Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…
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Reality is defined as that which is real, and it is created through a blend of belief and experience. Several years ago, Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier told me that he thought that there were three levels at which one can change or create "reality": (1) at the neurological level of the brain through neurochemistry; (2) at the sensory level through Virtual Reality simulation; or (3) in the external world through the atomic reconstructional possibilities of nanotechnology. But we can also change our perception and interpretation of the world through intention and will. Intentionally changing one's attitude can dramatically shift one's perspective and social relationships. Dreams also open up a frontier for exploring the possibilities of reality fabrication. When we asked Stephen LaBerge, lucid dream researcher at Stanford University, about using VR as a metaphor for lucid dreaming, he said that lucid dreaming was like "high-resolution VR."
A basic premise that we had for this book was that--through cosmological time, biological evolution, personal development, and cultural transformations-consciousness evolves. From atoms to galaxies, amoebas to neurons, the evolution of consciousness seems an endless adventure. Terence McKenna told us that he thought the ultimate goal of human evolution was a "good party." One thing is for sure. It is on the expanding edge of the horizon, where reality intersects the imagination, that we will forever find our new beginnings.
David Jay Brown,
Topanga, California
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Mushrooms, Elves and Magic
with Terence K. McKenna
Terence McKenna is one of the leading authorities on the ontologicaI foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a major in Ecology, Resource Conservation and Shamanism, he traveled through the Asian and New World Tropics and became specialized in the shamanism and ethno-medicine of the Amazon Basin. What he learned in these explorations is documented in The Invisible Landscape, which he wrote with his brother Dennis.
Born in 1946, Terence is the father of two children, a girl of eleven and a boy of fourteen. He is the founder of Botanical Dimensions-a tax-exempt, nonprofit research botanical garden based in Hawaii. This project is devoted to collecting and propagating plants of ethno-pharmacological interest and preserving the shamanic lore which accompanies their use.
Living in California, Terence divides his time between writing and lecturing and he has developed a software program called Timewave Zero. His hypnotic multi-syllabic drawl is captured on the audio-tape adventure series True Hallucinations--soon to be published in book form--which tells of his adventures in far-flung lands in various exotic states of consciousness. Terence is also the author of Food of the Gods, which is a unique study of the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution and The Archaic Revival, in which this interview appears. His latest book Trialogues at the Edge of the West, is a collection of "discursive chats " with mathematician Ralph Abraham and biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
This was our first interview It took place on November 30th, 1988 in the dramatic setting of Big Sur. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean we sat on the top floor of the Big House at the Esalen Institute, where Terence was giving a weekend seminar. He needed little provocation to enchant us with the pyrotechnic wordplay which is his trademark, spinning together the cognitive destinies of Gaia, machines, and language and offering a highly unorthodox description of our own evolution.
RMN
DJB: It's a pleasure to be here with you again, Terence. We'd like to begin by asking you to tell us how you became interested in shamanism and the exploration of consciousness.
Terence: I discovered shamanism through an interest in Tibetan folk religion. Bon, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet is a kind of shamanism. In going from the particular to the general with that concern, I studied shamanism as a general phenomenon. It all started out as an art historical interest in the pre-Buddhist iconography of thankas.
DJB: This was how long ago?
Terence: This was in '67 when I was a sophomore in college. The interest in altered states of consciousness came simply from, I don't know whether I was a precocious kid or what, but I was very early into the New York literary scene, and even though I lived in a small town in Colorado, I subscribed to the Village Voice, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD, mescaline, and all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in. Then I read The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and it just rolled from there. That was what really put me over. I respected Huxley as a novelist, and I was slowly reading everything he'd ever written, and when I got to The Doors of Perception I said to myself, "There's something going on here for sure."
DJB: To what do you attribute your increasing popularity, and what role do you see yourself playing in the social sphere?
Terence: Well, without being cynical, the main thing I attribute to my increasing popularity is better public relations. As far as what role I'll play, I don't know, I mean I assume that anyone who has anything constructive to say about our relationship to chemical substances, natural and synthetic, is going to have a social role to play, because this drug issue is just going to loom larger and larger on the social agenda until we get some resolution of it, and by resolution I don't mean suppression orjust saying no. I anticipate a new open-mindedness born of desperation on the part of the Establishment. Drugs are part of the human experience, and we have got to create a more sophisticated way of dealing with them than exhortations to abstinence, because that has failed.
