Michael Toms - Reviving The Archaic

It is only through a change in human consciousness that the world will be transformed.

The personal and the planetary are connected.

As we expand our awareness of mind, body, psyche and spirit and bring that awareness

actively into the world, so also will the world be changed.

This is our quest as we explore new dimensions.

As long as the earth was separated into small isolated territories, the ability to understand

patterns of connection and processes was not critical.

Now it is.

We are living in a time of exponential change, social, political and spiritual.

The importance of becoming more aware of our interconnections cannot be underestimated.

At the same time, this expanded perception of our relationship to the rest of the planet

and all living things begins with ourselves.

Around through millennia, human beings have sought to probe the inner depths and expand

consciousness using a variety of tools.

Today our guest, Terence McKenna, is a point writer of the new and emerging culture.

As an author and explorer, he has spent the last 25 years traveling the planet, studying shamanism

and what he calls the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation.

With his brother Dennis, he is the author of The Invisible Landscape and Psilocybin, the Magic

Mushroom Grower's Guide.

A talking book version of his Amazon adventures called True Hallucinations is an underground

classic.

He and his wife, Kat Harrison McKenna, are the co-founders of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit

research botanical garden and gene bank devoted to the collection and propagation of plants

ethno-pharmacological interest.

Join us for the next hour as we look for the connections with our guest, Terence McKenna.

My name is Michael Toms.

I'll be your host.

Welcome to New Dimensions.

Terence, welcome.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Terence, we started, I think our first conversation was back in 1977 and here it is mid-1991 and that's

14 years or 15 years almost, a lot's changed since then, a lot has gone on and perhaps you

could kind of bring us from the 70s to the 90s and from your own perspective as to what

you think has happened and is happening.

Well, I see a lot of disparate communities, communities that didn't really recognize a

common agenda at the beginning of the 80s have now begun to make common cause.

I think feminists, ecologists, cyberpunks, the psychedelic community, all of these disparate

communities have begun to coalesce on an agenda more or less around the notion of reverencing

the planet and perhaps beginning to create methods for saving it.

This is something that wasn't going on in the early 80s.

Why do you think this is happening?

Well H.G. Wells said history is a race between education and disaster.

I think it's probably happening because our problems are worse than they were 10 years ago.

So there we live in a paradox, the paradox of a world where things are simultaneously getting

better and worse.

So events like Chernobyl and the breakup of the Marxist states, all of these things have

forced, I think, even the most intractable intellects to realize that we live in a world of vastly

accelerating change and novelty.

And if we don't begin to take a grip on some of the problems which confront us, we may

eventually pass fail-safe points and these problems may then be much more difficult, if

not impossible, to solve.

So there's a rising sense of alarm and accompanying that, I think, a rising sense of the possibility

of new solutions.

In some sense, I mean, not in some sense, but in a very major sense, we live in a scientifically

based culture, very rational, reasonable, heavily based on logic.

And I know your work has encompassed much to do with overall expanding consciousness and

human consciousness itself.

How would you see our consciousness related to the culture we live in, the society we've

been raised in?

Well, in a way, you're right that we live in a hierarchically structured, rational, patriarchal,

scientific society.

But on the other hand, the program of science has pushed so deeply into the heart of matter

through quantum physics that a certain irrational element in nature itself has become visible

in the last 15 years to science.

Physics, which was always held up as the paradigmatic, rational enterprise, now deals with concepts

so exotic and counterintuitive that the notion of reason itself has begun to be called into

the question inside the scientific establishment.

And I think this crisis in science is probably being caused by the fact that our investigations

now make it clear that we cannot exclude the notion of spirit from the scientific enterprise.

People like Rupert Sheldrake, new disciplines such as chaos dynamics, fractal mathematics.

These theories and approaches hint that reason is ultimately insufficient for a complete description

of nature.

And this is having vast repercussions in the higher echelons of our civilization.

