library / Terence McKenna / Tmckenna-npr-mar 99

Tmckenna-npr-mar 99

Terence McKenna / audio 54:56 ~46 MB opus 118 kb/s

Recorded for KQED-FM's Forum in March 1999, this call-in radio episode features ethnobotanist Terence McKenna discussing psychedelics, plant medicine, and consciousness with host Michael Krasny and listeners. Topics range from Shaman Pharmaceuticals and the newly discovered Salvia divinorum to the role of altered states in accessing extraordinary experience, language as the foundation of reality, and the failures of both prohibition and New Age thinking. McKenna's live responses, grounded and articulate, engage callers' questions about meditation versus drugs, cultural anxiety, and the integration of visionary insight into ordinary life. His arguments weave ethnobotany, philosophy, and consciousness studies together, offering a rational counterpoint to both drug hysteria and spiritual naivety. The episode captures McKenna at his most accessible and thought-provoking.

transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited

From KQED-FM in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Michael Krasny. Welcome.

Terrence McKenna is an author, scholar, and ethnobotanist who has become nationally and internationally known

and singularly identified with, among other things, psychedelics.

In fact, Timothy Leary called him the Timothy Leary of the 90s.

And he has once compared his own vacation to Darwin's cataloging of nature

as trying to catalog the productions of psychedelic nature.

His books include Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, Time Hallucinations,

a recently published book in which he had conversations, it's called The Trialogue,

with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham.

It's called The Evolutionary Mind, Trialogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable.

And we always enjoy having Terrence with us to talk about all kinds of things.

Welcome to the program. Good morning.

Pleasure to be with you.

Well, actually, let me begin with something that just came up the other night.

I was at an event, an environmental fundraising event, down the peninsula.

And a few years ago, I had done something with Mark Plotkin,

ethnobotanist who wrote all about the rainforest and finding shamanistic roots

and actually started a company to go pursue pharmaceuticals in the jungle

and all that sort of thing.

Somebody said to me, you know, Mark Plotkin's shaman pharmaceuticals has gone belly up,

and I hadn't known that.

And suddenly, I started reflecting on that,

that maybe it might have something to do with all these inflated expectations

about the medicinal power of plants that Americans have perhaps bought into too strong.

Is that, do you think, operative here?

Well, my brother worked for shaman pharmaceuticals for a while.

I'm not sure it's accurate to call it Mark Plotkin's company.

We're probably sending several people through the roof.

Mark was one of the...

He was one of the...

Prototypical thing.

Yeah, right.

I think that a number of problems converged on their desire to make money,

one of which was the startling evolution of sampling technology

so that now it's possible to look at slurries of potentially drug-like material

produced synthetically in the laboratory

and identify thousands and thousands of compounds in a matter of hours.

And this technology didn't exist ten years ago when shaman was getting going.

So another company put out of business by technology?

Exactly.

Not keeping up with what the other guy was doing.

But has there been, in your judgment,

maybe a bit of overzeal with respect to the press

and the inflated expectations about what can be done for all?

I mean, the notion that there are panaceas out there,

cures to AIDS, etc., we just haven't found them.

Well, I think you have to understand,

if you're talking to tribal people

and they tell you that they have a plant that causes visions,

they're probably right.

But if they tell you they have a plant which cures diabetes,

diabetes is a set of syndromes defined by modern medical science.

How can Aboriginal people have those kinds of insights

into physiological functioning?

So the search for psychoactive drugs was very successful

based on interviewing Aboriginal people.

But the search for drugs applicable to other areas of modern medicine,

I think target-based drug design is much more effective.

Well, I kept thinking that our language is very revealing.

We have notions of magic mushrooms

and we talk medicinally about magic bullets.

I mean, what you've been in quest of in some respects is this magic.

I mean, that's what you've been looking for in a way, hasn't it?

Well, if you're looking for magical, psychoactive plants,

nature is full of them.

In every environment, in every ecosystem,

there are plants that either singly or in combination with nearby plants

will deliver powerful, mind-altering experiences.

Naturally, the jungles are most rich

because the jungles are most species-rich in plants generally.

But the chemistry of plants seems to have a place in it

for the production of compounds

which are very active in mammalian nervous systems.

And, of course, that includes ourselves.

Still much to be discovered in that whole realm?