RMN: You have said that the term "New Age" trivializes the significance of the next phase in human evolution and have referred instead to the emergence of an archaic revival. How do you differentiate between these two expressions?
Terence: The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology, eighties style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing, and this sort of thing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late Neolithic. It reaches far back in the twentieth century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism, even to a phenomenon like National Socialism which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor consciousness these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire twentieth century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that.
RMN: In the book you wrote with your brother Dennis, The Invisible Landscape, and in recent lectures and workshops, you've spoken of a new model of time and your efforts to model the evolution of novelty based on the ancient oriental system of divination, the I-Ching. Can you briefly explain how you developed this model, and how an individual can utilize this system to modulate their own perspective on the nature of time?
Terence: Ah, no. I think I'd rather send you a reprint of a recent paper in Revision than to try and cover that. It's not easily explained. If I were to give an extremely brief resume of it, I would say that the new view of time is that time is holographic, fractal, and moves toward a definitive conclusion, rather than the historical model of time which is open-ended, trendlessly fluctuating, and in practical terms endless. What's being proposed is a spiral model of history, that sees history as a process actually leading toward a conclusion. But the details of it are fairly complex.
DJB: According to your time-wave model, novelty reaches its peak expression and history appears to come to a close in the year 2012. Can you explain what you mean by this, and what the global or evolutionary implications are of what you refer to as the "end of time"?
Terence: What I mean is this. The theory describes time with what are called novelty waves, because waves have wavelengths, one must assign an end point to the novelty wave, so the end of time is nothing more than the point on the historical continuum that is assigned as the end point of the novelty wave. Novelty, is something which has been slowly maximized through
the life of the universe, something which reaches infinite density, or infinite contraction at the point from which the wave is generated. Trying to imagine what time would be like near the temporal singularity is difficult because we are far from it, in another domain of physical law. There need to be more facts in play, before we will be able to correctly envisage the end of time, but what we can say concerning the singularity is this: it is the obviation of life in three-dimensional space, everything that is familiar comes to an end, everything that can be described in Euclidian space is superseded by modes of being which require a more complicated description which is currently unavailable.
DJB: From your writings I have gleaned that you subscribe to the notion that psilocybin mushrooms are a species of high intelligence, that they arrived on this planet as spores that migrated through outer space and are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. In a more holistic perspective, how do you see this notion fitting into the context of Francis Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this planet and it's directed evolution has been seeded, or perhaps fertilized, by spores designed by a higher intelligence?
Terence: As I understand the Crick theory of panspermia, it's a theory of how life spread through the universe. What I was suggesting, and I don't believe it as strongly as you imply, but I entertain it as a possibility, that intelligence--not life but intelligence-may have come here in this spore bearing life form. This is a more radical version of the panspermia theory of Crick and Ponampurama. In fact I think that theory will probally be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure. As far as the role of the psilocybin mushroom, or its relationship to us and to intelligence, this is something that we need to consider. It really isn't important that I claim that it's an extraterrestrial, what we need is a body of people claiming this, or a body of people denying it, because what we're talking about is the experience of the mushroom. Few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that is unleashed. One cannot find out whether or not there's an extraterrestrial intelligence inside the mushroom unless one is willing to take the mushroom.
DJB: You have a unique theory about the role that psilocybin mushrooms play in the process of human evolution. Can you tell us about this?
Terence: Whether the mushrooms came from outer space or not, the presence of psychedelic substances in the diet of early human beings created a number of changes in our evolutionary situation. When a person takes small amounts of psilocybin their visual acuity improves. They can actually see slightly better, and this means that animals allowing psilocybin into their food chain would have increased hunting success, which means increased food supply, which means increased reproductive success, which is the name of the game in evolution. It is the organism that manages to propagate itself numerically that is successful. The presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack-hunting primates caused the individuals that were ingesting the psilocybin to have increased visual acuity. At slightly higher doses of psilocybin there is sexual arousal and erection and everything that goes under the term arousal of the central nervous system. Again, a factor which would increase reproductive success is reinforced.
