In May 1999, psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given between three and nine months to live.
I contacted Terence by email and mentioned that I was making a documentary about shamans at the Amazon and asked if I could meet him and record an interview.
Flying back home from the Amazon on December the 9th, 1999, just four months before he died,
Terence gave me one of his last interviews at his home on the big island of Hawaii.
Terence had tried many natural therapy cures and had also recently undergone gamma knife surgery to try and remove the tumour.
You've been here for a while?
Oh, I finished the house about two and a half years ago and was here about two and a half years building it, so...
Let me get Christy.
Everyone was hoping for a miracle.
Why do you think governments, most governments in fact around the world, have banned ayahuasca and made most psychotropics illegal?
Well, I think a social system is the product of a process of, you could call it social natural selection,
that a civilisation produces various...
religious ideas, political ideas...
some survive and some don't.
And it's because the social system is applying selective pressure, saying universal medical care for all, we don't need that.
Sexual flexibility among teenagers, well, we don't need that.
So, over time, a social system is built out of what is said to be...
saved and what is thrown away. And so when you start putting drugs into a social system
that actually promote unusual ideas, you're pushing the most important buttons that a
society has. The buttons that shape what it believes about life and death and value and
marriage and childbearing and all these things. And so that's very sensitive stuff and inevitably
becomes a point of contention. And societies will arm wrestle over that, up to and including
putting you away for 20 or 30 years for a half a gram of grass or something.
The war on drugs that America's sort of pushing around the world, what do you think
the effect is of that and who's really behind it, do you think?
Well, wasn't the struggle against communism a kind of struggle against ideas and who thinks
what?
And who is permitted to believe that people should be paid more than $3.80 an hour for
whatever labor they're asked to do and some of this other stuff. So capitalism, if it
doesn't have enemies, it will create enemies. It will point out these people or these people.
And so I think it's a thing like that, that it's a struggle to control the political agenda.
And I'm not a Marxist. I don't have much paper. I'm not a Marxist. I don't have much
patience with that. But I do think how Marxism has talked about the value of work and worth
and productivity of the masses and all that. All that rhetoric carries right over into
the so-called war on drugs, which is really a war against other people's values. It's
a continuation of, you know, the holocaust and the war on drugs. It's a continuation
cultural genocide and all the other efforts made by the phenomenal success of capitalism to shove
its agenda down other people's throats what do you feel about the fact that people could be
put in jail for 12 years for drinking this stuff well it's a disturbing tendency i mean it means
that at least the u.s government has made the decision somewhere to push hard against this
which is always the first strategy the first strategy is push hard against some trivial thing
cannabis or lsd or something like that and then once defeated in that strategy then there is
usually a period of negotiated an effort to create some kind of negotiated settlement
and then once that fails there's usually a squaring off and the
issue is minimized and translated into something trivial and we move on to the next great social
issue it's crazy what do you feel about the um the synthetic dmt and and ayahuasca now being
available you know do you think that the magic is lost when it's synthesized or and there's and
there's no real ritual aspect to the taking of ayahuasca well it's not so much that the ritual
is lost as that the the people who are doing the making and the taking and the shaking
may not really understand what they're getting into a drug like synthetic ayahuasca
farmawaska do people realize this is the same thing as has been taken for thousands of years
down there do they realize its role in shamanic healing and all this it's just one more example
of how everything is desacralized and corrupted because you know first ayahuasca has never been
heard of and the next thing you know everybody wants it because it's all anybody's talking about
so it goes from this mystery to being a kind of a fact
or a rage and then it becomes an income source and once it becomes an income source it's a commodity
like journalism sex aluminum whatever is being peddled on the open market i would prefer to
see ayahuasca remain at the status let's say of peyote in the you know where the native peoples
who are into it uh
sort of keep the faith understand how to make it and talk about it and when there's a question as
to what it all means then you go back to those native people and listen to their myth and all
that there is data to show that ayahuasca is medically effective against uh malaria and
industrial
industrial intestinal parasites and things like that so really it's a basic part of this native
medical system and if instead of trying to put everybody in prison we actually
you know try to do research on this stuff and find out how it works and
how it affects various conditions we would probably extract its benefit much more quickly
okay so what about the the combination of ayahuasca and the psychotry varitis that seems to be a
magic combination um how is it that the the dmt is able to be absorbed in the in the stomach
whereas if yeah if you could just explain that relationship well it involves the inter-relationship
between uh a brain mind system the pt8 andatin system which allows them to absorb the pt6 путum
that has had all the monoamine oxidase taken out of it pharmacologically.
