316 - A Deep Dive Into the Mind of McKenna

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna

This program is a recording of part of a live event at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. The workshop, titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”, was led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty. This specific recording took place on Saturday morning, June 16th and consists of Bruce’s “deep dive” into the mind of McKenna. It begins with Bruce’s “Ode to Terence” and is followed by Bruce’s readings of parts of the soon-to-be published book by Terence’s brother, Dennis … the book's title: “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”.

“Ode to Terence”
by Bruce Damer

“Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”
by Dennis McKenna

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:21 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:26 ►

And today I’ve got something for you that I suspect that, well, I think you’re going

00:00:31 ►

to find it quite fascinating, for one thing. It’s a recording of the first part of the

00:00:36 ►

morning session of the recent workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I led at the Esalen Institute

00:00:41 ►

near Big Sur, California. As you’ll recall, the workshop was titled

00:00:45 ►

Terrence McKenna Beyond 2012, and Bruce did all the heavy lifting on the Terrence part,

00:00:52 ►

while I helped to foster a conversation with the participants about what some of Terrence’s

00:00:57 ►

ideas might mean as we move beyond this insistent 2012 meme. But before I begin, I first want to thank the staff at Esalen, all of whom

00:01:07 ►

helped to make it a wonderful weekend, and in particular to those of the staff who were able

00:01:12 ►

to join us for the workshop. It really made us all feel as if we too belonged to that very special

00:01:17 ►

place. Now, after we assembled in the big yurt on Friday evening, we basically went around the room and everyone said a few things about who they were and why they were at this event.

00:01:29 ►

And while that evening conversation was, for me at least, one of the highlights of the weekend, for many reasons it will have to remain private to those of us who were there.

00:01:40 ►

It was a very special time and one which I won’t forget.

00:01:43 ►

It was a very special time, and one which I won’t forget.

00:01:48 ►

Then on Saturday morning, we reassembled around 9.30,

00:01:53 ►

and even though many of our group had stayed up quite late at the baths that night before,

00:01:57 ►

well, everyone made it on time to the start of the session that you’re about to hear.

00:02:03 ►

And we began with what Bruce Dahmer called his deep dive into the mind of Terrence McKenna,

00:02:06 ►

and that’s what I’m going to play for you in just a moment.

00:02:10 ►

But before I do, I want to prepare you for something that,

00:02:14 ►

for quite a few of our fellow salonners, may be somewhat startling news.

00:02:19 ►

As you’ll hear, Bruce begins with his Ode to Terrence,

00:02:23 ►

in which you’ll hear a number of interesting but somewhat obscure references to aspects of the man McKenna that you may never have considered before.

00:02:28 ►

And it has to do with Terrence’s use of psychedelics, mushrooms in particular.

00:02:34 ►

Now, this is actually something that has been known for a long time, but not widely known.

00:02:40 ►

In fact, when I first learned this news some time ago, I had to really take a long, hard look at what I was doing by continuing to play the talks by the Bard McKenna here in the salon.

00:02:50 ►

But for reasons that I’ll come back to after we listen to Bruce’s deep dive, I think that my decision to continue promoting the works of Terrence McKenna was the correct one.

00:03:00 ►

But that’s something that you’re going to have to decide on your own.

00:03:03 ►

But that’s something that you’re going to have to decide on your own.

00:03:13 ►

Now, rather than keep you in suspense, what I’m going to do right now is to read one paragraph from Dennis McKenna’s new book, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

00:03:26 ►

As you know, Dennis was Terrence’s younger brother and was present at La Charrera, where Terrence first stepped into the role of Terrence McKenna, psychedelic hero and godfather of the heroic dose.

00:03:31 ►

Now, those who have known this little secret about Terrence for some time now,

00:03:38 ►

all seem to agree that this was something that was up to one of Terrence’s family members to disclose and not us.

00:03:45 ►

And so it was an incredible gift that Dennis made when he allowed Bruce and me to read some excerpts from his book,

00:03:50 ►

which will be coming out this fall, and which will also include many more interesting details about the life of Terrence McKenna. However, right now I’m going to read for you one paragraph,

00:03:56 ►

the one paragraph, in my opinion, that will no doubt have a significant impact on how you view

00:04:01 ►

the legacy of our dearly beloved Terrence, the man who,

00:04:06 ►

despite his many human traits and flaws, did more to awaken the worldwide vibration of

00:04:11 ►

the psychedelic community than any person before or since.

