[silence] From KQED-FM in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Michael Krasny. Welcome. Terrence McKenna is an author, scholar, and ethnobotanist who has become nationally and internationally known and singularly identified with, among other things, psychedelics. In fact, Timothy Leary called him the Timothy Leary of the '90s. And he has once compared his own vocation to Darwin's cataloging of nature as trying to catalog the productions of psychedelic natures. Books include Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, Time Hallucinations. Recently published book in which he had conversations, it's called A Triologue, with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham. It's called The Evolutionary Mind, and it's called Time Triologues at the Edge of the Unthinkable. And we always enjoy having Terrence with us to talk about all kinds of things. Welcome to the program. Good morning. Pleasure to be with you. Well, let's, actually, let me begin with something that just came up the other night. I was at an event, an environmental fundraising event down the peninsula, and a few years ago I had done something with Mark Plotkin, an ethnobotanist who wrote all about the rainforest and the humanistic roots, and actually started a company to go pursue pharmaceuticals in the jungle and all that sort of thing. Somebody said to me, you know, Mark Plotkin's Shaman Pharmaceuticals has gone belly up, and I hadn't known that. And suddenly I started reflecting on that, that maybe it might have something to do with all these inflated expectations about the medicinal power of plants that Americans have perhaps bought into too strong. Is that, do you think, operative here? Well, my brother worked for Shaman Pharmaceuticals for a while. I'm not sure it's accurate to call it Mark Plotkin's company. We're probably sending several people through the roof. Well, Mark was one of the, one of the, kind of, prototypical things. He was one of the spearheaders. Yeah, right. I think that a number of problems converged on their desire to make money, one of which was the startling evolution of sampling technology, so that now it's possible to look at slurries of potentially drug-like material produced synthetically in the laboratory and identify thousands and thousands of compounds in a matter of hours. And this technology didn't exist ten years ago when Shaman was getting going. Another company put out of business by technology? Exactly. Not keeping up with what the other guy was doing. But has there been, in your judgment, maybe a bit of overzeal with respect to the press and the inflated expectations about what can be done for all? I mean, the notion that there are panaceas out there, cures to AIDS, etc. We just haven't found them, the right plants. Well, I think you have to understand, if you're talking to tribal people and they tell you that they have a plant that causes visions, they're probably right. But if they tell you they have a plant which cures diabetes, diabetes is a set of syndromes defined by modern medical science. How can Aboriginal people have those kinds of insights into physiological functioning? So the search for psychoactive drugs was very successful based on interviewing Aboriginal people. But the search for drugs applicable to other areas of modern medicine, I think target-based drug design is much more effective. Well, I kept thinking that we have...our language is very revealing. We have notions of magic mushrooms and we talk medicinally about magic bullets. I mean, what you've been in quest of in some respects is this magic. I mean, that's what you've been looking for in a way, hasn't it? Well, if you're looking for magical psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem, there are plants that either singly or in combination with nearby plants will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences. Naturally, the jungles are most rich because the jungles are most species-rich in plants generally. But the chemistry of plants seems to have a place in it for the production of compounds which are very active in mammalian nervous systems. And of course, that includes ourselves. Still much to be discovered in that whole realm? Much to be discovered in terms of sites of activity, characterization of receptors, cross-indexing the effects of various drugs. As an example of new discoveries, salvia divinorum is a Mexican mint plant that has been discovered to have a compound in it. Microgram for microgram, as powerful as LSD, completely disorientingly psychedelic. This is not a plant that has been made illegal or scheduled. And the compound, when studied, revealed itself to be from a chemical family never known to contain psychoactive substances. So the analytical tools are getting more subtle. The ability to detect nanogram amounts of material is now standard. And as it were, we're going back through the tailings and getting the gold out that was overlooked by cruder methods used in the past. You've never really, particularly in recent history, advocated illegal drug use, right? You mean somehow protesting the current legal situation? Or suggesting or countenancing in some way that those who want these kinds of experiences should avail themselves of them in defiance of the law? No, I've always had the political attitude that this was not something that you wanted to turn into a mass movement. I came up through the '60s and saw the fallacy of that. I think if people want to pursue these experiences, they can go to countries where they're available or they can grow these plants. And for example, this plant I just