[Music]
 Terence McKenna, how should I describe him? I asked a number of people and they looked
 puzzled and loped off. Finally I managed to get a consensus which is this, that Terence
 McKenna is an expert in Amazonian shamanism, a philosopher and an explorer of altered states,
 the sort of thing we all do when we get home of an evening. So, but I think he does it
 rather better than most. Terence McKenna, please welcome Terence.
 [Applause]
 Well I'm aware of how late in the day it is and I know some of you must be double parked,
 so I'll make this as succinct as possible. This morning's discussion caused me to wonder
 how much we would understand about electricity if our method of studying it was to stand
 on the tops of high hills and wait to be struck by lightning. It seems to me that's sort of
 the position that we're in vis-a-vis the UFOs. We have no real theory, we have conjectures,
 we have fiercely defended hypotheses, but we have very little that is concrete to go on.
 It's almost as though the issue of the UFO were an onion and as we peel the layers of
 the onion we discover when we get to the center that there is nothing there whatsoever left.
 It reminds me that if you cross an onion with a UFO, what you get is a flying saucer that
 brings tears to your eyes. And so what I would like to do is just based on the notes I took
 today to review what the options available to us are in terms of trying to get some kind
 of intellectual handle on this phenomenon and I'll move through them rather quickly.
 One possibility that I suppose is now out of fashion because it wasn't mentioned here
 today other than what Jacques said about ball lightning and plasmas is that the UFOs are
 somehow natural phenomena, perhaps piezoelectric forces that have an ability to interact with
 the delicate electrochemical machinery of the human nervous system to create an impression
 of hallucination or visitation or abduction. That's one possibility. The more serious contenders
 as explanations I think fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited? Or is there
 another tenant in the building that we are unaware of? And my own feeling about this
 tends to vacillate. I have had contact experiences. I have seen a UFO very close. I have met with
 entities from other dimensions and it has not impelled me to take a strong position.
 I've paid very close attention when these experiences were happening to me and there
 always seem to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive.
 And though Jacques didn't mention it today, I recall in his book, The Invisible College,
 he stressed the absurdity that seems to attend the contact experience. That if the contactee
 will truly tell the unvarnished truth, then there will be elements in the story which
 will make the contactee look like a moron. In other words, the invalidation of the experience
 is an inimical part of its structure, almost as though the entities were saying, "Well,
 you may tell this story if you wish, but if you tell it truthfully, you'll be taken for
 a fool." Well, there's nothing wrong with being taken for a fool, except that it does
 seal the phenomenon rather nicely away from the very sober ladies and gentlemen who are
 making their careers in some branch of science. They are not interested in investigating the
 kinky, the anecdotal, the possibly pathological. In preparation for this conference, I re-read
 Carl Jung's book published in 1954 called Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen
 in the Sky. And to my mind, no one has really gone beyond Jung. He understood very clearly
 that saying that something is a denizen of the psychic realm no way precludes its also
 having efficacious force in the physical realm through the phenomenon which he called synchronicity.
 Some of the points which Jacques made today about the nature of the medical examinations
 that are reported, they are absurd. They are unnecessary to be performed at our level of
 technology, let alone any future more advanced level that we might be asked to believe in.
