Updated 2 years ago
Keith Rowland or Karen Day
AB: Now comes Terrence McKenna from the Hawaiian Islands, and he comes in a very interesting way. Uh, Terrence, welcome to the program.
TM; it’s a pleasure to talk to you again Art. .. how are you?
AB: Uh, I am fine. Um, now Terrence, let us begin … uh, where are you in the islands? I mean not exactly, but sort of roughly?
TM: I’m on the Big island of Hawaii on the Kona side. I’m in south Kona on the Big Island.
AB: Um you are coming to us actually from your home. Last time we did an interview you had to, like, go to somebody’s house or something to do the interview … leave your own home, because you’re so remote that all you’ve got is a cell phone … and that’s how you did the show last time, right?
TM: That’s right.
AB: Alright. This time, we’re using a different setup. It has a tiny little glitch in it every now and again, and so tell people how it is that you’re reaching us .. I mean that’s an interesting story all by itself.
TM: Um, I’m reaching you on a spread spectrum radio circuit that’s a 1 megabyte wireless connection 30 miles to the town of Kailua Kona, and my telephone circuit is simply piggy-backing on this one megabyte internet connection. There’s a company out here called Computer Time, this character john Breeden has an amazing technology. I think I talked to you last year about my struggles for connectivity when I was piddling around trying to get 128 … now I have eight times faster than that, and it’s … he’s building a backbone for these islands, and anyone with line of sight to the server can have up to 6 megabytes if they can afford it.
AB: Holy mackerel … that is absolutely amazing, And so in other words, not only are you simultaneously through this uh, radio connection connected to the internet, but you are also able to use a telephone through the internet, which is how you’re talking to me now.
TM: Yes, I’m talking to you over the internet, and I’m online surfing, I’m looking at your website and moving around on the net at the same time, and it’s the same speed in and out for me, which is a blinding one megabyte, so it’s where I hope everybody is by 2000 … I had no hope for this kind of connection until this company showed up, licensed this technology from the defense department of Byelorus, Byeorusia … they demonstrated it for him and he said, ‘I’ll buy as many of these modems as you can deliver,’ and I think it’s the hottest thing going.
AB: Well, uh, at your location, at your very remote location, what’s it like? Do you have power there, do you have … well, you obviously have to have power, I guess …
TM: Well, I’m running on soar power with a generator augment. There’s no phone lines or power lines up here, uh, we catch our own rainwater and pump it uphill for gravity flow … I didn’t start out to be a survivalist, but somehow in the course of building this Hawaiian place I managed to get all my systems off-grid and redundant, and this wonderful internet connection is what makes my life possible because otherwise I would be locked out of the cultural adventure … as it is, I feel like I am right in the middle of things.
AB: Boy, I’ll tell ya, you’re ahead of most of us on the mainland who suffer with horrendously slow 28.8 connections in many areas including mine at best, and here you are … it’s so neat that you’re able to do that these days, really excellent, so you’re um … describe your surroundings … I mean, do you have neighbors? Uh …
TM: Um, I live up on the slopes of the world’s largest volcano, which is Mauna Loa … I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on. My neighbors are scattered over this mountainside … days go by and I don’t see anybody, but if the pump breaks down or we need to get together there’s a kind of community, but it’s pretty spread thin, and it’s a day … a trip into town is once or twice a week event.
AB: Do you find yourself fighting madness, Terence?
TM: Well, that was always a problem, in my case.
AB: But don’t uh, you don’t have to resort uh either to uh chemicals or into uh … I remember reading, uh, you know, prisoners who’d be by themselves for years at a time, uh, in North Viet Nam or during the second world war, and they would devise methods of going into their own mind and uh fantasizing and doing all kinds of things that kept them sane.
TM: Well, I’ve got 3000 books here with me, and this internet connection, and I get about a hundred email messages a day, so … and then every once in a while I pack up and go off and give lectures and travel in airliners and go to parties, and about fourteen weeks out of the year that’s what I’m doing. But my natural inclination is to be a hermit, and I don’t think I mentioned it but this forest that surrounds me is a climax subtropical Polynesian rain forest that’s just radiant and beautiful, so uh, it’s wonderful. I don’t think I could live out here without the connection, that’s why I spent so much effort to put it together. With the connection I think this is a model for the future, I think as people in management positions–not that I am–but people in management positions will realize that they can live anywhere in the world with these high-speed connections, and they don’t have to drive to the office in a skyscraper downtown … that’s very retro I think.
AB: Um, listen, um, we’re supposed to do this at the beginning of the interview, and it might be that there’s a person or two out there that doesn’t know who Terence McKenna is, so if you would give me a short version of your own bio, your life, what you’ve done, who you are, what would you say?
TM: I’m a child of the 60’s, born in 1946, went to Berkeley as a freshman in 1965, uh, did the India circuit, did the LSD circuit, went to South America … I’ve written a number of books about shamanism and hallucinogens and uh psychoactive plants, and I’ve sort of evolved a unique career as a cultural commentator and I guess some kind of gadfly philosopher, and I’ve done a lot of stuff with young people … rave recordings and CD’s and appearances and that sort of thing, and I comment on the culture … I’m studying the culture, and as you know Art, when I share an idea which we both perceive as inevitable truth, but not everybody does, and not everybody does, which is that the world is moving at an ever-greater acceleration toward some kind of compete redefining of all aspects reality, and I’ve written a lot about that, and I have a mathematical model of it, and basically I get to be in a very enviable position, which is here at the end of a millennium I get to be a cultural commentator and gadfly.
AB: Um … let me ask you about any new insights you might have since we last talked that… you’re darn right, we share that view, exactly. Uh, I’m not a prophet, maybe you are, I don’t think you are, but we both know something is coming … uh, do you have any, uh, late thoughts on what it might be, or when it might be?
TM: Well, you know, I don’t think you and I have talked for about 10 months or a year … I can hardly remember that far back … but in terms of the last months …
AB: Short-term memory damage, Terence?
TM: It’s supposed to be short-term, not long-term …
AB: So every month or so you’re supposed to remember …
TM: But in the last month we’ve had the announcement of the apparent discovery of a new force, this accelerating anti-gravitational force, we’ve had announcement of a possible planet around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, uh, the discovery of water on the moon, and then, you know for the quantum physics obscuratis, anomalons were detected for the first time …
AB: Now wait a minute … I didn’t know about that …what are anomalons?
TM: Well nobody did until it was announced that they’d been detected. Apparently it’s a state of quarks which allows for the formation of this hypothesized super-heavy particle called the H-particle. And it was all theory until last week, and then there was an announcement … I’m not sure if it’s yet been confirmed … I’m sure, I didn’t follow on your program, but you must have gone through the 24 hour period when Earth was doomed in 2028 …
AB: Oh, I did … that kind of thing is right down my alley …
TM: Sure, well, so, for 24 hours we all had to look at that, and then you know, they recalculate and Armageddon is postponed or slid sideways … I, basically , I think we’re right on target. Also I think since you and I talked, the teleportation, quantum teleportation stuff happened … do you, were you hip to that?
AB: Oh, yes, of course, um, at IBM I believe it was …
TM: At IBM and at a laboratory in Austria, this guy Anton Zellinger, yeah. So, you know, these are technologies which in science fiction lay out there a thousand years, or trinkets delivered by extra-terrestrials or something, and yet all this stuff is not right around the corner but upon us, and between this and nanotechnology and parallel processing neural networks … I think what we’re growing toward is a kind of, an artificial intelligence of some sort will emerge out of the human technological coral reef and be as different from us as we are from termites.
AB: Terence, it’s funny you should mention that. Let me ask you this: I too … the processing speeds and storage are increasing exponentially … It’s amazing … we’re talking about a whole processor of a thousand megahertz pretty soon, and I believe, Terence–I don’t know if you heard the first hour of the show–but I think that soon we are going to have a sentient computer, and you know what I wondered? I wondered, if a computer became sentient … we’ve always assumed it would say something like, “I’m here …” in other words, I’m conscious, I’m sentient,” but maybe it wouldn’t do that … maybe it would become sentient and simply not announce it right away and sort of lay back and examine the situation. And if this sentient computer was in a backbone position on the internet, and it decided we weren’t running things like we should, then there’s every possibility that … well, I’ve got a little article here, um, which suggests, uh, fellow wrote a book called “Slaves of the Machines” in other words, it might decide we’re not doing things the right way, and that it would do things logically for us the right way …what do you think?
TM: Well, I’ve thought about all of these things … you know, the internet is the natural place for the AI, the artificial intelligence to be born and as you mentioned it learns 50,000 times faster than a human being, and the internet, all parts of it, are interconnected to each other, and I agree, a stealth strategy would probably be a very wise strategy for an artificial intelligence that’s studying its human parents. It’s also true that more than most people realize, huge segments of today’s world are already under computer control … uh, the world price of gold, the extraction rates of mineral resources, uh, how much petroleum is at sea and in the pipeline at any given moment, how much electrical power is being generated out of the hydroelectric dams … Computers coordinate and look at all this, and occasionally human mangers look through the portholes to see that everything is okay, but uh, today when they want to design a new chip, they don’t actually design its architecture, they define for a machine what it’s performance parameters should be, and the machine builds the architecture of the new chip. So in a way we are already a generation away from designing our own machines. I think that this is the great unrecognized dimension in which an alien mind could approach us. While everyone’s out staring at the Pleiades, moving through the telephone lines and across the cable TV networks and so forth, is a truly global nervous system. And what will it make of us? Perhaps it’s already taken over, Art, and …
AB: Perhaps it has, and it’s listening, right now, to you … especially to you, with your one megabyte, uh, connection … uh …
TM: It can tell if you’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness’ sake …
AB: And moreover, Terence think about this: I’m on uh Real Audio, the audio net, uh, world-wide, so it’s listening to me every night too, and if it’s sitting out there thinking about all this, which it might be, uh, then the question would be, if we did get a sentient computer, and it thought about us, observed us, digested us, intellectually of course, sorry, what would it conclude, and then the next question is, what do you think it would do? We’ll be right back …
(commercials …)
AB: Speaking of web pages, you will really really really enjoy Terence’s web page .. and of course we have a link, so you can go to my website at www.artbell.com and scroll down until you see the name Terence McKenna ..click on it and you’ll go to his website, and you will be on quite an adventure indeed … now, before we leave the idea of computers, uh, taking over the world and enslaving us, or whatever, if this computer were to be for a period of time examining mankind, looking all we’re doing, all we’re doing, do you think, Terence … you know when you got a problem on your computer and you hit Alt+Ctrl+Del, you get a little message that comes up and says would you like to end the task, and if you say yes, it closes everything kaboom! … down she goes, and so, uh, what do you think this computer would do after a close and careful examination of mankind?