mentioned, salvia divinorum, there is no more powerful psychedelic and there is no more legal object in all of nature. This is as legal as lawn cuttings. So for the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status. Can we do the homework to the extent that we really know such things as... I mean, because there was... You've written about the acid scare in the '60s and all that sense of flashbacks and, you know, Art Linkletter's daughter jumping out of a window. I mean, a lot of people are very frightened by psychedelics and frightened by hallucinogens and with, some might say, good reason. Do we really know, in other words, the overall effects? Well, Tim Leary once said, he said, "LSD is a psychoactive compound that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who haven't taken it." And this occurs quite often. Drugs often have more effect on the people who don't take them than on the people who do take them. Drugs are... They have to begin somewhere, though. Although you've said science fiction is the gateway drug, right? I believe science fiction is the gateway drug. Paleontology for seven-year-olds is also a serious gateway drug. I think that society, rather than dealing with this as it should, has dealt with it with the heavy hand of the courts and the prisons, when what we should be doing is educating ourselves and our children. Drugs are here to stay. They're a part of postmodern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal, they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype, and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. Most parents would just want to steer their children away from drugs altogether, though, I would think. Well, but that sends a message that these things are bad, and then, of course, indiscriminately, children will involve themselves in these things, and the results are not happy. Knowledge is the only way to come to terms with this. It's a bit like sexuality. The battle for sex education is, I suppose, more or less won now, but that was a huge issue as I was growing up. Now, drugs, the response is the hammer of imprisonment, and yet, as I said, the number of drugs, the opportunities to take drugs, endlessly proliferate. If we don't educate people, we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist. Some might argue that sex education has only marginally affected, and perhaps because of our culture, the problem of sexual excess and, I suppose, what could come under categories of misuse of sexuality or abuse of sexuality have been, if anything, exacerbated through the years. Well, I suppose it's absent statistics. It's everybody's opinion. I certainly think people are having more and better sex than they were having in the '50s. Terrence McKenna, our guest, and we're going to talk to him, as I said, about a whole range of things here. You know, you've always struck me, and you've struck many people, and you describe yourself as a very rational man, and you certainly are an omnivorous thinker, reader, scholar, and so forth, and yet sometimes when you talk about some things that you have talked about, aliens, UFOs, intergalactic stuff, and so forth, it makes rational, skeptical people's skin begin to, you know, percolate in many ways. What do you say to that kind of response? Well, I think they're not listening carefully. My method, if you want to call it that, has been to explore the weird, the bizarre, the marginal with a rational mind, not with a will to believe. The truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. The truth, you can kick the tires, they'll let you take it for a spin. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. So, I've looked into marginal areas of human experience, historical and otherwise, with a rational mind, and what I have found is doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the new age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane human condition. I explored all candidates with an open mind and came to the conclusion that psychedelic drugs are the most accessible, the most efficient, the least dangerous. Now, there may be other ways to access the miraculous, flagellation, prayer, wilderness abandonment, what have you. I'm not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I'm interested in finding one doorway that worked. How does the rational mind determine what is miraculous as opposed to what may be induced or may be some sort of delirium or some kind of hallucinatory experience that has no basis in rationality? Well, I think Heidegger said we measure our relationship to reality by the depth of the call. And I think one of the chief justices said he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. The miraculous is self-evidently the miraculous, and it's certainly possible to take many drugs and have many kinds of experiences without coming near it. On the other hand, these psychoactive substances seem to be the most direct path to the miraculous. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean the dissolving of cultural constructs, the reality that is ever present outside who you are, who your culture is, what language you speak, your expectations. You know, we could disagree about the worth and the efficacy of psychedelics, but I think if we had shared the experience, we could agree that it is characterized by boundary dissolution. You're talking about something universal, something that suggests spirituality or aesthetics or maybe even theology, but not necessarily intergalactic communication, let's say, or exobiology. No, I don't think that the culture at the end of the 20th century is penetrated by dozens or hundreds of alien cultures seeking to trade high technology for fetal body parts or all of that. In fact, I consider all that pop culture to be indicative of the hysteria that is engendered by science moving beyond the range of the understanding of ordinary people. People will always generate explanations for what they see around them, and if they lack education, their explanations will be bizarre, quirky, primitive. And I take all this New Age channeling and all these extraterrestrial revelations and so forth to signify a profound dichotomy between officially sanctioned models of reality and then what people are saying to each other on the buses and in the dime stores. There have been some very telling studies, in fact, about those who had UFO close encounters and who were taken aboard ships and often various parts of the anatomy are penetrated or these kinds of things happen. And in most cases, the proliferation of these things occurred almost exclusively, especially the same kinds of descriptions of alien forms and so forth occurred after the spate of movies about these things. Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced free house calls in our homes. I mean, this could almost be a litmus test for sanity. If you believe that, then I want to sell you a bridge over the Hudson River quite cheaply. Then what is out there? How do we begin to even assume a kind of cosmic consciousness or awareness of what might be alive beyond this planet? Well, Michael, imagine if there were a force in the water or in the air or in the advertising that was causing a certain significant percentage of people here at the end of the 20th century to simply lose the ability to distinguish between memory and dream. Then people wouldn't know whether that image in their mind of a flying saucer came from close encounters or from that weekend at Uncle Tom's farm when they were 11. And I think something like this is happening. We as tribal people with aboriginal roots are set up to handle about ten stories and one long epic poem. Intellectually, the machinery of our brains, and yet modern media has exposed each of us to thousands of movies, hundreds of thousands of sitcoms, endless clips of film and audio data. And I think people are losing the ability to distinguish their own past from a kind of media-created collective past that has more the character of the Jungian unconscious about it than it has the character of the warm and friendly world of physics. A collective filmic unconscious? Yes, a kind of collective dream on which we draw. And out of it comes the Bigfoot, the flying saucers, the proctologists from nearby star systems. And people who have not been trained to deconstruct data or think rationally are completely victim of these media-spread, meme-like viruses that distort ordinary thinking, balkanize epistemology, and make social and political consensus on anything that much harder to reach. It just reminded me of Doug Rushkoff's work that we were talking about before we went on the air, and the allusion to memes. I wanted to allude to something else, and that is the 1971 trip that you made to South America, and you were out, it's been written about a number of times, with your brother. And your brother experienced, as a result of ingesting a plant, hearing a conversation his mother had on the telephone, your mother had on the telephone in 1953, you can correct me in the details of this, but Dizzy Dean was pitching a game that was being broadcast on the radio, he could hear all this, he believed he could hear all this, and at the same time, he was a three-year-old at the time. Now presumably your mother would have remembered this, or maybe not, if it actually happened, but this is the realm we're talking about, your brother said it was all inner, he thought, but this realm between dream and memory and the indecipherability of the two. Well, it is certainly true that in the presence of certain forms of schizophrenia, ordinary reality seems to dissolve into a stew of coincidences, laden facts, side glances from reality, if you will. I think that time and space is generally pretty firm, but that there are conditions, and it always seems to have to do with perturbation of mental states, whether achieved through some yogic or quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery, time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways. To me, this is not surprising, because it seems to me we obviously create time and space, these are mental constructs, they're not given from Mount Sinai, they're conventions that the animal body brings together in order to organize data about its place in the world. To borrow a little from Cartesian thought, I think time and space, therefore time and space exists. Something like that, absolutely. The world is made of language, Michael, that's the insight of psychedelics. What we expect to see, we see. What we say is there, is there. And this is really what the 20th century has contributed to philosophy, I think, the understanding that language is primary. Concepts like space, time, matter, energy, these are culture-bound, linguistically defined concepts. What is primary is the word. And it's very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code, everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. The world around us is defined by legal codes. The world inside our machines are defined by what we call computer languages. More code. Code is the primary reality. And in ordinary experience, code is language. Now, this creates opportunities for relativism, it creates opportunities