 So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what is it and what
 is it for? And I've given a good deal of thought to this question over the years because
 I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem, like many subtle problems, is
 haunted by our own naivete concerning language. If I were to randomly choose, and don't worry
 I shan't, five of you to come up here and each one of you would have 40 seconds to explain
 to the rest of us what an atom is, it would be preposterous. None of us know. I doubt
 there's a person in this room who can give an account of the atom that tallies with the
 quote unquote orthodox description of the atom. So there is a curious fuzziness about
 the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them
 in the clear light of consciousness. How much more ambiguity there is then naturally,
 attendant upon the examination of any kind of phenomena which are rare or tend to be
 fringy. So it isn't a matter of achieving consensus over the UFO. We can't even achieve
 consensus about what constitutes a decent souffle. So this passionate desire to drag
 us all under the umbrella of a single explanation is I think missing the point. To my mind,
 if the UFO phenomena is something arising out of the super ego of the human psychic
 organization, then we should ask why. What is it doing? And I don't want to sound like
 a public relations agent for Jacques Vallée, but to my mind, with the exception of Jung,
 Jacques is the only commentator on the phenomenon who has really pushed the frontier back. To
 my mind, in the Invisible College, when Vallée says, in looking at the effect, not asking
 the question, what is it, but what does it do, you very quickly see what the flying saucers
 are doing. What they are doing is eroding faith in science. They are an antidote to
 the scientific paradigm that has evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to
 the brink of global catastrophe. So the notion being developed here is that within the structure
 of the human psyche, there is something like a governor, something like a monitoring circuit,
 which, when a society begins to evolve in a pathological or lethal direction, phenomena
 can be induced not by the egos of men and women, not by their institutions, but by the
 overmind, the collectivity of the human species. Phenomena can be induced, which are so corrosive
 to the ideologies currently in place that their underpinnings are cut away, their validity
 is called into question, and their programs for social development and control are invalidated
 and destroyed. Now, a perfect example of this is the rise of infant Christianity. If you'll
 cast your mind back to the situation in the early years of the Christian era and imagine
 the mentality of a Roman aristocrat, a person of power in Roman society, their physics is
 drawn from democraty and atomism. In other words, they are thoroughgoing materialists.
 Their social theory is drawn from Epictetus and Plato. They are, in fact, extremely modern
 people by our own standards. However, among the gardeners and kitchen help and stable
 boys, there is news of a momentous event in the Middle East. A Jewish rabbi has triumphed
 over death and risen after three days in the tomb. Should the master of a Roman household
 have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk among the help, he would have just dismissed
 it with a sneer. What a preposterous idea. And it is a preposterous idea. Nevertheless,
 the fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts.
 And within 120 years after the annunciation of the birth of Christianity, its missionaries
 were beating on the gates of Rome attempting to convert the emperor. Now, I see a similar
 situation in the modern context, that rationalism, scientific technology, which began and came
 out of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the quite legitimate wish to glorify God
 through an appreciation of his natural world, turned into a kind of demonic pact, a kind
 of descent into the underworld, a nekeia, if you will, leading to the present cultural
 and political impasse that involves massive stockpiles of atomic weapons, huge propagandized
 populations cut off from any knowledge of their real histories, male-dominated organizations
 plying their message of lethal destruction and inevitable historical advance. And into
 this situation comes suddenly an anomaly, something which cannot be explained. I believe
 that that is the purpose of the UFO, to inject uncertainty into the male-dominated, paternalistic,
 rational, solar myth under which we are suffering.
 So I suppose if you had to categorize this point of view, you would say I'm taking a
 depth, psychological, psychoanalytic point of view. What I'm saying is that the UFO is
 nothing more than an assertion of herself by the goddess into history, saying to science
 and paternalistically governed and driven organizations, "You have gone far enough.
 We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what
 it is." Nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production
 of toys for healthy children. That's what science is good for. It is not some meta-theory
 at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid
 to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.
 Now there is another possibility which can be dovetailed into the first. It is that it
 is not so much the over-soul or the super-ego of the human species which is responsible
 for stopping scientific masculine paternalism in its tracks, but rather that unbeknownst
 to self-absorbed and myopic human beings, we have always shared, or at least for a very
 long period of time, have shared this planet with another, another intelligent species,
 another entity which may have been perfectly content to allow us to abide in our ignorance
 of its presence until the point where it came to its awareness that our style was toxifying,
 ruining, raping, and perverting the planet. And at that point, this thing springs into
 action with similar end results as the previous scenario, the invocation of the super-ego.