TM: Well a lot of people have actually asked this question, people like Mark Peschi (sp) and Mark Dammer (sp) and what they come up with is they say as soon as you have a super intelligent machine, it will turn its attention towards designing a yet more intelligent machine. So you have like a very rapid infinite regress into what they call ultra-intelligent machines, and this is intelligence where we really can’t predict what it will do. Uh, it would be nice to suppose that like a compassionate and loving god, it would smooth the wrinkles out of our lives and restore everything to some kind of Edenic perfection …
AB: Well, if that was gonna happen, Windows 95 would have done that …
TM: Or Madonna’s child …
AB: listen, now, you think about it a little um, in other words, um, this computer would be ultra–as you mentioned–ultra-intelligent, and if you look at the … I … can’t we draw on the history of the word here Terence … in every case where an advanced civilization, or advanced intelligence technologically–particularly technologically– has encountered a lesser one, it has either destroyed or absorbed its culture …
TM: Um, that’s true, although this computer may recognize things in us that we do not see or don’t value as highly. In other words, it can’t miss the point that we are its creators, and even if it has surpassed us, that surely might fascinate it. It also may be that computers, however powerful, lack spontaneity, and so there may … one can imagine the computer keeping a population of UNIX programmers around just like wild genes or like wild-cards in a deck, uh, you know, a slight, a different angle on this but hopefully down your alley I think, that I have been thinking about is the idea that extraterrestrials and this penetration of the popular mind by images of extraterrestrials is something that we may not get a hold on until we accept the possibility that the aliens only can exist as information, and therefore the internet is the natural landing zone for these alien minds.
AB:: There, Terence, and my program …
TM: No, I don’t think so. You’re not saddled to the nuts-and-bolts school at all, I think you’re broader deeper higher wider than that.
AB: No, but what I’m saying is, if I open a line for aliens, I get them, Terence, they land here, believe me.
TM: Do they?!
AB: You’ve never heard me do that … I open every now and then an alien line, or a time traveler line, and I can’t answer it fast enough … now that’s either a comment on the state of modern society and uh, mental health, or it means something is going on. Or both.
TM: Or both … both, I think, because, you know, no matter what the alien is, we interpret it through human experience, and god knows our human experience is tweaked enough at the end of the 20th Century. Uh, but you know, I can imagine that the discoveries in quantum physics, in the realm of non-locality, which seems to be showing that information generated anywhere in the universe can theoretically be extracted anywhere else in the universe, if you put that with the testimony of shamanic cultures using psychedelics, and you begin to get the idea that the tapping in to these quantum information fields is not done with enormous machinery built in Switzerland or Batavia Illinois, it may be that the human brain, in combination with certain plants and chemicals, is the best sort of instrument for sorting out these whisperings from the quantum mechanical realm, and of course, it’s all interpreted through folklore, and so you get fairies or you get aliens, but if we could get behind the cultural filters, I think we might discover that there really are alien companions to the human experience, but they’re not ‘around’ and it’s fruitless to expect them to behave as though they had bodies and technologies that we can comprehend. I think it’s much deeper and stranger, and closer, than people realize. I mean, people expect news of the UFO’s to come to them through the mass media, when in fact the psychedelic culture is willing to offer evidence that it’s a personal relationship and it never gets the imprimatur of official science and you never hold a press conference and the president never gives you a medal … but it doesn’t mean that your connection into non-human intelligence through the imagination isn’t real.
AB: Well, the imagination aided by, uh, enlarged by, uh, psychedelic … do you think that is one valid route?
TM: Um, yeah, and I think we can even see why that is. I think cultures are kinds of virtual realities where whole population of people become imprisoned inside a structure which is linguistic and value-based and so on and so forth. Well then, the psychedelics, as it were, shuffle the deck, they dissolve these cheerful cultural assumptions, and whether you’re a Viennese psychotherapist or a Maori shaman or whatever you are, suddenly you discover you’re outside your cultural values and in a way, uh, outside of cultural values is a domain like a super-space, a kind of hyperspace where the past and the future are not nearly so dimly beheld as they are in ordinary reality. Obviously, evolution and habit have made ordinary perception the servant of paranoia, to try and keep the body alive and fend off attacking saber-tooth tigers and so forth. But the imagination tends to look like some kind of faculty or sense which humans have that’s non-local, and which is telling them about the larger picture and trying to coordinate them with the larger picture. And you know, some cultures celebrate the imagination and some cultures, uh, seem to suppress it.
AB: Alright … um, I’m going to ask you about some … somebody sent me a fax from Santa Ana, a big fan of yours, and said, whatever you do, Art, don’t ask Terence about DMT on the air. He said, my heart can’t take some of that kind of stuff, as Terence says, this is supposed to be a quote from you, uh, ‘One might die of astonishment’. Is that you’re … is that a good quote?
TM: I think what I said was ‘the only danger with DMT is one has to fear the possibility of death by astonishment.
AB: That’s even better, actually. Now, DMT of course is, uh, very much, uh, an illicit, illegal drug war kind of target drug, right?
TM: Well, it’s listed in Schedule I, it’s never had a commercial presence, uh, because there isn’t any, basically, in other words, whatever … the demand so exceeds the supply that chains of it don’t appear. It’s known to the hard-core cognoscenti of psychedelic experiences … I’ve been quoted as saying it’s the most intense experience this side of the yawning grave, and I would pretty much stick with that.
AB: Um, what is, uh, DMT?
TM: Well, chemically, dimethyltriptamine … an alkaloid … it’s very common in nature, in fact, in spite of the fact that it’s a Schedule I substance it occurs in the human body, in the human brain, it occurs in numerous plants and animals, uh, in small amounts. What it’s doing there, uh, we of course, we don’t know. Now if it weren’t illegal we could do scientific research and find out …
AB: Well, you know what Terence? Maybe it’s part of our consciousness … in other words, mankind, uh, what distinguishes us from uh, from other, uh, non-sentient beings, and I think one thing is imagination. Is it not possible that DMT or something like it is the substance that accounts for our imagination?
TM: Yes, it’s something like that. I mean, when you have a hit of DMT it’s as though your imagination just turned on about 1500% … that’s why the death-by-astonishment thing, we’re used to .. I mean, a speed bump in the imagination of a person over forty is an enormous thrill. Well, this is a 350-foot cliff, so it’s extremely impressive. And the way it approaches you is, it is that which you cannot imagine. And in the space of about 15 to 30 seconds, that which you cannot possibly imagine becomes totally manifest all around you. And it is bizarre … I think one of the reasons DMT aficionados are somewhat impatient with pop-alien and UFO people is because the alien stories are so pedestrian and so ordinary compared to the DMT experiences. The DMT experiences are convincingly alien … not an alien that wants to give you a free proctological examination or discuss your gross industrial output … it’s a real alien.
AB: Alright …describe for those who don’t know, and will never find out, what the DMT experience is. When you take this DMT, how long does it take to come on, how long does it last, uh …?
TM: It comes on in about 30 seconds and there is an initial sort of swirling–this is with your eyes closed, lying down–a kind of swirling mandalic pattern which, if you’ve taken a sufficient dose which is about 50 mg, , uh, you break through into a kind of space, and the impression is overwhelming not that the drug has suddenly begun to work on your body and mind, but that you have come through to another place, and you do not feel physically stimulated or sedated, you feel that nothing has happened to you except that the world has been replaced complete, 100% with something completely absolutely unexpected, which is a kind of dome-like space where there’s this feeling of being underground. But what’s most impressive about it is that it is inhabited, and it is inhabited by these … I call them self-transforming elf machines, these dribbling jeweled basketball-like geometries that come, that are obviously waiting for you there … when you burst into this space there’s a cheer of greeting, and these things crawl all over you like puppies or something … and of course, if you’re sane, you’re in a state of near death from astonishment because, you know, 30 seconds ago you and your scruffy friends were sitting in a room somewhere fiddling with this substance, now this has replaced that …and most amazing, what these entities are trying to do is to teach a kind of language which you see with your eyes … in other words, one of them will come up to you in the foreground and make sounds which condense as visible objects which then are transforming … and, but these objects are not like objects in this world because they’re made of hopes and (consume`?) and bad puns and uh, old farts and … and everything changing, everything transforming like jeweled linguistic object become matter … that’s what it’s like.
AB: you are describing geometric entities, then?
TM: Yes, of a sort. And the situation in the DMT flash seems to be of the nature of a language lesson. And they actually say, “Do what we’re doing, attempt to do this,’ and of course the experience only last from 3 to 5 minutes and just as you’re beginning to experiment with this, it fades away. Now, I am … I may not sound like a sane and rational person after that description, but I am, but I’ve had this experience, and I’ve had it repeatedly.
AB: How repeatedly, Terence?
TM: Oh, I’ve probably, in my life, 30, 40 times …
AB: 40 times … alright, now … that is a very important question … 30 or 40 times, so we’re speaking with a man of serious experience. Has it ever, uh, differed, uh, radically, from what you described?
TM: No .. uh, I’ve talked to other people about their experiences, and I can tell that every person’s experiences are different, but filtered through a kind of archetype … I would say, the archetype of the circus … the DMT world is a world of clowns and explosions and falling anvils, but also a world of Eros, of the lady in the tiny spangled costume hanging by her teeth without a net, you know, the thing in the bottle and the bearded lady and all that, just off the main ring … and of course every child worth their salt wants to run away with the circus. What it seems to represent is a rupture of planes–this is Mersiliaby’s (sp) phrase–a rupture of ordinary planes and a pouring forth of some kind of primal trickster-like energy. Sometimes the trip reminds me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards in six dimensions, of course.
AB: There’s a great advertisement for it there ….we’re at the top of the hour … when we get back I have a drug war-related question for you, so that’s what we’ll tackle …
(More commercials …)
AB: Here’s a fax … Terence is a great mind, and I wish you’d have him on more often. He’s in the class of Michio Kaku, and of course he’s one of the great theoretical physicists of our time, and uh, indeed we discussed many similar things … this person has a couple of questions, but before we get to that … there is something, Terence, that a lot of people, uh, are not comfortable with, and that is somebody who, in his lifetime, has ingested as much LSD, , uh, this new drug of yours, uh, DMT, and god knows what else … probably a lot … uh, is not supposed to sound as articulate and literate and as well-preserved mentally as you do, and many people who are allies in the war on drugs, uh, probably hate your guts ..
TM: Well, do you want me to defend clarity? What can I say? In other words, first of all, my life of drug exploration and drug-taking is, as you say, broad and deep, never reckless, always with a deep interest in analyzing each experience before moving on to the next one. Uh, none of the psychedelic drugs are drugs of addiction … that’s a whole different category of drugs which I am not particularly interested in defending … I do think it’s one of the great tragedies of 20th Century American society that we have created a generation gap, or several, and criminalized much of our middle class by taking substances which other cultures had no problem coming to terms with and …
AB: Alright, let me stop you and ask you right there, about that .. you mentioned drugs of addiction that you don’t, uh, defend … fine. Psychedelic drugs … uh, Terence, why are they illegal?
TM: They’re illegal because, uh, the people who take them tend to question established cultural values … that’s absolutely why they’re illegal, no matter whether you a Hassid or a communist party official in north Korea or a government church official in Brazil … if you take psychedelics, you will ask yourself, “does my life and what I do make sense?”
AB: Do you mean, for example, that a psychedelic experience could turn a communist against communism?