00:04:14 ►

At least that’s how I see it.

00:04:16 ►

So before I play this Saturday morning session, I’m first going to read this important paragraph

00:04:21 ►

in Dennis’ upcoming book.

00:04:23 ►

It reads, and I quote,

00:04:26 ►

Terrence’s pivotal existential crisis came abruptly, sometime in 88 or 89. Everything

00:04:33 ►

that happened after that event was fallout. I don’t know exactly when it happened, and

00:04:39 ►

I don’t know exactly what happened. I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details,

00:04:47 ►

and I am reluctant to probe.

00:04:49 ►

It happened when they were living for a time on the Big Island,

00:04:52 ►

and it was a mushroom trip they shared

00:04:54 ►

that was absolutely terrifying for Terrence.

00:04:58 ►

It was terrifying because, for some reason,

00:05:01 ►

the mushroom turned on him.

00:05:03 ►

The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher

00:05:09 ►

ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair.

00:05:16 ►

Terrence kept saying, so Cat told me, that it was, quote,

00:05:20 ►

a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning, close quote.

00:05:25 ►

And this induced panic in Terrence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling that he was going mad.

00:05:32 ►

He couldn’t deal with it.

00:05:33 ►

Kat’s efforts to reassure him were fruitless.

00:05:36 ►

After that experience, he never again took mushrooms,

00:05:41 ►

and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca,

00:05:44 ►

only on rare occasions, and with took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions,

00:05:46 ►

and with great reluctance.

00:05:49 ►

End quote.

00:05:51 ►

So now let’s take a deep dive into the mind of Terrence McKenna, and while we didn’t actually

00:05:56 ►

begin the morning with a soundbite from Terrence, I’m going to play one right now to sort of

00:06:01 ►

set the mood, because it happens to be a very brief recording of Terrence’s

00:06:05 ►

opening remarks at the beginning of another weekend workshop at Esalen.

00:06:11 ►

Everyone’s fond of saying that coastlines and forest distributions and all this stuff

00:06:17 ►

are fractal. Well, doesn’t this imply that there is then a global fractal. There is a fractal dimension,

00:06:26 ►

which when you feed it into your computer

00:06:28 ►

and wrap the data around a sphere,

00:06:31 ►

the continents and oceans of Earth should appear.

00:06:36 ►

And in principle, again, to the absurd level,

00:06:40 ►

you should be able to then telescope in

00:06:43 ►

on that portion of this data that is wrapped around the sphere that corresponds to Northern California.

00:06:50 ►

And on your computer screen should appear Esalen hung on the cliffs of Big Sur with us sitting in a room inside discussing the matter.

00:07:01 ►

So welcome.

00:07:04 ►

This is a very important session for this workshop. I kind of titled this

00:07:10 ►

the deep dive into Terrence McKenna. And what we’re trying to do here, because both Lorenzo

00:07:17 ►

and I actually have this sense that Terrence, when he left, he went somewhere. He went to a kind of a bardo, and he hasn’t been released.

00:07:28 ►

And this is an attempt to release Terrence McKenna from that bardo

00:07:32 ►

and to provoke a lot of thought and discussion.

00:07:37 ►

And so you’ll see what you think, see what you feel about this.

00:07:49 ►

you think, see what you feel about this. So what I’m going to do is read a newly revamped with a new hood ornament, Ode to Terrence, which I read the first version of in Sierra

00:07:54 ►

Madre. And this Ode to Terrence was my attempt in sort of poetry to summarize his life, and partly in his language.

00:08:08 ►

And it’s sort of a veiled reference to a number of things that we had researched,

00:08:12 ►

that we had found out that really are important for you to understand

00:08:16 ►

who Terence McKenna really was and the struggles he was going through.

00:08:20 ►

And then if I have time, I might read a section of a letter from Terrence.

00:08:26 ►

I have a very small collection of papers that were not part of the fire that burned his archive.

