The Psychedelic Society

And I want to thank all the women who support me.

I have wonderful support systems from women of all types

who seem dedicated to the notion that Terrence McKenna can always be improved.

And I'm extremely grateful for that.

The frontiers are enormous in that dimension.

Okay, what I want to talk about tonight is the notion or the idea of psychedelic society.

When I spoke at Santa Barbara at the psychedelics conference,

whenever it was, last May, a year ago,

my contact lenses failed me at a critical point in my lecture.

And I said,

I simply had to wing it.

And later, when I played this tape back,

I heard this phrase, psychedelic society.

And I had never used it consciously in a lecture.

But because I had said it,

and because there had been a ripple of resonance to it

from the crowd of people there,

I began to think about it.

And this evening, I will just generally assess

what it might mean for us.

I'm definitely a pioneer in this field.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the book Megatrends,

which is making quite an impression at the moment.

Well, Megatrends nowhere mentions the eminent transformation of human society

through the application of psychedelic drugs.

I don't know what they were thinking.

What I think a psychedelic society,

what that notion means or implies to me,

in terms of ideology,

is the idea of creating a society

which always lives in the light of the mystery of being.

In other words, that solutions should be displaced

from the central role that they have had in social organization.

And mysteries, irreducible mysteries,

should be put in their place.

The British enzymologist J.D.S. Haldane, in the 1920s,

in an essay, said,

the universe may not only be stranger than we suppose,

it may be stranger than we can suppose.

And I suggest to you that as we look back over human history,

every pinnacle of civilization,

whether it be Mayan or Greco-Roman or Sung dynasty,

has believed that it was in possession

of an accurate description of the cosmos

and of man's relationship to it.

This seems to go along with the full flowering of a civilization.

But from the point of view of our present civilization,

we regard all those conceptions as at worst quaint,

at best half-right,

and congratulate ourselves that our civilization

at last has its finger on the real description

of what is going on,

and that actually what blinds us

or what makes historical progress very difficult

is our lack of awareness of our ignorance

and that beliefs,

should be put aside,

and that a psychedelic society

would abandon belief systems

for direct experience.

And this is, I think,

much of the problem of the modern dilemma,

is that direct experience has been discounted

and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.

I would prefer a kind of intellectual anarchy

where whatever was pragmatically applicable

was brought to bear on any situation,

but where belief was understood as a self-limiting function.

Because you see, if you believe something,

you're automatically precluded from believing its opposite,

which means that a degree of your human freedom

has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself

to this belief.

And I maintain that it's pointless to have beliefs,

in a sense,

because the universe really is stranger than we suppose.

And what we need is a return to what in the 16th century

was called the Baconian method,

which means not the elaboration of fantastic thought constructs

which explain,

but merely a phenomenological cataloguing of what we experience.

Computer networks and psychedelic drugs

and the increased availability of information in the world

have actually made possible the evolution

of new alien information states,

which never existed before.

And we are processing these things,

but at a very slow rate,

because we are hindered by ideology.

Now, I mentioned in an earlier workshop this afternoon

that Freudian models, Jungian models of the psychedelic experience,

which saw it as somehow a stripping away of resistance

and a revealing of complex and hidden emotions and motives

and belief systems,

has been replaced in the last five to ten years

with the shamanic model of hallucinogenic and shamanic experience.

This model holds that archaic peoples

have deputized special people

to probe hidden information fields using psychedelic drugs,

and that the information extracted from these information fields

is then used to guide and direct the society.

Now, I'm interested in this second model

and spent time in the Amazon

and am familiar with the operational mechanics of shamanism

and shamanic personalities and that sort of thing,

but I believe, actually,

that the psychedelic experience looms larger

than the institution of shamanism

and that we hold a unique opportunity

which is sort of the flip side of the culture crisis.

Our ability to destroy ourselves

is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves,

and what is lacking is a clear vision of what should be done.

What should be done is certainly not the accumulation

of ever larger nuclear arsenals

and the promotion of all kinds of primate game playing

of the sort that Tim Leary is well versed in denouncing.