for all kinds of dangerous and sloppy thinking. Nevertheless, we have to go down that route because it is clear this is a deeper understanding than what we inherited from the philosophies of the 19th century. Talking to Terence McKenna about a whole range of things, including changing philosophy. His newest book actually trilogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, is called The Evolutionary Mind. It's a feast of all kinds of stuff on visual math and factals and psychic pets and the millennium. Which brings up another interesting point. A number of years ago you talked about December 22nd, 2012, as the date of I guess what would be characterized as the secular apocalypse. Are you still with that date? Yes, it's nice now to have it all to myself since everyone's rushing the gun and piled on to Y2K. I was accused of being too crazy to suppose the world could transform in 2012. Now no one will wait. I represent an extremely conservative position. You're not that concerned about Y2K, then? I really am not. I live in Hawaii off-grid. It may be because I'm already prepared for it, but I suspect problems from Y2K will be local, confined in time, and fairly manageable. Of course, it's simply a projection for opinion. No one knows. Let me give a phone number here if you'd like to join us with Terrence McKenna. You're cordially invited to do so with questions or comments. You can reach us now at 415-863-2476. I'm going to open up the phone lines and invite you to jump aboard here again. The number in the 415 area code is 863-2476. Often called the guru of psychedelics, but a man who has lived quite an amazing life, studying in Tibetan Nepal, doing lepidopteran work in Indonesia, smuggling hashish. The list goes on. I'm cataloging my own work here for you, Terrence. We'll take some calls when we return on Forum. Local underwriting is provided by Harper San Francisco, publishing books dedicated to women's spirituality and feminist scholarship. Presenting Rianne Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade," HarperCollins.com. And by Brainstorm Networks, offering DSL, ISDN, and T1 Internet connections exclusively to Bay Area businesses, 877-2GET-DSL, or on the web at brainstorm.net. Friday on Forum, Jeffrey Klein will be the guest host and the topic of our discussion in the opening hour will be the Microsoft trial. Then we'll have a look at longevity and you're invited to join us for Forum. We're talking with Terrence McKenna and I want to go to your phone calls and we'll do that momentarily. Just a quick question though, when you talk about the miraculous and certainly getting a sense of the visionary power of plants and all of that, psychedelics, etc., is there a sense of your, as a westerner, and as a serious thinker and rationalist, being able to feel the kind of sacred and divine power that is often attached to many of these plants by other cultures? Can you absorb that? Can you internalize that? Yes, absolutely you can. I mean, it comes in the form of awe and astonishment, but awe has always been spoken of as an appropriate emotion in the presence of the supernatural. And when you finally grab on to the hundred thousand volt psychedelic experience, it's absolutely confounding because it seems to be the thing which our culture has been most at pains to deny the existence of. And so it's as though you come around the corner and there's Santa Claus, Bugs Bunny and the Easter Bunny all playing poker together, and you realize you were given the wrong story all the way down the line. And the appropriate response to that is humility and awe and a kind of redirecting of one's energies to try and get in line with this very large reality suddenly to be revealed outside the confines of our cultural agenda or our cultural concern. But you know, it's interesting because you speak with this kind of derogation about New Age, and yet at the same time, when you talk about the direct results and consequences of many of your experiences with these sacred plants, it suggests a sense of awe and mystery, but also a sense of the oneness and unity of life and a feeling of spiritual transformation, a feeling of feminism and ecology coming to the fore in terms of your political consciousness, all things which are very much a part of the zeitgeist and the New Age movement as well. Well, I've always felt that in a way the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was, "We'll try anything as long as we're sure it doesn't work." And that automatically exempts psychedelics. All talk of spiritual advancement is always talk of pushing, trying, practice, concentration, attention. Once you find psychedelics, you're not looking for the accelerator anymore, you're looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine or oneness or something like that. Now the game becomes a very grown-up game. How are you going to integrate this into your ordinary life? You're no longer a seeker, you're no longer an ingenue, now you're an insider. Now you can come and go from these transcendental places at will. Now how do you use that to make yourself a better person, better parent, better citizen of your community? You mean as a result of the opening up of your consciousness through the sorts of experiences you've had, you can become transcendental at will? Well, you can have recourse to the effective method at will, because the substances work. This means taking the substance over and over again. The substances work, yes. Lee is our first caller from Pine Grove. Good morning. Good morning, Michael. I'd like to ask Mr. McKenna if he can direct me to references in