Much to be discovered in terms of sites of activity,

characterization of receptors,

cross-indexing the effects of various drugs.

As an example of new discoveries,

Salvia divinorum is a Mexican mint plant

that has been discovered to have a compound in it,

microgram for microgram, as powerful as LSD.

It's completely disorientingly psychedelic.

This is not a plant that has been made illegal or scheduled.

And the compound, when studied,

revealed itself to be from a chemical family

never known to contain psychoactive substances.

So the analytical tools are getting more subtle.

The ability to detect nanogram amounts of material is now standard.

And, as it were, we're going back through the tailings.

And getting the gold out that was overlooked

by cruder methods used in the past.

You've never really, particularly in recent history,

advocated illegal drug use, right?

You mean somehow protesting the current legal situation?

Or suggesting or countenancing in some way

that those who want these kinds of experience

should avail themselves of them in defiance of the law?

No, I've always had the political attitude

that this was not something that you wanted to turn into a mass movement.

I came up through the 60s and saw the fallacy of that.

I think if people want to pursue these experiences,

they can go to countries where they're available

or they can grow these plants.

And, for example, this plant I just mentioned,

in Salvia Divinorum,

there is no more powerful psychedelic

and there is no more legal object in all of nature.

This is as legal as lawn cuttings.

So for the person who does their homework,

there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things

and their legal status.

Can we do the homework to the extent that we really know such things as...

I mean, Chris, you've written about the acid scare in the 60s

and all that sense of flashbacks

and, you know, Art Linkletter's daughter jumping out of a window.

I mean, a lot of people are very frightened by psychedelics

and frightened by hallucinogens

and with, some might say, good reason.

Do we really know, in other words, the overall effects?

Well, Tim Leary once said,

he said,

LSD is a psychoactive compound

that occasionally causes psychotic behavior

in people who haven't taken it.

And this occurs quite often.

Drugs often have more effect on the people who don't take them

than on the people who do take them.

Drugs are...

They have to begin somewhere, though.

Although you've said science fiction is the gateway drug, right?

I believe science fiction is the gateway drug.

Paleontology for seven-year-olds

is also a serious gateway drug.

I think that society,

rather than dealing with this as it should,

has dealt with it

with the heavy hand of the courts and the prisons,

when what we should be doing

is educating ourselves and our children.

Drugs are here to stay.

They're a part of post-modern life.

There will be more and more of them.

Wherever they are illegal,

they will spawn criminal syndicalism.

We need to sit down with our children

and explain to them how you take drugs,

how you evaluate their effect on you,

how you make decisions

absent social pressure and hype,

and how you come to terms

with this particular aspect of modern life.

Most parents would just want to steer their children

away from drugs altogether, though, I would think.

Well, but that sends a message

that these things are bad,

and then, of course, indiscriminately,

children will involve themselves in these things,

and the results are not happy.

Knowledge is the only way to come to terms with this.

It's a bit like sexuality.

The battle for sex education

is, I suppose, more or less won now,

but that was a huge issue as I was growing up.

Now, drugs, the response is the hammer of imprisonment,

and yet, as I said, the number of drugs,

the opportunities to take drugs,

endlessly proliferate.

If we don't educate people,

we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims

for the courts and the prisons to make their grist.

Some might argue that sex education

has only marginally affected,

and perhaps because of our culture,

the problem of sexual excess

and I suppose what could come under categories

of misuse of sexuality or abuse of sexuality

have been, if anything, exacerbated through the years.

Well, I suppose it's absent statistics,

it's everybody's opinion.

I certainly think people are having more and better sex

than they were having in the 50s.

Terrence McKenna, our guest,

and we can talk to him, as I said,

about a whole range of things here.

You know, when you...

You've always struck me,

and you've struck many people,

and you describe yourself as a very rational man,

and you certainly are an omnivorous thinker,

reader, scholar, and so forth,

and yet, sometimes when you talk about some things

that you have talked about,

aliens, UFOs, intergalactic stuff, and so forth,

it makes rational, skeptical people's skin

begin to, you know, percolate in many ways.

What do you say to that kind of response?

Well, I think they're not listening carefully.

My method, if you want to call it that,

has been to explore the weird, the bizarre, the marginal

with a rational mind, not with a will to believe.

The truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist.