So the visible and invisible worlds are coming together?

Yes, I think so.

I think science has really exhausted itself unless it begins to accept the notion, some notion,

of spirit.

I mean, this is a process that's been going on for quite a while.

For instance, we forget how exotic the discovery of the electromagnetic field in the middle of

the last century was for science.

I mean, up to that point, the notion of action at a distance was dismissed as pure superstition.

The world was conceived of tiny billiard ball-like objects winging their way through empty space.

And when Michael Faraday and Conrad or Lorentz began to write the equations for the electromagnetic

field, this was hailed as irrational, magical thinking.

Now we exist in an electronic information-dense society, a global planetary society that is

entirely knitted together by these same mysterious fields.

And I think in our own time, a similar but larger transition in scientific thinking is going

to take place.

You see, what's happened is the previous approach of science, which was to isolate the smallest

units in any system and then give a complete description of them, has given way to the realization

that you can't compute animals out of atoms.

And you can't compute the dynamics of societies by studying single individuals.

The great science of the future is the science of complex systems and processes.

This is a revolutionary refocusing of the explanatory power of science.

And it comes just in time, because the problems which really confront us are whole systems

problems, deteriorating atmospheres, epidemic diseases, spread of social unrest.

These are complex, compound, whole systems problems, and we need a new science to deal with this

kind of thing.

You've done a lot of traveling among other cultures and visiting shamans in different areas

of the world.

What do you see as the relationship between the ancient practice of shamanism and emerging science?

Well, I think every society, when it gets into trouble, looks into the past for models to anchor

itself.

When the medieval church broke up under the influence of new technologies and new economic

theories, classicism was invented by the Renaissance.

That was essentially a reaching back to models 1,500 years in the past to then create a revivified

legal system, economic theory, new aesthetic canons, and so forth.

What I see happening in the 20th century is a much more radical reaching back into the past.

I call it the archaic revival.

In fact, I have a book due out fall of 91 from Harper that will be called the archaic revival.

And when we talk about re-empowering these models from 15 to 20,000 years ago, we're talking

about partnership societies, a kind of nomadism, and especially shamanism, which is the integration

of medicine, politics, and psychotherapy into the figure of a single individual who operates

as a kind of exemplar within a society and gives it a cohesive direction and a sense of itself.

And I see this happening in many different venues and guises.

I'm speaking with Terence McKenna, co-author of The Invisible Landscape and co-founder of

Botanical Dimensions.

We'll be back in just a moment.

In Invisible Landscape, you touched on the area of time with the I Ching, and kind of

started there, I think, your interest in the I Ching.

And then more recently, you've actually created a software package dealing with how to expand

our understanding or conception of time.

Yes.

Well, I think time is the domain that science has been least successful in dealing with.

And this accounts for its inadequacies.

You could almost describe science as that human endeavor which is concerned with processes

which are independent of time.

In other words, no legitimate scientist believes that an experiment done on a Tuesday will give

different results than an experiment done on a Saturday.

Science deals with time-independent phenomena.

The problem is, in our own lives, our love affairs, our investment practices, historical vicissitudes,

these things all are time-dependent.

And so, what I've suggested is that probability theory, which averages many measurements to get

a picture of a phenomena, is actually only adequate to the more coarse-grained phenomena in the universe.

And that what we need is a theory of what I call the ebb and flow of novelty.

I take this word from Alfred North Whitehead, the idea that novelty is something which comes

and goes on many temporal scales.

It ebbs and flows within the context of a moment, a month, a millennium.

It's really the Eastern notion of the Tao, but stripped of some of its mysteriousness.

You see, I think that when we take a whole system's view of the universe and look back

through time, what we see is what I call the conservation of novelty.

That the closer you get to the present moment, the more novelty there is in the world, and

the more it tends to preserve itself and pass itself on.

And so, the evolution of life out of non-life, the evolution of culture out of animal existence,

the evolution of electronic culture out of previous print culture.