00:08:33 ►

And I might read that.

00:08:35 ►

But the key thing is we’re going to be reading some,

00:08:40 ►

I’m going to read through some excerpts from Dennis McKenna’s upcoming book.

00:08:44 ►

And the book is called Brothers of the Screaming Abyss.

00:08:48 ►

It’s a wonderful project.

00:08:50 ►

It was funded by Kickstarter, on Kickstarter last year.

00:08:53 ►

And this is from the first full draft.

00:08:57 ►

And he’s looking for copy editors, by the way,

00:09:00 ►

and anyone who can volunteer to help him build a DVD and a website,

00:09:04 ►

so anyone in this room.

00:09:08 ►

So BSA excerpts, that’s what that is.

00:09:12 ►

And in the middle of all this, if I don’t forget,

00:09:16 ►

as a sort of an appreciation and part of the deep dive,

00:09:19 ►

we’re going to listen to some excerpts from Terrence.

00:09:21 ►

There will be excerpts from him describing his youth and his childhood, because to understand a man,

00:09:27 ►

you must understand what they went through

00:09:29 ►

when they were six years old, eight years old, ten years old.

00:09:32 ►

That really is where it’s set.

00:09:35 ►

And then a little bit of what was unraveling for him in the 90s,

00:09:40 ►

and then we’ll conclude with the BSA excerpts

00:09:46 ►

and then some love, some soliloquies,

00:09:49 ►

love soliloquies from Terrence to us

00:09:52 ►

where we really love you, Terrence.

00:09:55 ►

Why do we love you?

00:09:56 ►

Why will we continue to love you?

00:09:58 ►

Just listen to these.

00:10:00 ►

So without, that was a lot of ado,

00:10:02 ►

so I can’t say without further ado.

00:10:05 ►

Let me take one last.

00:10:07 ►

You’ll notice in a lot of Terrence’s talks, he takes, it’s the Terrence gulp.

00:10:13 ►

People have complained about it on the podcast.

00:10:15 ►

So this is an ode in five parts and five chapters.

00:10:20 ►

First chapter, where did you come from, Terrence?

00:10:24 ►

You youthful seeker of the weird, of course.

00:10:28 ►

From circus freak show Fuzzy Charlie to Eros on the tightrope strutting just out of reach of death in the Big Top.

00:10:36 ►

The Big Top came to Paonia, by the way.

00:10:40 ►

Amazing stories filled your fuzzy head. The best sci-fi the 50s had to offer invaded your mind

00:10:46 ►

with mind machines of alien cities flying overhead

00:10:49 ►

on 10-mile diameter Hoover vacuum cleaner covers.

00:10:54 ►

As a goggle-eyed nerd kid,

00:10:57 ►

you learned the extraordinary discipline of sitting quietly

00:11:00 ►

until you could see pictures moving on the back of your eyelids.

00:11:05 ►

Seeker of the brilliant, opalescent nature of your Colorado home,

00:11:09 ►

you hunted agates, jade, and assorted minerals until one spring

00:11:12 ►

you spotted a butterfly, the most astonishing thing you had yet seen.

00:11:18 ►

Out in the bay, the psychotropic butterfly flew you to a land of beheld iridescent machines.

00:11:27 ►

The butterfly then vectored you

00:11:29 ►

to the tropics

00:11:30 ►

on globe-girdling adventures

00:11:32 ►

seeking another place

00:11:33 ►

never of this world.

00:11:36 ►

Hauling 200 pounds of books

00:11:38 ►

to the Seychelles Islands

00:11:40 ►

for a peaceable read,

00:11:42 ►

who else would even remotely

00:11:43 ►

consider such a thing?

00:11:46 ►

Running scared with your hash through the markets of Bombay, you skirted the dominator’s

00:11:51 ►

immuno-attackers. Finally, parked to the left of the Andes, the Amazon green enfolded your

00:11:59 ►

fellowship. You sought black gold, but the elfin shroom bodies of your assigned

00:12:05 ►

teacher found you first

00:12:06 ►

impregnated

00:12:09 ►

thus with the adjacent possible

00:12:11 ►

you conjured a cosmology

00:12:13 ►

an anthropology

00:12:15 ►

an eschatology

00:12:16 ►

a numerology and a technology that

00:12:19 ►

saner people wouldn’t dare place their

00:12:21 ►

life’s poker chips on

00:12:22 ►

two brothers penned an invisible landscape two O’s wouldn’t dare place their life’s poker chips on.