And all these psychoactive drugs seem to have a bigger, more dramatic impact
in the presence of a lowered MAO threshold.
And how this was discovered by Amazonian Indians millennia ago
and not discovered by Western science until 1956 or something
is just one of those peculiar facts about ethnobotany and ethnomedicine.
But it's certainly true that you have a much more dramatic effect with the two in combination.
And how many of these kinds of facts of folk science are out there to be discovered,
we don't really know yet, but slowly it's all being unraveled.
It's...
It's never been explained, you know, why there are so many plant psychedelics in the New World.
The cohoba snuffs, the ayahuasca, the mushrooms in the New World, salvia divinorum,
all of these things are New World, and this has been a social phenomenon,
the exploration of which has been pretty much pushed by New World anthropologists and philosophers.
If we'd had to depend on European philosophy for the content of the century,
we'd all be reading Jacques Derrida and, you know, those kind of people.
So it's a local phenomenon that's become global.
The way we value the Earth, the way we value commodities,
the way we extract them and manufacture them into saleable goods,
this will all...
be seen in a different way, I think, and, again, it's an issue of capital and labor
and how you value what you put your life into, and that sort of thing.
Well, what the shamans know that we don't is which plants how and where,
and it took a long time to figure this out, you know, they didn't invent the calculus, they didn't, you know,
they didn't, you know, they didn't invent the calculus, they didn't, you know,
sailing vessels of great speed and power.
None of that was pursued.
What was pursued was these vegetable entities that can be coaxed out of the plant world.
And the irony is that Europe, who set out, you know, in the 17th century to explore the world,
to bring in Christian civilization, may have encountered...
phenomenon variance on civilization that will ultimately prove more powerful...
more powerful than what we were peddling.
This discussion is by no means closed.
A lot about psychedelics before I encountered DMT...
and it showed me that I knew virtually nothing
Oh!
This is salvage of norama.
Oh yeah, this isolated energy has been added, and it's no good to let it go.
This is a great shot.
Full flower.
Uh-huh.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
You rarely see it so dramatically flowering.
This one?
Yeah.
Salvia divinorum.
Yeah.
And what...
Purple flowers.
What are the effects of these?
What part do you use?
You use the leaf.
The leaf.
And it has a compound called alpha-salvinorin in it and it's very easily grown in the right
soil.
You just take 80 leaves and chew them.
Yeah.
You just chew it.
Chew it.
Yeah.
And what's the effect?
And eat it as you're...
That's how the Mazatecs do it.
Oh, Mazatecs.
And what's the effect of it?
Very strange.
Holy shit, Jen.
Psychedelic.
Very hard to describe.
But...
Psychedelic.
Not really understood or known until 10 years ago or so, you know.
See the salvia all through here.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
And what's the legal status of that?
It's legal.
It's completely legal.
Amazingly enough.
Let's see.
This is Iowa.
That's why it was called Banisteriopsis because the leaves are opposed to each other like
the rungs of a ladder.
And it winds up into this.
I've got some pieces back at the house.
Oh, yeah.
You can show them.
Yeah.
Now here, this vine going up so high.
Higher.
That's ayahuasca.
I think the shaman offers an immense example of courage.
The shaman is not afraid of things which modern, postmodern people are afraid of.
of, specifically madness, a kind of madness.
People are afraid of drugs because they associate it with some kind of ultimate unhingement.
As we gain shamans who can speak to us in our own vocabulary, this will fade away.
This is, to some degree, the motivation for my career, is basically to give people permission
to say, it's safe, it's scary, it's weird, but you're not going to end up in a straight
jacket in some back ward.
You will live through this.
It's no more terrifying than the world's largest roller coaster or one of those places.