The truth, you can kick the tires,

they'll let you take it for a spin.

All forms of cult, all forms of hype,

all forms of delusion,

do require your participation in order to exist.

So, I've looked into marginal areas of human experience,

historical and otherwise,

with a rational mind.

And what I have found is doorways into the miraculous

are far fewer than the publicists of the new age

would have us believe.

On the other hand, they are not as rare

as the proponents of radical reductionism

and materialism would have us believe.

There are doorways out of the mundane human condition.

I explored all candidates with an open mind

and came to the conclusion that psychedelic drugs

are the most accessible, the most efficient,

the least dangerous.

Now, there may be other ways to access the miraculous,

flagellation, prayer, wilderness abandonment,

what have you.

I'm not interested in cataloging the varieties

of the doorways to the secret.

I'm interested in finding one doorway that worked.

How does the rational mind determine

what is miraculous as opposed to what may be induced

or may be some sort of delirium

or some kind of hallucinatory experience

that has no basis in rationality?

Well, I think Heidegger said

we measure our relationship to reality

by the depth of the call.

And I think one of the chief justices said

he couldn't define pornography,

but he knew it when he saw it.

The miraculous is self-evidently the miraculous.

And it's certainly possible to take many drugs

and have many kinds of experiences

without coming near it.

On the other hand,

these psychoactive substances

seem to be the most direct path to the miraculous.

Now, what do I mean by that?

I mean the dissolving of cultural constructs,

the reality that is ever-present

outside who you are,

who your culture is,

what language you speak,

your expectations.

You know, we could disagree

about the worth and the efficacy of psychedelics,

but I think if we had shared the experience,

we could agree

that it is characterized by boundary dissolution.

You're talking about something universal,

something that suggests spirituality

or aesthetics

or maybe even theology,

but not necessarily intergalactic communication,

let's say,

or exobiology.

No, I don't think that the culture

at the end of the 20th century

is penetrated by dozens

or hundreds of alien cultures

seeking to trade high technology

for fetal body parts

or all of that.

In fact, I consider all that pop culture

to be indicative of the hysteria

that is engendered by science

moving beyond the range

of the understanding of ordinary people.

People will always generate explanations

for what they see around them,

and if they lack education,

their explanations will be bizarre,

quirky, primitive,

and I take all this New Age channeling

and all these extraterrestrial revelations

and so forth

to signify a profound

dichotomy

between officially sanctioned models of reality

and then what people are saying to each other

on the buses

and in the dime stores.

There have been some very telling studies,

in fact,

about those who had UFO close encounters

and who were taken aboard ships

and often various parts of the anatomy

are penetrated

or these kinds of things happen,

and in most cases,

the proliferation of these things occurred

almost exclusively,

especially the same kinds of descriptions

of alien forms and so forth

occurred after the spate of movies

about these things.

Pro bono proctologists

from other star systems

are not making unannounced

free house calls in our homes.

I mean,

this could almost be a litmus test

for sanity.

If you believe that,

then I want to sell you

a bridge over the Hudson River

quite cheaply.

Then what is out there?

How do we begin to even assume

a kind of cosmic consciousness

or awareness

of what might be alive

beyond this planet?

Well, Michael,

imagine if there were a force

in the water

or in the air

or in the advertising

that was causing

a certain significant percentage

of people

here at the end

of the 20th century

to simply lose the ability

to distinguish

between memory and dream.

Then people wouldn't know

whether that image

in their mind

of a flying saucer

came from close encounters

or from that weekend

at Uncle Tom's farm

when they were 11.

And I think something like this

is happening.

We as tribal people

with aboriginal roots

are set up to handle

about 10 stories

and one long epic poem

intellectually,

the machinery of our brains.

And yet modern media

has exposed each of us

to thousands of movies,

hundreds of thousands

of sitcoms,

endless clips of film

and audio data.

And I think people

are losing the ability

to distinguish

their own past

from a kind of media-created

collective past

that has more the character

of the Jungian unconscious

about it

than it has

the character

of the warm

and friendly world

of physics.

A collective filmic unconscious

or something like that?

Yes, a kind of collective dream

on which we draw

and out of it

comes the Bigfoot,

the flying saucers,

the proctologists

from nearby star systems.

