on Art Bell (May 1997)

To the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the pole, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Art Bell.

And in the continuing adventure into the unknown, uncharted territories of the human mind,

we're going to be departing a little, in a way, this night and interviewing a very, very unusual individual on the big island of Hawaii named Terrence McKenna.

Who is Terrence McKenna?

Well, among other things, he's probably the successor to Timothy Leary.

That may not be the focus, or it may turn into the focus of the interview. I don't know.

And I don't care. He also has a lot of very interesting views on time and what we are approaching.

We'll talk about all that with Terrence McKenna, a very interesting fellow in a moment.

As a matter of fact, he had to come down.

Well, we'll find out about that from a very obscure location.

All right, this should be most interesting.

First, let us see if we can establish contact.

Terrence McKenna, are you there?

I am, Art. Good evening. How are you?

Well, I'm just fine, and I hope you hear me. I hear you okay.

Yes, I hear you fine.

All right. You are on the big island of Hawaii, is that right?

That's right.

Now, when I called you the other day, you were way up in an area where your only contact with the outside world was by cellular telephone.

Where do you actually live? On a mountain somewhere?

I live up on the slopes of the world's largest volcano, which is Mauna Loa.

And when you called me the other day, we mutually agreed my cell phone is not ready for prime time.

So I came off the mountain. I do have up there a 128K connect to the internet that's wireless 40 miles through the air.

Oh.

But my phones are not so good, so I came down off the mountain to talk to you this evening.

Well, if it were not for the delay, I would say an internet phone.

We could have done the interview by internet phone, but you have that little delay there that makes it hard.

So I think we've done the right thing.

Anyway, so you're off your mountain perch.

By the way, Terrence, what's it like living on the side of an active volcano?

Well, it's very exciting, actually.

I don't know if you've ever been out to the big island, but people think of Hawaii as swaying palms and endless beaches.

What we have out here are lava fields and 14,000-foot mountains on this island, two of them.

One, the world's largest volcano, the world's largest mountain in terms of volume, and the other one just a hundred or so feet shorter.

So we've got quite a dramatic landscape out here.

Is there any possibility that that volcano will actually blow?

Well, it's been in continuous eruption for the past 13 years, but over on the other side, about 70 miles away, on what's called the helo or the west side.

So we sort of feel pretty safe out here.

There is some talk.

They had a meeting of the International Geophysical Congress a couple of years out here.

There is large-scale destabilization that goes on periodically in these islands, big undersea landslides that produce local tsunamis.

But in an effort to escape human-created catastrophe and confusion, I'm betting that I can eke out 50 years on this island and slide through in good shape.

Well, it's probably a pretty good bet, actually, in the long scheme of things.

I think so.

I think Hawaii, if the world flies to pieces, it'll be a very good place to be.

And if the world doesn't fly to pieces, it's a pretty good place to be.

And if the volcano should totally blow up, it's a painless death.

That's right.

And a dramatic one.

Yeah, and a dramatic one as well.

That's right.

All right.

You have a theory about time.

Time, actually, Terrence, is one of my favorite all-time topics.

So before we launch into what you think about time, tell me what you think time is.

In other words, is time our invention, or is time a real thing that we, I mean, I realize we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?

Yeah.

I mean, you give me a perfect entree to launch into this thing.

See, in the West, we have inherited from Newton what is called the idea of pure duration, which is simply that time is sort of a place where things are placed so that they don't all happen at once.

In other words, it's viewed as quality-less.

It's an abstraction.

In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, what we're going to discover is that, like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete type.

You know, all matter, organic and inorganic, is composed of 104, 108 elements.

There's argument.

Time, on the other hand, is thought to be this featureless, quality-less medium, but in fact, as we experience it as living, feeling creatures, time has qualities.

There are times where everything seems to go right and everything seems to go wrong.

That's true.

Terrence, that's absolutely true.

I've wondered about that all my life.

There are periods of time where, in effect, you can do no wrong.

That's right.

And other periods of time where you can do no right, no matter what you do.

Well, so when looking at this, I created a vocabulary.

Actually, I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead.

But I think I'm on to something which science has missed.

And it's this.

It's that the universe or a human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large-scale or small-scale process, can be looked upon as a kind of a dynamic struggle between two qualities, which I call habit and novelty.

And I think they're pretty self-explanatory.

I'm sorry.

Habit and what?

Novelty.

And habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system.

And novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen.

And these two qualities, habit and novelty, are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle.

But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning.

And this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked, that if you look back through the history of the human race or of life on this planet or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic.

And so turning that on its head, we could say, as we come toward the present, things become more novel, more complex.

So I've taken this to be actually a universal law affecting historical process, biological processes, and astrophysical processes.

Nature produces and conserved novelty.

And what I mean by that is, as the universe cooled, the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems formed, as it further cooled molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA containing life,

later complex life, later complex life, multicellular life.

And this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves.

And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being.

This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a chemical system.

Nature conserves, prefers, prefers novelty.

And the interesting thing about an idea like this is it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head.

You know, what modern atheistic existentialism says is we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here.

And any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring.

I say no.

By looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and conserves.

And if that represents a universal value system, then the human world, as we find it today with our technologies and our complex societies, represents the greatest novelty so far achieved.

And so suddenly you have a basis for an ethic.

That which advances novelty is good.

That which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.

All right.

Let me stop you right there.

One of the first things that you said when we got on the air this morning was that you had a 128-baud connection from your mountaintop secret location.

Right.

Okay.

As we are discussing your theory, which is fascinating, of novelty, I'm taken to ask you about a quote, actually, of several pages, written by Michael Crichton.

And I know you know who he is.

Mm-hmm.

With reference to the Internet, it is Michael Crichton's contention that the Internet, which one might consider to be novelty exemplified.

Inconordinate.

Yeah, indeed.

Indeed.

It is going to result not in more novelty, but in fact in a slowing of the process of evolution or novelty, as you see it, because there will be a commonality.

There will not be innovation.

There will not be entrepreneurship.

There will be ten main ideas in America and Hong Kong and Moscow and London and so forth.

How would you address that?

Well, I'm astonished.

I hardly know what he's talking about.

Let me give you my take.

Okay, let me rephrase it.

He's saying the Internet will stifle diversity, and that diversity is critical to advancement.

Well, what I see happening, and I spend hours and hours a day on the Internet, is I believe it's the great force-empowering marginal and minority points of view to come along in centuries.

In other words, before the Internet, the great establishment ideas already had the machinery of media to communicate their position.

True.

What has happened is that the common man has gotten into the game with technology that I really don't think was ever intended to fall into.

Oh, you bet it wasn't.

Yes.

So I don't know what Crichton is talking about.

I believe what the Internet is doing is dissolving boundaries between people's idea systems, classes, and factions,

and we're getting a much richer evolutionary interplay among ideas and this sort of thing.

So I see it as a very fertile place with a lot of mutation going on in hardware, in how people view it, ideologies, this sort of thing.

I just don't know where he's coming from.

Well, I might expand on it this way.

He suggests, for example, that if you were to take an otherwise deserted or barren desert island and you were to put a species upon it,

that species, because there are so few of them, would by necessity be very innovative, would change very quickly in trying to adapt and live and stay alive.

On the other hand, if you put many, many creatures on that island, that process would be far slower, and he uses that as a parallel to the Internet.

I'm not sure that I agree with it either.

I just found it an interesting take on the sociological implications of the Internet.

Well, you see, when people talk about the Internet, they're usually talking about the Internet that was, because it's moving so quickly.

For example, I just read a paper by a guy named Alexander Cheslenko out at the Media Lab at MIT,

and he's talking about plug-ins that will translate websites of one language into another.

Well, now imagine when people can put up websites in Telugu, Witoto, Russian, French, you name it,

and you can automatically slide into those websites and see what's going on.

You're describing Crichton's nightmare and your best dream, I believe.

Well, this is the thing about technology.

It tends to polarize people.

Let me make one point here before we leave this time thing.

I said I'd identified an tendency in the universe which science had missed, which was to conserve novelty.

And then you asked about the Internet, which sort of led me to the second half of the observation.

Not only does the universe have this preference for novelty, but each acceleration into novelty has proceeded more quickly than the ones which preceded it.

So, for instance, the slow cooling out of the universe led to the slightly more rapid appearance of organic chemistry,

which led to the quite rapid evolution of higher plants than animals, which led to the hysterical pace of human history.

And I see no reason to suppose that that process of acceleration will ever slow down.

Is it, Terrence, a linear process or an exponentially accelerating process?

It's an exponentially accelerating process, which leads to a kind of end-of-the-world scenario

that has made a lot of people place me out with the squirrels because I'm saying that this process of novelty is now moving so quickly

that within our own lifetime it is going to accelerate essentially to such an intensity

that we will be experiencing more novelty in a few weeks or days than we've previously experienced in the whole life of the cosmos.

My God, you have described precisely what I have just written about called, I wrote a book called The Quickening.

Someone showed me your book and I said, this is in Atlanta.

I saw it and I said, yes, this guy is on to this.

I'm on to it from, I guess, more of a pedestrian perspective than yourself after listening to your first half hour, Terrence.

But we're talking about, it suddenly dawned on me exactly, precisely the same thing.

I've been doing this talk radio program for about 13 years, you know, the all-night show.

Right.

And I am a trained observer of events and people.

And every night I've had to watch the news and dissect what is going on in our world to prepare to do this program.

And in that 13 years, unmistakably, socially, economically, politically, environmentally, you name it, we can talk about it.

In every one of those areas of human endeavor, things are beginning to accelerate.

There is simply no question about it.

And that sounds exactly to be the same thing you're proposing here.

Yes.

Where I've gone further than most people is a lot of people have noticed the time is speeding up phenomenon.

But they tend to give credit to science or media or something like that.

That's right.

Yes, well, what I'm saying is this is built into the laws of physics.

Oh, I think you're right.

Terrence, we're at the bottom of the hour.

I think you're exactly right, Terrence.

Stay right where you are.

Oh, interesting, very interesting.

Terrence McKenna from the Big Island of Hawaii is my guest.

I'm Art Bell, and this is CBC.

97, it's Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.

And now, enjoy this honored hour on the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.

From May of 1997, it's Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.

And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.

We have a very, very interesting fellow on the line.

His name is Terrence McKenna, and he's from the Big Island of Hawaii.

And he has just described to me in language that you have to listen very carefully to exactly what I wrote about, the quickening.

And we'll pick up on that in a moment.

It's fascinating.

My comments, like hearing my own theory amplified, coming back at me or an explanation of what I wrote about.

Wow.

Anyway, in a moment, back to Terrence.

In some cases, we're back now to Hawaii and Terrence McKenna.

Terrence, I thought we lost you for a moment, but I think we have you back.

Are you there?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

There will be silences during the break, so do not interpret that as we have disconnected, Terrence.

Only if you get a dial tone are we in trouble.

Otherwise, just hang in there, okay?

All righty.

All right.

I mean, I sat here as I listened to you the first half hour in shock because I realized you were describing exactly what I wrote about.