So permission is what I find people want from me.
They want me to say, yes, I did it.
It was very scary.
It was scary.
I lived to tell the tale.
I showed you there were more rabbits in the field than you thought, right?
I go to a place where language finds it very hard to pull over and look around.
It's almost as though it takes you to a world that is not Englishable, and I suppose Germanable.
But as a native speaker of English, that's what it looks to me like is happening, that
the vehicle of language can only ...
Breaks down?
Yeah, it breaks down, and no matter how you try and claw the air, it doesn't quite come
over and give itself to you.
So that's fascinating to me as a writer, and a storyteller, and someone with an interest
in narrative and all that.
The idea ...
The idea that there would be realities that you couldn't wrap a description around is
fascinating, and it grows more fascinating as life moves along.
It seems like a miracle, an absolute miracle of some strange sort in the area of cognitive
construction is taking place.
How can someone ...
I don't know.
How can someone benefit from ...
Well, some philosophers would say such a thing is impossible.
There aren't unspeakable realities.
Somebody else would say, well, it's this or it's that.
So it sheds light on certain questions of philosophy and heuristics and all that, that
seems to me that it gives real answers.
I mean, maybe you don't believe these answers.
But I know a connection.
I know a convincing argument when I see it, and if anybody with argument could do
to you what DMT does to you, you'd embrace it in a hurry.
Well, we're long away from ritual, and I think rituals are what we need, that that's
why we create sports leagues and beauty pageants and all these things.
Simply to ...
You know?
Reassure ourselves that in these ritual-confined spaces, these energies can be held, and it's
the part we are most distant from.
No, the plant is more impressive.
If it were a shaman, people would say, well, it's show business.
I mean, I saw a guy cut a woman in half on stage once, or I saw this, or I saw that.
But I think the fact that in the case of DMT, a match head-sized piece of orange wax
can pull your entire philosophical world out from under you in about 15 seconds is
very, very interesting.
I mean, how long did it take you to learn to talk?
Two years or a year and a half?
How long does it take you to DMT?
Oh, about 30 seconds.
You know?
So, yeah.
Yeah.
It's very interesting.
We've created enough alienation that it seems as though we are going to explore the uses
of these shamanic technologies.
So the high-tech culture, the scientific and materialist culture, seems to have made
a choice to explore these things, and the shamanic aboriginal culture seems to have
made its choice.
But it's going to integrate while we're going to, you know, have another one of these socially
destructive debates about law and order and obligation and all the rest of it.
That seems to me to be a waste of time.
What do you think Ayahuasca has to offer?
Well, all boundaries are dissolving.
That's what the end of the millennium means.
It means that, you know, the tribes of the Amazon basin, the tribes of the New Guinea
highlands, the tribes of Oxford and Cambridge, everything is dissolving and humanity is reaching
a kind of plural consensus.
I mean, even the most sophisticated capitalist, let us say, is aware now that it won't do
to cut down all the trees.
But that's a mistake.
So what's happening is a single human viewpoint is sort of coming into existence, a viewpoint
that values nature, values natural resources, and tries to, however clumsily, to make some
kind of peace out of the whole human mess that we're now mixed up in.
I think what it brings is an empathy to the...
I think what it brings is an empathy to the destruction of the planet.
You know, the cutting of a rainforest is suddenly no longer completely abstract.
It's actually something you can feel and relate to.
And all political change begins with a change of feeling and value.
So if we begin to see the aboriginal people of every continent as the holders of this
knowledge, they will begin to look not so naive, not so foolish or something like that,
but actually as sophisticated people who have developed a working relationship with these
powers and things.
And that's the only way you're going to get real political change on some of these issues.
If we were having this discussion 30 years ago, we would not be talking about the aboriginal
people.
We'd be talking about ayahuasca.
We'd be talking about mushrooms and their potential and, you know.
So I think the plants change, the drugs change, but the challenge stays the same and the challenge
is to build a humane and human world without doing damage to the humanity that's already
in it.
What's your view for the future, Ian?
It requires dedication and intelligence.
Not so much among our shaman and our inner voyagers, but among the legislators and the
people who actually are going to have to make the social change.