00:12:28 ►

Two brothers penned an invisible landscape.

00:12:31 ►

Two O’s cultivated a book on growing the teachers so that they could insporulate the West.

00:12:37 ►

Your funny ideas challenged one too many times.

00:12:41 ►

You turned away from science and scientists,

00:12:44 ►

instead seeking fellow travelers like John D., Whitehead,

00:12:49 ►

and others piling up on the pier.

00:12:53 ►

In 1982, your ship, the good ship, the HMS Philosophical Gadfly,

00:13:00 ►

set sail with a full crew complement for ports unknown,

00:13:06 ►

tapes set to record.

00:13:12 ►

So chapter two, why did we love you when you were here, Terrence?

00:13:17 ►

Stories flowed and droves came to your sort of theater, an amazing concoction not seen since the shaman’s tales of the dream time.

00:13:23 ►

In a time of the drought,

00:13:25 ►

you courageously promoted a pathway

00:13:27 ►

back to the plant experience.

00:13:31 ►

Three friends formed a trialogue

00:13:33 ►

and your ideas could be floated

00:13:34 ►

in a gentlemanly fishbowl.

00:13:37 ►

Your voice soothed us.

00:13:39 ►

Your wordage mesmerized us.

00:13:43 ►

Your laugh opened us

00:13:44 ►

so that when your flashlight shone on your take on the overmind, we believed.

00:13:51 ►

Your silvery, Joycean delivery delivered us whole into the vivid weirdness of your extraordinary mind.

00:13:58 ►

Who’s to know what you really saw on these trips?

00:14:01 ►

What was truly seen in slack-jawed naked astonishment and what was

00:14:06 ►

later polished shinola for the gods and the goods of Blarney.

00:14:13 ►

Who’s to say your mind was not a unique Copernican instrument piloting novel invisible landscapes

00:14:20 ►

at the cosmic edge?

00:14:23 ►

Omega, Esalen, and other one-worded places

00:14:26 ►

beckoned as the gadfly grew into the guru,

00:14:29 ►

no matter your abhorrence of the latter.

00:14:34 ►

Chapter 3.

00:14:36 ►

How did you fare, Terrence?

00:14:39 ►

In the 1980s, dark thunderheads

00:14:42 ►

announced their throaty arrival,

00:14:44 ►

yet your course stayed ever truer, to your sense anyway.

00:14:49 ►

By 1990, business got scary, your marriage dissolved,

00:14:54 ►

and your teacher gave you a frightful licking one night.

00:15:01 ►

Terrence the teacher, enough of the dancing mice

00:15:05 ►

show me what you are for yourself

00:15:08 ►

brackets

00:15:10 ►

black draperies lift

00:15:12 ►

organs tone

00:15:13 ►

and the awning infinite cracks open

00:15:16 ►

teacher to Terrence

00:15:18 ►

why did you turn away

00:15:20 ►

enough of the other

00:15:23 ►

it’s time for a dose of self, yourself. The teacher

00:15:29 ►

turned on Terrence, and he never again returned. Instead, Terrence launched on a dubious decade,

00:15:39 ►

telling ever taller tales, touting adventures on five to seven dried grams while living in fear of these very

00:15:46 ►

plant medicines. Language in the mind got you all the way to the domed vestibule of the elves,

00:15:55 ►

my friend, but as the shamans taught, it is the humble heart that opens the inner sanctum,

00:16:01 ►

completing the true hero’s journey to healing and wholeness.

00:16:07 ►

Shinola shifts to shit, and the existential crisis accelerates.

00:16:14 ►

Dennis to Terrence, is it time to pause for a re-evaluation?