And people who have not

been trained

to deconstruct data

or think rationally

are completely victim

of these media-spread,

meme-like viruses

that distort

ordinary thinking,

balkanize epistemology,

and make social

and political consensus

on anything

that much harder to reach.

It just reminded me

of Doug Rushkoff's work

we were talking about

before we went on the air

and the allusion to memes.

I wanted to allude

to something else

and that is

the 1971 trip

that you made

to South America

and you were out,

it's been written

about a number of times

with your brother

and your brother

experienced

as a result

of ingesting a plant

hearing a conversation

his mother had

on the telephone,

your mother had

on the telephone

in 1953,

and you can correct me

in the details of this,

but Dizzy Dean

was pitching a game

that was being broadcast

on the radio.

He could hear all this.

He believed

he could hear all this.

And at the same time,

he was a three-year-old

at the time.

Now presumably

your mother would

have remembered this

or maybe not

if it actually happened,

but this is the realm

we're talking about.

Your brother said

it was all inner,

he thought,

but this realm

between dream

and memory

and the indecipherability

of the two?

Well, it is certainly

true that in the presence

of certain forms

of schizophrenia,

ordinary reality

seems to dissolve

into a stew

of coincidences,

laden facts,

side glances

from reality

if you will.

I think

that time

and space

is generally

pretty firm,

but that there

are conditions

and it always

seems to have to do

with perturbation

of mental states,

whether achieved

through some

yogic

or quasi-religious

technique

or through the use

of drugs.

But when we perturb

our mental machinery,

time and space

comes apart

and reweaves itself

in unexpected ways.

To me,

this is not surprising

because it seems

to me

we obviously

create time

and space.

These are mental

constructs.

They're not

given from Mount Sinai.

They're conventions

that the animal body

brings together

in order to organize

data about its place

in the world.

To borrow a little

from Cartesian thought,

I think time and space

therefore time and space

exists?

Something like that,

absolutely.

The world is made

of language, Michael.

That's the insight

of psychedelics.

What we expect

to see,

we see.

What we say

is there,

is there.

And this is

really what

the 20th century

has contributed

to philosophy,

I think.

The understanding

that language

is primary.

Concepts like space,

time, matter, energy.

These are culture-bound,

linguistically defined

concepts.

What is primary

is the word.

And it's very interesting

to me

that this psychedelic

insight

is restated

by the cyber revolution,

which says it

slightly differently.

it says the world

is code.

Everything is code.

Your DNA

creates you

as its code unfolds.

The world around us

is defined

by legal codes.

The world inside

our machines

are defined

by what we call

computer languages.

More code.

Code

is the primary

reality.

And in ordinary

experience,

code is language.

Now,

this creates

opportunities

for relativism.

It creates

opportunities

for all kinds

of dangerous

and sloppy

thinking.

Nevertheless,

we have to go

down that route

because it is clear

this is a deeper

understanding

than what we

inherited

from the philosophies

of the 19th century.

Talking to Terence McKenna

about a whole range

of things,

including

changing philosophy,

his newest book,

actually,

Trial Logs

with Rupert Sheldrake

and Ralph Abraham

is called

The Evolutionary Mind.

It's a feast

of all kinds

of stuff

on visual math

and factals

and psychic pets

and the millennium,

which brings up

another interesting point.

A number of years ago

you talked about

December 22nd,

as the date of,

I guess,

what would be

characterized as

the secular apocalypse.

Are you still

with that date?

Yes,

it's nice now

to have it all

to myself

since everyone's

rushing the gun

and piled on

to Y2K.

I was accused

of being too crazy

to suppose

the world

could transform

in 2012.

Now no one

will wait.

I represent

an extremely

conservative position.

You're not that

concerned about

Y2K, though.

I really am not.

I live in Hawaii

off-grid.

It may be because

I'm already

prepared for it,

but I suspect

problems from

Y2K will be

local,

confined in time,

and fairly manageable.

Of course,

it's simply

a projection

for opinion.

No one knows.

Let me give

a phone number

here if you'd like

to join us

with Terrence McKenna.

You're cordially

invited to do so

with questions

or comments.

You can reach us

now at

415-863-2476.

I'm going to open

up the phone lines

and invite you

to jump aboard

here.

Again,

the number

in the 415-area

code is

863-2476.