And what I did, Terrence, I realized that a lot of people say this quickening or whatever you want to call it, whatever name you want to put to it, is a byproduct of mass communication.

And I began to realize, uh-uh, no, it is not a product of mass communication.

Yes, we're hearing about it more and more volumes of it.

But in fact, in fact, what you are describing is really going on.

And I documented that much in my book, In Real Everyday Life, in each one of these areas and many more.

I documented the fact that it is not mass communication that is beginning to quicken things, but there is another process at work.

Now, I don't know what that is, and I don't know where it's leading.

In other words, people will say, well, when we finally get to this crunch point, whatever that is, what will happen?

And I don't have that answer.

I'm just a talk show host, an observer.

But maybe you do.

When we finally reach what you call time wave zero, what is going to happen?

Well, the only way to predict what's going to happen is to look at the quality of what has happened as the quickening, as you call it, has begun to accelerate.

What it's been characterized by is dissolution of boundaries between classes of people, bodies of knowledge, pools of capital, language groups, so forth and so on.

And so it seems to me ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

And, of course, what that looks like, I don't know.

I don't know whether it's a virtual reality where you become God through the public utilities or exactly what it is.

But it's clear to me that the human nervous system is globalizing itself, building a model of conscious thought on a planetary scale.

Tens of thousands of people are participating in this.

None of them have a real notion of what it's all about, but everyone is serving this sort of unfolding grand design.

And, you know, I think the emergence of alphabets was part of the quickening.

I think the emergence of hominids out of more primitive primates was part of this quickening.

I think this is the business that this planet has been about for a very, very long time.

Are you able to discern any timelines to time wave zero?

Well, yes.

I mean, we've been talking about this as a metaphor.

What makes me, I hope, a little different from some of the other profits in the marketplace is I've got a formal mathematical theory that, you know, I mentioned habit and novelty, this dualistic flow.

Yes.

Well, because it is a dualistic flow, it can be portrayed like the ebb and flow of the price of a stock or something like that.

In other words, it can be portrayed as a line graph.

So I've written computer programs which produce what I call novelty waves.

In other words, time-scaled waves that picture the ebb and flow of novelty.

And by fitting known historical and paleontological and geological data against these waves at different scales, I was able to finally discern a best fit.

But the conclusion that it led to was even, well, was very startling to me, which is this ultimate novelty, this transcendental object at the end of time isn't millennia in the future.

It is, in fact, slated to collide with historical necessities sometime in late 2012.

2012.

Now, I know you have some interest in the Mayan calendar.

I do.

I didn't know when I calculated this date that it was the same end date as the Mayan calendar to the day.

Oh, my.

Let me ask you this, Terrence.

What did you input to your database for this computer program?

In other words, what did I start with?

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Well, I started, I had a very academic interest in the Qing, which is the Chinese method of divination.

And this is, you know, everyone who's looked at this thing has been struck by the fact that it seems to work.

And so I carried out a mathematical analysis.

Wait, I don't know what Qing is, and I bet a lot of other people don't either.

A Chinese method of divining, what kind of method?

What is it?

Well, it's existed for thousands of years in China.

It's sometimes done by throwing 50 stocks or sometimes done with coins.

But it's a method of producing a thing called a hexagram, which is made up of either broken or unbroken lines, but six on top of each other.

So if you're a mathematician, you can figure if it's made up of broken and unbroken lines, and there are six of them on top of each other, there must be a possibility of 64 of these things.

And thousands of years ago in China, there was a vast body of literary commentary built up around these hexagrams.

And they have always been presented in a traditional order, a certain way that they are always presented.

And I was studying a very academic question, which is, is this order of these hexagrams a true order?

In other words, governed by rules, or is it simply a random jumble sanctioned by tradition?

And this very obscure academic question led ultimately to the discovery that the I Ching was a 384-day, 13-lunar cycle calendar.

And then from there, I realized that this 384-day calendar was actually a nested subset in a fractal timekeeping scheme that was really more accurate and more sophisticated than anything in the West.

So what I'm really suggesting here is that in the same way that the West conquered the nature of matter through the elaboration of modern science,

about 4,000 years ago in China, a deeper analysis of time was carried out than has ever been undertaken in the West.

Lame. It's quite...

Oh, Terrence, what is your website?

Uh, it's that levity. It's, uh, www.levity.com.

And then just click on Terrence McKenna there.

Levity is L-E-V-I-T-Y.

So it's, uh, it's www.levity.com?

Correct.

Uh, we'll get a link up shortly.

Uh, well, I think you do. I visited your website today. You've got good people.

Yeah, oh, Keith is, he does a wonderful job. All right, well, uh, so then you, you get there and then just click on Terrence McKenna

and, uh, be sure you're buckled in from the sound of what I've heard so far.

Well, the interesting thing you see, Art, is with a wave like that, you can do what's called retrodicting.

In other words, if you have a wave of novelty that describes the past, you have to correctly predict the Italian Renaissance, the Greek Enlightenment, the modernity of the 20th century.

And so by predicting the past, we've gained confidence that this wave predicts the future.

That sounds quite scientific. In other words, uh, science is repeatability.

And if you can repeatedly demonstrate that you can mathematically show the events of the past, then, yes, I would imagine you could project.

Well, so I've been at this since 1975, uh, but I, the theory...

...

is in a sense very conservative it never says what will happen it says when interesting things

are highly likely and when you're just wasting your time uh-huh um when you look out uh or project

out toward uh 2012 um what is the magnitude of the spike or the difference there uh if you can

give us an idea of magnitudes uh along the way there is only one point in the entire cycle where

the level of habit drops to zero effectively then novelty becomes infinite and that point occurs

uh on this solstice date in 2012. now it's very interesting there are some people on the net

called singularis and they're hard-headed engineering types and they take things like

rate of energy release rate of data storage uh this sort of thing and draw all their curves out

and they conclude that sometime between 2008 and 2020 uh everything we produce infinite amounts of

energy we pack infinite amounts of data into infinitely small spaces in other words this

same sort of thing where because of the acceleration built into the unfolding of this novelty process

we're going to cross more territory between here and 2012 than we've crossed between the big bang and

getting to here god that's an incredible thought it kind of explains what's happening you know uh that

it isn't the it isn't the old style religion but it isn't the sterile uh steady state of science either

it's that the universe is actually involved in some kind of process of self metamorphosis and human beings

indicate that we have crossed some boundary into a new uh era a new epoch of ever greater acceleration

into this process of self-revelation i mean this is what religions are raving about this is what

every prophet on the street corner is trying to articulate and no question i think it's real i think

we're we're getting a lot of static because people can only deal with it through images that they know

you know marshall mcleughan once said we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror

and that's sort of what it is that i call this thing the transcendental object at the end of time

and i think you know in a sense religion and christian revelation it will all be fulfilled in a way

none of us ever suspected because nature has this appetite for novelty and acceleration into novelty

and so then again i asked uh at this moment um that we speak of uh 2012 right what do you actually

think will occur thought about this a good deal and they're hard and soft scenarios but i've noticed that

what the time wave seems most uh coherently able to track is technology somehow technology is very

important it's the transformation of the human relationship to the world through tools and so

what i'm thinking would fulfill this entire scenario without requiring god almighty to put in an appearance

is uh time travel i think that uh we are moving toward you know if you look at biology over huge scales

time hundreds of millions of years uh it is a kind of conquest of dimensionality all right uh let's let's

consider that uh somebody recently said and i have been considering since i heard it uh a very simple

question if time travel is possible then where are the time travelers well when i asked that question

to my sources they said you you can only travel as far back into the past as the moment of the

invention of the first time machine because before that there were no time machine that i but let me

think about that does that make sense you could only travel back to the moment of the invention of the

time machine because prior to that there was no capability it's like trying to drive where there are

no roads yeah it also means when you invent the first time machine instantly time machines will appear

by the tens of thousands having come back through time to see the first flight into time

that's incredible i never that's a whole new line of thought for me about about that question um and it might

make sense it might make sense uh and your analogy is trying to that you cannot drive in essence uh

uh where there are no where there are no roads well of course you nearly do that when you go home uh

from from the broadcast here but and you haven't even been up to see me you're psychic

um we're very proud of our bad roads i understand it keeps the riffraff away i suppose certainly does

actually it doesn't keep the riffraff away but it keeps everybody else away

uh how long uh terrence have you been uh residing on the side of the volcano there well continuously

for about three and a half years i've had land out here for about uh well since 77.

since 77 and before that uh i lived i grew up in western colorado and i uh had my children and my

marriage and all that in uh california lived 35 years in northern california uh-huh you you knew

timothy leary yes uh i knew him uh we appeared in public mostly in europe uh together a few times and

he certainly was a huge influence on me i only came to know him in the pet in the past seven or eight

years but uh as a kid growing up in the 60s he he was an enormous influence on me you are now being

called by many uh his heir apparent uh his heir now i guess well i think not by many but i was called it

by him everybody else kept their mouth shut well i have my method i'm very interested in the psychedelic

experience i i was raised catholic and what i kept of that was an enormous thirst for the paranormal

the miraculous yes supernatural yes and i went to india and i made the rounds of the gurus and the

geishas and i didn't find what i was looking for but when i went to south america to the jungles down

there i discovered that uh lsd was only the tip of the psychedelic iceberg and what i had taken to be

modern science and modern chemistry was actually a tradition of of shamanism and religious use of

psychedelic plants that was thousands and thousands of years old and that fascinated me because i actually

it worked for me uh most people who seek uh the mystery with uh listen let let us pick this up uh

after the top of the hour now listen to me carefully you've got about a 10 minute break here uh at least

and you're not going to hear anything don't let it bother you just put the phone down grab a cup of coffee

or something or another and we'll be back to you okay all right stay right there this is cbc

this hour on the best of coast to coast am with art bell for 97 it's art and his guest the late

terence mckenna and now enjoy this encore presentation of coast to coast am with the lines are absolutely

alive and uh everybody out there just relax for a little while i have some advice for you my guest

is a very very unusual person whose name is terence mckenna in order to properly appreciate what you're

about to hear if you're just joining us in los angeles san francisco and so forth you're going to have to

pretty much put down whatever you're doing i'll turn the radio off a little bit and listen very carefully

because it makes a lot of sense but you've got to listen carefully terence mckenna we'll find out

more about him in a moment lives on the side of a an active volcano in hawaii an interesting place

to choose to live by itself and an interesting man indeed so terence more of terence mckenna coming up

art have you heard about terence mckenna's theory called time wave zero he suggests that as we get

closer to time wave zero we are experiencing tachyon radiation from it evidently the impending event is

so colossal that it will emit such intense radiation that some of it takes the form of faster than light

speed tachyon particles or waves which uh can travel faster than light and that they're actually being

hurtled backward in time the closer we get to the event the greater the radiation density hence the more

frequently and intensely we experience paranormal phenomena associated with it we'll ask about that by the

way we haven't yet this could be the mechanism behind what you call the quickening the event we are

approaching will probably be something tantamount to a white hole or a mini big bang it will for all

intents and purposes be the end of time for us terence believes it will occur consistent with the mayan

mayan calendar in the year 2012 now by the way he has derived this um independently of the mayan calendar