These are steps along the path of the generation and conservation of novelty.

And the reason this idea is important is because it offers a context for the historical experience

that we're undergoing.

If you go to the academies and ask, what is history?

You'll be told that it's a trendless fluctuation.

Well, if it's a trendless fluctuation, it's the only trendless fluctuation that has ever

been identified in nature.

And I want to suggest that actually it is not trendless.

It is a process of knitting things together, folding one phenomenon into another, bringing

distant people's languages and technologies into ever closer association with each other, leading

to the idea that history arises out of the natural world and points itself toward a kind of millennial

conclusion.

I don't believe we can look into the future 500 or 1,000 years and imagine human societies

as we have known them with our infantile and primate politics and so forth.

I think that history is actually an extraordinarily brief and self-transcending state.

It only lasts perhaps 1,000 generations.

Now of course to an individual whose life is as ephemeral as that of a mayfly, 1,000 generations

seems like a long time.

But from the point of view of the forces that have built this planet, subduction of tectonic

plates, glaciation and this sort of thing, 1,000 generations is the wink of an eye.

So part of this spiritual revolution that's taking place, I think, is the dawning intuition

on the part of many people that history is a process with a finite duration and that actually,

perhaps within our lifetimes, certainly within the lifetimes of our children, the human adventure

is going to be transformed almost beyond our ability to recognize it.

What would be the connection between Jung's idea of synchronicity and what you're talking

about?

Well, synchronicity in Jung's theory was a curious juxtaposition of a psychic event like the thought

of an old friend or something like that and an event in the so-called exterior world such

as the old friend suddenly calling on the telephone.

So that it gives the impression that psyche and world are somehow contiguous with each

other.

And I think this is true.

I think that one of the great truths that has been lost by the prodigal journey into history

is the truth of the seamlessness of reality and existence, that the ego is the great boundary

definer, the great divider of phenomena, and it's a kind of necessary evil.

I've written a book for Bantam that will be out early in 1992 called Food of the Gods.

And there, I argue, based on my experience with preliterate people in South America taking

hallucinogenic and psychedelic plants, I argue that sociologically speaking, these hallucinogenic

plants are almost like inoculation against the formation of ego.

That ego is like a calcareous tumor that begins to grow within the structure of the psyche when

there is not repeated contact with the kind of boundary-dissolving ecstasy that traditional

preliterate tribal people have built into their societies through the institution of shamanism

and then through the institution of group use of psychedelic plants.

This is the great fall into history, I believe, was occasioned by the slow fading of the use

of these plants in the prehistory of the Middle East.

So history is a kind of descent into a lower dimension where everything is seen through

the distorting lens of the ego.

And our present problems in the world, we have the technologies to solve our problems.

We have the financial punch.

We have the communication and educational systems necessary to inform people.

What we lack is the cohesiveness of mind.

It's that we must change our minds about racism, about how we relate to feminism, about

how we relate to the exotic and the unfamiliar.

It's a mental gymnastic act that must be performed.

And so I have spent a lifetime looking at these preliterate societies that use hallucinogenic

plants because what I see there is a dynamic, a kind of working out of the human dimension

in a context of nature that leaves both intact.

There's also a huge potential and not just potential but reality of these plants being

used for healing properties as well, right?

Oh, yes.

Even in today's high-tech world, 85% of all prescription and over-the-counter drugs can be

traced to a botanical source of some sort.

This is why my partner Kat and I, as our real-world political work, have founded and manage a botanical

garden in Hawaii whose mission is the rescue of medically important plants from preliterate

cultures in the warm tropics.

You see, now there is a certain amount of understanding of the danger of clearing the rainforests and perhaps

these very large conservation organizations and international lending agencies like the

World Bank and the IMF, they may eventually get their act together and halt the clearing

of the rainforest.

I mean, this would certainly be my hope.

