We get language applied to subjects which are neither related to the past nor the future, like mathematics.
And mathematics is a language which has gone out and described multidimensional spaces.
I think that nothing is more exquisite than the interior music.
And all music is obviously an effort to approximate this interior music.
And I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but I'm sure you all know the story of Beethoven saying,
you know, if you could hear what I can hear, you wouldn't bother with what I've written,
because it's just compared to what I'm hearing.
You have to, it's a knife edge, because the music does lead deeper into these visionary states.
But I still think that once you are where you want to be, that if you can cast loose from exterior musical input,
that this interior music will rise into perception and reward you for that.
The way that I take psychedelic drugs seems very natural to me.
But then when I describe it to groups of people like this, I realize that people have all kinds of styles.
And this has caused the psychedelic experience to be sort of blurrily defined in the mass mind.
My idea of how you take a psychedelic drug is that you reduce sensory input as low as you can
without the reduction itself becoming an impediment.
In other words, I'm not talking about isolation tanks and all that.
I'm just saying a dark, quiet, calm, cool, empty room is the best kind of situation.
And some of the most interesting trips that I've had have been to the accompaniment of a single sound,
which is simply a drone.
It's like the bindu, the seed around which then the multiplicity of the hallucinogenic vision can gather itself and constellate.
I mean, I blush to tell you this, but some of my most interesting trips have been to the accompaniment of my floor heater,
which makes a buzz like a refrigerator.
And that buzz becomes, you know, the cutting edge of a light, which is like a comet giving off in the eddies of its trail,
hallucination, all the hallucinations there are.
So I think that music is intrinsic to everything that we're talking about.
We are aspiring to the condition of music and we need music.
Therefore, we should have it as an exterior input when we can have it no other way.
So saying that I don't listen to music during those states is not a put down of music.
Music is obviously the ideal because it is one of these tonal languages that you understand by hearing.
It is an ursprach.
It has, it's a language of emotion.
Yeah.
I have a real quick question.
According to the graph that you've developed, it seems to me, and to the appendix that you wear to pin down,
that you could have almost your own running bio-rhythm chart based on this graph
and tell when their novelties are coming up in the next week or three months or so.
Have you gone that far?
Definitely.
One of the things that I do is I have a counseling service called Anamnesis.
Anamnesis.
And the reason I organized it as a counseling service was because I wanted people to interact
with my wave on the level of their personal history.
And I didn't want them to be contaminated by being my friends.
So I basically just advertised this service in Common Ground, which says something about
understand novelty in your life, maps of the past and the future, this and that.
And then people come to me and I interview them about their life.
And we search the wave for a good fit to their life.
And then we integrate their wave as a statistical component of the larger wave.
And then we can make maps of the present, the next six months, the next 10 or 15 years
that different levels.
And then people live it out and see if it works.
See if when the graph indicates novelty in their life should be increasing, it is increasing.
And when it shouldn't be, it doesn't.
It's like I've invented a one term form of astrology.
It only talks about novelty.
It tells you when it will go up, when it will go down.
It doesn't in any given situation say what will happen.
It only defines the level of novelty that must be fulfilled by whatever happens.
Synchronicity.
You see, what's one way that I think of this time wave is orthodox chemistry, physics, biology, probability theory,
all these things go together to describe what is possible.
So you say, you know, could an asteroid strike the Earth?
Let's ask the science.
And they say, well, yes, it's possible.
There are enough of them.
The probability is very low.
Or you say, you know, can we cleave this molecule with the input of this energy?
And you say, well, yes, it's possible.
Physics allows for that.
But what my theory seeks to describe is not what is possible, but what out of the set of all possible things,
why is it that certain things undergo the formality of actually occurring?
It is as though they are selected out of this vast pool of possible things,
things which could happen without violating any known laws.
But out of that vast reservoir, certain things undergo the formality of occurring.
And once they have occurred, the fact of their occurring has defined the level of novelty in that now past moment.