 It's astonishing to me that in the 45 years that the UFO, are we being visited question
 has been kicked around, I have never seen in any UFO book or publication the suggestion
 made that if we believe we are being visited by organic intelligent life forms from some
 other dimension or place in the galaxy, then we should very, very thoroughly examine the
 ecology of this planet for traces of its presence. What assurance do we have that the several
 million life forms that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here? Do we have any
 assurance? There are ways to gain that assurance by doing comparative DNA sequencing and this
 sort of thing. Some of you may know my own position, or one of my positions, which is
 that plants and fungi containing psychoactive compounds are extremely viable candidates
 for extraterrestrial intruders into the environment of this planet. And this is not to put down
 Whitley's story, which is a very interesting story, but had he prefaced his story with
 the comment that before it all happened he took five grams of mushrooms, I doubt he could
 have sold it to his mother. Because in the world where mushrooms and other psychedelic
 plants are imbibed, such stories are commonplace. It's no big deal. So I'm always amused by
 UFO investigators and compilers of data who will tell you, "Well, the first thing we did
 is we got rid of all the stories told by anybody who was intoxicated on anything." It seems
 to me that move has probably absolutely precluded any possibility of understanding what is going
 on. You see, culture is something that we wear like clothes. We're very much at ease
 with culture. Our mind is very much at ease with culture. And we gather the language of
 a given culture around us. Culture is the mind unperturbed. When a shaman or an ecstatic
 visionary goes into the wilderness and through ordeal or yogic practice or breath control
 or the taking of a psychoactive substance perturbs the mind, then we see what the mind
 is out naked, undressed from the clothing of language and convention. That's why I've
 made this point over and over again. There cannot, there will not be a serious discussion
 of the origin of UFOs or for that matter of the nature of consciousness itself until we
 leave the utterly culture-bound, provincial and hick-like attitude that science has foisted
 on us about perturbing the mind. Without the use of psychedelic substances, I think solving
 the UFO dilemma is going to be as thankless a task as attempting to understand the nature
 of the universe without availing yourself of the use of a telescope. It is simply tying
 our hands behind our backs. Now there is a third possibility, which is the one that is
 the more commonly entertained notion, which is simply that we are being observed by intelligent
 life forms that evolve somewhere else in the galaxy. They have quarantined our planet to
 keep us from being agitated by their presence and they will eventually reveal themselves.
 I find this an extremely odious notion, especially the part about how much chaos there will be
 if the truth is ever revealed. This is nothing more than the reassertion of masculine paternalism,
 its right to keep secrets from the rest of us, its belief that there is a privileged
 all-male class of people who can be let in on what's really going on and the rest of
 us, poor dears, have to be shielded from these tremendously shocking facts. I discussed this
 once with an entity and it said to me, "Well, you know, we've disguised ourselves as an
 extraterrestrial invasion so as to not alarm people with what's really going on." We're
 getting close to the end, folks. There is a fourth possibility, which I mention only
 in the interest of thoroughness, which is that these entities and their vehicles are
 not spacecraft at all, but are in some sense timecraft and that we may be the tremendous
 sense of empathy with these quite physically unusual beings may arise out of the fact that
 we're looking into the faces of our great-great-great-grandchildren who may be emanating back through time, carrying
 the message, a message, about some sort of future event or situation that lies many centuries
 downstream from us, but that is of such import that from that point, agents are moving backward
 or possibly forward through time, spreading the news of some kind of mode shift. This
 doesn't seem to me to be impossible. However, based on my own experience, which is what
 I think this thing really comes down to, because what we have in the UFO issue is an official
 position supported by scientists, whether they be Neanderthal right-wingers or doctrinaire
 Marxists or whatever, a conspiracy of consensus against the personal experiences of individual
 human beings who are told, "Well, what you're saying happened to you can't have happened.
 You are insane. You are mentally ill. You are mistaken." So what we really have here
 is a political issue. Which do you believe? Your perceptions, memories, and expectations
 aided by your intellect or some kind of utterly abstract, official, doctrinaire, sexist philosophy
 laid on from above. So I think really what the saucers do, if you accept their presence,
 is they empower us. They empower us to see science for the shell game that it is, to
 see the past 400 years of Western culture for the pathetic narrowing of the spectrum
 of allowable phenomena that it is, to the point where people think that if you can't
 bang on something with a hammer, it isn't real, which to me is just wild talk. I can't
 even imagine where that kind of thing is coming from. So I think, and I'll just leave you
 with this final thought, that in lieu of the repression—and it is a repression throughout
 this century of legitimately available ways of exploring the modalities of consciousness,
 and by that I mean psychoactive compounds—the repression of those compounds and their use
 by science has created a neurotic energy dynamic in the mass psyche, and the mass psyche has
 begun to hallucinate because the destiny of human beings is to live in the imagination
 in the hands of the goddess, and wherever that thrust is impeded, psychopathy will result.