the botanical literature regarding salvia dividorum. I grow 15 or 16 different species of salvia and I have a fair library and I'm unable to locate it. You should simply search on the Internet, salvia dividorum. There are several pages with dozens of links and there are active lists on the Internet. If you run an Excite search on salvia dividorum, you will have more than you know what to do with. All right, that's D-I-V-A or D-I-V-I? D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M. I've got it. Thank you very much. Thank you for your call. To Santa Cruz we go. To B.J., good morning. Oh, thanks for taking my call. Hello, Terrence. Hi, Barry. How are you this morning? Great. Yes, I just wanted to comment on a misunderstanding of the New Age. I heard Mr. Krasny say, "Isn't this New Age?" The misunderstanding, as far as the New Age is concerned, is that we can arrive at truth, or whatever it's going by these days, by transcendence. And I think what has occurred is that when the psychedelic movement was crushed in the '60s, the failure of the psychedelic revolution brought on the New Age. In other words, we replaced vision and imagination with visualization and its concomitant techniques, crystals and all that. The New Age stands for really--it's disguised as a visionary movement, but it really is all about the lack of vision and keeping the same structure, but changing the content of traditional patriarchal religions. As a matter of fact, there have been quite a number of feminists who have commented on the deep patriarchal character of the New Age, and I think that centers in the idea of transcendence, where you transcend the earth and your body and all this. And instead, I think psychedelics brings you to the depth, ecology vision of the earth, which I think Terence calls "Gaia." It brings you to the mind of the earth and not transcending. So I think that we need a real alternative to the New Age, and I think Terence is quite right metaphorically, because Terence rejected going up to the high Himalayas, and he instead went down south to the depths of the Amazon, and I think that is a signal of the way to go. Go south, young man. BJ, thank you for that call. I mean, it's an important distinction he's making here, at least as he sees the differences between New Age and what Terence McKenna is all about. We'll get more of your calls on in the meantime. Chris from Inverness is next. Yes, Terence. I was intrigued by your emphasis on language. It long seemed to me, and I'm sure it's not an original thought, that a lot of the "spiritual" realm, religions, teaching, the tarot, astrology, the UFO thing, all of that are forms of metaphor for something that we have coming up or that we're engaging in evolutionarily that our language is [audio cuts out] to cope with and express, in other words. I wonder if the whole psychedelic thing and your descriptions of the places that you've gone on DMT, I wonder to what degree those are metaphoric, and what kind of metaphor is it? Is it a synecdoche? Is it part for a whole? Is it next to something? Do you see what I mean? Well, I think I understand what you mean. As far as reality and its relationship to language is concerned, this is a fundamental split in the Western mind. Magic, which we haven't heard much about seriously since the 16th century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on. That idea gave way to modern science's idea that there were stubborn facts in the world that language could neither eradicate or ameliorate. Now, with the rise of cyberspace and virtual reality, language is becoming again re-empowered. I mean, in a sense, computer code is magical language. It's language which, when executed, causes something to actually happen. Now, as far as to what degree descriptions of these psychedelic states are metaphors, they have to be metaphors, because what is not often mentioned but always experienced with high-dose psychedelics is an actual alteration of the language-producing machinery itself. You know, some people have the idea you take a psychedelic drug or substance and the world transforms itself and you watch this happen. That's true to some degree, but the person, the watcher, is themself transformed. This is not a clean process. And when you actually see the machinery of language melt, involute, fractalize, crystallize, and transform itself before you, you get a tremendous sense of the malleability of reality and how it rests on a platform of stable physiological functioning. I also suggest, thank you, Chris, that, I mean, if reality is shifting and perception is shifting all the time in this cyber revolution with all this information technology, then we're evolving in different ways that we don't even understand yet. We're perceiving time in ways that we don't even understand yet. Well, yes, I spent last week with Bruce Dahmer, who's one of the great mavens of interactive virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace, but occasionally we would open-- Dressing in avatars? This means an avatar is how you appear to other people in cyberspace, so you choose to be a mini-skirted girl. I know it mainly is a Hindu word. I'm sorry. Oh, no, it's been appropriated and trademarked, and the Hindus are now out. But anyway, being in your avatar in a virtual world, talking to other people in a virtual world, and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen, so you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that, you leave the keyboard and you can practically feel the McLuhan-esque reprogramming of your communication-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you've