But even if the rainforests are preserved, what will not be preserved is the folk knowledge

that preliterate tribal people have gained over 25,000, 30,000 years in some cases.

Every time we go to the Amazon, what we encounter are young people in these tribal societies desperate

to move to the city, desperate to work as gas station attendants, outboard motor mechanics, chambermaids.

And this means that in a single generation, this vast repository of medical knowledge, folk medical

knowledge, is going to be lost.

So we are concerned both to physically preserve the living plants at our site in Hawaii, but

also, and of equal importance, to preserve the folk knowledge about these plants.

Because once a species becomes extinct, you know, they say nothing is forever.

Well, this is something which is forever.

Once a species becomes extinct, it's very hard to imagine that it will ever be brought

back again.

And as we deplete the gene pool of the planet, what we are eroding is the future availability

of medically important compounds for our children.

So it's a very vital and important area to us to see that the information and the plants

are preserved for the future.

I think it would be useful just to explain why these young people in these tribes are becoming

interested in Western-type employment.

What happens is companies move into the rainforest area, displace the tribes, or bring in Western

ways, and there's money, and alcohol, and everything flows very easily, and the young people become

entranced by that.

Well, you put your finger on it when you mention money.

What happens is the capitalist economies now penetrate everywhere.

And a tribal culture where a man could previously have status by being a successful hunter or agriculturalist,

now he must have an outboard motor, and he must work hard for that outboard motor, and metal

tools and transistor radios and these kinds of things have become the status-defining objects

in these societies.

Years ago, I did a study of food availability in the Third World, and I discovered that in

a number of areas of the world where people are actually starving, if you look at the botany

in those areas, there's ample food available.

It's simply that the people have failed to define it as food, and sometimes for the most arbitrary

reasons having to do with the capitalist system of values.

I mean, people in an area will not eat a certain fruit because it has a short shelf life and

is therefore unattractive to a trucking industry.

But these people are in the area where the plant is hanging on the trees.

What difference does it make to them that it can't be trucked hundreds of miles and sold

in a capital city?

But over and over, I saw plants, usually in the transition phase, these plants are designated

as fit only for livestock.

What this usually means is this is a previously sanctioned human food that capitalism has now

informed the people is worthless, and so they now define it as fit only for their animals.

So their animals walk around in pretty good shape, and the people have very nutrition-poor lives.

Amazing.

What you're doing in Hawaii is trying to preserve some of these disappearing plants.

That's right.

We have no real agenda.

We're too small in operation to act as anything other than a repository.

So we collect plants that native peoples tell us have medical importance, and then we make

those plants available to any legitimate interested parties.

And that could be drug companies, homeopathists, neo-shamanic healers in this culture, Bach flower

for people, anybody who believes that they can medically apply these things for the maintenance

of health, then we will cooperate with them.

And we have a number of very interesting plants that have, since we collected them, been proven

to have medical efficacy.

One thing to be said about the AIDS epidemic is that it did give a tremendous impetus to

looking at folk medicine again.

And I would bet if there ever is an AIDS vaccine or an AIDS cure, plant botanical sources of this

drug will be implicated.

Have you found any mushrooms that have medicinal properties?

Well, there are a number of mushrooms with extremely exotic chemistries.

The ling chi fungus in China was used for centuries to maintain the health of the Chinese emperors,

and a number of fungi sequester heavy metals and toxins.

In fact, for the past few years, people in Germany and Switzerland have not been collecting

mushrooms as they once did because the mushrooms have sequestered much of the radioactivity from

the Chernobyl meltdown.

So fungi clean the environment of toxins, and then in some cases they elaborate exotic chemistries

of their own that have a medical impact.

Ergot is the source of one of the major drugs of choice for migraine.

And of course penicillin is a fungus, and these examples could be multiplied.

I'm speaking with Terence McKenna, author of Archaic Revival, and co-author of The Invisible

Landscape.

You're listening to New Dimensions.