 There will be neurosis. There will be psychic epidemic. There will be confusion. So I believe
 that until we form a resolution to conduct an unfettered and mature exploration of the
 human psychology using all the tools available to us, that the skies of Earth will continue
 to be haunted by flying saucers. They will continue to be haunted by flying saucers and
 their denizens because they are symbols of our infantilism, of our sense of loss, of
 our incompleteness, and we can heal that breach by simply recognizing that the true mystery
 lies within us. The true mystery is in the mind, and its historical promise is the transformation
 of our society through the abandonment of reason as it has been narrowly defined by
 this extremely solar, masculine, paternalistic, materialistic legacy that we are the victims
 of. Well, I could talk for a long time, but I think that's it in a nutshell. Thank you.
 Thank you.
 There were a couple of points I didn't cover. Before I get into that, though, I would like
 to thank and call attention to the magnificent accomplishment of Elise Agar and the Omega
 Foundation. Elise and her people have done a tremendous job, and this is definitely the
 first time in Japan that I have ever had the privilege of attending. I said to someone,
 "Does the fact that the backdrops are beginning to look like the Russian Revolution mean we're
 making progress?" Can you all hear me?
 How's that? Okay. The area that I want to just spend a few minutes on tonight that I
 didn't touch on this afternoon is what then is to be done? Tolstoy's question. Once we
 reach this level of admitting the phenomenon, experiencing the phenomenon, trying to talk
 with each other about it, what is to be done? How are we to translate the message coming
 from the other side into a concrete reality that works for all of us, or is that a good
 thing? My take on this, which is nothing more than my take on it, is that what we are involved
 in and with in the UFO phenomenon is an extremely poignant and intense effort to end our alienation
 from the unconscious, that we can no longer have the luxury of an unconscious portion
 of the human psyche, that that is an artifact of the childhood of our species, and that
 in fact the ending of childhood, anticipated brilliantly in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's
 End, the ending of childhood is what we are experiencing in relationship to the alien
 archetype. As a species, we are coming into a kind of pubescent awareness of the presence
 of the other. Our childish historical concerns that were self-directed and self-indulgent
 no longer satisfy, and a deep kind of yearning has come upon the species, a yearning for
 the confirmation of the presence of an other, in the same way that an adolescent child becomes
 aware of and develops an extremely intense, highly charged and ambivalent attitude toward
 the opposite sex. I think we are discovering in our own psychic structure the potential,
 the possibility of a relationship with an intelligent species outside ourselves, and
 this raises for us all the tensions, all the issues that accompany an adolescent love affair.
 How are we to eliminate the human unconscious and come into our birthright as fully conscious,
 enlightened beings? What is to be done? Again, my opinion is that what we need to do is to
 concentrate on the phenomenon of communication and the evolution of language. We have been
 far too naive about the role that language has played in the construction of reality
 at its center, let alone off on the fringes with the elves and the fairies and the UFOs.
 We need to test the envelope of language. We need to perfect the fine idea of being
 able to communicate with each other. At the moment, and I think we proved it at this conference,
 it's nothing more than a fine idea. I felt before I came to this meeting that we would
 all sit down in a room and make great progress in about an hour toward understanding the
 phenomenon, and then I discovered that we were all, including myself, heavily freighted
 with linguistic momentum, the power of our own metaphors to carry us past the opportunity
 to listen to what other people were saying. And so I think that what we are dreaming of
 is a common language, and what the saucers are attempting to teach is the modality of
 a linguistic transformation in the direction of a kind of communication that is not dependent
 on culturally sanctioned dictionaries, but that is in the bones, in the neurons, in the
 synapses, so that the ambiguity which attends all our discussions about reality will be
 purged from our worldview. This is the essence of falling in love. One definition of falling
 in love is nothing more than lifting the veils of misconception between two entities and
 still being able to go forward toward some kind of union. So I really believe that we
 have moved so far from an awareness of the feminine portion of our psyche that now the
 thing dearest to us and closest to us must present itself in consciousness under the
 guise of an extraterrestrial or interdimensional invader. It's a comment on the alienation
 of our era, and the way this schism can be breached, the way this psychic wound can be
 healed and a kind of species-wide individuality emerge is through taking control, conscious
 control, of the evolution of language. This means paying a great deal more attention to
 what we say to each other, to linguistic intent. I think that the main legacy of the 1960s
 into the 80s was a legacy of language transformed in the direction of feeling. To me, the most
 shocking part of the male dominance of our worldview is the paucity in our language of
 terms that convey emotion. We have 500 words for the components of a steering mechanism.