been spending time in. So, yes, I think we're evolving. The shift in media is changing human beings at least as much as the introduction of print did in the 1440s. And the good news about all of this is that no one is in control, and no one understands enough about it to direct or sculpt it to some secular end. You read Leonard Schlain's book? I did read Leonard Schlain's book. I mean, on this program, you put much credence in that, that the whole nature of our brain is changing, and that's the result of the goddess in feminism becoming more preeminent in our lives and so forth. Well, he worked off an earlier book by Ivan Illich called The ABC-dization of Culture, who was also then cribbing from Marshall McLuhan, who talked about how sensory ratios changed cultures from hot to cool. You've got the genealogy and the derivations right. But, I mean, do you believe the premise? No, I do believe it. I think print created not only the modern notion of the citizen, it created the modern assembly line, it created all kinds of things which we assume are basic to humanness that are, in fact, artifacts of the technologies accepted by Europe some 400 years ago and then spread throughout the world. And misogyny, too? Misogyny probably has an older history. [laughter] Phyllis from Menlo Park, join us please. Good morning. Wow, my mind is spinning. Hi, Terrence. I was at the conference at Ethel and where you and Mr. Abraham and Leonard--pardon me--Rupert Sheldrake, I think, first developed some of these ideas. Is that the book--is this the book that's come out of that? Well, there were two of those books of dialogues or trilogues with Rupert and Ralph. The first one was called Trilogues at the Edge of the West, and the new one is called The Evolutionary Mind. And we just simply take up where we left off with that first book. Well, it's fabulous ideas, and the mind spins. Could you explain a little more the year 2012, what it is you envision as happening? Not only the year, Phyllis, we've got the date, December 22, 2012. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's the nice thing about mathematics. If you do it right, there's not much of a fudge factor. The idea about 2012 was simply from studying the structure of the I-ching, specifically the structure of the sequence of the hexagrams, way back in the middle '70s, I discovered a curve there which is a fractal curve with the property of damping its own oscillation. Now, what that means is that it eventually runs down and disappears, and it looks somewhat like a stock market. And I discovered that if you went at history with the concept that it was an ebb and flow between two polar forces, which I named habit and novelty, that you could actually get a conformational fit between this abstract mathematical algorithm, this curve, and the vicissitudes of invention, migration, warfare, political advance, and so forth, the factors that-- All of our global up and downs, or ups and downs. Exactly. And this was very satisfying to see history so well described by a mathematical algorithm. There was just one minor problem, which was the algorithm predicted that the quality I called novelty would reach infinity in our lifetimes. And when the calculation was finally done, December 22, 2012 A.D. But what do you think will happen? Are we all going to dissolve into subatomic particles? Well, there are two ways to answer that question. The honest answer is it's too early to tell. It's like asking a man facing east at 2 A.M. to describe the coming sunrise. He can't do it because the sunrise is over the curvature of the event horizon of the earth. That's the honest answer. Then the more fun answer is to pretend we do know what's going on based on looking at what novelty has been in the past. Novelty seems to be definable as density of connectivity. So what is going to happen in 2012 is that all points in this universe will be what mathematicians call cotangent. In other words, all points will be connected to all other points. Now, I dreamed this up in the early '70s, early '80s, where talking about all points being connected seemed pie in the sky. Although the New Age people did it with harmonic convergence, didn't they? To some degree. But now the Internet appears on the scene, and lo and behold, what is the Internet but a global connection machine knitting everything together and everything we want from the Internet, higher speed, greater flexibility, more intelligent searches, so forth and so on, tend to push the Internet toward ever greater states of complexification and connectivity. So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis. So mark it on your calendar, Phyllis. Okay, one more question. Is there an evolutionary intention in this? I mean, we want to get back to whatever state we're going to be in in 2012, so we have somehow managed to invent things like cyberspace? Well, evolution and intent are words which evolutionary thinkers don't like to see on the same page, because they believe that evolution is essentially purposeless, driven by random mutation. Very capricious facts, yeah. Right. That isn't what I believe. Well, no, it isn't what most people believe. There does seem to be a discernible morphogenetic unfolding toward a higher state of unity and connectivity, and that's what we're riffing off. Phyllis, thank you. And let's riff a little with Lawrence from Berkeley. Hi, Lawrence. Yes, hi, good morning. I wanted to speak up for traditional meditation and traditional methods, you know, of meditative discipline and mysticism, as opposed to drugs. Now, I know that everything I'm going