Terence, it's always been interesting to me that we live in a culture where the mushroom cloud is a symbol of ultimate destruction.

And at the same time, we have these mushrooms all over the planet.

And mushrooms are interesting. They're a lunar plant. They grow in the dark.

And then we look at the lunar symbolism of the feminine.

And we have the re-emergence of the goddess movement and the feminist movement and women's spirituality.

And now we have similar things happening with men, particularly in the United States.

And I wonder what you have to say about the mushroom and the culture.

Well, it's an interesting question.

Gordon Wasson, who was the discoverer of the mushroom cults of Mexico that were based on psilocybin mushrooms,

pointed out that cultures are either mycophobic or mycophilic.

For instance, the English are a tremendously mycophobic culture.

I mean, to the English, all mushrooms are toadstools and you shouldn't touch them because they're poisonous.

On the other hand, the Italians and the Poles have dozens of words for mushrooms in their languages.

And it's very common in those countries for people to go mushroom hunting on weekends

and grandmothers teach their grandchildren the many names for mushrooms.

Yes, I've at times asked of my audiences,

what mushroom is it that blooms at the end of history?

Is it the mushroom of Teller and Oppenheimer and Fermi?

Or is it this shamanic sacrament that was the basis of the high cultures of Mesoamerica?

I hope that it's the latter because in writing this book I mentioned for Bantam,

I've managed to convince myself that mushrooms were probably very important

in the emergence of language and consciousness in early human beings.

As the early hominids evolved in the grasslands of Africa,

we underwent a period of great dietary pressure,

having abandoned our fruititarian ways in the treetops.

And during that period, when we were testing many items for food,

including becoming carnivorous,

we doubtless encountered many of these species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms

because they tend to grow in the dung of the ungulate mammals,

primitive cattle and so forth that roved on the African plain.

And a very interesting thing about psilocybin is that at low doses,

it actually increases visual acuity.

These are doses so low that you feel no psychological effect at all.

But in rigorous testing situations,

it's been shown that there is an increase in visual acuity.

Well, you don't have to be an evolutionary biologist to realize

that if there is a food in the food chain of a hunting animal

that increases its vision, its visual perception,

then the animals that accept that food into their diet

are going to be more successful hunters

and consequently outbreed the individuals

that don't accept this item into the diet.

Well, then at slightly higher doses,

psilocybin creates what is called CNS arousal,

central nervous system arousal.

This means a kind of generalized restlessness

and state of energy within the body.

And it also means sexual arousal,

which means a heightened sexual activity

on the part of those individuals

that are accepting this item into the food chain.

Again, a factor tending to cause them

to outbreed the non-mushroom

using other members of the population.

And then finally, at what we would call a psychoactive

or psychedelic dose,

psilocybin, for reasons unstudied,

seems to act on the language-forming areas of the brain.

So you get outbursts of spontaneous glossolalia

and singing and chanting.

This may be the catalyst for language

in the original African situation

in which human beings were evolving.

Generally speaking, the way I have,

after 25 years of looking at these things,

the way I've come to see these psychoactive plants

that are in use by these preliterate tribal peoples

is as catalysts for the imagination.

And the imagination and its products

is what really distinguishes us

from the rest of animal nature.

I mean, we, 15, 20,000 years ago,

got the knack of exteriorizing our mental conceptions,

first as throwing sticks and chipped flint

and crude carvings,

but the process is unbroken

right up to the next computer,

the space shuttle and what have you.

We seem to be the creature

that makes its own ideas manifest in matter.

And I think that this catalysis of the imagination

is what makes these psychoactive compounds so interesting.

You'll recall, Michael,

that in the 60s, psychoactive drugs

were called consciousness expanding.

Well, if we take that notion seriously for a moment,

then I think we're going to have to ask ourselves

some deep questions about these shamanic sacraments

because it's the absence of consciousness

that is our greatest peril.