 We have five words for emotions. Each one of us is a swim in a concatenation of emotionally
 subtle wave phenomena that come and go just below the surface of our awareness. But if
 any one of us turns to another and says, "How are you doing?" the answer is, "Fine, fine,
 yourself." This is presenting a tremendous barrier to us to the expression of our wholeness,
 and I'm completely willing to line up behind Carl Jung on the notion that the UFO is an
 expression of our longing for wholeness. In Concipio et Verbum, et Verbo caro factum est,
 in the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh. In other words, if you were
 an actual extraterrestrial standing off in a spaceship looking down on this planet, you
 would not see the strivings of individual species. You would not even see the great
 classes of organized organic life. What you would see instead is a gene swarm, a language
 frenzy, the coding of meaning in genes, in words, in architectonic productions, in poetry.
 What is happening on this planet is the self-reflecting genesis of communication for itself. It is
 language somehow that is loose in our species on our planet, within and without the flying
 saucer. So communication, which we take astonishingly for granted considering the very basic kinds
 of needs that we communicate to each other, is actually the great frontier of our spiritual
 becoming. It seems to have passed right by us that we already possess a form of telepathy.
 The miracle of communication involves the fact that I make small mouth noises and you
 instantaneously consult the culturally sanctioned dictionary, and out of your dictionary you
 construct a map of my linguistic intent, and then through a series of grunts and nods we
 assure each other that we know what we mean. So in a sense, I said this afternoon that
 the UFO was here to confound us, to confound science. On another level, like the psychedelics,
 it is here to catalyze a finer evolution of communication, to goose us toward a little
 tighter epistemic, an ontological definition of the business of communicating with each
 other. If we could refine our channels of communication, we would coalesce into the
 kind of omnipotent, extra-worldly organism that we anticipate in our vision of the flying
 saucer. So I think really the flying saucer has become the guiding image of our own cultural
 evolution. We are going to live in the imagination. This planet is involved in a birth process.
 There is nothing unnatural about what is going on on this planet, and there is nothing unnatural
 or inappropriate about us. It's simply that the planet has carried us to term. We are
 now ready to leave the womb, and the womb is in danger of toxemia if we in fact do not
 leave it. We have passed into a new kind of time where the separation of our species from
 the planet that gave us birth is a necessity for the survival of both parties. And like
 any birth, it is a moment of crisis. It can end in catastrophe, and perhaps the saucers
 stand off to perform a necessary cesarean if things really turn into chaos. Many contactees
 report an apocalyptic scenario involving the saucers taking everybody away in the wake
 or in the eminence of a thermonuclear exchange. However, the mature way, the self-reflective
 way, the dignified way out of this cultural impasse, out of this global standoff, is for
 us to take seriously on a personal level the possibility of evolving our communications
 with each other so that we actually become the loving family of the goddess, the planetary
 organism that we all feel ahead of us in the future, casting an enormous shadow back over
 the historical landscape. Eventually, and when is up to us, it will no longer be a higher
 dimensional object throwing a shadow into the flat dimensions of history. It will be
 instead a transcendental object made manifest. We are in fact on the brink of great changes.
 Yes, the UFO phenomenon has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, possibly,
 but nevertheless it is somehow spun into the fate of our species. And the overwhelming
 image of self-transcendent flight, of return to a mandalic unity that transcends space
 and time, is the guiding archetype of our peregrination through history. So I believe
 that the UFO waits at the end of time in the same way that the individuated personality
 waits at the end of the ontological development of the individual. And if we act in good conscience
 and with great faith in each other, we can in fact realize the hope of the Irish prayer
 which says, "May you be alive at the end of the world." Thank you.
 [Applause]
 [Silence]


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