What needs to be done

is that fundamental ontological conceptions about reality

have to be remade.

We need a new language,

and in order to have a new language,

we must have a new reality.

It's almost a kind of Ouroboric equation

or a bootstrap situation.

A new reality will generate a new language.

A new language will fix a new reality

and make it part of this reality.

These psychedelic drugs are...

can be conceived of as points on an informational grid.

They provide new perspectives on reality,

and it is when you connect all points of perspective

that you have on reality

that a reasonably applicable model of it begins to appear.

And I think this reasonably applicable model,

what Wittgenstein called something which is true enough,

is what we're looking for.

The true enough mapping of experience onto theory

is what we're looking for.

But experience must be made primary.

The language of the self must be made primary.

And anarchy carries this responsibility

even when it's only political anarchy.

What I'm advocating is that we each take responsibility

for the cultural transformation

by realizing that it is not something

which will be disseminated from the top down.

It is something which each of us can contribute to

by attempting to live as far into the future as possible.

You know, we must get rid of the conceptions

of the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s,

the 80s, the 90s.

We must smear the historical past

into the historical moment

and become exemplars of the humanity of the end time.

And those of you who attended my lecture this afternoon

about time know that I believe that liberation

or let's even say decency as a human quality

is an actual resonance and anticipation

of this future perfected state of humanity

and we can will the perfect future into being

by becoming microcosms of the perfect future

and no longer casting blame outward on institutions

or hierarchies of responsibility and control

but by realizing that the opportunity is here,

the responsibility is here

and the two may never be congruent again

and the salvation of your immortal soul

may depend on what you do with the opportunity.

So what do you do with the opportunity?

What does it mean to say in operational terms

live as far into the future as you can live?

It means taking a position

vis-a-vis this emergent hyperdimensional reality.

It does not necessarily mean

becoming a psychedelic drug user yourself

but it means admitting to yourself the possibility

and if you feel the heroic potential within yourself

to be one of the experiencers

one of the pioneers

then you know what to do.

If on the other hand

you fear to be lost

in the abyss

you fear what William Blake called

falling into eternal death

fallen from the spiral of being

which connects one reincarnation to another

and falling into the realm of eternal death

then you orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience

towards the psychedelic phenomenon

as a source of information

a mirror image of the psychedelic experience

and the other is the psychedelic experience

that you experience in hardware

or computer networks.

Computer networks paradoxically enough

are a deeply feminizing influence on society

where in hardware

the unconscious is actually being created.

It's as though we took the platonic bon mot

about how if God did not exist

man would invent him

if the unconscious does not exist humanity will invent it in the form of

these vast networks able to transfer and transform information this is in fact

what we are caught up in is a transforming of information we have not

physically changed in the last 40,000 years the human type was established the

at the end of the last glaciation but change which was previously operable in

the biological realm is now operable in the realm of culture and we are shedding

cultural adumbrations of our vision of the Unitarian mystery at a faster and

faster rate as we try to accommodate ourselves and mirror ourselves to the

mystery which lies ahead of us in time

and which is throwing this vast shadow fatedness back over the entire

experience of human history for everyone who has lived in it and previous to our

own era the only control language which could be applied to this thing which was

bringing people together and causing birth and death and tearing down and

erecting civilizations was God and it was an

immaculate

imagined as a self-conscious force that was leaning into the world like a cat into a

fishbowl and making things happen now we have a different notion a notion of a

vector system where forces over a large area are oriented toward a very small

space and this is what history is

it's an inrush

towards what the Buddha is called the realm of the densely packed a transformational realm where the

opposites are unified and the way I characterize this union of opposites is to say it is that realm

where the body is finally interiorized the mind is finally exteriorized the way I think of the mind is

the fourth dimensional a fourth dimensional organ of your body you can't see it because it's in the

fourth dimension but you experience a sectioning of it in the phenomenon of consciousness but that

is only a partial sectioning of it the way a plane is a partial picture of a cone when it truncates

it the growth of information systems is only a mirroring in masculine hardware of what already

exists in nature as a fact and it is up to us to hone our intuitions and to become aware of this

pre-existent system of communication and wiring so that we can step away from the dualism of

which separate us from each other and from the world.