he simply uh has discovered that it coincides with it he goes on it is not unreasonable to assume that ets

possessing ufos if they exist will be flocking here to research or rather pre-search the phenomenon it is

also believed that tachyon bombardment would have bizarre effects on the human nervous system visions

that sort of thing as well as physical manifestations in the environment like the clearwater virgin bizarre

mutations like the chupacabra and heaven knows what else all the stuff you attribute to the quickening

might be explained by this and after listening to the first hour i must agree terence i'm stealing one

more bit of time to read you a fax that i think relates and challenges you a little bit it is from

stephen in wichita and it's well thought out um here it is art i'm not sure that you can equate novelty

with either acceleration or complexity a nature has always been novel and surprisingly so considering

earlier periods in earth's history given that over 90 percent of all species that have ever lived are now

extinct and the exotic body designs it would seem novelty is a given but in order to be effective it

must have a survival advantage and be passed on once the novelty becomes a hindrance it disappears

acceleration may be more a factor of population density virtually all of the social problems we face

today have been duplicated years ago in rat population density studies our novel inventions of this

century have simply allowed us to artificially compress distance and time by modes of travel and

communications profit motives have directed and limited the novelty of our civilization in this

century as never before and we are becoming a hindrance the higher the population density

the more the acceleration seems to be anecdotal but relative compare the pace of a small country

town to a large city with its population density and resulting problems accelerated by stress and

profit motives that's from steve in wichita what what do you think uh terrence well i don't disagree

with all of that uh i think there's certainly been ebb and flow of novelty within the 20th century uh

parts of it more novel than others but i think to to argue that it isn't among the most novel

periods in time is a pretty uphill battle uh the question is whether novelty is something which simply adheres to

statistical dynamics or whether it's a real direction a real arrow that is directing process and that's

what i maintain i think it's not true to say that uh uh the biota of the earth today is not

more novel than it was in the past certainly there are novel forms of life which have on undergone

extinction but the uh proliferation of human life which is an advanced animal plus a culture creating

creature indicates to me that we're at a level of novelty that this planet has never before experienced

of course it's it's an arguable thing because history which is what we're always comparing these waves to

is not yet a quantified thing i mean how do you rate the war of the roses over uh queen anne's war or

something like that uh but nevertheless though we don't have an absolute quantification of history

there is general agreement among historians that events like the renaissance the greek golden age the 20th

century are periods where a great deal of novelty and social forms and technologies was concentrated all

right you uh put together a computer program which um which was able to trace uh the ebb and the flow

of this novelty and in effect chart major events in history um how many uh if i might ask um hits

and misses uh as you as you when you got this in final development and then you look at each point in history

um how many hits and misses were there any misses in the model or did you hit each uh major

moment in history on the nose well by my understanding of this theory there can be no

misses in other words it's not a statistical theory we're not okay if we're right two-thirds of the time

here here so we have to be right all the time so you're telling me you are i submit to you and to

the world for your examination and critiquing the fact that yes the time wave uh with its end point

in december 21st 2012 described with as great an accuracy as i am able to discern the actual vicissitudes

of novelty and habit in history and natural history that's the claim that's right uh terence

have you submitted this uh i mean this is serious science that you're discussing uh have you submitted

this because of its repeatability that's science now have you submitted this to peer review well uh among

mathematicians yes and there's a lively debate raging on the internet about that uh let me say

something though here about science and why the acceptance of the time wave can't really occur

under the tent of ordinary science you have mentioned repeatability repeatability is the idea at the very

basis of the scientific method at the very basis of experiment that's right it's what's called restoration

of initial conditions but now notice that what the time wave theory is saying is that every moment in

time is a unique moment is unique and not and will not a specific excuse me specifically repeat but what you're

suggesting is that you can plot the highs of novelty uh throughout history yes you can but you cannot um

uh you cannot assume uh that you're doing it probabilistically in other words uh essentially

when you really understand philosophically what the time wave is saying it's an enormous attack on

probability theory you know the way science works now is if you want to know how much energy is flowing

through a wire you take a thousand measurements you add them together and you divide by a thousand and then you

have the current flowing through the wire but notice that that assumes that it doesn't matter what time

you make the measurements and so much of science is like this to the point where i am redefining science and

saying science is the study of those phenomena so coarse grained that the time in which they occurred does not affect

them and that leaves them and that leaves out then history love affairs corporate takeovers uh empire building everything interesting in the human world is too uh fragile too finely embedded in the context of its time to be open to that kind of scientific modeling

uh so uh so so so in other words uh they're really relatively small insignificant events that don't enter into the larger measurements you're making of this uh ebb and flow

well for instance on a given day when the chart says novelty will be high certainly somewhere in the world someone is having a very unnovel day uh it's a statistical thing

uh a bell curve no reference to you art sure but uh a bell curve where when the wave is predicting high novelty most people most systems will experience that novelty but of course

some will not it's the idea that probability is ebbing and flowing you know when you study statistics the first thing they teach you is when you flip a coin the odds are 50 50 heads or tails

if that were true the coin would land on its edge every single time that's the rarest of all results in a coin toss indeed so what's really happening is that what are called secondary

and tertiary factors are causing the coin to be heads or tails i say no there are zones in time where heads are favored and zones in time where tails are favored

the idea that time can be described as a perfectly smooth surface and then dealt with statistically is just a first pass with greek idealism and careful examination of nature shows it to be inadequate in the same way that perfect circles were inadequate for describing planetary motion

planetary motion you are therefore saying that conventional science uh does not have and cannot have with its present uh course of investigation and a proper understanding of time

that's right because it assumes that it is to be analyzed with statistics and that flattens out and denies the the difference among various times and types of time

different types of time carrence how long have you been working on this oh since 1971 71 71 yes um what is your you told me that uh you're you're originally from colorado family and all that back in colorado right uh then finally exile

uh well essentially yes and i got myself to the university of california at berkeley right at the time of uh the anti-war movement and all of that it was uh like a kid in a cultural candy store

and uh studied philosophy art history and then went off to asia uh basically to check out the hash dens and the gurus and uh the hash was fine but the gurus just wanted into my pocket

uh and so then i went to south america and as i mentioned that's where this shamanism thing just

really grabbed me what part of south america terrence uh southern columbia the putamaya river basin

and uh you know the it's the it's the psychedelic plants that are so fascinating to me because you mentioned

repeatability here's the technology a technique that lets you repeatedly and with relative safety

journey into alien world filled with alien forms of intelligence and it's the only thing i found that

does that in other words i've investigated flying saucers crop circles this and that i i it doesn't uh

turned me on but no i let me quickly stop you there and ask you about crop circles many many people feel

that they are fractal in nature and if you're on the internet i know you've seen uh photographs of some

of the more amazing ones stonehenge some of the rest of them they do appear to be fractal um what is your

thinking there well i was thinking you know i don't think it's been published in this country but this

wonderful book called around in circles by jim schnabel uh to my mind that blows the lid off the whole crop

circle thing uh you and i could spend a whole evening art discussing uh the relationship of the media to

the human psyche to how people handle evidence and uh because i i really think the the psychedelic community

has evidence to give on these paranormal questions that has never been properly heard and evaluated

because the ordinary society's attitude towards people who use psychedelics is that they are

automatically unreliable yes i know but i think we're not going to crack stuff like ufo abductions and that

sort of thing unless we admit the psychedelic evidence and if we do admit it suddenly the whole thing

begins to look very very different all right terrence i don't reject it um and a lot of guests that i've

had on uh who have been into the very same areas we're in right now um very politically correctly uh

rejected out of hand uh we don't you don't need it to accomplish this uh they say that you can do it

within yourself and i don't reject that thought either but i would like to hear the case that you would

present um for for psychedelics uh psychedelics opening the doors that you're talking about

um that that in fact they do um how would you make that case well i hear what you're saying is you're

equating spiritual techniques like yoga and prayer and exactly and that sort of thing i'm not sure

there's the connection i mean it does help to be an ethical person to take psychedelics but uh for

instance the psychedelic that has fascinated me most over the years uh is dmt dimethyltryptamine now

this is not a well-known substance no it isn't what is it well that's what it is dimethyltryptamine it

occurs in a number of plant species throughout the world it's utilized by native people and uh in the pure

form out of the laboratory when you smoke this stuff you find yourself inside the flying saucer that all

these dazzled people are raving about but you found yourself there by initiating an action on your own

in other words repeatability and after about three minutes of spending time with the self-transforming

elf machines and their technologies you're deposited back in your apartment pretty much none the worse

for wear well now let's give this stuff to the leading lights of the ufo community or anyone else

who has an interest in unusual psychological uh or paranormal phenomena all right all right hold tight

terence we're at another breakpoint state to be open terence mckenna's my guest what a totally

interesting individual he is you've got to sit by the radio turn the volume up a little bit put down

your book or whatever else you're doing and listen back now to the big island of hawaii and a very

unusual individual named terence mckenna terence um i've got a question for you have you ever watched star

trek oh yes oh yes good you're familiar then with the prime directive uh thou shalt not interfere as

i believe the prime directive yeah that's right yeah now um what you are saying is so serious and is such

a large revelation that uh is it not possible that you are in a sense doing what you're doing right now

uh violating the prime directive well uh you know it's only been about a hundred years since the news

began to arrive in the lap of western civilization that there were these uh psychoactive plants scattered

around the world the first one was the peyote cactus and in 1888 mescaline was extracted from that

uh i think it's not without implication that right at our moment of greatest cultural crisis

when we're destroying the environment and uprooting the rainforests and so forth and so on that out of

those same rainforests comes a phenomenon which if we will face it squarely offers a severe challenge to

our notion of how reality works and how the world is put together and what if we miss it what if we burn

down finally enough of the rainforest that that one plant that we could have used um is destroyed well

this may have already happened in the sense that there are many known cases of people collecting

promising plants from only one known source and then returning a few months or years later to find the

whole thing gone uh paved over that's right all right uh tackle this one aren't very interesting

adherence describes a workable scenario but my question with it is this is this a universal process

or only a localized effect i believe that one of the theories of modern physics describes that

observations affect the process or thing being observed isn't it possible that the uh the data

the random sticks in china is somewhat skewed by what is being determined as time hasn't everybody uh

noticed the phenomenon of time being perceived to slow down depending on how frequently you for

example look at the clock cooks have noticed the same effect with boiling water the quickening may

be happening because we notice certain events and then notice more of the same as time goes along in other

words we call cause the process to occur at least from our point of view ed in nashville is this a moment of deep

thinking yes well i'm i am thinking uh i think it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy i think we are

contributing to it as we uncover it within ourselves yes something is calling us toward itself and as we

approach it we become more like it something is sculpting out of the primate body over

a couple of million years, an entirely different kind of creature.

And as we go to meet this thing, which I call the transcendental mystery at the end of time,

we are taking on more and more of its characteristics, its godlike power,

its ability to span space and time.

Yes.

And when we finally do reach it, I imagine there will be a kind of effortless moment of merging and recognition.

Signposts along the way, life on Mars, maybe Europa, cloning.