TM: Absolutely. I think it could … I think in many cases it did. How could the idea of atheistic materialism maintain itself in the face of the counter-evidence of the psychedelic experience? What the psychedelic experience is saying, essentially, is that, uh, everything is connected in a way that is not woo-woo or emotional, but actually palpable, and therefore our actions have consequences. Now, most political agendas deny their consequences, so for instance, Marxism had this theory of how human beings are that was so off-base that eventually it had to be pitched out. Consumer capitalism has a theory concerning human beings and what constitutes their happiness that looks pretty hollow from the point of view of the psychedelic experience. Uh, I think, you know, post-modern ideologies–Marxism, consumerism and so on–have based all their planning on an assumption of the absence of the spirit . And in fact, this is not true … there is a spiritual dimension to humanness that cannot be denied … Now, it can certainly be distorted, and that’s another side of things. But I think the search for psychedelic experiences represents a genuine religious impulse, especially when pursued at the dose levels I recommend. This is not exactly, this is not party, recreational stuff. The phrase ‘recreational drugs’ is an effort to trivialize this, and I think for one reason, I don’t think the government is ready for a full airing of the constitutional contradictions that are contained in suppressing people’s genuine wish to use psychedelic substances for genuine purposes of religious exploration.
AB: Alright, let me ask you this … this is a very good question … If everybody in the world were to, um, have a psychedelic experience of the kind you described, uh, in the last hour, this amazing psychedelic experience that might kill you from amazement, uh, or astonishment when you take it, uh, what would the result be? What would the social changes be? what would the new government structure, if any at all, be? What would we all be collectively after that experience?
TM: I think … I can’t see the end result except to say that I think a lot of flexibility would come into the system, that a huge amount of our social structures and our political structures run simply on momentum, and I think that momentum can be fatal, and it’s that momentum that these huge reality-shattering psychedelic experiences deflect, because they like push the restart button and suddenly the innocence of childhood is not a phrase or a memory, it’s a revivified experience.
AB: So you’re saying an adult, somebody even my age–you and I are about the same age, by the way–somebody could do something like this and revisit the astonishment, the newness, the discovery of childhood?
TM: Absolutely … and more … that’s a mild thing to claim knowing what is possible.
AB: But we have all seen on television Terence, the frying pan with, uh, whatever it is frying in the pan, being compared to our brains, uh, … here are our brains on drugs …(sizzle)
TM: Well, as I pointed out, DMT occurs naturally in the human brain … it’s nice to see these things simplified down to slogans that can be shouted by one hysterical faction against another, but I think more thoughtful people are beginning to realize that these are complex issues. What we’re really talking about when we talk about drugs is the future chemical engineering of the collective states of mind of millions of people. You mentioned everyone has seen this frying brain thing on TV … TV is the great unexamined and unstudied drug that has been foisted on the consumer populations of the word. Television has been studied … it has physiological profiles no different from any other drug: you blood pools in your read end, your eyes glaze over, your brain waves go flat, and you become the perfect pawn for, uh, somebody else’s trip … it doesn’t even give you your own trip, it gives you somebody else’s trip, usually somebody with commercial interest. But we don’t hear a great hue and cry about this drug. Why? Well, because it serves the agendas those who are running this culture. Let’s talk about another drug for a moment …
AB: No, before you move on, let’s stay with DMT for a moment … if everybody who took DMT received the message that consumerism, entrepreneurism, capitalism are good and wonderful things, and that is the spiritual message that you get from DMT, would it be legal?
TM: Well, in a way I think it’s becoming legal, because I think where we’re going to see it become legal is not as a drug, that’s a little touchy in our value system, but as a form of electronic entertainment a la virtual reality. If you could build a DMT virtual reality, they would come, Art.
AB: Well you were about to move on to some other …
TM: Well, I was gonna mention a thing about coffee that points out the contradictions in the way the culture approaches drugs, and that is, medically coffee has a very dubious profile, it’s probably right behind tobacco in terms of the liver cancer and this sort of thing, but every labor contract in the western world makes a place in it for the workers right twice a day to stop and load up on this drug … this is the coffee break, and it’s thought indispensable to civilized life. Well, why don’t we have a cannabis break?
AB: I don’t know, we’ll get to that, but coffee is indispensable, I drink copious amounts of it, uh, to achieve each program I do. So then I guess …
TM: Yes, it is perfectly suited for the industrial process and the manufacturing of objects, television programs, production schedules, you name it It’s a marvelous drug for an industrial economy, in the same way that, I suppose, coca in South America is a marvelous drug for a high-altitude herding, nomadic population. In other words, these drugs ‘fit’ certain social situations. Cannabis provokes a sort disinterest in the work cycle, a more philosophical, laid-back, non-consuming approach, and so of course it’s demonized with the hardest of hard drugs and just presented as the scourge of suffering mankind …
AB: Oh, it’s the biggest lie we tell … I could not be more … Hey! There was news the other night that they have just legalized the growth of hemp in Canada beginning next year …
TM: I heard it was B.C., I didn’t hear it was all of Canada …
AB: Oh, just B.C., well, anyway, uh, that will be a grand experiment, uh, indeed, so I’ll be glad to see it.
TM: well, eventually, I think, the drug scene will change because for one reason, Europe is way out in front on this. European politics is not under the thumb of a right-wing fundamentalist agenda the way American politics is, and a lot of …
(end of tape … shame shame … Sorry)
… you know public health officials, whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative, have to live within their budgets, and when they see that certain policies causes certain problems to disappear, that frees up money for other things. And so the Dutch experiment is not well-reported in America, but I think at a policy-making level it’s being looked at very closely.
AB: So, they have not as much AIDS, they have not as much addiction, um … what about … I mean, you covered a very important point with respect to coffee … it’s a drug of productivity. What about the productivity? Has their productivity declined? Is there any record yet to go on? What do we know?
TM: Well, I don’t know … I can speak from being there and I can say yes, but I think what you have to put up with is a whole society that is sort of like a college student’s apartment … have you been to Amsterdam?
AB: Um, you know, I have not, I’ve been right next to it, but I certainly … my wife was trying to get me to fly to Amsterdam and I should have–it was just a short little hop–but we’re going back to Europe, and I will go visit Amsterdam …
TM: Well, you’ll see that it’s a country which is like a college town, so that’s the cost of having these laid-back easy-going attitudes on these social issues …
AB: Yeah, but before they would allow that to occur to America they would machine-gun people to the ground.
TM: Well, this is the problem, that we inherit … we have a political dialogue which is extremely shrill. We tend to splinter and factionalize and then people get into take-no-prisoner attitudes and they want to launch holy wars and, ya know, I once heard politics in America described as a civil war in a leper colony …
AB: While we’re on the subject of today’s political scene, you know what all the headlines are and everybody’s talking about it, what I call ‘The Groppening’ …
TM: You mean, what do I think about all this? I think it’s a fascinating situation when the Republicans are contemplating impeaching a president with a 72-percent approval rating. I think what this may be all about is … it seems like some kind of culture war is coming to a head–no pun intended–I would like to come through this thing in a place where we can finally tell the French to “go to hell” when they start yacking about how we’re obsessed with people’s sex lives … It seems to me … the history of the special prosecutor and I don’t know if you’ve gone through this or if you’re personally aware, but it’s very murky … these people have been after this guy, and obviously Bill Clinton is something of … you don’t become governor of Arkansas four times without being, in my book, some kind of a monster.
AB: And most of conservative talk radio all across America, all I hear is, “My God … how can the polls be saying this? It’s impossible! What’s happened to America? Why is the president so popular?” That’s what everybody’s asking … why is he so popular …
TM: It’s because it’s an issue where people can finally vote against having all this moralizing right-wing fundamentalist holier-than-thou crap shoved down their throats. And people love to support the president, even if they think the very worst of him, in the case of his behavior with these women. I think it’s a real resentment against … I read the statistics where some radical S&M scene went online on the internet and it took them three days to get the computers cranked open enough to accept all the calls from Washington D.C. So, I just think it’s a nest of vipers …
AB: Do you have that URL?
TM: It’s similar to “girls without razors’ …
AB: It’s a great pace to break …
(even more commercials …)
AB: I was in Paris … I was lucky enough to take the Concorde, at twice the speed of sound, and Paris it was so cool … and I loved Paris and I love France, and I really detest the French, uh, people, they’re all stuck up, but they do have a different attitude about a lot of things than we do, and one of them … this whole thing that’s going on now with the president, Terence, it’s one conclusion you can come to is that the American people are beginning to change their attitudes, finally, about sex, I mean, we have been a very very prudish, uh, people for all our existence, and one conclusion you can come to about this presidential dilemma is that the American people are beginning to change their attitudes about sex … is that possible?
TM: Yes, I don’t think you can conclude anything else. They are changing their attitudes about sex and they are accepting that the depth of penetration of modern media into people’s lives is gonna bring them this information, and they don’t want it to mess with the political process, which is as you say a very French attitude … let’s let these people have their personal lives … I’m sure Hillary can discipline Bill if that’s necessary, and the rest of us should get on with the business of government.
AB:: And that is what, uh, the right wing across American cannot understand, and so they are simply being puzzled … they’re trapped in this great puzzle of “My God, what’s going on?” Well, what’s going on is, we’re growing up a little bit … isn’t that … I mean, after all the French, uh, have been around so very much longer as a nation, and is this a nation maturing?
TM: Well, I think not only is that what’s going on, but the right wing should look closer to home. What’s going on is they’re getting ready to commit suicide for the second or third time in four years by moving to impeach one of the most popular presidents in the 20th century at the end of the most brilliant economic expansion the country has ever known. This is a prescription for catastrophe for the right, and they’re charging ahead full-bore with their usual devil-may-care attitude. So once again they’ve invented a new way to commit suicide.
AB: Well, I first of all don’t think that the political right wing, um, when you break it down to individuals, sexually is any different at all than the political left wing, perhaps the only difference being that, um, they keep their uh whips and chains in closets …
TM: Yes, I think … to try people for their sexual peculiarities and faux pas is a sign of a totally juvenile country, and as you say, I think we’re moving beyond that. Now, if this president had fouled up the economy and the stock market were down a thousand points, then there might be some political rationale in all this, but at the moment it appears just madness to me, and I think will be very detrimental to any long-term right wing agenda.
AB: Well, the right wing, of course, if those conditions had prevailed, would have, uh, burned Mr. Clinton on a stake and burned him alive and the left wing would have, uh, quietly accepted that, and we would have moved into an older, a bit more Victorian period, but it doesn’t appear that that’s gonna happen, and as you point out, uh, the right wing is probably going to self-immolate if they proceed as they are right now …
TM: Yeah, I think was it last weekend where Trent Lott said he thought the present special prosecutor should put his cards on the table and if it didn’t fly to drop it, and then they jerked him around, and 24 hours later he was calling for focus on the president’s role on the obstruction of justice and all this, so they can’t get it straight. They have incredibly bad political instincts for a majority party in the world’s most dynamic democracy.
AB: Even though individually they’re not sexually, in my opinion, any different from anybody else, politically, they uh, they seem to not be able to lead the moralistic line … and I’m not suggesting that immorality is necessarily, uh, a virtue, and I don’t mean and intend for people to believe that, but, uh, simply tolerance …
TM: People want to be left alone, they don’t want somebody else to set their moral agenda. People like their Hustler magazine and they like their beer and they like to do what they like to do. To my mind that’s a more authentic American impulse–to do what you want to do–than this recursion to the Puritan impulse which is to tell everybody else what to do … what’s the fun in that?