Often called

the guru

as psychedelics,

but a man

who has lived

quite an amazing

life studying

in Tibetan

Nepal,

doing lepidopterous

work in Indonesia,

smuggling hashish.

The list goes on.

I'm cataloging

my own work

here for you,

Terrence,

and we'll take

some calls

when we return

on forum.

Local underwriting

is provided

by Harper,

San Francisco,

publishing books

dedicated to

women's spirituality

and feminist

scholarship,

presenting

Reanne Eisler's

The Chalice

and the Blade,

harpercollins.com,

and by

Brainstorm Networks

offering DSL,

ISDN,

and T1

Internet Connections

exclusively to

Bay Area businesses,

877-2-GET-DSL,

or on the web

at brainstorm.net.

Friday on forum,

Jeffrey Klein

will be the guest host

and the topic

up for discussion

and the opening

hour will be

the Microsoft trial.

Then we'll have

a look at longevity

and you're invited

to join us

for forum.

We're talking

with Terrence McKenna

and I want to go

to your phone calls

and we'll do

that momentarily.

Just a quick question

though,

when you talk

about the miraculous

and certainly

getting a sense

of the visionary

power of plants

and all of that,

psychedelics,

etc.,

is there a sense

of your,

as a Westerner

and as a serious

thinker

and rationalist,

being able

to feel

the kind

of sacred

and divine

power that is

often attached

to many of these

plants by other

cultures.

Can you absorb

that?

Can you internalize

that?

Yes, absolutely

you can.

I mean,

it comes in the

form of awe

and astonishment,

but awe

has always been

spoken of

as an appropriate

emotion in the

presence of the

supernatural.

And when you

finally grab on

to the 100,000

volt psychedelic

experience,

it's absolutely

confounding

because it seems

to be the thing

which our culture

has been most

at pains to

deny the existence

of.

And so it's as

though you come

around the corner

and there's

Santa Claus,

Bugs Bunny,

and the Easter

Bunny all

playing poker

together,

and you realize

you were given

the wrong story

all the way

down the line.

And the

appropriate response

to that is

humility and awe

and a kind of

redirecting of

one's energies

to try and get

in line with

this very large

reality suddenly

to be revealed

outside the

confines of our

cultural agenda

or our cultural

concern.

But you know,

it's interesting

because you speak

with this kind

of derogation

about New Age

and yet at the

same time when

you talk about

the direct

results and

consequences of

many of your

experiences with

these sacred

plants, it

suggests a

sense of awe

and mystery

but also a

sense of the

oneness and

unity of life

and a feeling

of spiritual

transformation,

of feminism

and ecology

coming to the

fore in terms

of your political

consciousness,

all things which

are very much

a part of,

the zeitgeist

and the New

Age movement

as well.

Well, I've

always felt that

in a way the

New Age was

a flight from

the psychedelic

experience,

that the New

Age was saying

its invisible

agenda was

we'll try

anything as long

as we're sure

it doesn't work

and that

automatically

exempts

psychedelics.

All talk of

spiritual advancement

is always talk

of pushing,

trying,

practice,

concentration,

attention.

Once you find

psychedelics,

you're not looking

for the accelerator

anymore,

you're looking

for the brakes

on your

spiritual vehicle,

you have suddenly

found the means

to achieve

the stated goal

which is union

with the divine

or oneness

or something

like that.

Now the game

becomes a very

grown-up game.

How are you

going to integrate

this into

your ordinary life?

You're no longer

a seeker,

you're no longer

an ingenue,

now you're an

insider,

now you can

come and go

from these

transcendental

places at will.

Now how do you

use that

to make yourself

a better person,

better parent,

better citizen

of your community?

You mean as a

result of the

opening up

of your consciousness

through the sorts

of experiences

you've had,

you can become

transcendental

at will?

Well, you can

have recourse

to the effective

method at will

because the

substances work.

The substances

work, yes.

Lee is our

first caller

from Pine Grove.

Good morning.

Good morning,

Michael.

I'd like to

ask Mr. McKenna

if he can direct

me to references

in the botanical

literature regarding

Salvia dividorum.

I grow 15 or

16 different

species of

salvia and

have a fair

library and I'm

unable to locate

it.

You should

simply search

on the internet

Salvia dividorum.

There are several

pages with

dozens of

links and

there are active

lists on the

internet.