The rise of the Internet, virtual reality, nanotechnology, possibly alien artifacts, all that and more.

One image I carry of this thing, Art, is you know those mirrored balls they hang in dance clubs?

Yes.

That send scintillations racing around the wall.

Well, the scintillations are distortions of the thing.

And so as we approach this transcendental object at the end of time,

there will be more and more breakdown of ordinary reality and more and more distorted scenarios of what it is.

That clearly is process underway now.

Yes.

And everyone is, through their own fears, religious training, hopes, they're trying to project what is it?

And there's a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty.

I am not afraid of it.

I would really like, one of the great things about the psychedelic aliens is they don't vibrate with this strange vibe that the fetal trading grays of popular media vibrate with.

It's a much more upbeat and affirmative kind of alien contact that occurs through the plant.

Uh-huh.

This one plant, or this one drug that you described.

Dimethyltryptamine.

Yeah.

DMT.

I don't know what that is.

Well, what makes it so attractive in a discussion like this, Art, is it's one of the most powerful of all the psychedelics, but it only lasts five minutes.

Five minutes?

Five minutes.

So someone who has spent a lifetime dissing psychedelics or denying the existence of the paranormal, for that matter, should at least be willing to invest five minutes.

We've never lost anybody.

You pick yourself up and go on about your business.

Five minutes.

The effects, could you describe them to much of my audience that I know can recall the effects of LSD or various mushrooms?

It's very different.

Very different, huh?

Well, LSD is a kind of psychological self-examination and strange thought processes and insights.

What happens with DMT is there is the unmistakable feeling of having gone to a place.

In other words, it comes on in about 15 seconds, and suddenly you're in a place, and this place is full of what I call self-dribbling jeweled basketballs that are intelligent in some sense.

They're like badly trained Rottweilers.

They come sounding forward, and what they're doing in there is they're conducting some kind of a language lesson, because they speak.

They have a language which you can see is the only way I can explain it.

What is the source of DMT?

Is it a manufactured drug?

It can be, but its source is really in nature, in plants like Cicotria viridis, Desmanthus selenoiensis.

There's a whole bunch of this Latin salad.

Most of these are South American plants, but every ecosystem on Earth has DMT sources in it.

In fact, the human brain naturally produces DMT.

Why, we don't know, but I'd say there is a strong clue.

Here is a drug which causes people to see little creatures, and this same substance occurs naturally in the human brain.

Now, I'm not saying that's the answer to the UFO phenomenon, but how many people have looked at this and pursued it?

Well, then let me ask this.

There are many who claim to have been abducted, Terrence,

and if DMT is a natural occurring substance in the brain,

your theory could probably be verified by measuring those who have claimed to be abducted.

Would such a measurement scientifically be possible?

Well, the problem is, you recall, I said it only lasts five minutes.

So, unusual amounts of it in the body are very quickly brought down to baseline.

It's one of the most transient drugs in the body ever, ever observed.

So, and an interesting thing about it, Art, is when they measure its presence,

they look at human cerebro-spinal fluid,

and they've discovered that it reaches its greatest concentration there between three and four in the morning.

Well, that's when people are doing the intense REM dreaming.

And so, I think what, you know, the Australian aboriginals have this concept of the dream time.

Yes.

And I think when you put the dream time, the chemistry of DMT, the abduction stories together,

and the depth with which modern media has programmed and messed with people,

you're very close to being able to begin to talk about the alien phenomenon.

I think there are aliens, but I think they can only reach us through our minds.

They don't cross the universe in ships of titanium.

They don't even project holograms of themselves into the desert air.

They come through the human mind.

And if you look at the human mind, in all cultures and in all times and places,

except Western Europe in a few intellectuals in the past few hundred years,

the human mind has always been haunted by sprites, gnomes, mixtes, elves.

Yes, yes.

So, I don't see the UFO, the modern wave, as anything more than the latest wave

of this mysterious relationship we have with disembodied minds through the imagination.

Well, then people say, well, so this is the old psychological reduction argument.

No, because when I say the human imagination, I don't mean some paltry psychological function.

I think the human imagination is the largest part of us

and where we're going to spend most of the rest of human history.

Hear, hear.

All right.

How is such a theory greeted by the majority of people who listen to it?

I mean, right now I'm getting a lot of faxes,

and a lot of people are really hearing what you're saying.

Even though you've got to listen very carefully,

they're hearing what you're saying, Terrence,

and a lot of them are agreeing with you.

But there's going to be a big body of very violent disagreement, too, isn't there?

Well, yes, there are some very large eggs at stake in this game.

I mentioned science and the need to revive probability theory.

There is a lot of vested interest in certain versions of what the UFO phenomenon is.

But you see, what I bring to all of this, and speaking for the psychedelic community,

what we bring to all of this is not simply another raft or another tall tale, but a massive...

Oh, no, I hear that.

So then, would you suggest that sightings of UFOs, abduction encounters,

are, if you could be there measuring a burst of DMT, you'd certainly find it at that moment?

I think you would find it.

And I think you would also, another place where you would find it is at human death.

I think this is very important.

At human death?

At human death.

I think as we die, we have, if we haven't had it, a DMT trip.

I also think probably every night, in these deep dream states,

we penetrate into realms from which we can remember almost nothing.

Well, then, that would be another moment at which you should be able to measure a spike in DMT level in the brain.

Are you talking about death?

No, no.

Oh, yes, yes, I...

Yes, yes, I'm talking about both instances you cited, REM sleep, deep REM sleep, and the moment of death.

Well, it's been confirmed in deep REM, doing this kind of research on dying people, you get a lot of ethical questions.

I understand.

But you're saying it has been confirmed, do you know where?

In deep sleep.

No, no, no.

In what institution there has been confirmation of this?

Well, at the University of Mississippi a few years ago, a team led by a guy named Christian,

all those papers are in the literature, and, in fact, anyone interested in this should just search DMT on the Internet,

and they may have never heard of it, but they will be astonished.

Well, I've never heard of it, but your chain of logic is making sense to me.

Now, let us talk for a second about paranormal events.

As we approach time wave zero, it is your contention, I think, that paranormal events, ghosts, poltergeists,

paranormal events of all manner and shape will begin to increase,

which would suggest, I think, that DMT spikes will be increasing.

Yes?

It's a way of putting it, and certainly DMT is becoming more known in society,

and there's almost a fad now of locating plants in one's environment

and extracting this stuff and getting enough out to actually hit the money.

Yeah, do we have laws against it yet, by the way?

I guess I ought to ask, huh?

Well, it's an interesting situation.

Here it is in a human neurotransmitter.

Every single one of us has it in our body,

and, yes, this is among the most illegal substances.

Figures.

It figures, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. Figures.

It's the catch-22.

We're all holding, aren't we?

Well, the way things are going, we'll probably all be tossed in the pokey for it.

We'll have little roadside stops and DMT measuring devices.

Well, I think this was Adam's fall.

You made a...

I'm going to return to another subject for a second.

You made a fascinating statement.

I said, well, if there's time travel, where are the time travelers?

Your answer was, they will not be here until the first time machine is invented,

because you could not go back to a time prior to the invention of a machine that would enable travel.

Your parallel was you can't travel where there are not roads,

and there are not roads back that far in time.

If time is to virtually end by 2012, Terrence,

where would you see the invention of a time machine, the first time machine, between now and then?

Well, I don't think it's between now and then.

Actually, I think it's then.

It's then?

It's then.

In other words, if what the time wave zero thing is showing is that events can be portrayed in this linear way as a line on a graph,

that suddenly in 2012, for some mysterious reason, this can no longer be done,

it must be because in 2012, time ceases to be linear.

And that must mean that's because a technology is created which causes time to lose its linear and serial quality,

and that could only be time travel.

And you believe that at that moment, tens of thousands or millions or who knows of time travelers will suddenly show up?

Well, actually, that's my conservative model of what would happen.

And what's against that is, I'm sure you've heard this, the well-known grandfather paradox,

which is time travel is always said to be impossible because you travel back in time

and you could kill your own grandfather.

How do we avoid this?

Yes.

I think we avoid it by actually what happens when the first time machine is invented

is the rest of universal history happens instantly.

This is the only way paradox can be kept out of the picture.

So I call it the God Whistle scenario.

So in other words, linearity ends at that instance.

And the rest of the history of the universe occurs in a few milliseconds.

It's sort of the reverse of the Big Bang,

where you get a lot of action in the first few nanoseconds of the universe's life.

In this model, the universe undergoes half of its morphogenetic unfolding in the last few milliseconds of its existence.

Is that then the moment when the human race, in effect, joins those that we can temporarily now visit only with something like DMT?

Or that the human race joins those who have passed over into the great beyond, or both.

That's what I think it is.

Are they one in the same, in your view?

They may be.

I thought that, you know, these DMT creatures, what are they?

And the conservative position, since we know there are human beings, is they must be some kind of human being.

But what kind?

And the only answer I can come up with is souls.

I mean, I resisted this.

But is it possible that shamans have been using plants to peer into the great beyond,

and that there is a kind of ecology of souls out there?

When you ask the shaman, they say, well, you weren't listening.

We told you we did it with ancestor magic.

Say, oh, I get it.

An ancestor.

An ancestor is actually a dead person.

Oh.

Absolutely fascinating, Terrence.

Listen to me.

We're at the top of the hour.

Go take a 10 or 12-minute break.

And when we come back, we're going to talk about souls, because I've got some recent, really incredible news about souls.

And you're just the right guy to comment on that.

And don't worry, folks.

We will get the lines open.

Terrence, rest.

Okay.

All right.

Terrence McKenna.

Wow.

Here's my...

If, on the other hand, you have the time to sit down and really listen to what's being said,

not reacting like a Neanderthal with your head hitting the table,

then you're going to come away from this thinking some new thoughts.

And there's value in that.

Back to Terrence shortly.

Terrence McKenna, that should be an interesting adventure unto itself.

But I want to ask you, Terrence, about, a little bit about souls.

You mentioned souls, and so I have two questions.

One is, there was a recent, not recent, very old medical study in which a medical doctor actually

endeavored to set out and prove, in days when it was politically okay to do this kind of thing,

that the soul could actually be measured, that at the very instant of human death,

and he went through a whole big trip.

I put the medical report up on my website.

The human body loses about three quarters of an ounce,

and not due to gases or anything else you might imagine in your mind,

no physical cause, all of that accounted for.

And he printed and published this medical study suggesting the human body actually instantly,

at the instant of death, loses three quarters of an ounce of weight.

Do you have any reaction to that?

Well, looking at it through the eyes of novelty theory,

I think nature is very reluctant to give up a complex ordered form once it's been achieved.

I've noticed that the difference between living organisms and things like chairs and tables,

the chairs and tables don't metabolize.

In a sense, the soul is something which is manifest in time.

It's almost as though organisms have a hyperdimension.

They're objects with time folded inside of them.

And at death, what seems to happen is this complex morphogenetic field, if you will,

simply withdraws back into whatever higher dimension it came from in the first place.

It's not that...

That should be an interesting adventure unto itself.

But I want to ask you, Terrence, a little bit about souls.

Souls, you mentioned souls, and so I have two questions.

