So without further ado, I want you to welcome ethnobotanist, shamanologist, and visionary
 Terence McKenna.
 [Applause]
 Well, it's a pleasure to be in Southern California and in Claremont addressing the young society
 Before we get into the main body of all this, I will personally introduce myself to some
 of you who may not know me.
 I started out my academic career as an art historian with a major in Asian languages
 and that took me to Asia and sort of disillusioned me with traditional spiritual approaches in
 the Asian style.
 And I reconnected then with my childhood love of nature and pretty much abandoned the humanities
 and went into the sciences.
 But by then it was too late to become a real scientist and I was too tainted by my time
 again among the poets and the artists.
 So I had to become a very soft, hard scientist.
 So I got a degree in conservation of natural resources, about as soft a science as you'll
 ever hope to touch.
 And I did a lot of traveling around looking for a viable, vibrant, numinous approach to
 spiritual reality and the only place I found it was in the Amazon basin where, as you know,
 there are extremely archaic groups of people.
 People who never submitted themselves to the historical process the way the peoples of
 the Middle East and Europe did.
 And there, there flourishes through the use of chemically complex plants, techniques and
 traditions for accessing a world invisible to the rest of us, a world of forces and information
 that is transhuman, supernatural, if the word means anything.
 But this, this supernatural dimension is anchored in the plants that live in our world.
 And my brother was a botanist and I had botanical training as we studied the psychoactive plants
 of the world, especially the New World tropics where they seem to be concentrated.
 We were simultaneously exalted by the realization that we had found a doorway, a real doorway
 into hyperspace and at the same time tremendously upset and alarmed by the fact that this doorway
 is in the process of being dismantled by the forces of human ignorance that are not even
 aware of its existence.
 So this was the impulse behind the decision on the part of my partner Kat and I that these
 plants must be saved.
 They must be preserved in germplasm repositories or botanical gardens or something like that
 toward a day when they can be studied and the power, the dimensions within them can
 be given their real weight.
 So to this end, we founded a botanical garden in Hawaii that is specifically dedicated to
 preserving plants with a history of shamanic importance.
 And I mention this because this is the real world political work that we do and everything
 else I will say today will be barely anchored in any world familiar to most of us.
 But there is a political anchoring.
 There is a place where it all comes tangential to the World Bank and the IMF and the host
 governments and so forth and so on.
 It is tremendously important to preserve this shamanic option if for no other reason than
 we do not know what it is.
 We do not know what it is.
 So at the break, if you come up, the newsletter of our botanical garden is the large stack
 of beige paper and there are 300 copies of that.
 I hope there is enough for everyone.
 We do exist on donations.
 So if any of you are philanthropists, we can certainly tell you how to spend your money.
 We have many plans for your money.
 Okay.
 I wasn't kidding about what an honor I think it is to address the Jung Society.
 At one point in my life, my greatest desire was to become a Jungian analyst.
 And I had the good fortune of coming upon Jung very young.
 I was about 15 when a very precocious friend of mine brought Psychology and Alchemy in
 the Carrie F. Baines translation.
 I think it had just been brought out.
 And we were stunned and we read it from cover to cover and then went on to Mysterium Conjunctionis,
 Eye on the Studies in the Phenomenology of the Self.
 I said to someone yesterday, we read all the books of Jung that the Jungians never read.
 They seem to stop up there toward the front of the line with the archetypes of the collective
 unconscious and the personality type.
 But to my mind, it was the late stuff that was fascinating.
 And I am slightly puzzled, and we were talking about it last night, at the distance between
 the Jungian community and the psychedelic community, because they seem to me, the unschooled
 observer, to be definitely sharing the same concerns.
 And strangely enough, they share much of the same history and geography.
 Basel was, of course, Jung's hometown.
 It was Albert Hoffman's hometown.
 Did one half of town know what the other half was doing?
 I'm not sure.
 The relationship of Jung to the collective unconscious as its discoverer has been always
 somewhat puzzling to me, because of course, if you know the history of 20th century art,
 you know that Dada, which was the great prefigurative movement for surrealism, rose in Zurich.
 So we've got LSD, the schools of modern art that laid great stress on the irrational,
 and the great schools of psychology that extended the boundaries of the unconscious, all raffling
 around in these little Swiss towns.
 And it's interesting to imagine conversations or meetings that might have taken place when
 people slightly left their ordinary habits and wandered into bars they didn't know and
 drank with people they'd never met before.
 Because Jung provided maps of the unconscious, and at 16, when we were beginning to experiment
 with this, and let me stress, this was before the great social waves of LSD taking of the
 1960s, just preceding that.
 From about 1963 to '65, we were frantic for maps of the unconscious.
 And Freud was useless.
