Psychedelic Society

Forty years ago, flower power blossomed in San Francisco and spread its seed across America. The mantra of sex, drugs, rock and roll became a popular chant and the dream of peace, love, and community took root in the land. The dream did not die. It's part of a generation's collective experience. The fractal energy of that idealistic moment in time resonates in me this summer. I'm wearing a set of headphones, plugged into my laptap, listening to "Darkness Darkness" by the Youngbloods, and I'm happy these sweet tones of light can spread so magically through the darkness that seems to shroud our world today. I'm reminded of what Jimi Hendrix said during that summer of love: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." Just how to call that peaceful world into being remains an unanswered question. The fractal resonance I'm sensing this afternoon is no doubt part of the Timewave that washes over us moment by moment, carrying us into an unknown but somehow familiar space where peace is not only possible but finally actualized.

Watch the video in which McKenna talks about a psychedelic society.

Terence McKenna speaks about what is taking place today in an interview conducted by Jay Levin in May 1988 entitled In Praise of Psychedelics. I'm including an exchange that offers interesting insights into the times in which we're living and the direction in which we're headed.

JL: You think you've gotten from your visions some sense of the nature of where we are going, but is there, in fact, a "choice point," a moment when the individual--or the species collectively--has to make a choice about this direction rather than that? Or is it simply that there is a direction of history in which we are naturally going?

TM: The thing is, reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion. Twentieth-century history is not simply a fluke or an anomaly--it is the culmination of a process that has been in motion for as long as the planet has been in existence. We are not alienated and outside of nature; we are somehow the cutting edge of it. And this vast output of buildings and highways and all the things that characterize the modern world is actually a feature of the natural world. Similarly, the evolution of technical intelligence on the surface of the planet, while new, is not unnatural.

Human beings are therefore the natural agents for a compression that is building up in the temporal world toward transition into some higher dimension of existance. History is going to end. This iss the astonishing conclusion that I draw out of the psychedelic experience. And all the scenarios of history's ending that haunt human thinking on the matter, ranging from the Apocalypse of john down to the latest prophecies of the flying saucer cults, are attempts to grasp or come to grips with an intuition of transcendental departure from business as usual.

Looking at present cultural trends and extrapolating them, it's reasonable to suggest that by the end of the Mayan calendar--which is in 2012 A.D.--we will be unrecognizable to ourselves, that what we take to be our creations, computers and technology, asre actually another level of ourselves. And that when we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature. These are all dualisms that are temporary and provisional within the labyrinth of history. This Archaic Revival means that all our religions were pale imitations of the Mystery itself. then people will say, "Now I understand! Now I understand why the pyramids, why the fall of Rome, why Auschwitz, why the H-bomb." All these things are signposts on the way to the transcendental object. And once we reach it, meaning will flood the entire human experience.

JL: But to see people so transformed, so back in tune with nature on a mass level, would mean we were collectively prepared to put such low-consciousness matters as planetary pollution or the Arab-Israeli struggle behind us virtually overnight. For that to happen, wouldn't there have to be some kind of transcendent event? A visit from a flying saucer? Nuclear warfare? I don't know, I'm trying to remain a rationalist.

TM: It seems highly improbable that such a thing would occur. However, look at something like the phenomenon of language in our species. How probable was that before it existed? It represents some kind of intersection of the monkey species with a transcendental force of some sort. And yet, once it came into existence, it is seen to be inherent in our biological organization.

JL: Nothing in your drug experiences has shown you what that single shamanic event might be?

TM: I think it could be something like this: The transcendental object, which has been well described since the sixteenth century, is the union of spirit and matter. The transcendental object is matter that behaves like thought, and it is a doorway into the imagination. This is so important, because it anticipates a life lived entirely in the imagination.

Now you ask, "How could such a thing be?" Well, as just one hypothesis: Suppose a way were found to integrate human and machine intelligence to create a culture in which humans and machines were psychologically indistinguishable. This would allow us to influence the dimensions of that interaction. If we're creating another dimension, it might as well be paradise. So what today we contemplate as a transcendental object may be a salable technology by 2012.

JL: In other words, you're saying that the transcendent event might conceivabley be the creation by 2012 of a computer program that we would interact with to bring us to a heightened state of existence? Maybe one created by a genius computer programmer and metaphyysician will tripping on psilocybin?

TM: Yes, a computer program. The two concepts, drugs and computers, are migrating toward each other. If you add in the concept of "person" and say these three concepts--drugs, computer, and person--are migrating toward each other, then you realize that the monkey body is still holding a lot of our linguistic structure in place. But if the monkey body were to be dissolved, then we would be much more likely to define ourselves as pure information. I think this is what is happening--that beyond 2012 everybody becomes everything. All possibilities are realized, even possibilities that are mutually exclusive. Because the resolution and the realization of these possibilities occurs in a different kind of space--"nanotechnological" or psychological space, or a true hyperdimension. It's very hard to imagine what it will be like, because we simply do not have the metaphors and the experience to cognize what we are moving toward.

JL: Can you conceptualize--or visualize--the nature of a computer program that would facilitate this higher-consciousness process?

TM: Well, I have actually developed a piece of software that I call Timewave Zero. It's a fractal wave, a mechanical description of time that shows that all times are actually interference patterns created by other times interacting with each other and that all of these times originate from a single end state. Advanced versions of this kind of program could be created in the twenty-four years we have left until 2012.

This isn't something human beings have to decide to do--this is something that is happening! The trick is to figure out what's going to happen that allows you to relate. The psychedelics help to do this because they anticipate the transcendental object. All religions anticipate the transcendental object. All great spiritual personalities, somehow, anticipate and embody the transcendental object. This is no longer centuries or millennia away. It is right here, right now. It is what explains the precipitous drop into novelty that the twentieth century represents. The twentieth century does not make any sense whatsoever unless it ends in a complete transformation of the species. And the nuclear death and the life-affirming factors are so inextricably intertwined tthat it will remain a horse race right up until the last moment.

In one of my lectures, I asked, "What mushroom is it that blooms at the end of human history? Is it the mushroom of Teller and Fermi and Oppenheimer, or is it the mushroom of Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson and Richard Evans Shultes and Timothy Leary?" I believe that it will be very hard for people who are not insiders to figure out where to place their bets. But the very fact that you and I can have this conversation is proof of the nearness of this event. People couldn't say these things even thirty years ago--no one would understand. You know, in testing high-performance aircraft there's an expression "stretching the envelop," meaning pushing the performance capabilities to the absolute outer limits. This is what the twentieth century is doing to the planet and the human organism. We are stretching the envelop as we approach, not the sound barrier but the...call it the "mind barrier," the "social barrier." We will not disintegrate when we reach it and fall out of the sky. Instead, if we have designed our social spacecraft correctly, we will slip right on through into an infinite realm of potential human becoming.