It's the absence of our ability

to communicate to each other

or to inspire masses of our fellows

to embark on a sane political agenda

that is pushing us toward Armageddon.

So if we really believe

that there is any factor in the environment

which expands consciousness,

I think it would behoove us

to give it a very careful going over.

Well, in point of fact,

psilocybin mushrooms are illegal

in the United States, right?

Yes, they were made illegal in the 60s

at the same time LSD was made illegal,

although no evidence was ever presented

vis-a-vis the toxicity

or social dangers posed by psilocybin.

What happened was in that era

of great social concern and hysteria

over the millions of doses of LSD

that were being sold into society,

all hallucinogens of the indole type

were made illegal

in spite of the fact

that many of them had never even been available

in American society.

The consequences of this are

that for over 25 years,

science, which prides itself

on its unflinching ability

to explore all phenomena

with a dispassionate eye,

has actually been legally barred

from exploring these compounds,

which if you go back

to the original literature,

the psychotherapeutic community

anticipated these things

with the same kind of fervor

that penicillin was received

by the orthodox medical community

or the splitting of the atom

had on the physics community.

It's really to science's great discredit

that the fears of government

were translated into policies

which actually directed pharmaceutical research

over the past 25 or 30 years.

I always think back to the evolution of anatomy

in Western Europe.

The science of anatomy was created

by people who stole bodies off the gallows

in order to dissect corpses

because the church forbade the dissection of corpses.

This was thought to be witchcraft or something.

And it was the curiosity,

the scientific curiosity

of Renaissance geniuses like Versalius

that created the modern science of anatomy.

And if scientists of our own age

had a similar kind of courage,

I think you would see more argument

against this blanket ban

into psychedelic research.

I'm not advocating a societal wave

of psychedelic experimentation,

but I certainly think that qualified researchers

who are in a sense deputized

by the institutions

that the rest of us have put in place,

those scientific researchers

should be able to go

where their curiosity leads them.

It occurs to me that

when we talk about expanding consciousness

and particularly relative to hallucinogenic drugs

and we all are aware of the war on drugs,

which kind of is all-encompassing,

that there's a basic fear level

that comes up around the idea,

oh, my consciousness has expanded.

What about that fear?

It seems to be endemic in our culture.

Well, I think that we are

the most ego-bound culture

that has ever existed

and that if you look

at the psychedelic experience,

not mine or yours,

but thousands and thousands

of these experiences

and try to say,

what do they all have in common?

What is the generic aspect

of the psychedelic experience?

It's boundary dissolution.

And we in Western culture

have a lot of problems

with boundary dissolution.

It's the most frightening thing

we can imagine.

The way in which we are obsessed

by private property

and stuff and legality

and what's mine and what's yours

means that something

which dissolves those boundaries

or makes them appear irrelevant

is just so corrosive

to our social institutions

that we react with fear.

This goes back

to what I was talking about earlier

in our conversation,

the fact that the early partnership style

of human organization

that existed up until,

let's say, 10,000 years ago

existed because of the presence

of the institution

of psychedelic shamanism.

And when that faded

in the culture's antecedent

to our own,

then you suddenly get

the appearance of the ego,

the abandonment

of the nomadic lifestyle,

the invention of agriculture.

And the invention of agriculture

brings with it

the overproduction of food,

which then creates

the problem of hoarding.

the most advanced building

in the world

of 10,000 years ago

was the grain storage tower

at Jericho.

And it was specifically built

to keep somebody

from eating that grain

and to provide that grain

for somebody else.

And at that same point

in history

where agriculture

and heavy wall building appears,

we see suddenly

the accumulation

of many chipped flint points

around habitation sites.

It means that hunting

wasn't going on,

but warfare was going on.

So the whole panoply

of Western cultural institutions,

patriarchy, male dominance,

agriculture, urbanization,

hierarchy, all arise

as the old psychedelic shamanism fades.

That's why I think

the notion of an archaic revival

is so powerful.