One is, there was a recent, not recent, very old medical study

in which a medical doctor actually endeavored to set out and prove,

in days when it was politically okay to do this kind of thing,

that the soul could actually be measured that at the very instant of human death,

and he went through a whole big trip.

I put the medical report up on my website.

The human body loses about three quarters of an ounce,

and not due to gases or anything else you might imagine in your mind,

no physical cause, all of that accounted for.

And he printed and published this medical study suggesting the human body

actually instantly, at the instant of death,

loses three quarters of an ounce of weight.

Do you have any reaction to that?

Well, looking at it through the eyes of novelty theory,

I think nature is very reluctant to give up a complex, ordered form once it's been achieved.

I've noticed that the difference between living organisms and things like chairs and tables,

the chairs and tables don't metabolize.

In a sense, the soul is something which is manifest in time.

It's almost as though organisms have a hyperdimension.

They're objects with time folded inside of them.

And at death, what seems to happen is this complex morphogenetic field, if you will,

simply withdraws back into whatever higher dimension it came from in the first place.

It's not that it falls apart or dissolves.

It's that it retracts from matter.

It closed itself with matter for some decades,

and now it's simply releasing its organizational power over matter.

But it isn't being destroyed.

I mean, that's my personal take.

I absolutely agree with you.

But by your description, it would suggest there could not be physical weight to it,

or could there be?

No, I think there could be.

I think we don't know what it is or of what it consists.

This is all, as you pointed out, because of social attitudes and different ideas of medical ethics,

these areas are very, very difficult to get data on.

All right.

Next data point.

I don't know up there on the mountain whether you've got television.

Do you have television up there?

Well, we have it, but we don't do much with it.

You don't do much with it.

All right.

Well, 2020, about a week ago, did a truly fascinating segment.

Maybe you heard me talking about it on the program.

Damned as thing.

They followed a 57-year-old woman who received both a heart and lung transplant from a teenage boy.

When she woke up from the operation, she had the immediate cravings,

I mean immediate cravings, of a teenage boy.

And if that's not enough for you, Terrence, she, of course, had no idea who the donor was,

but she had a dream in one of the successive nights in which she dreamt the name of the donor.

All of this was chronicled on 2020.

Now, again, it goes to the question of the nature of the soul, but, I mean, these are physical body parts.

Yes, and the obvious implication here is that some essence of that boy was transferred to this woman,

and it is not the only case of this.

It has been noted again and again in transplant cases.

What does that suggest?

Well, you know, we have memories, and we've never located, though we believe they are in the brain.

We've never proven or demonstrated that.

My friend Rupert Sheldrake, the British physicist, he believes everything has a kind of memory,

objects, organs, ideologies, and that these things surround objects like auras and follow them through time,

that you can't move a heart or an organ from one body to another without some of the, dare we say it,

karma associated with it coming with it.

I don't see how it could be any other day.

Sure, we dare say that.

No problem.

And I think it's fascinating.

So it, again, is really evidence of, I don't know if I dare use the word soul,

because I'm not sure that is the soul, but it certainly is some sort of transference that is occurring

that indicates that maybe our soul or our being is in no central location,

but rather a total part of it, yes?

Yes, absolutely, yes.

All right.

I would like to begin taking some calls here and let them ask you some questions.

First time caller line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna in Hawaii.

Yes, Terrence, I got so many ideas I wanted to question you about, but I'll try to limit it.

As far as souls go, would we agree that the electrochemical energy in the brain

has to go somewhere after death?

Yes, this is what we're saying, that in a sense it withdraws into what I call hyperspace, you know?

In a way, you could say the body is a lower dimensional sectioning of a higher dimensional object,

which is the soul-body complex.

And on the other point I wanted to touch on, as far as your uniqueness curve,

how do you account for the chaos theory that there are random particles in the universe affecting the interaction of particles that they come by?

I will agree with you that nature as a large system is circular.

It recirculates.

I mean, there are cycles, but...

I'm not sure that's what the time wave zero theory suggests at all.

No, I think this word you introduced into the question, random,

this word is a word out of probability theory and statistics.

I mean, there may be random processes in the universe,

but so far the only ones we've ever found were inside random number generators produced by mathematicians.

In other words, it's a nice, simple supposition to suppose there are processes that can be described as random,

but the more we look at nature, the more we find order.

Chaos theory is misunderstood by a lot of people, too, as using the old notion of chaos as disorder,

but what chaos for modern mathematicians is, is almost a super kind of order,

a super fecund medium out of which perturbations to higher states of order can spontaneously emerge.

This is what Ilya Prigozhin and Ralph Abraham and all these people are talking about.

I want to toss something, ask you something, Terrence.

I interviewed a scientist who now has a private company called Pear Inc.

He produces, you may know about this, he produces a computer program

in which you are able, which is a gigantic random number generator designed to run on a good fast computer,

and it enables you to pull down two pictures, for example, one of random absolute noise on the left,

and the other of, it wouldn't matter, the scene of a mountain or any other physical photograph that you might want to bring down.

It gives you many choices.

You put them side by side, Terrence, and then you, a process of randomness will begin in the computer,

and your job is to sit in front of the computer and to cause the random noise,

well, you can do it either way, cause the random noise to disappear,

bringing the picture into perfect clarity, resolution,

or you can work on it the other way and try to cause the picture to be completely consumed by the random noise.

And the suggestion is, and there is a rating given at each sitting,

the suggestion, and apparently the proof is,

that you, with your mind, are able to affect a rapidly generating random number sequence, generator, whatever.

And, by God, you can sit there and do it.

Yes, there's a site on the web called the Retro Psychokinesis site,

where they claim you not only can move these random number generators around,

but you can move them around in the past.

In other words, they invite you to, numbers are being flashed on the screen,

they invite you to concentrate on the numbers being odd or even,

and then they demonstrate that to a small percentage,

people can actually push this in the direction they want it to go.

So what does that suggest?

It is really the same thing I described to you, just a different method, same thing, though.

Well, but then there's another wrinkle.

They tell the people they're generating the numbers in real time,

but they've actually made a tape three weeks before and put it in a vault,

and the people are still able to push it the way they want.

In other words, in some sense, they accomplished what they set out to do

before they set out to accomplish it.

So, yes, there's lots of this stuff being statistically studied,

and it's very amenable to being demonstrated on the web.

And what it really brings, yes, still lives.

But that is a form of time travel to the past.

I think what we're going to discover is that how you move around in time

is not determined by the laws of physics,

but determined by cultural programming.

And that this is what's going to tear open shamanism and yoga

and some of these other things.

We are far more imprisoned by cultural convention than we are by physical law.

All right, Terrence.

Wild card line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.

Where are you, please?

Good morning, Mr. Bell.

This is Robert in the San Joaquin Valley in California.

Yes, sir.

Good morning.

I have two questions.

But, Mr. Bell, I'd like to say first I heard earlier on the news

that scientists have discovered a substance in cats' brains

that enable them to, when they take catnaps, if you recall,

when they wake up it's instantaneous and they're very alert.

They said that this will lead within the next two to three years

a sleeping pill for humans without side effects where when they wake up

they will wake up instantly and alert.

And we shall call it the catnap pill.

Fascinating.

Yes, sir.

All right.

Yes, sir.

Terrence, sir.

Sure.

Fascinating, sir.

I'm really enjoying listening to you.

I have two quick questions.

The first one, for most of my life,

I heard people say that everyone has dreams.

I never, ever remembered, never recalled a dream.

And about eight years ago,

there was a scientific report that stated

that there is approximately 5% of the population of people

that do not have dreams.

When I go to sleep, it's like a rock.

And I wanted to mention that.

And then I'll give you my second question.

I'll listen to you.

The little slice of death.

Yes.

Terrence?

The last question.

Mr. Bell had a guest, Ed Daines, remote viewer.

Oh, yes.

He mentioned in his remote viewing,

he could not see beyond 2000, was it 12, Mr. Bell?

Yep.

Now, and Christians refer to the rapture.

I'm just wondering what your take would be on all of this.

All right, all right, all right.

Very good.

Both good questions.

Let's tackle the easiest one first, dreams.

And I'm not aware of a study that suggests that 5% of the population doesn't dream.

Most of the people I've talked to suggest that everybody dreams.

Maybe 5% don't remember them.

And we were talking about dreams earlier with respect to DMT.

So could there be people, in your opinion, Terrence,

who do not dream at all, therefore have no DMT spikes at all?

Well, it's interesting.

I would have thought, as you suggested, that everybody dreams,

but some people don't remember it.

But it is true that I would guess 1 in 20 people don't respond to DMT.

This is very puzzling.

They simply do not respond to it.

And, of course, this has never been studied because it's an underground drug.

But there may well be, it may be that dreaming is something recently arriving in human evolution

and not something we can just take for granted.

So then, are we to presume that those who do not dream have not sufficiently evolved?

Well, I wouldn't put it that way.

Too cruel, huh?

You know, everybody has different genetic strengths and differences.

Maybe they've got a hell of a back swing.

I don't know.

Or, to be fair, perhaps we could suggest they are the ones who have evolved past the need for it.

I want to be kind to them, Terrence.

There you go.

All right, hold on, Terrence, rest.

And when we come back, we'll tackle the second part of the question,

which involves remote viewing and the realm in which that occurs.

Fascinating stuff.

Terrence McKenna, right back.

This is CB's on the Labor Day edition of the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.

From May of 1997, it's Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.

Art Bell will be back live on the air tomorrow night, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning.

And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.

Once again, here I am.

Good morning.

Terrence McKenna is my guest.

And, oh, what a wide variety of reactions indeed we're receiving.

To some, Terrence is a heretic.

He's dabbling in the black arts, witchcraft, magic, perhaps even the Antichrist.

To others, this kind of reaction, Art, I'm a computer artist programmer.

Consider myself a very intelligent person.

I've been listening with absolute fascination.

I think that your guest is right on the market, explains everything very succinctly.

It's brilliant, period.

That's Dave in Milwaukee.

And we'll get back to Terrence in a moment.

Okay, back to Terrence McKenna on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Terrence, remote viewing, I'm certain you know what that is.

Sure.

Sure, good, okay.

What realm are remote viewers operating in, in your view?

Is it the realm, is it the same realm that one might achieve through various methods,

including the chemical method you refer to?

Well, I'm sure you've heard about Bell's non-locality theorem

and the rise of the idea of non-local information in quantum physics.

I think what we're going to have to face is the idea that through the imagination,

all information throughout space and time is somehow accessible.

The body tends to localize consciousness

because consciousness associated with the body has developed to protect the body,

basically as a threat detection device.

But the imagination, which we tend to think of as something we make up or we create,

I think is actually something we're embedded in.

And if you can filter out the noise sufficiently,

something like viewing at a distance, remote viewing,

these things are a commonplace in these shamanic and psychedelic societies.

But even aside from those, in the discipline...

Now, when I say remote viewing,

I refer to the discipline that the armed services came up with to spy.

Naturally, of course, you know the armed services are going to use it for a military purpose,

and it was to spy.

Now, in that process, there are very specific protocols

that endeavor to erase the imagination,

ensuring the purity of the information received.