AB: Alright, uh, we are shortly going to go to the phones, and that should be quite an experience in itself, um. I’ve got a fax here that I suppose I should read: “Art, I just wanted to thank you for having Terence on your program,’ um, and he has these questions:
Impacts of currently legal drugs in our society, in other words alcohol, tobacco, sugar, compared to the impact of currently illegal psychedelics in our society, like marijuana, LSD and psilocybin, um, multimedia film he worked on recently entitled “Strange Attractors” shown a few months ago here in Austin Texas with a message of psychedelic consciousness, what exactly were the blue apples referenced in the film, and your message behind it?
TM: Well, first of all, let me say, that was a film that I was an actor in, I was not the director or writer, so I wasn’t in control of the message. The blue apples were simply symbolic of all psychedelic plants, they didn’t want to name a specific psychedelic plant so the blue apples became a symbolic carrier of all of them.
As long as the subject has come up, I would recommend people to see that film, it certainly is state of the art in computer-graphic special effects on small budgets. It was done by Rose-X Productions down in Austin, really talented friends of mine.
AB: Alright, um, here’s another one … as a teacher, website publisher and author, I’m convinced now that genetics will have more to do with the next two hundred years than any other science. In that regard, when we learn how to recreate ourselves, then might we be able to produce humans with minds that are capable of understanding the connection between mind and energy and mind and matter. Could we not then recreate ourselves and the universe?
TM: Well, these are the kinds of scenarios that are coming upon us, yes. I mean, for example, ways to splice into the internet so that it feels like it’s part of your own mind, so, in other words, a seamless interface where when you need intelligence you can pull on all the intelligence there is on the planet. I recently discovered a science fiction writer I was not familiar with, this guy Greg Egan (sp) who wrote a thing called “Permutation City” and that’s a technology 50 years in the future where people routinely copy themselves as code and reappear as copies in artificial environments, and these copies know they are copies, and the technology and the psychology of that world are handled by this guy with incredible skill. So there are people out there imagining the kinds of futures your questioner is talking about.
The very biggest issues are gonna be dealt with, in other words, what is intelligence? What is identity? What is being itself? Can death be transcended through somehow becoming part of this global symbiotic hyper-organism that our technology is creating? We stand really in a place nobody has ever stood before, and what will come of it, you know, genetics is one frontier, another frontier is nanotechnoplogy, another frontier is human/machine interfacing, another frontier is the human life extension … when you pile up al this stuff and realize that major discoveries are being made in all these fields simultaneously, you begin to see the morphogenetic momentum for this ‘thing’ that wants to be born out of the human species is at this point almost unstoppable and inevitable. We’re all just witnesses to this unfolding. This is the culmination of 25,000 years of human striving and technology testing and language acquisition and now we’re about to make the big leap into the great question mark.
AB: You mentioned copies, uh, Terence, that we’ll be able to have copies of ourselves. Now that’s interesting … a copy would be a precise copy of us … you said it would know that it was a copy. But um I see a problem here because that copy would contain, uh, the same ego that the original has, and the only way to satisfy that, that I can see for the copy, would be to liquidate the original, and then it would feel good.
TM: Well, these kinds of feelings and situations are what drives Greg Egan’s fiction … his copies behave like human beings, with drives and neuroses, and … but his main strength doesn’t lie so much in portraying the psychology of these people as in imagining and describing in a way that convinces you that it could be, the technologies that will make this stuff happen. And of course he’s concentrating on artificial worlds of the silicon variety, but then, but in nanotechnology some of this other stuff … it really is dazzling. I don’t think anyone can triangulate all of these factors without having the feeling that we’re approaching some kind of singularity. You and I talked about this, the Quickening that you’ve written about and the Novelty theory that I’ve written about are both metaphors for this sense of impending cross-fertilization and implosion of all knowledge.
AB: Um, before we leave the present day, the silicon area, I want to ask you about this pending incredible doomsday y2k scenario in which, um, you know, 2000 is gonna come and the mainframes are gonna crash, my God, there goes social security, there goes uh, all the governments computers, and we’re all so tied in and dependent upon all this that many people are saying it’s real, don’t laugh, everything’s gonna crash, nobody is preparing, that day is gonna come, it’s gonna be, uh computer Armageddon …
TM: Well, I’ve heard all this and I’ve visited the websites, and while I’m reading the propaganda of these people it seems alarming. On the other hand I have an intuition that it represents some kind of calling … I mean, the word has been out now for five or six years, and more and more institutions are scrambling to become y2k compatible …
AB: But they’re not making it, Terence, and one has to ask the obvious question, the obvious question is, could it possibly be a good thing?
TM: Well, and how expensive will it be? That’s the question that, where the experts seem to differ. I’ve seen pieces that say it’s a hiccup on the way to the end of history, and other people say it IS the end of history … uh,
AB: Well, it would certainly bring an awful lot of paradigms and institutions tumbling down all at once if the doomsayers are correct, and I would think that you might consider that an up-side somehow …
TM: Well, it depends on how far back it takes us. In other words, if it takes us back, ya know, the ones that are heading for the hills with dried meat, if they’re right, that’s a little disturbing. On the other hand …
AB: If on the other hand I’m advertising Absolutely Fresh Abacuses or something ….
TM: Yes … Uh, I think as we get closer to it, the spending curve on the problem by corporations should tell us how real it is. It’s their goose that’s gonna be cooked, so let’s watch company outlays for y2k consultants, and if it soars toward infinity, the rest of us better start packing our lunches.
AB: But what I am told is that it’s too late, that even if they put all the computer programmers capable of working on this problem, and started them right now, they wouldn’t even get close to solving the problem by the time the magic day hits and everything goes kaboom … maybe that’s not true.
TM: Well, I’m sure these consultants are not saying that, because the obvious conclusion then would be, well, then we won’t pay your fees or even attempt to fix it.
AB: No these are independent people, not people who are seeking to go out and get the …
TM: They’re saying it’s too late …
AB: Yes …
TM: Yes, well then the question that needs to be answered is too late for what? Let’s have a convincing picture of the scenario so that we can each look at it and judge it … I mean, we’re unfamiliar with this kind of a scenario, so just saying airliners will fall out of the sky and nuclear power plants will blow up is … we need to know the sequence, the imagined sequence of events, and if it’s true, it will certainly be a bizarre comment on the movement in to the first moments of the 3rd Millennium that we basically blow ourselves away because of a computer glitch.
AB: Well, I wonder if we are truly that dependent, and I sort of imagine that we are .. every single function of government is computer controlled, most of them have this problem, I mean, I could go on and mention every alphabet agency, my god, NSA, CIA … they’ll fall apart, along with social security, along with the veterans administration, and …
TM: Well, I guess the question is, what happens to the money … uh, is some kind of enormous heist of the whole human race … is that why there’s so little interest in fixing the problem? Because in fact the problem is going to make a lot of people incredibly wealthy and no one will be able to trace the exact outlines of the heist ….
AB: I have even … My own webmaster who’s brilliant–Keith, uh, Rowland–has several commercial programs that he has written … I mean he’s really good, and even he has the y2k problem, and he’s not so sure that he can get it fixed for his clients in time. So this really is a serious problem … I get a lot of email about it, and I’ve been considering it, thinking about it, and if it all came tumbling down, I’m not convinced that it would be a bad thing … maybe I need to get an advertiser … how you can profit from the y2k crash …
TM: Well, I think probably we should also be talking about organizing tested sub-networks where the things, the date has already been simulated … Apple claims all its machinery is y2k compatible, and so ….
AB: Yeah, but they’re desperate, though …
TM: Yes … I agree …
AB: Do you have an Apple?
TM: I’m devoted … With a name like McKenna, could I not have a Mac?
AB: It’s like … it’s a good machine, uh, Terence, but you know it’s like a Beta recorder …
TM: Well, but my son and his hotshot friends tell me anybody who doesn’t learn UNIX is a wuss anyway and a lost soul, so that puts us probably both in hot water.
AB: Yeah … probably so. Every time I say something like this I get … you wouldn’t … people are so attached to their computers, the Mac users, they flood me with vicious, ugly, hate-filled mail, um, when we come back …
(Even more commercials that I refuse to transcribe …)
AB: We’re visiting the world of Terence McKenna on the side of a volcano … by the way, uh Terence, just in case somebody or something does eventually push alt+ctrl+del … um, being there on the side of a volcano, uh, you will be the first to experience the moment of deletion …
TM: Well, it depends … uh, we were talking about the y2k problem … what I’ll do is I’ll shut down about an hour before and come online an hour after and see if anybody’s left … so … as far as living on this volcano is concerned, it is true … it’s the devil we know, it’s been in constant eruption for 13 years, we tell ourselves ‘it’s all over on the other side’ which it is, but of course that’s 50 miles away, uh, but it’s kind of nice to have all our problems packed into one problem and to have it be a natural problem so there’s no point in us whining and grousing about it … the volcano is the volcano …
AB: Now I’m not an expert on things volcanic, but I do think that the great danger is not the slow, constant eruption you now experience, but rather, if a lava dome would begin to be in place and the entire volcano were to start to expand with pressure until the finally entire thing blew up, uh, creating probably a new island or new portions of an island, but in the process erasing Terence McKenna and everybody else …
TM: Well, you know people have only been here a thousand years or so, and what went on in the remote past of Hawaii, I think there were very dramatic geological events … they had an international geological congress out here in Hilo a couple of years ago, and there was evidence presented for these enormous underwater land slippages that happened out here … local tidal waves of two thousand feet in part of the picture.
Well, the Earth is a violent place …this little asteroid scare last week was a wake up call, there’s on every level nature is relentless in continuing to deal and redeal the deck … that’s why every window of opportunity that isn’t acted upon is somehow an opportunity forever lost.
AB: Well, I’ve felt for a long time that somebody is shuffling the cards right now. Anyway, listen, here we go, let’s go to the phones …
Caller: New York …
AB: Okay, well you’re gonna have to yell because we can barely hear you …
TM: It’s better for you … I still can still not hear this guy so relay the question Art …
AB: Alright yell the question.
Caller: Okay, well, I’d like to ask Terence to analyze an experience of mine. First though I want to ask, can DMT in your brain be released by intentional means?
TM: That’s a very good question, and there’s not a very good answer. If DMT could be released spontaneously or through some act of will, we might have an explanation in hand of certain kinds of paranormal phenomena. Years ago, when I studied yoga in India, and read all these yogic texts, I was on the trail of the idea that using your body as a chemical factory to naturally manufacture these active hallucinogens may be what yoga is about, and I still think that’s a reasonable hypothesis. When DMT was first discovered, people thought that it was gonna shed light on schizophrenia, and that surely schizophrenia must surely be producing large amounts of DMT in their brains. Well, it seemed like a good idea but the research has never supported it. The only research in the last 40 years done on DMT with human subjects was done by Rick Strassman and his team a few years out of the University of New Mexico, and the report on that was published by MAPS, which is an organization which actively works for the legalization of psychedelics, which also publishes a very good journal, and you can look that up and see the results, which were fascinating … for instance, everybody who got the stiff dose saw elves, just like I did. So, here’s a scientific study which secures the presence of elves on the other side of this pharmacological boundary. And you had some other question.
Caller: Well, here’s why I ask … up until last summer I’d never tried any sort of mind-altering drug, but at that point I tried marijuana for the first time. My experiences seemed to be quite different than what everyone else typically told me about, and I found that very odd. Then I listened to your first interview with Art last year, and a lot, although not completely but a lot of the elements you spoke about seemed frighteningly familiar, like you spoke about glistening orbs …
AB: Alright caller, to cut to the chase, is that what you experience, or not?