Because I think

if we continue

with the old dominator model,

then we're going to create

insoluble problems for ourselves.

We have to think back

to the techniques

and approaches

of the high paleolithic

if we want to work ourselves

out of the jam that we're in.

It's also interesting to me

that we now have

more than 5 billion people

on the planet.

And of course,

when you talk about Jericho

10,000 years ago,

there were quite a few less people.

And these tendencies,

of course,

have within more of a population

become even more pronounced.

Yes, I'm not advocating

any kind of rollback

or anything like that.

I think we've gone

much too far

for that to happen.

I'm fond of saying

that the only escape

is what's called

a forward escape.

We cannot reject technology.

We cannot pretend

that we are not

5 billion strong.

But we can accept

and explore the styles

of that previous era.

Obviously, the feminine

was given a much more balanced emphasis

in that previous situation.

Obviously, the spirit

was an accepted

and recognized part of life.

I mean,

I like to think

that the whole rise

of Gaian consciousness

is rooted

in the awareness

that nature

is a kind of

minded world soul

and that the awareness

and the ability

to connect

to that minded world soul

is what we lost

when we descended

into history.

And I'm not

particularly airy-fairy

in my approach to this.

This is what I've seen

by spending time

with these cultures

that live

much closer

to the land

and to great nature

than we do.

Nature is

some kind of

communicating,

language-generating engine.

The way plants

and animals look,

the chemicals they shed

into the atmosphere,

the way they relate

to each other

through symbiosis

and so forth.

Nature is some kind

of great piece

of integrated

linguistic machinery

and we have fallen out

of that system

and we believe

that it is inert

or even worse,

ours to devour

and ravage

as we see fit.

And the consequences

of this are fatal,

simply fatal.

I mean,

we have invented

a sin

for which there

isn't even a word

which is

the sin

of looting

the future

so that your children

have no future.

I mean,

no culture

on earth

has been

so insensitive

to its own

survival

as we have become

and this is because

we are completely

disconnected

from this sense

of a living

dynamic world

in which people

have a place

but it is

only their place

and it has to then

be integrated

with the larger systems

in which it's embedded.

And this is really

what the psychedelic

shamanism

informs one of.

and it's not

a cult

of the primitive.

Primates

have always been

into dominance

hierarchies

and male dominance

and that sort of thing.

But I believe

that for a brief

period

of 10 or 15,000 years

because of the

elaboration

of these relationships

to these boundary

dissolving plants,

a whole different

style

of relating

was able

to evolve

within

the proto-hominid

line

and that

that's what

created language

and caring

and notions

of self-sacrifice

and notions

of beauty

and poetry

and then

it was lost

and life

became

once again

about dominance

hierarchies

and flim-flam

and that sort

of thing.

But the

values

and the goals

that we all

hold

as the highest

values

that human beings

are capable of

were all generated

in that

tribal situation

15 or 20,000

years ago.

To give life

meaning

we're going

to have to return

to the essence

of those styles.

You know

you're speaking

of a living

communicating

language generating

earth

reminds me

of your

connection

to the octopus

and I think

that's a good

example to

really portray

the kind

of communication

that goes

beyond language.

You might just

talk about

how the octopus

communicates.