Well, this is the projective imagination of the individual

meeting the incoming signal of the great beyond, the great whatever it is.

And, yes, I think a talented remote viewer is someone almost empty of projection

so that they can actually feel or intuit the incoming signal.

I imagine it's a very delicate thing,

but I also imagine with the proper kind of feedback to tell you when you're doing well,

it's probably something that could be coaxed out of most people.

So, as I said in the last hour, we're more imprisoned by what we think of as culture

than by the laws of physics.

All right.

Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Terence McKenna in Hawaii.

Hello.

Yes, hello.

Where are you?

I'm Richard, and I'm in St. Peter's, Missouri.

All right.

Mr. McKenna has been giving me some insight.

I have been working with a system of divination called geomancy,

and it consists of the generation of figures consisting of points.

I use dice to generate the figures.

Once the figures are generated, then a reading, in other words,

a combination of figures, gives insight into future events.

It would seem as though I've been working on this for three years,

and I've gotten it down to the point where I've got a card reading system

that is basically self-programmable,

which to me is fascinating because my clients have in some way focused on the dice

to create the pattern.

And in so creating the pattern, I get insight into when things are going to occur

and what things will happen to them, and it's on the money.

Yeah, I'd love to say it's 100%, but it would suggest to me, other than synchronicity,

that consciousness with a simple focus, dice, can travel through time.

I believe is what Mr. McKenna is talking about.

Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't.

It's the same idea, or it sounds like the same idea,

but perhaps without the same documentation and a flawless performance.

Terrence?

Well, you know, all over the world there are these divinatory systems.

The Chinese geomancy, tarot cards, the Maya has a system of throwing crystals and small rocks.

And skeptics who deal with these things, who are usually anti-the paranormal,

always come back and say, well, you know, it was uncanny, it seemed to work.

And I think the worldwide presence of these divining systems which seem to work,

but which we won't admit work because we can't imagine a scientific principle

that would allow them to work, they're really signaling to us

that the universe is more complicated than our scientific principles are able to make room for.

So, he's on the right track.

He's on the right track.

It's always about a set of defined elements,

whether they're hexagrams, cards, stones, crystals,

and then a randomizing of them,

either a shaking and a tossing or a choosing or something like that.

And then out of the human imagination come associative projections,

which are always strangely right on the money.

And this indicates to me there's a resonance between the human psyche and the world

that is invisible to the ego

and that can only be coaxed into an observational space

by tricking the ego through a kind of random process

like throwing cards or dice.

Sounds to me like you simply have a far more refined process,

but I've heard the similarities.

All right, here's one for you.

Back to time travel.

Just a thought to ponder regarding time travel.

You're going to have to listen carefully.

Terence made a statement with regard to the possibility

of eliminating your own existence by killing your own grandfather, as an example.

If time travel was possible,

it would be impossible to eliminate yourself by killing your own grandfather.

The reason for this being that if time travel is possible,

then time would be kind of like a loop tape

which is constantly replaying itself by killing your own grandfather.

You would cease to exist.

Therefore, as the loop replays itself,

you would not exist to be able to kill your own grandfather.

Consider it.

You travel back in time, point a gun at and shoot your grandfather to death

prior to his ever having children.

You instantly cease to exist.

But if you cease to exist,

who would pull the trigger on the gun

as the time loop replays itself?

Confusing, but interesting and worth pondering.

Well, that is the grandfather paradox.

They perfectly stated it.

I don't exactly hear it as an objection to what I said.

That is a perfect stating of why many people have thought time travel was impossible

or that you could only travel forward into the future.

All right.

East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terence McKenna.

Hello.

Hi.

Terence, from what I've heard, you are obviously a disciple of Satan.

And I have to say that I want to know why no scientist has ever disproven the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

All right, Terence, O disciple of Satan.

Yes, he is a disciple of the devil.

Okay.

Well, let's get his reaction to that.

We're talking of these matters.

So it is worth some consideration, Terence.

How do you respond?

Well, if I am a disciple of Satan, it's an unknowing disciple.

Okay.

I am, at your break, someone said I was a heretic.

I certainly am a heretic.

You're not a heretic.

You're just deceived.

Pardon me?

You're deceived.

You're not a heretic.

You're deceived by Satan.

When you die, you will know that Jesus Christ is God.

Well, perhaps.

My position on all of this is...

Sir, pause and let him answer, okay?

Okay.

Yeah, my position in this is that we're not in this world to choose between good ideologies and bad ideologies.

I think that's sort of...

I don't know, maybe this is middle age setting in on me,

but I've sort of come to the conclusion that all ideologies are the enemies of human freedom

and that we're not, you know, you haven't made progress when you choose existentialism over Christianity

or anything over anything.

Real maturity begins when you notice that these ideologies are cultural furniture.

Oh, Jesus Christ was a liar.

No, no.

Oh, no.

He was a piece of cultural furniture inside Western civilization.

But let me turn to this question of the resurrection for a moment,

which I find a little more interesting.

All right.

I can't remember in which gospel it is.

The caller probably can tell us.

But when the Marys go to the tomb the morning after the resurrection and Christ is there,

he says to them as they approach, he says,

Women, touch me not, for I am not yet fully of the nature of the Father.

And I have never heard any Christian enthusiast discuss exactly what this means.

It's a fascinating statement.

Here is Christ resurrected, having overcome death, standing alive at the side of the tomb,

but saying, I am not yet completely of the nature of the Father.

And what this suggests to me is some kind of crypto-biological process that we're dealing with here.

I don't think science can prove or disprove the resurrection because science never deals with unique events.

If we had a thousand resurrections, I suppose they could statistically examine it and make a judgment.

But these unique historical events are more properly the study of historians, not science.

Let me ask you in your own little way, as a historian,

as you have looked back to develop your model,

when you get to the time of Christ, what do you see?

What kind of peak do you see?

It's a very good question.

Fascinating question.

Yes.

Fascinating question.

At that point in the wave, there is a unique signature that doesn't occur at anywhere else in the wave.

So, in a sense, it does indicate the life of Christ as being incredibly unique.

But recall, I said it never says what will happen.

It just says where to look.

And what makes the call on Christ a little difficult, although, well, what makes it a little difficult is that Christ shared the earth with Augustus Caesar.

In fact, the story of Christ's birth mentions that Joseph and Mary were going because of a census of the world that Caesar had called.

Well, Caesar Augustus was one of the greatest military and political geniuses of all time.

So, he's in the same part of the wave as Christ.

I don't know how to tease them apart, but I can certainly tell you that the time wave tells us that the period from 15 B.C. to 40 A.D. was extremely novel.

Well, I have spoken with a number of, again, referring to the remote viewers, and they have made a unique statement, many of them, that at 2012, or at approximately 2012, they can look no further.

And they see, they run into a sort of a brick wall, if you will, and it is as though there is nothing beyond.

But what they do see and describe is a gigantic spiritual event of some magnitude, which they're unable to discern the precise nature of.

That's, I could climb aboard all of this.

I think we're headed for everything we can imagine.

In other words, the resurrection and the life, the overcoming of three-dimensional space and time, time travel, star flight, immortality, planetary telepathy, consciousness out of the body.

It will be delivered by human hands, out of the human imagination, under the prompting of the gods and the entities and the forces in the human unconscious.

It is fortuitous, Terrence, that we are doing this program and recording all of this for history for the time after they toss you into the volcano.

West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna. Hello.

Terrence.

Hello.

Yes, where are you, sir?

I'm in Prince George, B.C.

British Columbia.

Way up here in Canada.

Okay.

Friendly neighbor to the north.

Yes, sir.

I'm just getting a little disheartened by some of these weird Christians, but that's beside the point.

I wanted to ask Terrence if he'd ever read any Castaneda.

Oh, yeah.

I read a lot of the early stuff.

A lot of the early stuff.

There's a later one called The Fire From Within.

And for any of the viewers out there who are digging this, which I am, I'm only 21, but I've been waiting 1,000 years to hear this program.

Look, I mostly have listeners.

Now, I'm not saying some are not viewing, but mostly listeners.

Oh, viewers.

The ones who are of my persuasion.

I might be viewing.

Well, you've got to use the real eyes.

But anyways, The Fire From Within, it's basically, I just wanted to state that it covers exactly what's been discussed here tonight.

And for any of the listeners out there, I'd just like to say that if they're into it, and maybe are yourself, if you're digging what Terrence is saying tonight, that maybe you should read that book.

Maybe I should read that book?

Yeah.

So, Terrence, you've not read the book?

Not that particular one.

I read the early Castaneda things.

What do you think about it?

Well, I think that he, in the earlier ones, he was truer in his description of the method.

In other words, I think that any claim to be able to penetrate these places regularly and effectively that isn't psychedelically based, in other words, that doesn't involve alteration of consciousness, has to be looked at very carefully.

And what goes on in those Castaneda books is he starts out talking about detour and peyote and this and that.

But then in the later books, it becomes more about these techniques and quasi-yogic stuff.

But why is it not possible, Terrence, that once one is introduced through the chemical method to these alternative realities, that one eventually may not discern a path without their use?

Well, in principle, it's possible.

It's just simply in a lifetime of looking into this, I've never seen it in a convincing form.

And a point that needs to be made here is a psychedelic experience is not like meditation.

It's not like anything else.

Meditation is pretty, you know, nobody goes to the ashram in the morning with their knees beating together in terror over what's about to overcome them.

On the other hand, DMT test pilots are dry-mouthed and white-knuckled.

This is the real thing.

He says it becomes a matter of saving and re-channeling energy.

Well, if you can do it without the planned ally, I take my hat off to you.

If I found it happening to me, not in the presence of the ally, I would be extremely agitated and upset.

I don't want to be able to achieve these states on the match.

They're too titanically alien and strange.

Oh, that's interesting.

That's interesting.

In other words, you are suggesting that you are very, very comfortable with the chemical avenue because to have it otherwise would be so disconcerting as to possibly.

I'm not sure, Terrence, but it may bother me that I understand you so well.

I thought it might.

I thought you and I were kindred souls when I looked at your book about the quickening.

Art, I think anybody who is stretching into this stuff comes to the same conclusion that things are moving faster and faster in a very bizarre direction.

I agree.

Terrence, can you stick around for one more?

Yeah, one more.

Good.

One more it is, then.

Terrence McKenna is here.

It's a rare opportunity for you, truly a rare opportunity.

So, I would suggest that you go to your telephone and join us if you are able.

If not, and you would like to get a copy of this program, you can do so beginning now.

It'll be a, let's see, one, two, three, four hour program.

By calling 1-800-917-4278.

It'll take some re-listening.

That's 1-800-917-4278.

From the high desert, this is CBC.

How are you?

Good.

How are you?

I'm doing pretty good.

You know, I want to ask you a couple questions.

Do you think the reason why people generally, like remote viewers, for instance, lose credibility is because, like sidekicks,

they have a distasteful track record and don't predict stuff like the Oklahoma bombing or a bank robbery before it happens?