And so that's what it's like.
This novelty wave is an additional variable which has to be added in to physical laws.
It's the variable which dictates what out of the possible states which ones actually are realized.
And it's the flux, the coming and going of that wave of novelty which controls that.
Now, if you're in a highly novel situation, then you get what Lilly calls cosmic coincidence or Jung calls synchronicity.
You get obvious connections which have no obvious casuistry behind them.
They are connected through meaning, not through the chain of cause and effect.
And that is simply happening because the level of novelty is so great that these sideways connections are beginning to come apparent.
And at the end of time or at the ingression into this higher dimension, I think this will become excruciatingly present in the foreground of our experience.
In other words, synchronicity is getting stronger.
Coincidence is getting stronger.
The world is becoming more irrational.
Science did work better in the 19th century than it's working in the 20th.
Because reality is slowly slipping through its fingers.
There was a maximum moment when the dreams of science and the nature of reality overlaid almost perfectly.
But now reality is growing beyond it and pulling away from it.
And I think soon I shall be pulling away from this meeting.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it.
A.M.
Amnesis.
So that's against the loss of memory.
Yes.
The platonic doctrine.
You know that scene where Plato proves that the slave understood geometry
without ever having been taught by asking him certain questions.
It's the doctrine of recollection.
That all learning is recollection.
And he called that an amnesis.
That's great.
That's a great title.
Yeah.
Well, we're word folks.
I think that's wonderful.
That's great.
Well, I hope you'll read The Invisible Landscape and let me know what you think of it.
Around at local bookstores, et cetera?
It's fairly hard to get.
I think they're selling it out front.
Did you mention that memory is somehow connected to time?
Yes, I did.
I was talking about how being able to have memories is a kind of conquest of the temporal dimension,
and was a very important moment in biology when animals could be enough outside the present to say,
Oh, I've been here before, or I know that I can't swim, or I know that's a trap, I should avoid it.
I think memory was a part of this evolutionary conquest of dimensions, which begins, you know, just with tactile nearness, and then light, and then motility through walking, and finally memory and anticipation of the future, and then finally as in human society, anticipation of thousands of years of time and recovery of thousands of years of time out of the past, not just personal experience.
Well, I kind of see that my memory is not perfect and judgmental.
And in that sense, maybe there's a saving factor because as I live in time, if my memory is perfect, then why update it?
That's true.
Yes, we live in the present in a sense because we have such bad memories.
Thank you for coming.
Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Good.
Well, I hope to see you again.
Good.
Why are you talking about getting to the end of time?
Uh-huh.
Maybe we have to get to the end of power.
Yes.
Well, I think this deepening of synchronicity and coincidence that I talked about will have the effect of getting us to the end of power.
It's harder and harder to plot with power.
Even in our own time, we've seen the most powerful forces in the world totally brought low.
I mean, America loses the Vietnam War.
Richard Nixon can't hang on to the presidency.
It seems like the more powerful you are, the more in danger of being depotentiated you are.
And I think this is about information, about the density of media, that power and information are at war with each other.
And power must work hand in glove with ignorance.
And ignorance is on the run.
Yeah.
Well, we all are.
Anybody in these societies is.
Let me just get your reaction.
I did a theory put out by an engineer, John Kennedy.
He said that he was coming to the end of the interglacial region.
I'm about to enter the United States.
The evidence is that the seeds are dying in the soil and the people in the pool and so on and so on.
In the function of the glacier, we're bringing back mineralism tubes.
Which takes 90,000 years to re-mineralize the soil and we'll have it.
We'll have it.
Thank you.
CO2 in the atmosphere goes on.
We'll have it.
Well, this thing I was saying about how things are becoming more connected through time and speeding up.
The last 10 million years of Earth's history have been the most violent and violently fluctuating in all of Earth's history.
The last million of those 10 million years have been the most violent.
And of those...