 I mean, the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to
 what Freud called "day residues" and repressed sexual desire and stuff like that didn't
 wash.
 Within 10 minutes, you could tell that was not a serviceable metaphor.
 Jung, on the other hand, offered a vast pantheon of gods and archetypes and psychic complexes
 forgotten or abandoned.
 I mean, I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archaeologist, someone who
 goes with toothbrush and nut pick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea
 systems.
 And if any of you have ever read the complete works of Jung in the Bollingen set, you know
 that the richness of it is all in the footnotes.
 I mean, here was a man who raised the footnote to a high art and who was aware of a literature
 that nobody else, to my mind, seemed to know about.
 But Jung's references reach a thousand years deep into the past with great density of reference.
 I mean, this is where I learned about Macrobius and Dosethius and Dionysius the pseudo-Aryopaga
 and all those folks that you just never hear about.
 It was my introduction to the underbelly of Western civilization was through Jung.
 Well, to my mind, and now I'll theme this in to today's theme, I think Maria mentioned
 that Jung did not have a lot to say about shamanism.
 He came to it late in his life and he had already worked through the massive, the exegesis
 of the symbol systems of the European mind.
 And so he was sort of content to indicate shamanism as an area where more work was to
 be done.
 And then the great follow-on scholar was Mercile Liad, who then actually studied shamanism,
 showed what its archetypal underpinnings were in all times and places.
 And the combination of Jung and Liad, I think, pretty much delivered us as firm a map of
 the psyche, as dependable a map of the psychic geography as we can expect to have until we
 make the trip ourselves and readjust the landscape with our own notes and observations.
 For Jung, the great path into the unconscious was alchemy.
 And alchemy is an interesting pivotal domain because I think we could, in a way, say it
 lies halfway between the concerns of an archaic shamanism and halfway between the concerns
 of a quasi-scientific, psychedelic attempt to explore consciousness.
 Mercile Liad wrote a brilliant book on alchemy called The Forge and the Crucible, which is
 the bridge to show you how you go from Jungian psychology into an understanding of alchemy
 that approximates Iliad.
 The notion for the alchemists that Jung brought forth very strongly was the idea of projection
 of psychic contents, projection of the active imagination, onto processes and objects in
 the exterior world.
 In the case of the alchemists, it was the swirling chemical processes in their alembics,
 in their alchemical vessels, that they projected the great round of the archetypes onto these
 chemical processes.
 They saw crystallization, sublimation, separation as statements about the contents of the psyche
 as much as statements about the exterior world, because for them the firm division between
 mind and matter, the firm ontological division between mind and matter that is built into
 Western thinking now, did not exist.
 That comes with Rene Descartes, with the invention of what's called the res extensa, the extended
 world, and the res verans, the interior world, which has no spatial extension.
 So for the alchemists, mind and matter were two terms whose mutual exclusivity could be
 blurred under certain circumstances, and the terms of one could migrate toward the other.
 Well, now we as moderns ordinarily only experience this state when we are intoxicated by hallucinogenic
 drugs, or when we are in a state of severe psychic weakness, when there is then overwhelmment
 from the unconscious that is not with the permission of the ego, as happens in the psychedelic
 experience.
 Well, all of these various ways of approaching the psyche seem fairly abstract and bloodless
 and removed from daily existence, unless the psychedelic experience is present.
 And then it vivifies these metaphors.
 It makes clear what these various perennial traditions are talking about.
 So what I thought I would try to do today, and you're welcome to try and steer it other
 directions in the question and answer period, is the workshop is sacred plants as guides.
 A lot of information has to be imparted if we're going to satisfy my pedagogical urge
 here, because I would really like to leave you with information that you didn't have
 before, some of which may have practical efficacy in your own life.
 So in thinking about this very large issue, sacred plants as guides, I basically break
 it down into three categories for ease of handling in a context like this.
 And they are a kind of survey.
 How many of these plants are there?
 What are the chemicals that drive them?
 And what is their geographical distribution?
 In other words, just what are the botanical facts of the matter?
 And then secondly, I think in order to understand what these things mean for spiritual growth
 and psychic development, you have to place them in the context.
 And the context is chronological and historical.
 Have these things always been around?
 Have shamans always been taking them?
 How do they relate to the synthetic drugs that have been developed in the last couple
 of centuries?
 So the history of our relationship to the pharmacologically induced ecstasy.
 And then finally, and probably we'll get to this this afternoon, the phenomenology of
 the experience and the techniques for achieving and controlling it.
 Because this is a practical, there is a practicum here.
 This is not a course in Mongolian philology or something like that.
 The ultimate idea is to get those who feel called to the task sufficiently informed and
 psychically empowered that they can push off into the oceans of mind in the interior with
 some fair amount of confidence that they'll return to port with all hands.
 (audience laughing)


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