would dictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain.” His recommendation is to “go to the rainforests, the aborigines, and check up--check in--on what we have always dismissed, which is the world of natural magic and wisdom obtained through intoxication.”

Given his theory that “history is ending” and that “as history accelerates, the rate of the ingression of novelty into three-dimensional space is asymptotically increasing,” McKenna speculates that “we're approaching the kind of symmetry break that occurred when life pulled its slimy bottom out of the sea and crawled onto the land. We are approaching the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negative animal impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.”

McKenna contends that “history is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object” and that “as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal. Because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you see, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon.”

According to McKenna, if we are “to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental and a fusion with Nature,” we should consider psychedelics as one way to do this since they appear to “dissolve boundaries and open the way to the Gaian mind.”

McKenna spends the remainder of the evening fielding questions from the audience. Asked about the distinction he makes between organic psychedelics and synthetic drugs, such as LSD, McKenna points out that “psilocybin and the tryptamines are much more reliable visionary activators.” He addresses a question concerning ritual and style of drug taking” by describing how he does psilocybin, a method he recommends to anyone interested in achieving “the psychedelic breakthrough.” Many more issues are addressed before the conversation concludes.

McKenna clearly regards “psychedelics as the only way to react fast enough to have an impact on the runaway momentum of historical error.” He rallies his audience at the end with a call to “Legalize the dream! Reclaim the human mind! Let's make dreams legal, let's make plants legal, let's legalize the imagination, empower hope, and begin to build the kind of world that we would feel alright about handing on to our children.”

High Times Interviews Terence McKenna

Synopsis:

High Times Magazine, April 1992

In this interview, conducted by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen, McKenna responds to questions concerning his interest in shamanism and the exploration of consciousness, the social role that he sees himself playing, and the ways in which New Age philosophy differ from his notion of an archaic revival. He is asked to comment on “Francis Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this planet and its directed evolution has been seeded, or perhaps fertilized, by spores designed by a higher intelligence” and about “the role that psilocybin mushrooms play in the process of human evolution.”

When asked to comment about his assertion “that in certain states of consciousness you're able to create a kind of visual resonance and manipulate a 'topological manifold' using sound vibrations,” he indicates that it is his belief “that we're on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, going from a language that is heard, to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior processing. The language will still be made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual impression.” He points out that the shamans in the Amazon have been engaged in this use of language for a long time through the songs they sing.

Asked to speculate on a future in which humanity has mastered space technology and time travel, McKenna suggests that “things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and nanotechnology offer new and novel approaches to the realization of these old dreams.”

On the topic of lucid dreaming, McKenna reports that he has had dreams in which he smokes DMT, and is transported into an altered state. He believes that “the psychedelics, the near death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries ... all of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we're living in these dimensions.”

Responding to questions about Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of the morphogenetic field and whether “morphic resonance could be regarded as a possible explanation for the phenomena of spirits and other metaphysical entities,” McKenna states that not only are such ideas plausible, but also that “some kind of theory like that is clearly becoming necessary” in order to explain “how out of the class of possible things, some things actually happen.” Asked to comment on the new class of designer psychedelics and the fact that there are no morphogenetic fields associated with these drugs, McKenna contrasts his “spooked-out” ketamine experience to that of the mushroom. He says, “If you take mushrooms, you know, you're climbing on board a starship manned by every shaman who ever did it in front of you, and this is quite a crew, and they've really pulled some stunts over the millennia, and it's all there, the tapes, to be played, but the designer things should be very cautiously dealt with.”

Several more intriguing questions offer McKenna an opportunity to elucidate his views about the human imagination, super computers, cycles of history, future predictions, the mathematical rules that stand behind visual appearances, the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants, and the meshing of his ideas with fellow “Psychedelic Compressionists” Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Frank Barr.

Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature

Synopsis:

Los Angeles, California, October 17, 1987

McKenna’s talk is given to benefit Botanical Dimensions, a 20-acre botanical garden in Hawaii, which is dedicated to preserving tropical plants that are in danger of extinction, as well as the knowledge of their medicinal or herbal or shamanic usage. He begins by addressing “one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism: the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence.”

McKenna’s initial confrontation with “the felt presence of the other” occurred in the fall of 1967 after smoking DMT for the first time and came to him as “an astonishing personal surprise.” He likens the experience to “being struck by noetic lightning.” Afterwards, he set himself the goal of understanding this bizarre experience for which “there is no place in our world,” but that feels “overwhelmingly, existentially real.”

