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.”