We need to realize that there is a gene swarm,

not a set of species on the earth,

that half the time when you think you're thinking,

you're actually listening,

and that ideas are remarkably slippery things

and they're very difficult to trace to their origins,

and that we really are one-on-one and all together

in a dimension that is not as accessible

as you might wish to be congealed,

as Finnegan's writing says.

The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue,

social issue, ethical issue,

whatever the term for it is,

and it is precisely because they are deconditioning agents.

They will cast doubt in you.

If you're a Hasidic rabbi,

a Marxist anthropologist,

or an altar boy,

because their business is to dissolve belief systems,

and they do this very well,

and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience,

what William James called, in talking of infants,

a blooming, buzzing confusion,

is what they leave you with,

the raw datum of experience,

and out of that,

you reconstruct a world,

and you need to understand

that it is a dialogue where your decisions,

the projection of your grammar

onto the intellectual space in front of you

is going to gel into a mode of being.

We actually all create our own universe

because we are all operating with our own private languages,

which are only very crudely,

translatable into any other person's language.

There's even a physical analog to this,

which will further reinforce this notion of alienation.

It is that your picture of the world impinging on your eyes

is made of photons.

Photons are tiny wave packets so closely circumscribed energetically

that they can be thought of particles,

thought of as particles.

That means that

every single photon which falls on the back of my eye

is different from every single photon

which falls on the back of any one of your eyes.

This means that I am using 100%

a different section of the world than any one of you is

to get a picture of the world.

And yet we are sitting here with the naive assumption

that our pictures of the world differ only by our perspective

within the space of the room.

And we have numerous extremely naive assumptions like this

built into our thinking.

And our most venerable explanatory engines such as science

happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines

and therefore they have built into them

the most naive and unexamined assumptions.

For instance, science.

We can demolish it in 30 seconds.

Science tells you that a set of conditions will create a given effect

and that every time that set of conditions is in place

that effect will be found to obtain.

Well the only place this happens is in laboratories.

In our experience it isn't like that.

A contact with a person is always different.

The experience of making love,

having a meal,

riding the bus,

these things are always different.

It is their uniqueness in fact

and the uniqueness that pervades all being

that makes it bearable at all.

Yet science is willing to tell you that the only things worth describing

are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered.

This is because these are the only phenomena science can describe

and that's the name of the game as far as they are concerned.

But we, to claim our freedom,

to take advantage of the tiny moment

between immense abysses of unknowability,

perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations,

perhaps transitions into other life forms,

these things we don't know.

But in the moment of being human

we have a unique opportunity

to figure things out.

And I have the faith

that it is possible sometime, somewhere

to have a conversation

perhaps no progress would be made until the ninth hour

but to have a conversation

in which reality could be literally pulled to pieces

beyond the point of reconstructing.

I had a friend, I'm not sure if this is germane,

but I had a friend back in the sixties

who one day on LSD took a toothpick

and he sat for fourteen solid hours

with the toothpick and a large red brick

and he demolished it.

He reduced it to nothing

with this toothpick and his fingernail

long after the toothpick was gone.

And this is what we have to do

to the ideological concrete in which we are set.

We have to claim anarchy

and realize that systems

have a life of their own

that is anti-humanist.

There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency

in all systems.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

who was the inventor of general systems theory

said, you know, people are not machines

but in every situation

where they are given the choice

they will behave like machines.

We all fall into patterns.

We all then hold those patterns

ever more tightly.

They cannot be violated

and this happens on the thought level.

And we are at the cresting wave

of the historical wave

of this kind of uptightness

that stretches back millennia.

And I think that we have now come

to the end of this phase.

Whether you buy into my own

peculiar apocalyptic

and transformative vision

involving 2012

or whether you just can tell

by looking around you

that the shit may soon hit the fan,

I think we can agree that we have come

to some kind of a pass.