McKenna identifies “the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature” as the blind spot in Western culture. He theorizes that “as human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature, they inevitably secrete the institution of shamanism. Like a pearl around a sand grain, a nexus point, a loci of inter-dimensional data-flow, which is really what it is. Under certain conditions, which have to do with molecules that have evolved in these species which have a weirdly quasi-symbiotic relationship to our species, you strike through the veil. Melville said, ‘if you would strike, strike through the mask.’ And that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of apparent reality. And then, something is there which to me is a miracle.”

He goes on to describe how his attempts to understand this experience led him to Nepal and later to Tibet to study pre-Buddhist shamanism. He eventually winds up living in the remote jungles of Indonesia, collecting butterflies, totally immersed in “the real fact of the rain forest; the real fact of organic nature.” It was in this jungle that he came to understand how “nature is communication and how nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem, right down to the DNA.”

According to McKenna, “the answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience” and that “people who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility, are turning their back on their birthright.” He believes that psychedelics can unify us, introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention.”

McKenna concludes his talk by reasserting his contention that “Nature is the great teacher” and by positing an emerging paradigm of the spirit whose components include “an empowering of direct experience, a return to the feminine, and a legitimizing of the presence of the vaster regions of the unconscious.” Psychedelic plants can help prepare us for the great adventure ahead.

Following his talk, McKenna answers questions from the audience about his theory of the timewave and provides a reading of our current situation in the historical process.

Revisiting Alan Watts

I remember the day I bought two books by Alan Watts--The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are and This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience--and one by Ram Dass entitled Be Here Now. It was on a spring afternoon in 1970 during my freshman year at Rutgers University. I dropped the books onto the grass and sat down beneath a tree to examine their contents. In those early days of college I was interested in exploring ultimate philosophical, psychological and theological questions. You know the ones--What is the nature of reality? Does God exist? Who am I? What is the purpose of existence? I'm sure there were others. I was also intrigued by what I'd read about LSD and heard from friends who had dropped acid.

As I sat with my back propped against that tree in the middle of the green commons during a break between classes--my mind steeped in the ideas of Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers, in the discoveries of Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, in Spinoza's ontological argument--the world appeared brimming with beauty, mystery and wonder. I recall flipping through the pages of Ram Dass's odd, square-shaped book, the mandala on the cover radiating the message REMEMBER BE HERE NOW. Both Ram Dass and Alan Watts promised a distinctively Western slant on the Eastern metaphysical philosophies I was studying at the time. Moreover, they promised to make the ancient Vedic scriptures more comprehensible to a mind shaped, and at times numbed, by a seventeen year sojourn in the New Brunswick public school system. The authors also offered their own personal take on the psychedelic experience and its mystical implications. I had already read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and was familiar with the work of Timothy Leary. I shared a small off campus bungalow with two friends. I was ripe for experimentation, a vessel ready to be filled with a divine Gnosis.

More than 36 years have passed, a more or less orderly procession of days, from that spring afternoon under the blue sky of of my boyhood home, and the memory of that period in my life is strong still, and resurfaces in my reflections. As I sit in front of my laptop on the porch of a house built on a narrow spit of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnagat Bay, observing people pass by on their way to and from the beach and listening to the sounds of summer traffic, I know that the airwaves are filled with a stream of continuosly updated war reports transmitted via satellite feeds and broadcast day and night on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. The news reminds me of the same televised madness of the Vietnam war beamed into our homes some 36 years ago. Tonight I'll walk to the beach, sit upon the sand, gaze off into the night, listen to the waves break against the shore, and REMEMBER BE HERE NOW.

For more on Alan Watts and Ram Dass, visit the following links:

Alan Watts: Lectures and Essays

The New Alchemy (An essay from This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, by Alan Watts. This essay was written in 1960.)

A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? (This essay by Alan Watts appeared in LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, edited by David Solomon, 1964.)

Breaking On Through Again (Ram Dass wraps his expanded mind around the last of the truly taboo subjects--death and dying)

Ram Dass Interviewed

Our Collective Psychosis

Paul Levy presents a fascinating psychological analysis of George Bush as a manifestation of our Shadow that has been projected onto the world stage. Will an awareness of the externalized unconscious content of our collective psyche precipitate a global awakening?

Read a collection of Paul's articles on his web site Awaken in the Dream.

Carol S. Wolman, MD, Board Certified in Psychiatry, has this to say about Paul Levy's new book:

“The Jungian analysis by Paul Levy, of Bush and the culture which maintains him, reaches deep into the American psyche. It should be studied and digested by everyone. If the citizenry would recognize that Bush’s egomania is acting out a national illness, we would all be saner. If the US could integrate the “shadow” which Bush projects upon the “the axis of evil,” perhaps we could achieve world peace and start to solve global problems. A MUST READ."

Listen to Paul Levy discuss his ideas in an interview with Fintan Dunne.