And do you think that time machines can be, or the possibility of the future of time machines might have something to do with something that's very normal in nature,

such as extreme shockwave technology and just normal physical things that happen generally,

and the mainstream physics that will create synthetic time travel reality?

Well, I don't know from what direction time travel is going to come.

It used to be completely unrespectable to discuss it in the scientific literature,

and if you run literature searches now, you'll see over the past ten years,

this has gone from unmentionable to quite respectable.

There's a book called Time Travel in Physics and Science Fiction by Nabum that will definitely bring you up to speed on the many, many approaches to time travel.

It's been known since 1948.

There was a paper by Kurt Gödel with a scheme for time travel that would work.

It simply requires that you spin a cylinder half the size of the solar system at the speed of light.

But everybody agrees if you could do that and then travel along its transverse axis,

you would be moved backward into time.

So sort of in the way we started out with vacuum tubes and now go to the Pentium,

we have now very rude Goldberg approaches to time travel,

but I'm sure by 2012 we will have brought this to a kind of perfection.

And do you suspect, Terence, that time travel will manifest itself from the physical, from physics,

or that time travel will be manifested from within?

I think we're going to find a way, basically, to obliterate the difference.

You know, it's only been 500 years since some Europeans sailed over the horizon

and found the lost half of this planet.

That's right.

And I think the human imagination is as solid as the real estate you're standing on, Art,

and that when this is understood, there will be a kind of migration into the human imagination.

And that this is, you know, time travel, space flight, immortality.

We have these terms for these things, but what is really coming is going to be all this and more.

Our way of talking about it is inevitably incredibly quaint,

because we talk about it inside the very culture it's going to make obsolete.

It sure would do that.

Terence, a lighter question.

This comes from my wife at the beginning of the program.

She knew that you were the one to follow on in Timothy Leary's footsteps,

and so she thought she would ask you, it is rumored, or it is perhaps a legend,

that Timothy had squirreled away like a treasure trove at some secret location,

25,000 hits of blue sandos.

Where is it?

Do you know where it is?

My goodness, Art, your wife follows these things.

Where is the blue sandos?

That's right.

Where is the X mark on the map?

Have you got the map?

Well, my lips are sealed.

When they open the tombs on Cydonia, I'll issue a press state.

All right.

We'll leave it right there.

West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terence McKenna.

Hello.

I'd like to talk to both of you.

I am of the belief that there are two types of people in the world, basically,

like people who have had psychedelic experiences, people who haven't,

and the vast difference in their ways of thinking once they have had a psychedelic experience.

That's why it's illegal.

Yeah.

What is the direction?

I wanted to ask Terence that he sees this state now where it is illegal,

and why it is keeping, I think, our civilization down to its dreadful state.

I think that, you know, if it could be, you know, like through mass awareness somehow,

like get, I don't know, like, I don't know, I just wish it could be legal

so people, I think, could go to the next level that we are, you know,

coming to so fast with, I don't know, like things speeding up.

I mean, everybody feels that I believe, everybody that I know.

Did you say next level?

Yes.

You're calling from San Francisco, not Rancho Santa Fe, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yes.

Let me say this.

I mean, I'm a bit of a pessimist on this subject because I take psychedelics so seriously.

I can't imagine them ever being really legal unless there's a total social transformation

because my analysis of it is the reason everybody from a Marxist state to a Christian oligarchy

to a high-tech industrial democracy can get together and agree that psychedelics are a terrible, terrible thing

is because the social effect of psychedelics being taken by large numbers of people

is a kind of deconditioning from the cultural myth, whatever they are.

It's no knock on any given society.

It's just that if people start taking psychedelics, they start questioning what they've been told about reality.

And culture is in the business of keeping you inside a set of predetermined answers to those questions.

Well, based on that then, adherence, perhaps Legalization Day is 2012.

Well, there you go, Art.

There's an apocalypse that would shake our world and leave the heavens intact.

That day, that drug war ends.

First-time caller line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Hello.

Hi, Art.

Hi, where are you?

I actually am also from San Francisco.

Okay.

So it seems to be San Francisco night for the last two calls.

Well, I'm not surprised.

Nor am I.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you up front, I am a professional stand-up comedian,

and I guess sort of in the vein of Lenny Bruce,

so I do a lot of research, and I've read a lot of your writings, Mr. McKenna,

including Archaic Revival, Invisible Landscape, and also, excuse me,

the CD that you have that you did with Space-Time Continuum.

Oh, yeah, the Alien Dream Time.

Yeah, which was very fun.

And I'm also familiar with Mr. Sheldrake's writings as well,

and I would say to the 25% dissenter faxes that you've been receiving, Art,

that they are probably saying that because they're not familiar with a lot of what Mr. McKenna is saying.

Well, and a lot of them never will be.

It'll go right past them, and they hear one thing only, and they see devils.

Right.

And, you know, that's okay.

Right.

Actually, in relation to what you're saying there,

I would say to the gentleman who considered Mr. McKenna to be in league with Satan,

that the truth does not have an ideological agenda or anything like that whatsoever.

Sure.

My question to you is, you're familiar with the writings of John Lilly?

Sure.

In my neighborhood, there's actually an isolation tank center,

and I regularly go down there with mushrooms,

and I'll hop into the tank while I'm doing mushrooms and whatnot.

I'm very fascinated by your writings on DMT,

and what I'd like to know is how would I be able to locate DMT or the plants that it comes there from?

Now, I don't know that we can tell that on the air.

Well, we can say something.

We've already said it's right behind your eyebrows.

Right.

So that's one thing.

Uh-huh.

The other thing is the real practical answer is go to the Internet

in terms of if you want to locate plants in your ecosystem.

There you go.

There's vast discussion of this and incredible, enthusiastic communities.

But as Art says, we've already pushed the envelope.

I don't think we can start peddling Schedule 1 substances on the air,

nor would we wish to.

Nor would you want me to, sir, because then you might not hear me anymore.

However, it's on the Internet.

Look, it's a lot less dangerous than a lot of the other crap on the Internet,

building missiles and bombs and all the rest of that.

Well, can I ask you this?

Can you give me an idea?

Use a search engine.

Right.

All right?

All right.

Thanks a lot.

That's what they're there for.

Wild card line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.

Hello.

Wow.

I actually got through.

Yes, sir.

It seems that way.

Where are you?

I'm in Madison, Wisconsin.

All right.

Go right ahead.

Another hot air.

First of all, Art, I just wanted to say about a year ago I talked to you

and you were telling me that I was doing myself a lot of harm by using psychedelics.

I think Terrence is just good proof that someone can turn out all right.

No, I didn't tell you that.

I didn't tell you you were doing yourself a lot of harm.

I thought you did.

Nope.

No?

I wouldn't make that judgment.

That's something that only you can conclude.

I see.

But also, I want to make a suggestion for a guest.

I think Terrence might be familiar with him, but have you ever heard of Douglas Rushkoff?

Oh, yeah.

I know Doug.

Yeah.

I've read many of his books.

Just what he means.

More publicity.

I think he's just a great guy.

All right.

Anything else?

Yes.

Terrence, I have a video called Alien Dreamtime.

Yeah?

I just want to say I really like it.

Oh, yeah.

Well, that's a thing I did a few years ago with a band called Space Time Continuum.

Yeah.

What was the essence of it, Terrence?

Well, it was a rave in San Francisco, and I talked about, if you can imagine this, I talked

about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution to a backbeat.

This is something we haven't gotten into here, Art, but I have a whole other rap on how mushrooms

actually impacted and caused the breakthrough to self-reflecting human consciousness.

We'll have to save that one for another time.

I guess so.

Interesting.

East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.

Good morning.

This is Larry in Peoria, Illinois.

Hi, Larry.

This is really very interesting because I just recently read some of the excerpts from

The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, which is his take on the Tibetan Book of the

Dead.

And I missed the first part of the show, so I'm sorry if this has already been talked

about, but I was wondering what is basically the difference between DMT and LSD.

Good question.

Well, LSD lasts hours and hours and tends to be, I think my own phrase is abrasively psychoanalytic.

Essentially, I think LSD does what most people think psychedelic drugs do.

They cause you to review past memories.

They cause you to see your life in a different light, so forth and so on.

DMT is not like that.

It seems to go beyond the personal dimension.

It doesn't matter, I think, who you are or where you started from.

It carries you into its own world, a world that is alien on its own terms and doesn't

have a lot of information in it about your psychology or your dilemmas.

So, it's less useful for psychoanalysis and more useful for exploring what I consider to

be pretty dramatic paranormal dimensions, considering they're so easily accessed.

You're speaking about, it's interesting, all this talk about dimensions and going to the

next level, I just had a psychic, a psychedelic experience recently when I had a meditation

on the nature of the universe as being like a geometric structure that's so immensely more

vast and diverse than you can really explain.

Well, I think, you know, there's the vastness of space and time that we know about, but then

as we look into the micro-dimension and we see how much there is in the atomic and subatomic

world, I mean, the world is an amazing and dynamic place.

And this is why I'm so down on ideologies, because I think they're dusty mirrors to hold

up to the splendor of the felt presence of the living universe.

Here is a, I believe, McKenna, quote, quote, Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed

at the head of this planet, unquote.

Yep.

And what I think I was referring to there was resource extraction, propaganda, pollution

of the atmosphere, and this sort of thing.

If we continue to practice our cultural values as we have practiced them over the next thousand

years, we're going to make the earth unfit for our children, which is a sin and a tragedy

of such magnitude, we don't even have a name for it.

Boy, I sure agree with that.

And then this, quote, LSD is a drug that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in persons that have

not taken it.

Terrence McKenna, quoting Tim Leary in Los Angeles in 1991.

Accurate?

Well, I tried to give that quote to Tim, and he swore to me he'd never said that.

So it's sort of hanging out there in the air.

But it's a very funny quote, because I think it makes clear to people how agitated you can

become by drugs you haven't taken.

And how often the people who have the most negative drug reactions are the people who didn't

take the drugs.

You are a heretic.

And just one last, as we head toward the bottom of the hour, the mind rests on a foundation

of chemical machinery.

Yes.

It rests on a foundation of chemical machinery.

It is not simply the product of chemical machinery any more than I am an automobile when

I drive it.

All right.

Well, rest your chemical machine for a moment, and we'll come right back.

Terrence McKenna from the Big Island of Hawaii is my guest.

We've got 30 more.

If you've got a question, we've got phone lines.

I'm Art Bell, and this is CBC.

My guest is Terrence McKenna.

Terrence, again, with respect to Timothy, he, of course, as you well know, has been launched

into orbit with a number of other notables.

And I was just wondering, again, referencing that 25,000 hits of Blue Santos, do you suppose

it's possible that Timothy had them launched with himself and that orbital decay will provide

one great last acid rain at about 2012?

Well, he did want to prove that you can take it with you.

All right.

First time caller line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.

Hello.

Hi there.

Hi.

Where are you?

I'm in Nanaimo, B.C.

British Columbia, all right.

I first discovered you, Art, about three years ago, and I was getting you very faintly at

night from KEX in Oregon.

Yes.

Now we've got you on C-Fund in Vancouver, and we're all real happy about it.

Thank you.

You keep us up all night.