If you run

an excite

search on

Salvia dividorum

you will have

more than you

know what to

do.

All right,

that's D-I-V-A

or D-I-V-I?

D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M.

I've got it.

All right, Lee.

Thank you for

your call.

To Santa Cruz

we go to

BJ.

Good morning.

Oh, thanks for

taking my call.

Hello, Terrence.

Hi, Barry.

How are you this

morning?

Great.

Yes, I just

wanted to comment

on a misunderstanding

of the New

Age.

I heard Mr.

Krasny say,

isn't this New

Age?

The misunderstanding

as far as the New

Age is concerned

is that we can't

arrive at truth or

whatever it's going

by these days by

transcendence.

And I think what

has occurred is

that when the

psychedelic movement

was crushed in

the 60s, the

failure of the

psychedelic revolution

brought on the

New Age.

In other words,

we replaced the

vision and

imagination with

visualization.

And it's

concomitant

techniques,

crystals,

and all that.

It is the

New Age

stands for

really, it's

disguised as

a visionary

movement, but it

really is all

about the lack of

vision and

keeping the same

structure, but

changing the

content of

traditional

patriarchal

religion.

As a matter of

fact, there have

been quite a number

of feminists who

have commented

on the deep

patriarchal character

of the New

Age, and I

think that centers

in the idea of

transcendence,

where you

transcend the

Earth and

your body and

all this, and

instead, I think

psychedelics brings

you to the

depth ecology

vision of the

Earth, which I

think Terence

calls Gaya.

It brings you to

the mind of the

Earth and not

transcending.

So I think

that...

That...

But I think

that...

That...

We need a real alternative to the New Age, and I think Terence is quite right, metaphorically,

because Terence rejected going up to the high Himalayas,

and he instead went down south to the depths of the Amazon,

and I think that is a signal of the way to go.

Go south, young man.

All right, BJ, thank you for that call.

I mean, it's an important distinction he's making here, at least as he sees the differences between New Age

and what Terence McKenna is all about.

Let me get more of your calls on in the meantime.

Chris from Inverness is next.

Yes, yes, Terence, I was intrigued by your emphasis on language.

It long seemed to me, and I'm sure it's not an original thought,

that a lot of the spiritual realm, religions, the I Ching, the Tarot,

astrology, the UFO thing, all of that are forms of metaphor for something that we have coming up

or that we're engaging in evolutionarily that our languages cope with and express, in other words.

And I wonder if the whole psychedelic thing and your descriptions of the places that you've gone on DMT,

I wonder to what degree those are metaphoric, and what kind of metaphor is it?

Is it a synecdoche?

Is it part for a whole?

Is it next to something?

Do you see what I mean?

Well, I think I understand what you mean.

As far as reality and its relationship to language is concerned,

this is a fundamental split in the Western mind.

Magic, which we haven't heard much about seriously since the 16th century,

magic is the idea that the world is made of language

and that you can control the world through language,

through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on.

And that idea gave way to modern science's idea

that there were stubborn facts in the world

that language couldn't either eradicate or ameliorate.

Now with the rise of cyberspace and virtual reality,

language is becoming again re-empowered.

I mean, in a sense, computer code is magical language.

It's language which, when executed, causes something to actually happen.

Now, as far as to what degree descriptions of these psychedelic states are metaphors,

they have to be metaphors.

Because what is not often mentioned,

but always experienced with high-dose psychedelics,

is an actual alteration of the language-producing machinery itself.

You know, some people have the idea you take a psychedelic drug or substance

and the world transforms itself and you watch this happen.

That's true to some degree,

but the person, the watcher, is themselves transformed.

This is not a clean process.

And when you actually see the machinery of language melt, involute, fractalize,

crystallize, and transform itself before you,

you get a tremendous sense of the malleability of reality

and how it rests on a platform of stable physiological functioning.

I also suggest, thank you, Chris,

that if reality is shifting and perception is shifting all the time

in this cyber revolution with all this information technology,

then we're evolving in different ways that we don't even understand yet.

We're perceiving time in ways that we don't even understand yet.

Well, yes.

I spent last week with Bruce Dahmer,

who's one of the great mavens of interactive virtual worlds,

and we were dressing in avatars,

meeting people in cyberspace,

but occasionally we would open...