Yes

well this is my

favorite

animal example

because

what I

noticed

when I was

in the Amazon

with these

tribal people

who use

a psychedelic

brew

called

ayahuasca

they lay

great stress

on singing

while under

the influence

of these plants

but then

they critique

the songs

but not

as musical

performance

but as pictorial

performance

so that people

will say

I liked

the blue part

where you had

the silver stripes

and the chartreuse

polka dots

well to an

anthropologist

coming in

from the outside

this is very

puzzling

we thought

we just heard

a song

but this person

criticizes it

as though it were

I realized

that the

neurological

shift

in the brain

that was being

created

by these

plants

was somehow

allowing language

to be processed

as a visual

rather than

an audio

phenomenon

well you know

it's said

that if you

see

if you stand

somebody else's

shoes

you see

what they mean

in a sense

you are

that person

seeing

somebody else's

point of view

is a much

deeper

kind of

connection

than simply

hearing

their point

of view

well

having

made this

connection

I then

looked around

at the animal

world

for a model

for this

kind of

communication

and as you

mentioned

nature always

provides a

model

and the

model I

found

was the

communication

system

of the

octopi

many people

know

that octopi

change

color

but I

think most

people think

it's for

camouflage

it's something

very

protection

right

this is not

it at all

octopi have

a huge

repertoire

of blushes

dots

traveling lines

textures

colors

and these

are for

purposes of

communication

an octopus

which is a

very soft

bodied

creature

nature

it's

essentially

a very

large

mollusk

divided

from our

line of

development

hundreds of

millions of

years ago

it's

essentially

a naked

nervous

system

it becomes

its linguistic

intent

it doesn't

turn its

thoughts into

acoustical

signals

it turns its

body

into a

visible

manifestation

of its

inner

states

I like

to say

that the

only way

a voluble

octopus

can

change

its mind

is by

injecting

the

correction

fluid

of its

ink

into

its

environment

and

I think

that this

visual

mode

of

communication

that the

octopus

exemplifies

is something

that we

could take

as a

model

for the

way we

want

our

technologies

to

develop

we

have

always

taken

animals

as

the

models

for

our

technological

development

the

19th

century's

obsession

with

the

steam

engine

and

the

railroad

was

nothing

more

than

a

love

affair

with

the

horse

in fact

the

locomotive

was

called

an

iron

horse

well

then

in

the

20th

century

the

and

the

third

reich

and

we

realize

that

technology

in

these

stealth

fighters

and

F-16s

and

F-18s

this is

the

dominator

dream

come true

to come

streaking

out of the

heavens

at Mach 3

but I

would like

to suggest

that

the

animal

model

for the

future

is

this

visually

communicating

soft

bodied

essentially

telepathic

cephalopod

the

lowly

octopus

that

becomes

its

language

and

thereby

eliminates

ambiguity

from

communication

this is

another way

of dissolving

the

ego

by

eliminating

the

ambiguities

in

our

language

I

see

this

as I

listen

to

you

I

see

this

represented

by

at least

some

human

beings

the

way

they

function

in

the

world

or

the

way

they

appear

in

the

world

I

think

of

for

example

the

Dalai

Lama

without

words

the

Dalai

Lama

communicates

yes

he

has

a

wonderful

presentational

ambiance

about

him

there

are

others

that

there

are

others

that's

right

one

of

the

reasons

I've

spent

a

little

bit

of

time

recently

associating

myself

with

the

new

technology

called

virtual

reality

is

because

I

think

that

the

real

purpose

of

virtual

reality

would be

to

objectify

or make

visual

language

and that

we can

change

the way

we relate

to language

by moving

language more

and more

away from

the acoustical

and toward

the image

that McLuhan

said all this

25 years ago

it's just taken

this long

for the rest of us

to understand

what he meant

Terrence

we've run

out of time

but I see

this is part

one of a

continuing

series

I'd love

to explore

virtual reality

with you

but we have

to go

I want to

thank you

for being

with us

today

thank you

very much

it's always

a pleasure

I've been

speaking with

Terrence McKenna

co-founder of

Botanical

Dimensions

co-author of

The Invisible

Landscape

and upcoming

books

The Archaic

Revival

and Food

for the

Gods

my name

is Michael

Toms

on behalf

of the New

Dimensions

radio staff

and all those

who are members

of Friends

of New Dimensions

I'm wishing you

well

this is

program number

for more

information

about the

work and

legacy

of Terrence

McKenna

you can

go to

www.deoxy.org

slash

McKenna

www.deoxy.org

slash

mc

k-e-n-n-a

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