And what is going to come out of it

is either going to be

a great deal of dislocation

in the biosphere,

the invalidation of intelligence

as an adaptation of biology

and our extinction

or we are going to become

as James Joyce dreamed we could

man-made dirigible

is how he put it.

In other words,

the exteriorization of the soul,

the interiorization of the body.

And in this process

everything is going to be

challenged.

The very notion of humanness

is going to be challenged

because we are on the brink

through genetic manipulation of DNA

of actually taking control

of the human form,

of being able to extend

the notion of art

inward into the human body and form.

Are we classicists?

Shall we each be an Adonis

and a Persephone?

Are we...

What are we?

Are we surrealists?

Shall I be a potato

and you a burning leopard?

These are decisions

which will have to be faced.

These are the important questions.

And this vertical game

which we see in the metaphors

that are applied to psychedelic drugs,

consciousness expansion,

getting high,

psychedelic tripping,

demonic flight,

all of these things

are being paralleled.

It's like the drugs

are the feminine software

formative leading edge

of what is happening.

Coming along behind that

is the hardware engineering

masculine mentality

that is processing all this stuff

into hardware.

And this will continue

until the leading edge

out distances

the engineering mentality

through breakthrough.

And this is what I think

the shamanic hope is.

That we can find a way

to use chemicals

in our bodies

and our voices

and our thoughts

and our hands upon ourselves

and each other

to transform ourselves

without technology

to move into the realm

of the imagination

on the natch as it were

with an interiorized

psychopharmacologically applied technology

that frees us in the imagination.

At the same time

that this is going on

the engineering mentality

is going to set human societies

in orbit around the earth

and the moon

and the near planets.

But there's a catch here

for the engineering mentality.

Which is that the very void

which surrounds the planet

exemplifies this enfolding

abyssal feminine element.

It is the mysterious mama matrix

of Finnegan's Wake.

The mysterious mama matrix

is the universe

and there is no escaping that fact.

So that I think

the engineering mentality

which will seek to change man

into his machines

will have to be counterpoised

by the psychedelic

earth-oriented

imagination-oriented

side of things

which will create then

the potential

for the spiritual marriage

that will be

the alchemical perfection

of a new form of humanity.

And this is not far away.

It can't be far away.

It must be now and soon.

And it is as I said

it is a personal responsibility

incumbent upon all of us

to act.

There is definitely

an obligation to examine

the possibility of action

and to think clearly

about self and other

language and world

past and future

because too much

we have lived

in the light of the idea

that your ideology

will be dictated to you

essentially by geography.

And if you are born in India

you will find out

that the cosmos is one way.

If you are born in Brooklyn

you find out

it is another way.

What we need to do

is transcend

these localized grids of fate

which make us

what we are

but don't want to be

because you claim

this higher level of freedom

by the simple act

of applying attention

the experience of being

the primacy of experience.

This is why I can get along

with these people in the Amazon

who do these drugs

because though my Spanish

is terrible

and often theirs is worse

because they are Indians.

La experiencia, Señor.

And yes, we understand.

We know.

And he says, you know,

because we are posing

usually as scientists

of some sort.

You are from this or that university.

You will return to this laboratory.

You show me this paper

which has the name

of my friend in it

because he helped you last year.

But I say to you,

experience is the thing.

And the only thing

you can say to that is

we know.

It is.

We must begin to send out

ideological

visions

rather than be

the consumers of them.

We need to turn off

the metaphorical televisions

which are hooking us in

to the network

of cultural assumptions

dictated from the Pentagon,

Madison Avenue,

and what have you.

We need instead

to turn on our terminals

and to begin to interact

with like-minded people

throughout the world

and establish

this new

intellectual order

which will be then

the salvation of mankind,

I firmly believe,

because it is a collectivity

and people will then feel

the interrelatedness

of their fates,

feel that interrelatedness

as a thing which transcends

national divisions,

ideological divisions,

feel the primacy

of being part

of the human family.