to say is going to be anathema to your guest, but I think it's important that the audience hear it. I wanted to--you know, what happens with drugs is what happens when St. John of the Cross, writing in the 16th century, talks about as the dark night of the soul. And this is something that happens with any kind of meditative or mystical high. It goes away, and you get into--and when it goes away, the contrast between the incredible light and joy that you are feeling and the absence of it produces Great Depression, which John calls the dark night. In traditional mysticism, what happens when the dark night of the soul occurs, when the mystical light goes away, is that you have to do some work. You have to do some work that is required by faith to say, "Okay, I remember this state, even though I'm not feeling it now, and to get back to it, I have to exhibit love, I have to exhibit humility, I have to exhibit harmony between myself and others, not in my imagination, but in reality, you know, by working to create this harmony with others." The problem with taking any form of drugs, you know, whether it's a pill or a natural plant, is that when that dark night comes, when the light goes away, you don't have to do the required work. All you have to do is pop a pill again, or pop another drug again, so that instead of getting a condition of love, which is produced by actually serving people and by trying to produce a condition in which their needs are in reality as great or as important as your own personal needs, you simply assume that what feels... you go for a kind of a unity through the back door. You say, "What feels good to me must therefore be good to you." And you get a unity of fantasy rather than a unity of love and work. All right. You're listening to Forum. I'm Michael Krasny. Terrence McKenna, let's go to you on that. Well, this is a standard argument, meditation versus drugs. I think there's a misconception about how people who use drugs for self-exploration do it. It's not a matter of combating coming down by taking the drug again. I think the dark night of the soul is a natural and unavoidable part of any psychological growth process. Jung called it the "negredo," taking a term from alchemy. The idea of the way to use psychedelics is very similar to how the caller described using ordinary spiritual techniques. It takes about seven or eight hours to have a psilocybin trip. I would think it would take 30 or 40 days to assimilate the messages of that trip and integrate them into your life. But certainly the visions which you obtain are an inspiration to community, to love, to striving to return to these places. Now, the perils of drugs are the perils of overdose or underdose. The perils of the traditional spiritual methods are the malevolence of the guru, the potential for being manipulated on somebody else's schedule and agenda. No path of spiritual advance can be said to be without risk. I looked into yoga. I've studied Zen. I've studied a number of these so-called spiritual disciplines. And I find more backbiting, more human frailty on display than I find in the solitary practice of taking drugs with an exploring attitude. Let me thank Lawrence for the call. Do you find that there's sometimes a kind of expectation that someone who has experimented with drugs as much as you have should be much more wiggy and out of it and less rational than you are? Oh, yes. You should be ravaged by these drugs? Yes. Well, my public image, I think, is this is a kind of wild man halfway between William Burroughs and Tim Leary. But that's not who you are. No, it's not who I am at all. Quite the contrary. I was a somewhat stodgy, logical Irish scholar. Yes, drug taking and drug using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap that we've had to put up with, we would have gotten some kind of remediation from the Justice Department. I mean, the idea that potheads are stupid, the idea that acid makes it impossible for you to think straight, you know, the dirty little secret of Northern California's vast economic success down at Silicon Valley is the creativity that was injected into this area in the 1960s through the LSD revolution in many, many significant cases. But you do see people who are wigged out as a result of it. I mean, like you say, it's individual cases perhaps, but you see them and you see people who use marijuana chronically who seem to slow down. I mean, I've seen it. It's an evolution or trajectory that I've seen all too frequently with people who are very heavy pot users. Well, you see it with alcohol. You see it with tobacco. Exactly. Life is not user safe. You know, Whitehead said it's the business of the future to be dangerous. On the other hand, it's good to get an education. It's good to know the classics. It's good to be able to do a quadratic equation, and it's very good to understand what LSD is all about. I mean, these are aspects of life you don't want to go to the yawning grave without having been exposed to. Troy is our next caller from Pacific Grove. Good morning. Good morning, Michael, and thank you very much for this. This has been one of the best in a long time. And I'd like to get my fingers on this big, huge door of perception that we're trying to ease open. The thing with drugs, an analogy that I use with many people, you know, it's like when you use drugs and you get to that place that's like a mansion inside your own mind, there's something that -- two things. One, you know then that you are the son of the king and that this is your mansion and it's in your mind, and you were right all along. The only thing is is