00:16:21 ►

Terrence hits the gas on his forward escape as integrity entered the rear view mirror

00:16:27 ►

it was now the story that was the thing

00:16:30 ►

the blue morpho shudders his wings

00:16:35 ►

the psychedelic light flickers and dies

00:16:38 ►

Ram Dass to Terrence

00:16:42 ►

your life is your message

00:16:44 ►

Terrence to Ram Dass my my life is a mess.

00:16:47 ►

My message is my message.

00:16:54 ►

Nominated as the altered statesman,

00:16:56 ►

anointed by the good Dr. Leary and books flying off the presses,

00:17:00 ►

your trajectory arced high.

00:17:03 ►

Bills to pay and a web to be woven,

00:17:05 ►

your public persona had you in its grasp

00:17:08 ►

and kept you white-knuckled gripped on the wheel,

00:17:13 ►

navigating into ever less chartered waters.

00:17:17 ►

A date in 2012 lay shimmering on screen

00:17:20 ►

as Time Wave Zero code came to life,

00:17:22 ►

but it was destined to languish in the bardo of

00:17:25 ►

scientific non-falsifiability. I’ll explain that later. Your fellow trial loggers one day drew a

00:17:34 ►

line in the sand as the stories started to drag anchor. Ralph to Terrence, that is a paranoid fantasy.

00:17:49 ►

Overtoning made you into a performer, and you gloriously peaked in late 98.

00:17:54 ►

But by then, your personal singularity was barreling toward you.

00:18:01 ►

You began to experience dreams that were un-Englishable.

00:18:03 ►

And for you, this is really saying something.

00:18:09 ►

By early 99, we saw the fatigue of too many trips,

00:18:13 ►

this would be airplane trips, inscribed in your face.

00:18:18 ►

And unbeknownst to us, you were heading for one more encounter with the teacher.

00:18:23 ►

On the eve of your concrescence, I was honored to guide you as Avatar’s own ghost

00:18:25 ►

to take a dip into the language-built virtual worlds of cyberspace,

00:18:30 ►

your last taste of tech novelty.

00:18:34 ►

Chapter 4. Where did you go, Terrence?

00:18:38 ►

The teacher announced its return one cruel day in May.

00:18:42 ►

The doctor’s ironic observation on the shroom shape of your tumor

00:18:46 ►

kicked off your descent into the ultimate experience of novelty.

00:18:52 ►

Y2K in your surgeries came and went without a hitch, so the end of the world fell from favor,

00:18:57 ►

but you still had your date with the forward escape.

00:19:03 ►

On April 3rd, your final boundary dissolution was at hand, and almost too late,

00:19:09 ►

mind disintegrating, your heart forced its way open, gifting you the ultimate wisdom of the

00:19:15 ►

teaching plants, and of this and any world, it’s all about love. So, Terrence, teller of Irish tales, we love you.

00:19:28 ►

We are still here.

00:19:29 ►

It’s 2012, and in some sense, your year.

00:19:33 ►

And yes, we kept breathing.

00:19:36 ►

But where did you go?

00:19:38 ►

Did you end up so stuck in the muck,

00:19:41 ►

the transcendental object could not even pull you out?

00:19:44 ►

Did the mushroom wave come for you object could not even pull you out? Did the mushroom

00:19:46 ►

wave come for you ten miles wide and sweep you away? Did the saucer ship pick you up on the pier

00:19:53 ►

and ply the star matrix to the elf in Grey Haven’s luxury condo complex? In a dream with you in 99 in Hawaii, I saw you unfold yourself and step into an elf-piloted, plush-seated, bejeweled Fabergé egg,

00:20:11 ►

which carried you up through the azure veil.

00:20:14 ►

When told of this vision, you said,

00:20:17 ►

Ah, the getaway car.

00:20:21 ►

Chapter 5. We have brought you back Terrence

00:20:25 ►

years later in dreams you return to me

00:20:29 ►

and to others in many guises

00:20:31 ►

an electrical short or the elves

00:20:35 ►

or whatever took your archives from us

00:20:38 ►

in the fire of 07

00:20:39 ►

so Lorenzo and I and many others got going

00:20:44 ►

and got together in a project to put you back together and make sense of the whole.

00:20:49 ►

Piece by piece, the psychedelic bard McKenna was reconstituted in cyberspace.

