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.