DJB: Isn't it true that psilocybin inhibits orgasm?
Terence: No. I've never heard that. Not at the doses I'm talking about. At a psychedelic dose it might, but at just slightly above the "you can feel it" dose, it acts as a stimulant. Sexual arousal means paying attention, it means jumpiness, it indicates a certain energy level in the organism. And then, of course, at still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. It is as though it is an enzyme which stimulates eyesight, sexual interest, and imagination. And the three of these going together produce language-using primates. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
DJB: During your shamanistic voyages how do you, or do you, differentiate between the literal and the metaphorical I/thou dialogue that appears to occur in certain states of consciousness? In other words how do you differentiate between the possibility that you are communicating with otherworldly independently existing entities and the possibility that you are communicating with isolated, unconscious neuron clusters in your own brain?
Terence: It's very hard to differentiate it. How can I make that same distinction right now? How do I know I'm talking to you? It's just provisionally assumed, that you are ordinary enough that I don't question that you’re there. But if you had two heads, I would question whether you were there. I would investigate to see if you were really what you appear to be. It’s very hard to tell what this I/thou relationship is about, because it's very difficult to define the "I" part of it, let alone the "thou" part of it. I haven't found a way to tell, to trick it as it were into showing whether it was an extraterrestrial or the back side of my own head.
DJB: But normally the way we can tell is we receive mutual verification from other people, and we get information from many senses. You can touch me. You can see me. You can hear me.
Terence: Well, this is simply a voice, you know, so it's the issue of the mysterious telephone call. If you're awakened in the middle of the night by a telephone call, and you pick up the phone, and someone says "Hello" it would not be your first inclination to ask "Is anybody there?" because they just said hello. That establishes that somebody is there, but you can't see them, maybe they're aren't there, maybe you've been called by a machine. I've been called by machines. You pick up the phone and it says, "Hello this is Sears, and we're calling to tell you that your order 16312 is ready for pick up," and you say, "Oh, thank you." "Don't mention it." No, so this issue of identifying the other with certainty is tricky, even in ordinary intercourse.
RMN: There is a lot of current interest in the ancient art of sound technology. In a recent article you said that in certain states of consciousness you're able to create a kind of visual resonance and manipulate a "topological manifold" using sound vibrations. Can you tell us more about this technique, it's ethnic origins, and potential applications?
Terence: Yes, it has to do with shamanism that is based on the use of DMT in plants. DMT is a near--or pseudo-neurotransmitter, that when ingested and allowed to come to rest in the synapses of the brain, allows one to see sound, so that one can use the voice to produce, not musical compositions, but pictorial and visual compositions. This, to my mind, indicates that we're on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, so that we are going to go from a language that is heard to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior processing. The language will still be made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual impression. This is actually being done by shamans in the Amazon. The songs they sing sound as they do in order to look a certain way. They are not musical compositions as we're used to thinking of them. They are pictorial art that is caused by audio signals.
DJB: Terence, you’re recognized by many as one of the great explorers of the twentieth century. You've trekked through the Amazonian jungles and soared through the uncharted regions of the brain, but perhaps your ultimate voyages lie in the future, when humanity has mastered space technology and time travel. What possibilities for travel in these two areas do you foresee, and how do you think these new technologies will affect the future evolution of the human species?
Terence: Some question. I suppose most people believe space travel is right around the corner. I certainly hope so. I think we should all learn Russian in anticipation of it, because apparently the U.S. government is incapable of sustaining a space program. The time travel ques
tion is more interesting. Possibly the world is experiencing a compression of technological novelty that is going to lead to developments that are very much like what we would imagine time travel to be. We may be closing in on the ability to transmit information forward into the future, and to create an informational domain of communication between various points in time. How this will be done is difficult to imagine, but things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and nanotechnology offer new and novel approaches to realization of these old dreams. We shouldn't assume time travel is impossible simply because it hasn't been done. There's plenty of latitude in the laws of quantum physics to allow for moving information through time in various ways. Apparently you can move information through time, as long as you don't move it through time faster than light.