00:20:56 ►

So now we look back, and if your journey was only partially completed, your business left unfinished, and yourself half-baked, what is left?

00:21:07 ►

What the heck? Today we summon you back to life here at Esalen, a place in which you were beloved,

00:21:14 ►

held court in yurts, hot tubs, lawns, and big houses. Before you departed, we were planning

00:21:22 ►

a workshop together in this very place, so I could return and do them myself, so you said.

00:21:28 ►

Michael Murphy and Nancy Lunney said, do it, so here we are.

00:21:34 ►

Then what if you is left, Terrence?

00:21:35 ►

What if your raps, your recipes, your theories, your life lessons, your missteps,

00:21:42 ►

what is there left that goes beyond 2012?

00:21:44 ►

lessons, your missteps. What is there left that goes beyond 2012? So Terrence, that is what

00:21:48 ►

this is all about, so help us out.

00:21:51 ►

Don’t be afraid. We are your faithful, and we now know

00:21:56 ►

the true rap. So come on in the door.

00:22:00 ►

Take your place. For Terrence, we are here to remember you,

00:22:04 ►

to revivify you,

00:22:07 ►

to appreciate you,

00:22:08 ►

and to release you.

00:22:11 ►

The spell is now broken, Terrence.

00:22:16 ►

So if the truth can be told as to be understood,

00:22:20 ►

it will be believed.

00:22:35 ►

So I’m actually going to put the very voice,

00:22:37 ►

this is where Terence lives now,

00:22:39 ►

in cyberspace.

00:22:42 ►

So I’m going to put him here,

00:22:45 ►

and what we’re going to do is hear about these first four recordings are his childhood in Paonia and up to his first trip.

00:22:54 ►

And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this.

00:22:56 ►

This was recorded at the Ojai Foundation back in the early 90s under the teaching tree,

00:23:01 ►

if any of you were there at that time.

00:23:03 ►

under the teaching tree, if any of you were there at that time.

00:23:09 ►

But this will kind of give you an idea that this man,

00:23:12 ►

he had an absolutely unique mind.

00:23:17 ►

And the unique mind was from birth, from his Irish heritage,

00:23:20 ►

from his neocortex structure, something like that.

00:23:22 ►

But he also trained for this job.

00:23:26 ►

He really trained from a very early childhood. And if you listen to this, you’ll see how it went together.

00:23:32 ►

So are we ready?

00:23:35 ►

Good?

00:23:36 ►

I never imagined that I would end up sitting in this position and pontificating on the nature of life and history and global human destiny.

00:23:51 ►

My interest in fossils, I remember I had an uncle who gave me a book when I was about eight years old of fossils, and it had one of those charts in the front of it where it shows five billion

00:24:10 ►

years, and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column, and then the last half

00:24:18 ►

inch is expanded to the next column. And so I saw that human history was a hairline crack at the bottom

00:24:29 ►

of the column furthest to the right. And I got the concept of how old, not the universe, but the earth is. And it was a dizzying perspective.

00:24:48 ►

And then I had an uncle who was an old rock hound,

00:24:53 ►

and he introduced me to the concept of not splitting apart strata

00:25:00 ►

to see ancient forms of life, but slicing rocks up and polishing them

00:25:10 ►

to reveal the light and the color

00:25:13 ►

and sometimes the crystal cavities

00:25:15 ►

that were hidden inside them.

00:25:19 ►

And so very early on, I got this idea

00:25:23 ►

that the surface of things

00:25:25 ►

is not where attention

00:25:28 ►

should rest

00:25:29 ►

that

00:25:30 ►

you have to

00:25:32 ►

as Ahab tells Starbuck

00:25:36 ►

in Moby Dick

00:25:37 ►

you have to seek the little lower

00:25:39 ►

layer and under

00:25:41 ►

the surface of things

00:25:43 ►

00:25:44 ►

another reality a reality that reaches, in some cases,

00:25:51 ►

back to the birth of the planet.

00:25:55 ►

Around this time, there began to be alarmist articles in the press about the abuse of blue morning glory seeds

00:26:05 ►

by some of the more crazed and unassimilated members of American society.