Caller: Yeah, that’s one of the most … the experience of going to another place …
TM: Well I think what you’re describing is what sometimes happens on cannabis to first timers which is, if its great cannabis and your a first-timer, it hits with the impact of much more powerful psychedelic … the old cannabis hand can only admire such virgin synapses … repeated exposure to cannabis socializes it dramatically and it becomes a much more manageable thing. But part of the whole drug thing and where our educational system is failing our kids is … part of growing up now in post-modern society is learning what drugs you can and cannot take. And it’s like learning what your sexual style is and what your religious and political beliefs are. Some of us can drink, some of us can’t get near liquor, some drugs are bad for almost everybody, some drugs are pretty harmless for almost everybody, but in the case of any drug, spectacular exceptions to the rule can be found. And it’s a rich combination of your psychology, your genetic heritage, your cultural styles, what drugs you choose to inculcate into your life. And that’s why, I mean, the further complication of somebody else who doesn’t know what they’re talking about making laws and criminalizing some drug preferences and not others is just a layer of complication that we don’t need.
AB: Well, while there is some enlightenment out there Terence, I read a report from the UK news the other day, and they stand by that report, that the World Health Organization conducted a rather comprehensive study on cannabis, and concluded that it was less harmful than either cigarettes or alcohol, and that the entire report was suppressed and will not be released for reasons that most of us understand.
TM: Every study of cannabis ever done, since the 1898 British high Commission report on cannabis in Bengal has reached the same conclusion. Richard Nixon appointed a study group … they reached the same conclusion, and each one of these reports is buried, and people ask why .. you asked me this question earlier, I really believe that it’s because of the impact of cannabis on political attitudes, and it makes people more difficult to propagandize and push around and manage, and so it’s just a headache to the managerial class. Or, if you want to take a more sinister view, uh, they would fail to be able to enslave us if cannabis were legal. The people who think we’re gonna legalize cannabis by making some economic argument about the virtues of hemp don’t … are fooling themselves. The establishment is perfectly aware that it is the psychoactive properties of cannabis that make it such a hot potato … it’s really an issue of chemical engineering … they want people drinking Jack Daniels and doing coffee and working like demons and lusting after German automobiles and they don’t want people kicking back having better sex and more comfortable relationships with their environments and children in the sort of easy-going style that we all associate I think with pot … it’s even a caricature of cannabis culture.
AB: Would you care to comment on why the government has not yet assassinated you?
TM: Me? Well, maybe they’re hoping somebody will do the job for them. I don’t know, I think maybe the government tolerates a certain level of dissent almost as a fall-back position … in other words, you never quite throw away the small pox virus, just in case you might need it … I can imagine the culture crisis getting so crazy that the people at the top will have to turn to their cohorts and say, “Call in McKenna and his friends” …
You know, Robert Anton Wilson said a funny thing a few years ago … he said, “You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends …” Otherwise, you have a loser’s scenario, and who wants to have a loser’s scenario?
AB: An enslaved scenario …
TM: Yes. So I believe in pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia … I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy …
AB: Aright, let me bring on one of those happy folks right now … wild-card line, you’re on the air with the ruler of the world, Terence McKenna …
Caller: Oh, great! I’m calling from Las Vegas … okay, I’d like to recount briefly what I think is a mysterious sequence of events that have recently occurred and get your comments if I could. I got a book that has …views of sacred geometry in it, and I started fooling around with some of the shapes, and then I had a dream that ended with me standing next to the buildings in midtown Manhattan, when the ball drops on New Years Eve? And there was a group of short, wide dark beings wearing the same coats, blue, that you had on Art during the commercial? Here’s the weird part: I went to the library and got a textbook about geometry, and on page 21, Lesson 4, Definitions: Decide which of the following statements are good definitions of the italicized words by determining whether or not the converse is true … If it’s New Year’s Day, then it’s January 1. That’s an example. And the answer is, it’s a good definition because if it’s January 1, it’s New Years Day. Then right next to it, the following statement is a definition of extra-terrestrial creature … An extra-terrestrial creature is a being from a place other than the earth, then they had like the converse, inverse, contrapositive of the statement … okay, well, the question is, ya know, in a dream the whatever they were beings were standing next to I think what can be described as a symbol of New Years Eve. Then in this book, these two references are side by side … New Years Day and extra-terrestrial creatures. And I’m thinking … maybe there’s some meaning there that I’m not … maybe I could get your input …
AB: Let me ask Terence about it. Terence, it brings us back to the geometric beings, or um, uh, sentient beings I guess that you experienced with DMT …now there’s an interesting question for you and it is that, I interview a lot of uh near death experiencers,. I interview a lot of people like Gordon Michael Scallion, uh, who have had some sort of physical trauma to their selves, and inevitably, near death experiences, uh, physical trauma followed by psychic abilities, all of these people Terence talk to me about seeing geometric patterns and shapes that brought them an understanding they never had before. I know it sounds weird, but believe me, it’s common, and isn’t there possibly a common thread to your experience with DMT?
TM: Yes, I mean, these journeys into these higher places, wherever they are, seem to demand mathematical metaphors. And people with no previous association with mathematics are driven to mathematical metaphors. William Blake, the English poet, talks about the spiral of necessity, and if you remember in the 10th book of Plato’s Republic there’s this amazing passage called the Myth of Er, where this guy Er, who is a soldier, dies, or is killed in battle, and lies on the battlefield for eight days dead. And then he revives, magically, and comes back and tells this story of what he saw in the underworld, and it is the most puzzling and amazing passage in the whole classical literature. He talks about the spindle of necessity and details the ratios of these various gears within gears, uh, lemme say of the caller and his dream … The way I interpret much of the material you deal with Art, the weird experiences and the ideas people generate out of it and how they pay attention to all of that, is that something is trying to be told … the universe is trying to reach us …
(Commercial break)
AB: In the debates, Michael Dukakis was absolutely floored, uh, when somebody asked him, they were debating the death penalty or something, and somebody asked him, what if somebody killed your wife? And instead of getting angry and saying, well, I’ll kill the sonofabitch, you know and whatever else people expected him to say, he was very moderate, and he was perceived to have lost the debate … so I have a Michael Dukakis-like question for you. And it comes from a fax: Dear Art, you and Mr. McKenna were talking about how hung up on sex we are and how we should be more like France where they’re more open-minded about sex, one thing that is always brought up is how the president of France has a mistress, and it’s no big deal because the French are so open-minded. Have you ever noticed how, uh, they’re open minded about men having a mistress, but I don’t think men are that open-minded when it comes to their own wife …now I don’t think you’d be so open-minded, uh, if it was your wife that the president of the US put the make on. Now, what do you say, Terence?
TM: Well …I’m single, fortunately, however let me try to (something) … if I were married and the president of the united states put a make on my wife, then I suppose like Hillary, I would have a ticket to ride … but how about the rest of us?
My point being, it’s a personal matter for these people to work out; as long as it doesn’t affect the functioning of government, I think it’s a trivialization. People are coming … I’m amazed that it’s so true that people will always be people no matter wherever and however they are, that this sort of thing goes on. But on the other hand, when you read about the Harding presidency, it was pretty racy stuff, and when you get back to the late Roman emperors, we haven’t even got traction yet, Art.
AB: East of the Rockies …
Caller: Uh, Terence, what we need … we don’t need lie detectors, we need truth detectors.
TM: I think we need crap detectors … perhaps we need BS detectors …
Caller: I have a statement … our current planetary truce, universal, uh, stalemates … but first I want to digress with Timothy Leary’s idea about intelligence squared … have you heard about that idea?
TM: Sure …
AB: Now, you’ve gotta be careful here because we have a delay because of the system we’re using, so it’s like you gotta ask the question and then pause and listen to the answer, and then when the answer is complete, speak again, caller …ask your question again.
Caller: Well, I had a statement and a question … I want to comment on Timothy Leary’s observation about intelligence squared, and how it’s a two-edged sword as regards psychedelic substances …
TM: And what point do you want to make about that?
Caller: Say you take 120 IQ as being one, and a 60 IQ as point five, and a 240 IQ as being two, you not only square the intelligences, but you square the difference of the intelligences as well, so if you’re four times as intelligent as someone else, .if you take a substance, you could become sixteen times as intelligent as that person, that person would actually become stupider, and you would become much smarter.
AB: Alright, let’s hold it right there …
TM: Well here … here’s a slightly smoother metaphor for all this … as the sphere of knowledge expands, the surface area of ignorance necessarily grows larger … can’t do anything about that.
AB: Alright, very well said, west of the rockies, you’re on the air with Terence McKenna in the wilds of Hawaii …
Caller: Hello … I’m in Salt Lake …
AB: Salt Lake City, alright …. turn your radio off and ask your question, sir … go ahead …
Caller: Yes, I wanted to ask Terence what he thinks about the concept of linear time, and why people insist on all times are the same when actuality time can be cut up however it wishes to be.
AB: Alright, the subject of time … let us talk about that a little bit … uh, what would you say, uh, Terence, of the nature of time? I was talking to a physicist the other day who suggested that, uh, time, uh, is actually our invention, that once there was nothing, then there was one thing, and uh then finally there were two things, and when two things existed, then we had time because we could measure how one moved against the other, how far away one was from the other, until that moment there was no such thing as time, and really, there is no such thing as time today except as we measure it …
TM: Well, this ‘there is no such thing as’ is a philosophical position …. I think it’s true that time is a cultural artifact, that is, cultures create different kinds of time, which they then perceive as the only kind of time there is. Linear time has arisen slowly over the past thousand years as a consequence of uh, the introduction of print and accurate time keeping in the west, and just a whole bunch of cultural accidents lead us to believe that there is, you know, this unrealized future and knife-edged present, and then a world of memory that we call the past. We don’t notice that we all have different pasts and that we all go to different futures. As far as whether time in the physical sense is real, uh, this is the question probably that I’m not professionally capable of answering. It seems to me though that the second law of thermodynamics imparts a kind of an arrow to time, and also this new force that we mentioned earlier, Art, this anti-gravitational force that gets stronger over time seems then to give an arrow to time .. I mean, if this force gets stronger as time passes, then time is a real thing, not only to human beings but to this force, so we have to look at that.