And I think that it

will not be done

without psychedelics

because we have drifted

so long without them.

Surely we are the culture

that has gone longest

without psychedelics

in any cultural situation

throughout the world.

It's been 2,000 years

since the mystery

was real at Eleusis

and in that 2,000 years

we have wandered

far, far into confusion.

But we are the prodigal sons.

We can redeem

the ideal of shamanism

from pre-technological

social stasis

and actually project it,

perfect it,

and send it out

to the stars.

And if we don't do this,

everything is lost.

There is no standing still.

There is only risk

and commitment

to these millennia-long

cultural goals

that will restore meaning

and direction

to our civilization

or we will fritter it away

into chaos and destruction

and the horrors

of the typical future scenario.

Thank you.

You mentioned the expression

gene swarm

and I'm not familiar with it.

Could you explain it?

Yes.

I talked about this

in the workshop this afternoon

pointing out

that the notion of species

is simply

a 17th century convention

of biological classification

begun by Linnaeus

because when you visually

look around

with no awareness

of geological time,

you do seem to see

distinct plants and animals.

But now that we are aware

of such things

as bacterial transfer

of genes from one organism

to another

and this sort of thing,

we realize

that the apparent fixity

of the species

is an illusion

and that actually

there is only a gene swarm

on the planet

and it coagulates

into centers,

the densest kind of center

it coagulates into

we call an organism

but it also coagulates

into more loosely bound systems

such as symbiotic relationships

or even

or yet more loosely bound relationships

ecotomes and biospheres

and that really

there are just

from any given biological center

there is just a series

of concentric shells

of influence

going both directions

outward

and that's a more true view

of the situation on the planet

than the notion

that there are distinct species.

So that you would see

the actual organisms

and all that

as being maybe

or the gene swarm

expressing itself

as an interaction

with the environment

at that particular moment

Yes, they are temporary

aggregates

of genetic material.

I've never heard that

and I find it very interesting.