Dressing in avatars?

This means an avatar is how you appear to other people in cyberspace,

so you choose to be a mini-skirted girl.

I know it mainly as a Hindu word.

Oh, no, it's been appropriated and trademarked,

and the Hindus are now out.

But anyway, being in your avatar in a virtual world,

talking to other people in a virtual world,

and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen,

so you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time,

after a couple of hours of that,

you leave the keyboard,

and you can practically feel the McLuhan-esque reprogramming

of your communication-based categories

based on this bizarre informational environment

that you've been spending time in.

So, yes, I think we're evolving.

Knowing the shift in media is changing human beings

at least as much as the introduction of print did in the 1440s.

And the good news about all of this

is that no one is in control,

and no one understands enough about it

to direct or sculpt it to some secular end.

You read Leonard Schlein's book?

I did read Leonard Schlein's.

I mean, he's on this program.

You put much credence in that,

that the whole nature of our brain is changing,

and that's the result of the goddess and feminism

becoming more preeminent in our lives and so forth?

Well, he worked off an earlier book by Ivan Illich

called The ABC-dization of Culture,

who was also then cribbing from Marshall McLuhan,

who talked about how sensory ratios changed cultures from hot to cool.

You've got the genealogy and the derivations right.

I mean, do you believe the premise?

No, I do believe it.

I think print created not only the modern notion of the citizen,

it created the modern assembly line,

it created all kinds of things

which we assume are basic to humanness

that are, in fact, artifacts of the technologies

accepted by Europe some 400 years ago

and then spread throughout the world.

And misogyny, too?

Misogyny probably has an older history.

Phyllis from Menlo Park, join us, please.

Good morning.

Wow, my mind is spinning.

Hi, Terrence.

I was at the conference at Esalen

where you and Mr. Abraham and, pardon me,

Rupert Sheldrake, I think, first developed some of these ideas.

Is this the book that's come out of that?

Well, there were two of those books of dialogues

or trilogues with Rupert and Ralph.

The first one was called

Trialogues at the Edge of the West,

and the new one is called The Evolutionary Mind.

And we just simply take up where we left off with that first book.

It's fabulous ideas, and the mind spins.

Could you explain a little more the year 2012,

what it is you envision as happening?

Not only the year, Phyllis, we've got the date,

December 22nd, 2012.

Yeah, well, that's the nice thing about mathematics.

If you do it right, there's not much of a fudge factor.

The idea about 2012 was simply,

from studying the structure of the I Ching,

specifically the structure of the sequence of the hexagrams,

way back in the middle 70s,

I discovered a curve there,

which is a fractal curve

with the property of damping its own oscillation.

Now, what that means

is that it eventually runs down and disappears,

and it looks somewhat like a stock market.

And I discovered that if you went at history

with the concept that it was an ebb and flow

between two polar forces,

which I named habit and novelty,

that you could actually get a conformational fit

between this abstract mathematical algorithm,

this curve,

and the vicissitudes of invention, migration,

warfare, political advance, and so forth,

the factors that...

All of our global up and downs.

Exactly.

And this was very satisfying to see history

so well described by a mathematical algorithm.

There was just one minor problem,

which was the algorithm predicted

that the quality I called novelty

would reach infinity in our lifetimes.

And when the calculation was finally done,

December 22, 2012 A.D.

But what do you think will happen?

Are we all going to dissolve

into subatomic particles?

Well, there are two ways to answer that question.

The honest answer is it's too early to tell.

It's like asking a man facing east at 2 a.m.

to describe the coming sunrise.

He can't do it because the sunrise

is over the curvature of the event horizon of the Earth.

That's the honest answer.

Then the more fun answer is

to pretend we do know what's going on

based on looking at what novelty has been in the past.

Novelty seems to be definable as density of connectivity.

So what is going to happen in 2012

is that all points in this universe

will be what mathematicians call cotangent.

In other words,

all points will be connected to all other points.

Now, I dreamed this up in the early 70s, early 80s,

where talking about all points being connected

seemed pie in the sky.

Although the New Age people did it

with harmonic convergence, didn't they?

To some degree.

But now the Internet appears on the scene,

and lo and behold,

what is the Internet

but a global connection machine,

knitting everything together,

and everything we want from the Internet,

higher speed, greater flexibility,