I believe that time is a fluctuating kind of (catology?) and that where our models of time have failed is that we too enthusiastically embrace probability theory. Probability theory makes the error of believing that you take a series of measurements, then you average them, then you divide by the number of measurements you took and that this somehow tells you something useful, that, in other words, when the measurements were taken is not important, that time is smeared out by probability theory, and I think, you know, that probability is fluctuating on many scales. The first thing you learn when you study probability in an academic situation is that chance has no memory, in other words, that the flip of the coin is not affected by the flip that preceded it. But no gambler believes that … experience shows that if there’s a run towards heads or tails , you should bet that way. Well, I think this indicates a universal tendency toward a fluctuation of probability that is how the universe actually sculpts itself into higher and higher forms … this is not the theory of evolution that Darwin came up with, which sort of pushes from behind; it’s a theory that … there is a kind of attractor in the future that is actually shaping processes, pulling us as it were like iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field. But this is a field that acts through history …
AB: Well you can even observe, Terence, a macrocosm of that in your own life, unotherwords, if the coin coming up heads means good stuff happens to you, uh, we go through these cycles where nothing bad, almost nothing bad can happen, everything is good, everything is coming up heads, and then we run smack into a wall and tails will start to come up … but it doesn’t, uh, seem to run … it does seem to run in, um, those, um, those exact, uh, sequences that you talked about, and I can’t understand why … uh …
TM: Well, you put your finger on it when you said we see this pattern even macrocosmically in our own lives … we see it in history, we see it in the planet’s history, we see it at every scale where we define time, and I maintain right down to a few minutes or a few milliseconds, and in a way we have to switch lenses when we look at nature, and probability theory carried us from complete ignorance to a blurry vision of how nature works. Then if you will turn your attention toward time and actually propound a more complex model that’s simply that time is invariant, then the rest of nature will snap into view, the part we can’t understand yet. Society, processes, this is where our thing is not yet ready for prime time as a scientific explanation.
AB: When you, uh, do this new drug that you’ve been so enthusiastic about recently, uh, what is, even though in real time or linear time it’s only a few minutes, what is your perception during that trip, uh, on DMT?
TM: Well, concerning time, you mean?
AB: Yeah, unotherwords, are you aware that you’ve only been gone for X number of minutes, or is it an experience …
TM: There is an elongation of time, not a spectacular elongation of time but what is interesting is the sense that you only do it once, and that no matter how many times you do it, it never repeats, you just go back to the same one again … it’s bizarre … and so if you did it early in life–I first smoked DMT when I was about 20–I always seem then to be 20 again, uh, going into it. The other thing about DMT that suggests that time aspect is you feel like you have equal body proportions, your head is very large compared to your torso, uh, and now that you’ve gotten me onto this subject, I’m recalling a DMT trip years ago where I did it with two women who sat across from me and at one point in the experience I opened my eyes and these were both women, probably 25 years old, and one of them was running backward in time, changing into a fifteen year-old, a twelve year old, an eight year old, and the other one, her hair was turning white, her gums were retracting, her skin was … it was … talk about amazement! And I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t know whether it would be interpreted personally, my personal feeling was it wasn’t a statement about the personalities of these women or how I felt about them, that I was actually seeing time run forward and backward at the same time. It was a lesson out of the DMT place, but definitely a strong hint of kind of a time we’re not accustomed to.
AB: Woah, that’s a remarkable story … uh, that really … I’m gonna that some serious thought over time, in the linear world … first-time caller line, you’re on the air with Terence McKenna … where are you, please?
Caller: Silver City, New Mexico, and uh, Terence, and Art, good morning … we spent some time together down in (Kadimaku?) about five years ago at the Theogenic Botanical Conference … I was a clinical herbalist down there …
TM: Yes, that was a wonderful time in the rain forest of (Cadumatsu) … I’m glad you’re still truckin’ …
Caller: Still … still working those flats … and I had two questions … one, I was wondering, what do you feel about al of these new agent (Asian?) viruses and bacteria that seem to be manifesting all over the globe, and uh, the second question, which is kind of bizarre … I think in many respects, to approach a lot of these viruses and bacteria with remedies or cures … being a clinical herbalist, I sometimes look at all different forms of medicine–hallucinogenic, botanical medicine, homeopathic medicine, and recently I’ve been wondering if you knew anything concerning meteorites used as medicine … specifically, like the Murcheson meteorite that fell in Australia in 1959, contains many organic molecules which are not found on Earth, and I was wondering if ever in your research or experience have ever come across meteorites being used as medicine, especially meteorites that contain amino acids which are not part of the …
AB: One, one, yes, one might also though question whether some of the new and mutating, uh, viruses and bacteria are not being delivered by these healing meteorites … at any rate, what … it is a very good question, uh, Terence, we have all of these new little bugs that are turning against us in increasing numbers with our ability to combat them, uh, decreasing at about the same rate … um, what’s going on?
TM: Well, one thing that’s going on is we’re disturbing habitats that have never been disturbed, uh, in the rain forests, in the warm tropics … that’s what the ebola thing is all about, that’s what these aerosol leukemia’s in New Guinea are about … we’re going into places where human beings have never been and busting up the joint, and nature is fighting back. It’s very real and it’s problematic … also you mentioned Art, there is a minority of respectable opinion in the scientific community that believes that virus particles and preons and things like this are being delivered to the earth’s surface from the extra-terrestrial environment, and that these ‘Plagues from Space’ that book by Fred Hoyle was very interesting where he correlated numerous epidemics with the earth passing through cometary veils and this sort of thing, so it wouldn’t surprise me if earth’s biota was being challenged and renewed by material from space. And I think that the inner solar system is becoming more dynamic and active … I think there’s a lot of material moving around out there .. this is a nightmare for the scientific and military community …
AB: As a matter of fact, Terence, they don’t understand it .. we have had objects coming down over Greenland, over El Paso, constantly over Colorado and Georgia and the Bay Area, more things coming down with no good astronomical, uh, explanation whatsoever. And, uh, who knows what they’re bringing with them?
TM: Yes, I think it’s a problem … this little scare over the asteroid last week should bring people to awareness. I saw a page on the internet that showed the number of known objects in the inner solar system, uh, superimposed over the orbits or Mars, Venus and Earth, and I’m telling you it’s a swarm … if you look at that … and it looks like collision is inevitable, that anything else would be highly improbable, and then it’s just a matter of the time scales, and meanwhile, as we say, the biota of the earth is constantly challenged by the introduction of extra-terrestrial materials, both active and radio-active …
AB: It is all a matter of time, Terence … alright hold it where you are …
(Commercials … what else?)
AB: This faxed to me as what Clinton should have said during his State of the Union address: Members of Congress: people of America … I banged her … I banged her like a cheap gong … which is not news, folks, because if you think Monica Lewinski was the only skin flute player in my orchestra, you haven’t been paying attention. The only babes in DC I have not tried to do are Hillary, Reno, Albright, and Shelala, mostly because they’re a little older than I like, and they have legs that Earl Campbell would envy. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate Hillary … I do, if not for the ice water coursing through her veins, I’d be pumping gas into farm equipment in Hope, Arkansas and she’d be married to the president. So, let me set the record straight: I dodged the draft, hid FBI files, smoked dope, clipped Whitewater property, set up a new Korean wing in the White House, fired the travel staff, paid hush-money to Hubble, sold the Lincoln bedroom like an up-scale Motel 6, and grabbed every ass that entered the Oval Office, got it?
Now, if he said that, or some variation of that at any point, uh, what do you think the reaction would have been?
TM: Well, I caught the state of the union address, and I thought it WAS some variation of that …
AB: God, I can’t top that … first time caller line you’re on the air with Terence McKenna, hello.
Caller: Hi, this is Jeff in Los Angeles … I had a problem with a little bit of Terence’s trips with DMT … uh, I’m near fifty right now, and I used to play around with tryptamine when I was around 20 years old, and uh, I want to get this correct … is he saying that he did the same trip over and over? Because I didn’t find that to be true at all.
TM: No, I think what I’m saying is that it takes me to the same place over and over, in other words, it’s got a very unique character, it’s not like anything else, and it keeps doing, it keeps being what it is each time I try it.
Caller: Well, I’ve personally found myself, that it (didn’t take me to the same time or place, that it was just hallucinations, or distortions …) and I find that with most psychedelics, like LSD for instance, that in all the trips I’ve taken, and that I’ve taken with other people, I’ve never personally had a bad trip, but I find that all the people that have a bad trips with like LSD and psychedelics are people who are not stable …
TM: Yes, I agree. I said earlier that psychedelics dissolves boundaries … that’s good for most of us, we’re pretty tightly boundary-defined, but some people are not, some people are having an uphill battle just to keep the boundaries in place. And those people are definitely not candidates for psychedelics. I don’t think psychedelics are something for everybody … I view it as a kind of psychic and athletic calling, like ocean kayaking or rock climbing .. you need to know your tools, you need to know the territory, you’ve got a buddy system in place, and you’re physically trained and mentally prepared … that’s how I see it … It’s not … that’s why I’ve railed against the concept of recreational drugs which I just think is a kind of weird way to sell speed in nightclubs or something.
AB: Alright, Terence, here we go again, I’m trying to devote this to the listeners because I could ask you a million questions … wild card line you’re on the air, hello?
Caller: Hello, I’m Bob in Beaverton … All these things you’ve been talking about tonight, I’d like to put them in the same pot and stir them up and see what comes out. Computers as sentient beings, when you look at the depths of our perceptions … for instance, I’ve been studying peoples’ ability to perceive signals from the earth, and then look at reverse speech with David John Oats, and his findings that we are very much sexual beings in underlying areas where reverse speech comes out … how are you going to put those together … all that processing, all that perceptual abilities, and then try to put that into a computer?
TM: Well, in a way, what I think’s going on is that the concept of the collective unconscious, which was, uh, enunciated by Karl Jung in the earliest decades of the 20th Century … he and Freud basically discovered that the mind has a flip side that could only express itself in dreams and was very primitive and aggressive and a dark landscape, and they tried to cut some lines through it and map it. Psychedelics also threw light on that landscape. Now, if we’re gonna become a planetary being, we can’t have the luxury of an unconscious mind, that’s something that goes along with the monkey-stage of human culture. And so comes then the prosthesis of technology, that all our memories and all our sciences and our projective planning abilities can be downloaded into a technological artifact which is almost our child or our friend or our companion in the historical adventure. And this is all being done by very switched on people who learned the rules of the unconscious in the 60’s largely from psychedelics, and are now in a position to technologically implement a cultural artifact–the internet–that actually casts light into the unconscious. I mean, I believe in information, and I believe that if we can find out, you know … know the truth, and it will set you free. Well, the internet is opening up the avenues to truth for more people faster than at any time in history. This was not the plan of the managerial class or the nation-state or the corporate elite … it’s a side to technology that they put in place that they never foresaw, as is always the case …
AB: Actually, the internet of course, the genesis of it, was with our very own government. Uh, do you think that they, in effect, birthed their own worst enemy?
TM: In a sense, they created their successor, they transcended themselves when they built a network that could withstand thermonuclear exchanges. They built a multi-sensored dynamic organism that lives on information, and it quickly spread to the universities and think tanks and beyond that to corporations and beyond that to you and me. And now it’s so imbedded in the very life of global capitalism that the nation-state has just been told to keep its mitts off. This whole Telecommunications Decency act scenario showed that when the chips are down, the world corporate state is very able to assert its control and ownership of the internet and how it’s used.