That's why what goes on in the Netherlands is so important.
These are the most liberal people in the world.
Well, are they liberal enough to actually change the basic structure of their society?
I mean, talk is easy.
I mean, I'm not saying that they're not.
But can they actually make the change?
What they're trying to do is establish the notion of a thought crime, you know, that
it's a crime to consider restructuring the state this way or this way.
And that will, you know, if we have not learned anything from the 20th century, we should
have learned that wars of ideology are hopeless.
And just bring incredulity.
Yeah.
And just bring incredible grief and loss of life.
So I'm hoping that what the 21st century can mean is movement beyond ideology and an actual
rational, and I think it is, rational approach to integrating the irrational into how we
think about society, city planning, social management, and all the rest of it.
Well, some years ago, a dozen years ago.
A dozen years ago or more, a fellow patented ayahuasca.
Somehow this happened.
It's not supposed to be possible with plants.
And then a group of several South American tribes put a lawsuit on him.
And it took a lot of money and years and years to work this to the Supreme Court.
And about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that you can't patent ayahuasca.
You can't patent a plant.
That a plant is not an invention.
It's not made by human genius.
It is a product of nature.
So no plants can be patented.
And that patent was declared void.
So that's a good thing.
There is a thing called the UN Convention on Narcotics, which was something that when
the US and NATO and all that.
Completely controlled the UN.
They produced this document, which if you signed it, you were basically joining this
club, which said you would commit resources, time, manpower to eradicating all these drugs.
And that was pretty much done through the late 50s and then on into the 60s.
And then, of course, LSD was done.
It was very threatening, because you can get 100,000 hits under one postage stamp.
Well, for somebody who's trying to control something that they look upon like nerve gas
or something, a weapon, quote, weapon, with that kind of a description makes people very
nervous indeed.
And so it came out of that.
they produce unexpected ideas and conclusions. That's what strange politics does. You know,
you go in a Freemason and a Republican and you come out, God knows what, a polyamorist and an
anarchist or something like that. Yeah, because they nibble away at the
edges of orthodoxy. I mean, once you get the idea that a mushroom can talk to you in your
native language and propose various things, life never looks quite the same again, you know. I mean,
in a sense, you could say civilization was the journey from fairy land to scientific materialism.
Well, then there you are. You think you've conquered scientific materialism,
but here's a mushroom, here's a vine, here's aretticum, here's
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and they all give you a message back that is just so peculiar you don't know what to do with it.
Well, there's a lot of evidence and discussion about whether or not it gives you telepathic powers
or science fiction-like powers.
This could be. I mean, two brains six feet apart are both biochemical oscillators.
I wouldn't consider it a miracle if it were found that brains floating in ayahuasca
have a kind of supernatural connection.
And if the tendencies of past history are to continue, that's what it would have to be,
that we're on the brink of designing drugs, of moving our technological design process
to a point where we can actually design drugs.
That extract power from them that we never had or dreamed of before.
And that would carry us well beyond the industrial revolution.
I mean, that would be the new world.
And just briefly, your recent journey, facing whatever it is that you've faced,
you know, death, what your journey about death, about...
You mean you're referring to the fact that I'm...
I have glioblastoma multiforme, which is a form of brain cancer.
Well, I wish I could say I'd had more insight into death.
I've had a fair amount of insight into dying, which I find a very alarming prospect.
It doesn't... Death itself is so far beyond ordinary experience.
The threat of dying doesn't really move you toward understanding it.
Death is the great mystery around which religions are built.
And being able to say, I know what it is, I know how it works,
is the way you start a congregation and get a little community going.
I would say the big surprise for me was I'm not afraid of death.
The way I thought I would be.
It's just such an intellectual question mark
that you just move to the next page
because there's nothing to be said about death
except that it seems to last rather a long time.
If you had one thing that you wanted to say to people
from all your learnings that you've had, you know, through your life,
what would that one message be to someone?
That following your own curiosity is a better method
for exploring the world than any of the methods offered.
Sheer curiosity is the thing that I've always let carry me along.
And I have no regrets about any of this.
I think it's...
worth the life
to put these issues in front of people.