Violent in terms of the weather?
The weather and glaciation and earthquake and pole shift and all these things.
The last 100,000 years have been the most violent of that.
So what we're getting is an increase in all kinds of change.
And why this is happening to the planet is not clear.
In other words, during the Jurassic period and pre-Cambrian, the Earth's climate was very stable.
Earth's temperatures were very stable.
Apparently, the weather was very mild.
Now, we have these tremendous fluctuations, glaciations.
And in fact, man was largely formed because of that, because the glaciations have the effect of endlessly splitting apart and reuniting human gene pools, which is, of course, the fastest way to intensify diversity.
You know, you breed gene pools apart, then you mix the populations, then you separate them again, then you mix them.
And this is a major formative factor making man.
So it's as though, in a way, the planet, the instability of the planet on a planetary scale has called forth an intelligence these years.
Well, I'm saying it's running, it's driving the pump of evolution.
It's the thing which is making evolution happen faster than it has ever happened before.
Because change always drives evolution, you know.
I think that if the glaciation period comes soon, that the competition for space and resources will be so intense that the bombs will go off the most of us.
Yes, we've certainly never faced a glaciation when we had the technology.
But on the other hand, if the glaciation doesn't come soon, real soon, we'll be gone, you know.
Well, in another hundred years, Gerard O'Neil suggests the major population center by 2050 could well be the Jovian moon system.
That's where the hydrocarbons are.
That's where the metals are.
This is where the things we need are.
And if classical patterns are followed, we will go where the natural resources are.
Do we need something as higher beings?
I don't think we are going to spiritualize ourselves out of existence.
I think that the dualism between spirit and matter and body and soul are probably going to be transcended.
We, what we do is we excrete ideas.
We take in matter, unprocessed matter, glasses, plastics, metals, and we excrete them as ideas in a very highly organized form.
What do we need concentrated metals? Isn't that the consensus for a highly technological civilization? Is that what we want?
Well, it may be a transitional phase.
In other words, maybe sophisticated civilizations always build with molecules.
But even we are machines in the sense that we are made of DNA.
Obviously, the metallic petroleum phase of a culture is very brief.
As soon as we understand the genetic machinery, we will use that as our technology.
Everything can be made with DNA, not just people.
You can make telephones and soft drink containers, and everything can be made this way.
I really, you know, I really hear kind of an ambivalent of technology, which I don't care.
I mean, I think it's something we have to resist and ignore.
And I hear a part of you going for this, you know, this place where the new center is going to be out there with the metal.
I don't know.
Well, someone, it wasn't to you, someone at the last one asked this very question.
Said, you know, there are two directions.
To turn the earth into a garden.
To recognize that we are the stewards of the ecosystem of the planet.
To try to reign in our Promethean, Faustian tendencies.
Or what I'm saying, which is space colonies and this Apollonian, non-earth oriented culture, which I kind of lean toward because I think that the other possibility was foreclosed sometime in the 18th century.
That the moment, that to achieve now that no growth ecological earth as garden civilization would require unbelievable savagery being unleashed.
Because there are too many of us.
Now the only way out is up.
I think that's true.
Well, this is a question for, uh...
Do you think that we can deliver, see, what we have to do is either deliver an American standard of living to everyone on the planet or convince them that they don't want that by doing it ourselves.
But I, I don't see that happening.
I agree with you.
It could happen.
Yeah, the space colony is wonderful because it's, it's, it's, it really splits.
Everybody has to come and say, because here we're talking about building a machine larger by a thousand times than any machine ever built.
And saying, you know, is this the answer to man's problems or is this a deeper plunge into the nightmare?
I feel everything that you're saying, but I also think that it's too, in a sense, it's too intellectual because what you're saying is we understand what should be done and let's do it.
But what if, uh, we exist to stockpile plutonium and to build this staggering technology to build these space colonies because, to lift the Terran gene swarm off the surface of the planet because the planet is in danger.