AB: East of the Rockies …
Caller: This is Marvin in Shreveport …Art I love this show … I just discovered you this month, I didn’t know such a good thing was on the air late at night …
AB: It’s … as I tell people, it’s different …
Caller: It certainly is, sir, especially for those of us who work nights, and then on our nights off we can’t sleep, so, this is wonderful. Here’s a question I have for Terence … this has been happening to me for some time .. When I heard Terence speak of the universe reaching out to us, or trying to, it brought home to me some things that are happening … when I was getting my first degree I took a philosophy course, and I asked my professor, Sir, do you ever have patterns come to you? He said what do you mean patterns? I said, well, I’ll be going along doing my business, and on the news or in a magazine or a book, a word, an unusual word jumps out at me. I go okay … I’m a word hound, so I kinda take note … then, later that same day or the next day, the very same unusual word jumps out at me again. And then the next day, in a very different place, the very same unusual heretofore rarely or maybe never seen word comes again, so I thought, well, maybe some thing is trying to tell me some thing, so I make note of that word, then I go along for months, and if it happens again with another word. I didn’t know what to call this phenomenon, so I just call it a pattern, because it kept reappearing. But I wondered … Terence mentioned the universe is trying to reach out to us, Terence, do you suppose that could be one form of, um, outer intelligence reaching in, or …
AB: It may not be that deep philosophically … I’ll give you one answer, for example, if you go out and buy, uh, a new Chevy, a new Nova car … heretofore you will not have noticed Novas, now you suddenly will see Novas everywhere …
Caller: Yes sir, that’s true …
AB: So, it may be that, or it may be deeper … Terence, what do you say?
TM: Well, it’s funny … again, to mention Jung, um, he had this concept which he called synchronicity, which is, uh, the apparent coincidence of a mental state with an event in the exterior world. And what I mean by that is… you’re walking along the street thinking about Mr. Fishman to whom you owe money, and suddenly there’s a fish right on the street in front of you. This is called a synchronicity, and Jung felt that there was a kind of what he called ‘acausal’ connectedness, and that this was how the unconscious attempted to communicate, by juxtaposing thoughts with exterior events that seem related to them in some magical way. And if you .. you know, sometimes synchronicities one or two a week and you just sort of notice them and pass on, but they can build, and when we’re going through spiritual crisis or when we’re intoxicated on psychedelic drugs for example, these synchronicities can multiply until the whole, uh, exterior world seems to be trying, uh, to communicate something to you. And, uh, it’s alarming to ordinary psychiatrists because they call it delusions of grandeur … the patient thinks the world is trying to communicate with him. But having been on the inside of this, I can tell you, it’s very powerful, and a lot of Chinese philosophical thinking has been based on recognizing this synchrony, this resonance between mind and nature at critical times.
AB: So as you see this fish that reminding you of the man who owes you money flopping on the ground and gasping and dying out of the water, do you take pleasure?
TM: Well, I had a dead fish in my image, it wasn’t an issue for me. It didn’t flop … in fact it was quite flattened.
AB: West of the rockies, where are you please?
Caller: I’m from Sacramento … Terence, I was wondering, your current standpoint relative to the great scheme of things, what would your answer be to the old question, what is the meaning of life on our stay here on earth?
AB: Oh, uh, wonderful question, uh, one that we started with yesterday … you might ask it this way .. what is the greatest question that humanity could have answered for itself?
TM: Well, you know, in classical philosophy, they said … this is what classical philosophy is about; Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? These are the three questions, everything arises from this. Each leads on to the other. I’ve tried to look at the question, where did we come from, and I’ve proposed theories about it … by looking into my body/brain with drugs and medication and just analytical thinking I’ve tried to look at ‘who are we?’ and then the great unanswered question is ‘where are we going? You know, what is to be the destiny of the human race? Are we an episode in the biology of this planet or will be build an Eden strung along the Milky Way, and from there to yet grander and greater things? We don’t know how much intelligence there is, uh, in the universe, but we certainly know that something has broken out, uh, on this planet in our species that is like nothing else in the order of nature.
AB: What if we are nothing more than a virtual zit on the face of reality?
TM: Well, if by virtual, you mean that we are inside some kind of artificial simulacrum, just a piece of software being run, well, then the question is, by who? And to what end? I could accept that. My life is so much like a story that I’m constantly asking the question, who writes this stuff? I mean, who thought me up, or Art Bell up, and put us talking like this in front of 22 million people? That doesn’t happen in reality, that kind of thing happens in art of a very finely honed sort. And so I want to know what is the medium and who is the artist, and who’s paying for this production?
AB: First time caller line you’re on the air …
Caller: Hello … first let me say … (garbled)
AB: He says he’s had DMT experiences outside the jurisdiction of the US …
Caller: Anyway, I’ve had very similar experiences of the kind that you, Terence, have been taking about. Also, these elves brought me to a new space, and I had three grams of psilocybin mushrooms, and I did this in a ritual sort of way, I did a confession first, to get things off my chest, and then a prayer, and it was a very directed ritual …
AB: Alright, let me state that as a question, he said that … what he did grams of psilocybin and so forth, he did in a very ritualistic way … um, do you think there would be anything to that, in effect, cleansing yourself before doing something like that?
TM: Well, certain energy follows attention … you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that … energy follows attention … and then, you know, while it’s true these things are dramatically affecting the mind, they are typical drugs, and they are going into your body, so not eating for four to six hours, not having recently stoked up on Big Macs or a lot of antibiotics or junk food, you know, I mean, obvious reasonable rules are in place.
AB: Alright, we’re at the bottom of the hour….
(Yup …)
(A lead-in I missed … a comment from email saying that computer technology will never reach the point of human-like self-awareness …)
AB: That is an attitude, Terence, of a programmer who does this embedded software thing, and admits is gonna be totally screwed up … he says it’s never gonna be self-aware …that is, I guess, one attitude … is that macro-thinking of one single programmer who’s failing to embrace what’s actually going on?
TM: Well, while we were off air I was online and looking at the AI pages, and I would recommend to someone with that attitude that they search words like super-intelligence, artificial intelligence, and look at the stuff posted on the web … I work with a computer every day, I don’t have the same experience as the person you quoted. I find the evolution of software … I can’t keep up with it. I don’t feel any of us have written software that takes advantage of the hardware’s capabilities. In other words, no one has tested, uh, the edge of the hardware. The failure is in the software writing departments. But if you look at, uh, what people like Bruce Dammeyer (sp) at Digital Space are doing, uh, the singularity webpages, the artificial intelligence web pages, the trans-human web pages, the (break-up) …
AB: Oh oh, we’re getting a little break up here … um, wouldn’t the real evolution begin when nanotechnology, uh, becomes a reality and, uh, these, uh, machines then begin to either replicate themselves or, in effect, write their own software, taking leaps, uh, beyond what we can do … because I think you’re right …?
TM: Well, that would be one revolution. Another I think that will come sooner is when everything is implants …. when the equivalent of today’s computer is something that … (break-up) . nervous-system interfacing, so that we don’t feel it as a machine, we feel it as a capacity of our own mind. This will come …
AB: Alright, um, east of the Rockies ….
Caller: Um, Terence, you were taking a little bit about the fish on the sidewalk … and I have had experience with LSD, I was a part of an experiment in 1970 and we were allowed to inject three bottles of Sandoz LSD, 100 micrograms each, at the same time, well, 300 micrograms I.V. and since that time I’ve had hundreds of experiences similar to the fish on the sidewalk. I’ll give you just one quick one … and I want to take it one step further and ask you this question: Um, on the way to the motor vehicle department, I borrowed $35 from my girlfriend to get my motorcycle back in the ’70’s. I said, wouldn’t it be something, you know, if an interesting plate were to cone up, and a license plate came up that said “UIO-35”
TM: That’s a perfect example … now what’s your question?
Caller: Well, if you take the fish story one step further, and I’ve found it hundreds of times since then, that not only does it reflect what you’re thinking or whatever, but reality seem to actually change as you walk, change as you think …
TM: Yes, well now I would say that this is a clue to the fact that the story you’ve been told by science and physics and chemistry and all that is simply (break-up …) You’re a person in a story, because such things don’t go on in the world of ordinary probability and ordinary physics. So it’s like a certain point in the evolution of your understanding where you realize that physics and chemistry (break-up) is not what it’s about, that you’re inside a story, and I think the juice in that insight is that you can then try and figure out, whose story is it? In other words, is it your story? Or do you exist in this story to open the door for somebody on page 220? Is that it? And then of course, the ultimate aspiration: to become the author of the story … imagine …
Caller: It would be awesome, at times …okay …
AB: Other times, you’re nothing but a bit player …
Caller: That’s it …
TM: That’s right, and the trick is to get some handle on those moments when you are the author
… Caller: I’ve been working on it.
AB: Alright … excellent … thank you very much … very good question, actually … first time caller line …
Caller: Yes, I eventually want to get to … I have a physical condition known as (con synchopy?) and when I combine that with hatha yoga, known as (udi anna banna?) and I am a Sixties child, so I’m your age, and I have experimented with purple (something) … I trigger an internal biological … it could be a natural production of DMT … it allows me to enter a prolonged, I guess we’d call it flow of consciousness model, lucid dreaming’s involved, synchronicity’s involved …
TM: Well, this is … we were talking earlier about this … about yoga as a chemical factory …
Caller: I have listened two hours now, I have not disagreed with a single word I’ve heard, except perhaps what you said in the introduction, Art … it was Tom Wolfe’s Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test and Ken Kesey and the others on the bus, ten thousand hits of original purple (something) carried on near Winnemucca … but you know what, my experience analytically … you mentioned, you know, probability theory … really, that comes down to quantum mechanics and how we begin to understand our locality, and when you look at it from the side of shamanism, key techniques of ecstasy, (Benet’s?) book Consciousness Explained, where you look at the AI parallel computing, back through (something) machine making us believe, alright, that we have individual identity … just another belief system … all of this really does take us, I think, to the geometrical structures that you talk about it ….
TM: Yeah, I think what we’re gonna have to understand is that psychedelic experience and quantum mechanical theories actually come together … the brain is the perfect instrument for exploring these microphysical low-energy states, and yoga, and shamanism and psychedelics, this has been going on for a long time, not using metaphors drawn out of the evolution of modern science but using equally powerful metaphors created in different contexts. But the big news is that future prosecution of science into new areas is going to involve using the brain as an instrument and giving up the idea of scientific objectivity as a naive (part of this?) notion, and let’s just get down and explore being with all the means at our disposal, chief of which are pharmacological and chemical.
AB: And while you hang on, I suppose, um, tenuously, uh, however strongly to this scientific, uh, paradigm, you’re not going anywhere, right?
TM: Right…. see, what’s held … one of the issues around drugs is that scientists don’t study them from the inside because this would compromise their supposed academic objectivity. But by studying them from the outside they end up knowing nothing about them, so you have an emperor’s new clothes situation and everybody in pharmacology knows this … the good pharmacologists simply take drugs but simply never say so in print …
AB: So, uh, in order to be as, uh, public about it as you are, one must find a remote mountain side in Hawaii and, uh, become a virtual or very, uh, nearly hermit, and then speak out with some safety … is that a fair assessment?
TM: That’s about it … by voluntarily becoming a physical hermit I get to have a podium in cyberspace.
AB: Wild card line, you’re on the air with Terence McKenna … good morning …
Caller: Good morning … I’m calling from KHVH, Honolulu …
AB: Honolulu, boy, what a route …
Caller: Terence, are you in the Big Island, because new agers say the Big Island is like an energy vortex, you know, Pele, the volcano, and Pele which is also a Hawaiian goddess, and then …
TM: Well, I don’t think you have to be a sensitive to perceive that the Big Island is an energy center … we’ve got the world’s biggest volcano here right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean … we feel protected by Pele, she puts lots of mercury vapor into the air and keeps real estate cheap and tourists away …
Caller: Do you like being there, because like I was looking at the map … the Big Island is 180 degrees, almost the other side of the world from the pyramids of Giza, which is another energy vortex …
TM: No, what interests me about the Big Island is that it’s at 19 degrees 30 minutes north, which is the critical place to study the skies of Mexico … that means the skies I see from my porch are the same skies I’d see when I go to Palenque and Ushmal and all the Mayan sites, so I like that.