So, Terrence, I've read, I think, all of your books, if not most of them.

And in True Hallucinations, there's a part where you have a mushroom in the hut with you

and your brother, and he makes a sound that you describe, but I think nobody else that,

you know, unless we were there, we wouldn't understand the sound, makes the mushroom glow

or appear to.

And you were speaking before about human consciousness interacting through resonance with the universe

around us.

And I wonder if you could sort of explain how those two things tie in.

And in doing so, I'd like to ask you if you've read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.

I have read The Holographic Universe.

He was a friend of mine.

He unfortunately died a few years ago.

Oh.

Resonance is the principle, almost magical, of action at a distance.

You know, you can play a certain open note on the cello, and the piano, 50 feet across the

room, will sound in the same octave.

So, resonance, we know exists.

It's a musical phenomenon.

But what we need to realize, I think, is that resonance is built into time.

Time, in a sense, you could say a given moment in time is a kind of hologrammatic interference

pattern of past times.

And I consider those past times to be in resonance.

So, one of the things Art and I haven't discussed tonight about my time wave is that it does allow you

to look at a certain period of time and decide what it was in resonance with in the past and

those past epochs that are influencing it, then their influence can be seen in popular

fads, furniture styles, what movies are up, that sort of thing.

With the DMT, you say it's produced in our bodies.

It is.

Can the DMT molecule in the brain change our electron spin resonance in the molecules

in our brain?

And can that possibly make our brain act as an antenna that allows us to see all those

other things that you're talking about?

Well, these are the kinds of ideas that my brother and I were playing with clear back in

the early 70s.

And the tragedy, one of the tragedies of the repression of psychedelics is not that they

were taken out of the hands of the curious public, but that they were made off limits to

scientific research.

Not that anybody put up a sign, but it was very clearly understood that pharmacologists who

specialized in psychedelics could expect to be passed over, not promoted, not given the

plum job.

I could spiel off a dozen questions, very interesting central questions about the mechanism of psychedelics

that we could answer with ordinary clinical studies.

It's simply that how do you do ordinary clinical studies on substances that the government has

made illegal?

Well, you don't.

It's impossible.

Of course you don't.

Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.

Hi.

Wow, this is a very serendipitous meeting.

I've played around with a lot of EEG for the last few years, and I find that I do serendipitous

things, but unplanned.

Hey, thanks, Art.

Sure.

What do you think, well, there was one physicist, I can't think of his name.

He describes time as nature's way of keeping things from happening all at once.

That's exactly what Terrence just said we're going to come to at the zero point 2012.

Yeah.

Well, I wanted to get back into a little bit of physics, but almost cosmic physics, having

to do with black holes.

Okay.

And I wanted to ask you how you felt about the black hole being nature's way of, well,

the ultimate recycling device in the universe.

Well, it certainly is this.

Anything which falls into a black hole is deconstructed down to spin and angular momentum, and I think

all other information is stripped out of it.

I think, you know, if there can be gravitational wells like that, then there can also be the

kind of novelty wells that I'm suggesting.

In other words...

Novelty wells?

Well, if statistical probability is not a very clear way of looking at the universe, if, in

fact, probabilities vary through space and time of any given event, then there will be areas

of extremely high improbability and, conversely, probability.

So I think we've got to get past this idea of time as a smooth surface and begin to think

of it as a kind of landscape, a place where some things are more probable in some places

and some things more probable in others.

You know, you look for water in the bottom of the valley.

You look for glaciers up on the slopes.

I think time has a topography.

It is a topological surface of some sort, and science in the West has just completely

sailed past all this.

Well, how is it described?

Well, I don't want to make a long thing out of this, but...

Well, in Newton, it's described as pure duration.

In other words, perfect flatness.

Then Einstein comes along and he says, well, no, in the presence of massive gravitational

objects, space-time has a very smooth and slight curvature.

What I'm saying is that even at local scales, time is variable, and that when we explode time

at any scale, we discover the same fractal patterns as we're seeing on scales far above and far

below it.

So really, the time...

Or far in and far out of it, too.

Far in and far out of it.

So really, what it is, is it's like a Fourier transform or something like that.

It's a holographic matrix that is self-similar on many scales.

The organization of a galaxy, the organization of an atom, these things, in my theory, are

morphologically linked.

They look that way because they are linked across scale and across space and time by an

underlying architecture of the universe.

You know, there's a big mystery now in cosmology, the dark matter mystery.

Where is 90% of the matter?

For the galaxies to be hanging together under the laws of gravity, 90% of them must be missing.

Well, I say, there's no missing matter.

What's missing here are some laws.

And the laws that are missing...

Well, could it be consciousness itself?

Well, it's this appetite for complexity, that every particle in the universe participates

in this.

The galaxies hang together as spirals because it's the more novel thing to do.

Not because they are under the control of gravity, but because there is a cosmic law of aggregation

toward novelty that we've missed.

Would the Fourier be a way of measuring that, say, with Fourier measurement of the brain itself

or EEG?

Well, you could measure it in a Fourier matrix.

You could measure it in many different kinds of matrices.

The point is to demonstrate it to somebody outside the system who's looking at it.

I think the breakthrough, the great breakthrough in mathematical modeling of nature in the last 20 years

has been the discovery of fractals and self-similarity on many scales.

And this is part of that.

What I'm saying, really, is that time is a fractal structure.

It can be defined by a limited set of variables and then iterated on the micro scale, the macro scale,

the human scale.

They're all operating under the same architectural constraints but at different scales.

You know, when I talk to my friends in the EEG world, I do a lot of EEG spectral analysis and stuff.

They think I'm nuts.

Well, you thought not.

I say, well, if you want to buy my machine and operate, this is how the universe is.

And when I speak in these terms, it's like it's in a big hall, you know, empty room.

Well, there's a lot of confusion in the sciences right now.

The complexity people are not talking to the dynamics people.

The poor materialists have all been crowded into biology.

Meanwhile, over in quantum physics, they're talking like a cultist.

And none of the news has reached psychology and sociology yet.

The house of science is in incredible disarray.

And it's because sciences wish to describe nature.

They've now distanced with all the easy stuff.

Now we're asking questions like, what is language?

What is mind?

What is process?

These are very deep and difficult questions.

And I think they're going to cause a revolution in the science and a reformation of its methods.

Or science is not going to be adequate to the game.

Well, perhaps after some period of anarchy.

Yes.

Well, that's what we're going through.

East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.

Hello.

Hello there.

Hi.

I just want to start by saying thanks.

And I wanted to say it's an honor to speak to Terrence.

I'm a big admirer.

Where are you, sir?

I'm in St. Louis.

My name is Alex.

I'm 21 in St. Louis, Missouri.

All right.

Okay.

And I wanted to start by actually commenting on a couple of things that have been said earlier this evening.

One, I'm looking really forward to 2012.

And I'm looking really forward to being part of human evolution, really.

And I wanted to say about the throwing out of the rock that, you know, it seems kind of like that God has already thrown out the rocks on this planet.

You know, and that is plenty as is.

You know, that is the way things are.

And that's the planet as we have it.

And that should be plenty of knowledge as is, you know, for us to.

And I've had some experience with psychedelics, and I am not finished yet, far from, actually.

And, but the truth to it is that my true enlightenment, the truth is not outside, it's inside.

That's a very interesting point.

Terrence, let me ask you a question.

Do you contemplate the possibility that your trip will be complete before 2012?

In other words, your personal trip, that you will conclude at some point that you've done as much as you need to do and know what you need to know and don't need to do it anymore?

I can imagine that.

What I would like to do is take my ideas and turn them over to a general community of interested people and let the chips fall where they may.

You know, science is the only human endeavor where you actually get points for proving you're wrong.

And I love that approach.

I'm not interested in pontificating or building dogma or founding a cult.

I'm interested in the ongoing adventure, which is a collective adventure, of generating ideas, testing them against reality and the evidence, discussing them with other people, and then going on to build better ideas.

And I cannot believe that time wave zero is finished or complete because I have finished with it.

I'm hoping that like work done by greats in the past, this thing can actually be validated as a real insight into how nature works.

Right. Well, that would have been an arrogant attitude, and I'm glad to see you not displaying it.

Yes, I would like to see this thing broken on the wheel of rational discourse or progressively advanced to new levels.

All right. West of the Rockies, without a lot of time left, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna. Hello.

Hi. This is Dan from Northern California.

Hi, Dan.

Hi. Quick question, Terrence.

In your book, Food of the Gods, you talked about early proto-hominids encountering psychotropic plants, I guess psilocybin, and that being sort of the catalyst for this incredible leap of human consciousness.

What about the next step in our evolution?

Do you see it coming through some sort of psychoactive substance that we either have yet to develop or encounter?

Well, I think that we have encountered these things.

I think the enormous creativity of the last half of the 20th century is a direct consequence of the rise of psychedelic chemistry and the breakdown of barriers between cultures.

In other words, most of the people designing and building the Internet have psychedelics in their past.

Most of the people in the music business, in fashion, in media, in scientific research, medical research, architecture, the dirty little secret about the creativity of 20th century civilization, at least in the last half of the 20th century, is that it rests so firmly on a psychedelic base, and yet we deny that.

I've got one final question I've got to pose to you with regard to our discussion on the Internet.

I interviewed Charles Ostman, an expert in nanotechnology.

He predicts that within the next few years, or even less, we will begin to encounter sentient entities within the Internet.

Artificial intelligences. I believe that will happen.

And Hans Moravec has written a lot about this.

He would be a guy for your show, Art.

And he's talked about how these AIs, these artificial intelligences, they learn 50,000 times faster than a human being.

Well, you turn one loose on the Internet, where it can talk to all these computers, it can make 50,000 years of progress in one year.

Because Moravec thinks we're not even going to know what hit us when these things come into being.

Listen, time, as we must measure it, is coming to a close.

How many books have you written?

Five or six.

Invisible Landscape, Food of the Gods, Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, True Hallucinations, Archaic Revival, on and on.

Where do people get these? Regular bookstores?

Oh, yeah. They're Bantam and HarperCollins.

So any decent bookstore can have them or can order them.

All right. Suppose somebody would like to send you an email on the Internet.

Now, be careful here.

Okay. Here it comes.

H-C-E at well.com.

That's H-C-E.

Thank you.

Here comes everybody.

That's well.com.

H-C-E at well.com.

Right.

That's so appropriate.

Here comes everybody indeed.

Are you able to answer the majority of the communications?

I try.

It may be short.

I'm getting about 70 email messages a day.

What you're going to do to me, Art, I can't even imagine.

But I will make a valiant try.

A conciseness count.

All right.

It does indeed.

And people should understand that with the volume you're about to get, it may be brief.

Terrence, what a pleasure it has been.

Again, we will do it someday.

If they don't toss you into the volcano first, we'll do another interview one day.

How about it?

Well, I'm worried they may toss you after this one.

But if you're there, I'll be here.

All right, Terrence.

Done.

Okay.

Thank you, my friend.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

From the big island of Hawaii, he's headed back up to his mountain.

And me, I may be headed for the volcano.

Who knows?

That's H-C-E at well.com.

But it's all right.