What about the fact that the last million years has been the most turbulent of the last hundred million and the last hundred thousand the most turbulent of that?
Perhaps the planet is destabilizing.
In that case, what is happening is we are not, it isn't that man is evolving into space man and leaving the planet.
It's that man is the cutting edge of biology on the planet and biology is frantic to escape because it senses that the ecosystem, but there will be if we take everything and go.
And also that's a question. In other words, it's a commonplace, uh, of the G whiz school of thought that we're made of stars, alien stars, you know, the atoms in your body were once in the heart of alien stars.
Well, if that's true, and everyone agrees it is, but the statement which should follow on that, that means that there are atoms in your body which are, which were once the atoms of alien planets, not stars.
So, I think that, uh, the galaxy is no barrier at all to biology. Our biology is a barrier to understanding how biology really works.
So, one last thing. Co-evolution quarter was very much into space colonies at that point.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
The space colonies are gonna be such highly organized places in terms of our present culture and politics that they're gonna be totally authoritarian systems.
Because they have to be. Everything has to be totally controlled and in its place for those kind of very fragile environments to survive.
On Earth, you can have a very relaxed, liberal atmosphere, and the space colonies are gonna be a prison.
Wow!
Maybe, because, you see, the Earth is a prison, and we are threatened by toxicity and plutonium and all these wonderful things.
Plato, on the other hand, thought that the minimum governable size of the human population was 50,000 people.
Now, which is more likely to give rise to a totalitarian nightmare?
A society of 700 or a billion people with short resources on Earth, with hostile neighbors, or a swarm of space colonies, several hundred of them, each with a population no more than 50,000, and spread through a volume of the size of the solar system.
See, I think we stand on the brink of the greatest stage of pluralism since the Greek city state, and that it's not true, this whole thing about control.
But here is where there must be staggering control, because there are hydrogen weapons stacked like cordwood.
We must have thought control, not of populations, of leaders.
They agree on both sides.
This is the place where there is no pressure.
We have no idea how dangerous to ourselves the threat of extinction is, whether it occurs or not.
Just the weight we are carrying around, knowing that we could become extinct.
If there were a hundred space colonies spread through the solar system, man would be a galactic species.
Nothing short of the explosion of the star could threaten all genes aboard the space colony, and everybody will go.
We are simply the guy who gets to push the go button.
But the animals, the plants, the bacteria, the fungi, everything will maybe, probably fall in lots of 40s and 50s.
The people who build these highly technologics are the most scientific, authoritarian people on earth.
Oh, it'll be built, it'll be built for the wrong reason.
But it will be built.
You know, I mean, Columbus wanted to get rich.
The expansion of human consciousness.
His longtime interest in plant hallucinogens, drug experiences generally, and the conscious development of conscious alternatives,
led him into the investigation of the phenomenology of religious experience worldwide,
but particularly that of primitive people against a background of nature.
His interest led him on a journey to the Amazon basin, where he discovered a way in which these states became available to himself directly.
Terrence McKenna, I wonder if you could share with us that experience that shaped your life and work since that time.
Certainly.
There have actually been a number of expeditions to the Amazon that I have participated in.
The earliest in 1971, the most recent in 1981.
In 1981, a joint ethnobotanical expedition composed of people from Harvard and the University of British Columbia,
went down to Iquitos in the far east of Peru.
And my brother was part of that expedition.
He is an ethnochemist at the University of British Columbia.
We were looking at ayahuasca, which is a hallucinogenic beverage taken over a very wide area in the lowland jungles of Ecuador,
Columbia, and Peru.
And we were also looking at a very little-studied hallucinogen called ukuhe, or kuruko,
which is used by the Witoto, Bora, and Muenani people.
And in both cases, these hallucinogenic drugs are based on DMT,
or DMT in combination with some other chemical which potentiates the experience.