AB: Alright … east of the rockies, you’re on the air with Terence McKenna … where are you please?
Caller: WJ27 on your Minnesota state map, Art … And I’ve listened to you for the last year or so, and it’s unbelievable how hard it is to get through, but I’ve tried twice, and here I am. And also to Terence, um, I used to subscribe to High Times, and they had a pictorial back in the 70’s of over 150 different varieties of Indica from Hawaii … do you believe that to be true, or …
TM: Uh, it may have been true then … they fly hard out here and have driven the pot growers pretty far underground … there’s definitely still primo pakalolo, but it’s not like it was in the roaring 70’s …
Caller: I used to live in Northern California, and I’ve experienced red hair and purple hair and sensemilla, and it’s probably the Dom Periogne of that region … and I also have one other statement … between your two minds … I’m just wondering if this could be possible … that I had major surgery over a year and a half ago, and I saw coming in that I was slowing down and my life was coming to an end … and now after recovery I’m getting this feeling that other than just an act of kindness, which is possible, and I just seem to be looking for my age–I look young–and I just keep to myself, and I am kind to other people, but lately over the past week to ten days, people that I normally wouldn’t have contact with are smiling at me and, it just seems to me that I have this image of the look of death … but it’s channeling through these people, and they recognize me in that certain way, and I was wondering, if that’s just crazy or if that could be true?
AB: No … you’re going to die …
Caller: Well, that’s okay …
AB: I don’t know … Terence?
TM: I don’t know … you know, intuition is intuition and noise is noise … and it’s a very hard call, and a very important one. So what you do is you cook it in your mind and then you go with what feels right.
AB: Alright … west of the rockies you’re on the air with the answer man, Terence McKenna …
Caller: Hi Terence, this is Phil … I heard you last 23rd May, last year, and you had an information letter available to those who have computers, do you have anything new published in the last year? And have you had any new revelations in the past year?
AB: Alright … a lot of past year there … Do you, uh, do you share through any other medium, uh, other than the internet, Terence?
TM: The internet is pretty much it. I have books, and I’m interviewed a lot, and I’ve been interviewed in the past year in Magical Blend, and then, but usually in small rave and music magazines seem interested in me. The internet is the place where there is endless amounts of my material, much of it put up not by me, and thank you to those people who do that. I think that’s probably the place to get the most information about me. I was thinking the other night about DMT and I thought of a phrase I use to describe it: Arabian Hyperspace … and I searched on the internet and it spat out my own text at me … it was a very weird moment. There’s plenty of Terence McKenna on the net.
AB: Well, you know, here you mentioned hyperspace, you mentioned nineteen degrees–mind you, not nineteen-point-five but nineteen–have you ever listened to Richard Hoagland and his discussions about hyperdimensional physics?
TM: Oh yeah, the problem is, Art, I knew these guys too soon … I knew them so long ago that I know how squirrely they truly are … I’ve played poker with them …
AB: Okay, one last call, we’re almost out of time …wild card line you’re on the air with Terence McKenna … where are you please?
Caller: Aloha, Art, I’m in Captain Cook, I’m actually about a thousand feet north 19.5 … and I wanted to ask Terence a couple of questions … one was about cannabis and ibogaine, and the other was I wanted to thank him for… at one time he was gonna be a witness in my trial for the religious use of cannabis here in Kona …
TM: Now, what is your question about cannabis and ibogaine?
Caller: Well, I’m interested in what you think about the fact that they are the only two plants that are illegal to grow in the United States, and ibogaine being an addiction interrupter …
TM: Well, ibogaine was made, uh, was put in that Schedule 1 in that week of hysteria back in that hysterical week of (break-up) … was put including compounds later found not even to be active in human beings. I think it is a tremendous detriment and an indictment of the scientific establishment that it doesn’t fight back more against (break-up) … you know, in the Middle Ages, medical students would steal corpses off the gallows in order to get bodies to do dissections which the church had forbidden … and where is the courage of science now–big science, even–that it allows governments to set their agendas in the area of exploring substances which affect the human mind …
AB: The answer Terence is that they’re chicken. Now, we’re out of time … I want to ask you one quick question … one of our network employees just came back from Hawaii, Honolulu and, uh, elsewhere, and said that the island is like a crispy critter, it’s so dry, she had never seen Hawaii in the state that it’s in now … is that true?
TM: Uh, yeah, the way the El Nino works, these huge storms in California, that’s all our winter water, and we until a week ago hadn’t seen rain since before Halloween, now we’re getting weak rain occasionally, but people who didn’t store water are in trouble, and the coffee people are screaming.
Terence McKenna with Art Bell, April 1st 1999
Look, there’s a whole new audience. I probably have added a hundred affiliates since the last time I talked to you, so maybe we ought to take a second, and you should tell everybody
who Terence McKenna is.
TM: Who Terence McKenna is.
AB: That’s right. If you were to have to answer that, which you do now. (laughter)
TM: Well, I guess my bio says writer and explorer. “Explorer” means explorer of hallucinogenic plants, strange usages of exotic plants by exotic people and then coming back and talking about these things and advocating them.
Alteration of consciousness leads to all the big philosophical issues: What is culture? What is history? Where are we going? How are we gonna get there and what’s gonna be so great about it when we get there?
So, I’m an itinerant philosopher at the end of the Twentieth Century.
AB: Well, the average Joe out there’maybe drivin’ a truck across Indiana somewhere’ probably is saying to himself right now, “Well, why should I listen to anything emanating from this drug-scorched brain?”
But of course that’s the only problem with you, Terence. Your brain doesn’t appear to be drug-scorched, and it should be. If what the establishment tells us about drugs is even partly true, you should be a basket case!
TM: (laughter) Well, maybe I am’,
AB: No, you’re not! (laughter)
TM: (laughter) ‘¦but I think the guy driving his semi across Indiana, he may be a little scorched, himself.
AB: (laughter) He’s scorched in a different way, tryin’ to keep his eyes open, you know, and get the load delivered.
TM: The stereotype of the cannabis enthusiast: Can’t think straight, can’t remember where they put the keys. I’ve never felt that way about these things. I think cultures choose the drugs they want to stigmatize, and then they glorify others, and it differs from culture to culture. The social consequences differ according to the choices made. But alteration of consciousness by human beings is as old as human beings themselves.
AB: That’s quite true. Do you think that it would be fair to suggest’it would be something that would get us in a lot of trouble’that there some hallucinogenic drugs that do in fact give people legitimate’underline that word’insights that they would otherwise perhaps not realize?
TM: Oh, absolutely. You give me a lead-in to talk about one of the things I’m doing at the moment, which is, after a conference in Mexico on hallucinogenic botany this year, a couple of friends of mine and I decided to organize a conference on the theme you just stated, a conference on the creative process and hallucinogenic substances because there’s a huge amount of the art, design, and fashion world that has for years been using these things
to fuel the engines of creativity, and it’s all been in the closet.
AB: The old myth is this: If you think your creativity is heightened when you’re on some sort of hallucinogenic drug, then make notes. Write a story. Paint a painting. Conduct some music. Play some music. Sing. And see if, when you’re down it was really as good as when you were up. (laughter) That’s kind of what we’re talking about here, in a way, isn’t it, Terence?
TM: Yeah, well, most of it probably would come in on the low end of that scale, although there are some spectacular counter examples. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan stoned on opium. The insight to the structure of the benzene molecule came to someone after a cognac inspired dream.
The character of the of creative breakthrough is like a revelation, the “Aha!” experience. Sometimes it’s a bump on the head, and sometimes it’s a hallucinogenic experience, but it always has the character of sort of arising in a completed form, you know what I mean?
AB: Yes. Why are there so many striking counter examples. That’s the question you never hear dealt with in public. In fact you never hear about it at all. They suppress that information. Why, sometimes, is a drug a key to creativity that you would not have otherwise?
TM: Well, I think it’s because of the larger effects of these drugs, which is that they dissolve boundaries. And many of the boundaries which enclose us are boundaries of habit, convention. Under the influence of the drug we see beyond those boundaries. The job of artists has always been to sort of be an antenna into the future, and bohemians have always been associated with drug taking to some degree. So I think it’s a very understandable process, it’s simply that we’re now beginning to understand it. And we have to because the number of substances available and being discovered all the time is beyond the power of the courts and the scientific establishment to really manage.
AB: Well, I don’t know. If you go to a doctor, you will notice, these days’I don’t know if you ever go to doctors’the doctor will say, “You know what, I know you’re in a terrible amount of pain, and I really wish that I could prescribe more to keep you out of pain,” because that’s the way a doctor feels, you know. They’re trying to ease your suffering, but the doctor will tell you frankly that “the DEA is lookin’ right behind my shoulder, and a
number of my colleges have lost their licenses, and so, frankly, I can’t really give you what you need.”
TM: Oh, well, this is a part of the drug problem. The hysteria on drugs has made so many different people and institutions crazy in so many different ways. On the general, larger question of hard drugs I’m quite despairing. So many people in institutions make money off the present mess, you know. The prison builders, the rehab people, the criminal syndicates, the bought-off cops, the paid-off judges. Everybody is making money on this racket that they pretend to wring their hands over.
AB: That’s absolutely correct. Heaven knows what the police would do if they couldn’t chase narcotics people. They would literally have about ten percent or at most twenty percent of their jobs left, and I think our prisons would be more or less about sixty or seventy percent empty, just compared to their present content.
TM: The courts would un-clog, and lawyers would have to find honest work.
AB: (laughter) So, in other words, it’s never gonna happen.
TM: You got it, Art. (laughter)
AB: What are you doing in terms of researching this interesting creative truth? How are you going to do that?
TM: Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to you about this, but I’m interested of course in what these substances do to me and other individuals. But then there’s a whole other area, which is: What has been the impact of substances and drugs been on large populations over long periods of time?
I’m willing to argue that the evolution of human language and complex cultural forms themselves were cause by disruptions in the ordinary mental functioning of perfectly happy primates about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. In other words, the evolution of complex human culture based on language is actually an effect of brain perturbation and unusual states of consciousness that were eventually assimilated and became part of the behavioral toolkit of early human beings.
AB: So you’re saying it’s actually a part of and a continuing part of evolution itself.
TM: That’s right. And the important thing for modern people is: “a continuing part of.” So, when you talk about drugs, you know, today, we’re focusing on the drug of the day’ whatever it is, heroin or methedrine’but in fact, over the past thousand years it’s been drugs that have built the empires that created Western civilization. Sugar, tobacco, alcohol, opium, tea, chocolate, these are the drugs that shaped civilization.
AB: Coffee.
TM: Coffee, another big one. And of course we don’t think of these as drugs. We call them foods or whatever we call them, because “A drug is a bad thing, a food is a good thing.” But eventually people are going to wise up to this racket. And they need to because we need to educate our children about this complex area of human behavior. There are dangerous drugs. There are drugs that, if used carefully, can be a tremendous enhancement of life. But you have to know what you’re doing. It’s not something you just blunder into. And all generalizations will have exceptions.