Well, it turns out

when you start

I don't want to get

too deeply into it

because it's a sideline

but when you start looking

at the ways

that genetic material

is transferred around

there are all kinds of ways

there's even been

a kind of termite

found in Africa

where the mating activity

is so furious

that

and the sexual organ

of the male insects

so sharp

that they actually pierce

the body cavity

not only

of

females

but also

of other males

and by marking

the sperm

of these insects

and following it

you can discover

that some

male individuals

are transferring sperm

to females

that is not

their sperm

and that absolutely

violates

the central dogma

of Darwinian evolution

which is that

the genetic material

the transferability

and adaptability

of the genetic material

is directly linked

to the adaptability

of its carrier

but here you have

a situation

where the owner

of the sperm

may be dead

because he was

non-adaptive

but the sperm

because it's in the body

of a more adaptive insect

is actually

having an impact

on the expression

of the phenotype

so that's very technical

but anyway

genetic material

moves around

in all kinds

of ways

and I'm sure

there are more ways

soon to be discovered

the responsibility

always rests

on us

and you don't want

to go out

and immediately

form a movement

to change

those guys

or that bureau

I think

the thing

that should be done

is

people who are

involved

in psychedelics

should live lives

of such

exemplitude

and impeccability

that the notion

that there was anything

shady

or wrong

or curious

about this phenomenon

would be ludicrous

I've thought about it

see I didn't think

any other questions

then thank you

and thank you

very very

yes

I have a clearer vision

of how you would see

a psychedelic society

in that

if we were able

to demolish

a lot of the belief systems

that we do operate under

what would

how would we relate

to one another

how would you see

that vision unfolding

there was a French

sociologist

about 15 years ago

who had some

vogue

and then faded

I don't know

what his sin was

but his name

was Jacques Ellul

and he wrote a book

called

The Technological Society

and in there

he had an axiom

and the axiom was

there are no

political solutions

only technological ones

the rest is propaganda

what a psychedelic society

would do I think

is it would rationally

solve problems

the first thing to notice

is that

we could pave

the street

with gold

if we would just

eliminate defense spending

in other words

our limited energy resources

are not being allocated

in such a way

as to move us

towards survival

we have to begin

to solve

our problems

using solutions

that are present at hand

no matter

who they offend

so there would be

a value system

in operation then

a value system

a humanist value system

it's very interesting

that to me

that the

what do they call it

silent majority

that the way

in which they name

their enemies

is secular humanists

this is the only

intelligent thing

they ever say

it's the only

intelligent phrase

in their entire repertoire

but it's fascinating

we are secular humanists

that's precisely

what we are

we believe

that human beings

are to be the measure

of all things

that there is

no other standard

not a classless society

or god almighty

there is no other standard

but man

humanity

people

and this is

a renaissance idea

that was first denunciated

by Marcello Ficino

in 1510

but we have not acted

upon it

we have not up to this time

had a secular humanist society

we've had this curious mix

of medieval remnants

in the religious department

gangster capitalism

in the economic department

stasis seeking Marxism

as a counterpoise to that

we have never rationally

tried to solve our problems

and we have never

rationally tried to solve

our problems

on a personal level

until the advent

of

well

psychology

in the modern sense

people never examined

the center

they thought of the center

as a mirrored bead

and that this

you didn't ask questions

about the self

or motive

or the relationship

of your worldview

to trauma

expectation

class level

the

all of these things

we have become aware of

as we have steadily

retreated

from the illusion

of a world

deployed

in three-dimensional space

and we're only

at the beginning

of this process

for instance

I mean

I don't say this

to knock Esalen

I say it

as an example

I think Esalen

is definitely

one of the most

important

and most important

people

in the world

definitely

the cutting edge

of things

and has been

for some time

but isn't it

preposterous

that Esalen

operates

under the laws

of the United States

which make taking

these drugs

illegal

they must

do that

they must

do that

they have no choice

whatever their

private opinions

may be

and

all institutions

are in that

bind

there's no such

thing

as a revolutionary

institution

there are only

revolutionary

people

and this is

why

this de-emphasis

on belief

systems

and they

their

support

systems

which are

institutions

seems to

me

the essence

of this

psychedelic

message

it's

it says

be against

method

don't

be enslaved

to method

embrace

anarchy

and that's

a bad name

because in the

political arena

it's a weird

number

but in

philosophy

in science

in love

and in human

relations

generally

it seems to

me it is

the most

respectable

system

based on

its track

record

any

any others

yes

is there

any

kind of

a way

it is

to

like

this

well

this is

a game

you can

play

yes

I mean

his view

of it

was very

correct

there are

these lines

that can

be traced

back

gnosis

I didn't

use this

word

tonight

gnosis

nor did

I use

the word

logos

it's very

close to

the notion

of the

collectivity

of the

psychedelic

society

my idea

is that

we could

change

the logos

of the

mystery

religions

from a

religious

mystery

into a

social

reality

and that

would be

a social

transformation

because

it would

essentially

sacralize

the

of

we gotta

do it

and do

it

now

type of

thing

as far

as shamanism

is concerned

I couldn't

quite understand

why

I can't

sit back

in my

stupidity

and continue

this

you know

practice

is it

because

we're

coming to

man

can

destroy

and destroy

human

beings

that's

so

true

the

is

the

a

the

but there's only one game in town and if you want to be part of the adventure of being

you have to get your feet wet and that means you have to get committed in some way so it's not

done now it will be done in 100 years from now this is coming i mean this wave has been rolling

toward completion since before the breakup of pangea this is the big picture yes it's coming

the monkeys are going to the stars whether smoothly or not so smoothly is not clear but the

monkeys are going to the stars and they're going to take everyone with them and it can be a

relatively smooth birth with no tearing and no bleeding and everything just moving right along

or it can be holy hell and leave the earth the smoking cinder before it's over with but the monkey

thing the information creation

is definitely on its way to the stars i don't think anything can stop that

if you wanted to stop that you had to get back there before the pyramids

well thank you very much