that there's a policeman that comes around. It's the rules. You break in through the window, then you must get tossed out. I think Freud would call that super-ego. But the truth is is that it is your house. The only thing is is you've just got to find the key to get in the front door the way you're supposed to enter it, and then it becomes your own home. Well, don't you think the disenfranchising of people from their own bodies has been a major cultural agenda for the past three or four hundred years? It's incredibly so. Except I must confess, when you start talking using your castle metaphor, I thought right away of Kafka. That's my own proclivities. In a sense, it is just a metaphor, again, because we're really struggling with this, to get back to the beginning premise of the show, of how language constructs our world, and how the visual experience now is somehow seemingly a bit disconnected from our lexicological order. And we're able to vision things that don't necessarily always fall into an ability to communicate. Vision is a key word here. And, Frey, thank you for much of what Terence McKenna's whole thinking career and search has been about. Where do we get vision from? What part of nature does... Where do the ideas come from? People who don't take psychedelics think it's all moving lights and little concentric circles. They don't understand that these are tremendously emotionally moving, dramatic scenarios that one could not possibly generate out of one's own mind. Or if one could, then every single one of us is a Beethoven, is a Gilbert and Sullivan, is a Shakespeare. And maybe that's true. But if that's true, that is empowering and worth knowing. I remember once, many years ago, interviewing Ram Dass, and he said, "I honor what psychedelics have done for me." And there was a storm of protest, because he seemed to be countenancing the use of psychedelics. And that was during part of the whole scary era. I think many people still are, particularly where children are concerned, scared about psychedelics and scared about drugs in general, even in terms of frontiers of consciousness. You honor what psychedelics have done for you, obviously, don't you? Oh, absolutely. To me, they opened my mind to realms of beauty and understanding that would never have been accessible otherwise. I read the mystical literature. I knew what I was shooting for. That's what I mean by doing your homework. But for me, it fell upon me with the force of a transforming miracle, and it's always been my motivation publicly to speak about that for that reason. Well, we've been speaking with that walking miracle himself, Terrence McKenna. Always delighted to have you and to engage with you. Thank you so much for being with us. The newest book is The Evolutionary Mind, Triologues at the Edge of the Unthinkable, with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terrence McKenna. Thank you all for being with us this hour. We'll be with you on the morrow, and Jeffrey Kline will be sitting in the seat tomorrow. Our program's producers are Robin Giannatasio-Mahl, David Minkow, and Holly Kernan-White-Talley. Executive producer of Forum is Raul Ramirez. From KQED-FM in San Francisco, I'm Michael Krasny. [music] I'm Peter Sagal. Imagine this scenario. You're at a swank cocktail party. You spot an incredibly attractive person. You know from the ineffable expression on his or her face that they're lonely, bored with the sycophantic attention extreme physical beauty brings. They want something more from a companion, something deeper. You sidle closer. You say, "Did you know that in Hong Kong, the film 'As Good As It Gets' is called 'Mr. Cat Poop'?" The extremely attractive person turns to you. No one has ever said anything like this to her or him before. He or she says, "How did you know that?" You say, "I heard it on 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me,' the NPR news quiz." He or she smiles. "Tell me more." "Hey, it could happen." "Wait, wait, don't tell me." You can hear that Saturday at 11 a.m. here on KQED Radio. The Bay Area's weather forecast for today is calling for sunny skies and cool temperatures. You can expect highs from the mid to upper 50s today. Patchy late-night valley fog tonight, otherwise mostly clear and cool, lows in the 30s. The Friday forecast, mostly sunny tomorrow, except for some patchy morning valley fog, with highs tomorrow 55 to 60 degrees. It's time now for Talk of the Nation. It's 11 o'clock. You're listening to member-supported KQED FM San Francisco at 88.5 FM. [♪♪♪] From NPR News in Washington, I'm Ray Suarez, and this is Talk of the Nation. Lines out the door at $150 a head to hear this. I was told that there were some who thought that I might have an announcement to make, but I don't. Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York not announcing she's running for the U.S. Senate. We're not doing tax cuts as planned this hour on the program. It's time for open phones. Call us at 800-989-8255 with your comments on the week's news or other additions of the program. You have the floor. You set the agenda. 800-989-8255. Open phones on Talk of the Nation after the news. [♪♪♪] From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Corva Coleman. A military jury in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, has acquitted a Marine pilot of all charges connected to an accident in the Italian Alps last year. More than 20 people died when Captain Richard Ashby's jet cut the cable. [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 6.71 sec Decoding : 5.15 sec Transcribe: 4057.21 sec Total Time: 4069.07 sec