These are probably the two least-studied of the hallucinogens,
although ayahuasca is a major folk religion over a very large area
and is involved in shamanic curing
and is very familiar to the poor classes of the lowland jungles of Peru,
and is well-known among the mestizo populations.
The curico is a much less known drug,
and we were studying it because the orthodox pharmacological theories say that it should not be orally active,
and yet it is.
So there was a scientific problem there to deal with.
Something of discovering a new reality for science.
Well, you have to have a scientific problem to center these expeditions,
and then what you actually brush up against, of course, is the phenomenology of the drug,
the drug as it's experienced,
and this is far removed from the pharmacological issues which are being sorted out now in the laboratory.
But the experience of taking these drugs in the Amazon up these small tributaries that run into the main body of the river among pre-literate people who are definitely not middle class
and in the ambiance of the equatorial continental jungles is very interesting, very enlightening.
How did you respond to that?
I assume that you'd experimented with other hallucinogens in the recent past before you made that journey,
and that indeed you were looking for the effect that would have a psychophysical response in you,
and yet apparently you came upon something quite unexpected.
Yes, well, since the middle 60s we had been interested in dimethyltryptamine, DMT,
both because of the intensity of the experience and also because of the rapidity of its onset.
When DMT is smoked, it comes on in about 15 to 30 seconds, and the onset of the effects of that rapidity actually challenges science to explain it.
And then the content of the experience seemed to us to go beyond even the orthodox model of what the psychedelic experience should constitute.
In other words, the psychedelic experience has been discussed in terms of consciousness expansion
or exploring the contents of the personal or the collective unconscious
or achieving great empathy with works of art or something of that sort.
What we found with these tryptamines was there seemed to be an unanticipated dimension,
which was contact with alien intelligence.
I call it this for want of a better word,
organized intellecties that presented themselves in the drug trance with information that seemed to be not drawn
from the personal history of the individual having the experience or even from the collectivity of human experience.
And later we came to feel that this effect was particularized to the tryptamine hallucinogens.
In other words, not only DMT and ayahuasca and these more exotic Amazonian drugs, but also psilocybin,
which is probably the most widely experienced of these drugs.
To me, it was astonishing that a voice could address you in that state and impart information and dialogue with you.
Gordon Wasson, who discovered the psilocybin mushrooms or who formally brought them to the attention of Western science,
he also wrote about this phenomenon.
But for that matter, so did Plato in discussing the Logos for Hellenic human beings.
This experience of an interiorized guiding voice with a higher level of knowledge was not alien.
However, the intellectual adventure of the last thousand years has made an idea like that seem preposterous,
if not psychopathological.
And so, as moderns, as pharmacologists exploring these drug states, my brother and I came upon this phenomenon.
And in the ensuing years, we have worked with it, directed other people's attention to it.
And I would say a consensus has emerged that this phenomenon is real, but no consensus has emerged,
nor it may be that no consensus will ever emerge about exactly what it is.
Are we dealing here with an aspect, an autonomous psychic entity, as the Jungians would style it, a sub-self that has slipped away from the control of the ego?
Or are we dealing with something like a species overmind, a kind of collective intellect?
Or are we, in fact, dealing with an alien intelligence, with all that that implies?
It's not an easy question to answer.
It's not even an easy question to grapple with, because I think the phenomenon does not manifest itself,
except at doses high enough, taking now psilocybin, that the drug can be distinguished from any other drug.
And that would be my personal definition of the effective dose of a drug.
You should be able to tell it from any other drug.
Terence, there are certain parallels that are quite obvious.
One of them that immediately comes to mind are examples such as St. Joan hearing voices and gaining direction.
Granted, she was a farm girl, and perhaps she was growing mushrooms in the backyard.
But there seems to be throughout history, within the realms of religious experience, the hearing of voices.
And it's always attributed to, quote, God.
Right.
Whatever that image is for the individual that's experiencing it.
And I wonder how this equates.
Obviously, that experience does not...
Well, maybe...