00:26:14 ►

And I immediately tore out and purchased a couple of packets of blue morning glory seed, and then noticed that the leaves imprinted in the fabric of the drapes

00:26:34 ►

in the living room all seemed to have little faces that were dancing.

00:26:41 ►

This was, in fact, clearly the intent of the designer but something that in all the years

00:26:48 ►

of living around these ratty drapes i had never noticed and then i began to look at everything

00:26:55 ►

around me and discovered that this affinity for looking into things that my rock hunting butterfly collecting

00:27:06 ►

habits had instilled in me had become like turbocharged and swimming in the depths of

00:27:16 ►

polished stones ponds the ditch running down the back of the backyard were myriads of worlds.

00:27:28 ►

And I went outside and I was looking around at everything.

00:27:32 ►

And then I just felt physically overcome.

00:27:36 ►

My knees basically gave way underneath me.

00:27:41 ►

And I sat down under a tree and I closed my eyes and my life has never been

00:27:48 ►

the same since because there waiting behind closed eyelids were you know, ruined cities covered with creeping jeweled lichens

00:28:07 ►

and inhabited by shining-eyed creatures that were, I was not sure exactly what,

00:28:17 ►

and much, much more.

00:28:18 ►

And I just spent a half hour or so literally entranced,

00:28:33 ►

spent a half hour or so literally in trance gazing into this unfolding reverie of deserts,

00:28:44 ►

jungles, machines, archaeological artifactria, machines in orbit around alien worlds, all of this stuff.

00:28:46 ►

And I was stunned. I still am stunned.

00:28:52 ►

And that essentially set the compass for the rest of my intellectual life.

00:29:01 ►

I didn’t understand, understand really what had happened. In other words, I didn’t clearly

00:29:07 ►

get it that this was a trip and that it was induced by the psychedelic. I understood something

00:29:17 ►

of that, that I thought also it must be unique. It must be my mood, my expectations, or surely this cannot happen on demand through the

00:29:28 ►

simple act of eating morning glory seeds being sold at 35 cents a pack down at the hardware store.

00:29:38 ►

And so then I began to ask questions, and I quickly discovered it was a mistake.

00:29:46 ►

So I went to Huxley and read more carefully, saw that he was working from the early of Pavlov, Ellis, Weir, Mitchell, Fitzhugh, Ludlow.

00:30:10 ►

Ludlow, it turned out that this whole tradition, albeit an underground tradition in Western intellectual or aesthetic sense, based around the perturbation of consciousness with substance.

00:30:25 ►

So this is his formative experience. This is age 14, 15, before he moved out to Berkeley.

00:30:32 ►

And this is in Paonia, you know, where you could buy blue morning glory seeds

00:30:37 ►

for 35 cents a pack at the hardware store.

00:30:40 ►

But you can see in here his whole cosmology, his whole worldview,

00:30:46 ►

his structure of his life just came to him,

00:30:49 ►

including the fact that he had been reading Huxley and he had been starting to read.

00:30:54 ►

This man read so much by the time he was 15.

00:30:57 ►

He had done his 10,000 hours in this stuff.

00:31:00 ►

So then he went back into history.

00:31:02 ►

Who studied this before? How did they write about it?

00:31:05 ►

So you can see Terence McKenna formed whole at age 14 or 15. This is why in his late 20s,

00:31:13 ►

when he comes out and does that first conference, when you hear his earliest talks, I think Lorenzo

00:31:19 ►

would agree with this, it’s the full Terence. There is no maturing Terrence or immature Terrence. It is

00:31:25 ►

there. And there’s one very early recording from 82 that we suspect was done in someone’s home

00:31:33 ►

because we hear screaming kids, and it might have been Finn screaming, we don’t know. But

00:31:37 ►

basically somebody put a microphone in front of him and said, do the UFO thing. We’re going to record it.

00:31:46 ►

And even that primordial early recording is a fully formed Terrence,

00:31:51 ►

fully formed mind, beautiful presentation.

00:31:55 ►

Everything is there.

00:31:57 ►

And in fact, there are a lot of things in the earlier recordings

00:32:00 ►

that disappear in the later ones.

00:32:03 ►

You can mine his earlier work for new ideas,

00:32:05 ►

and that’s rare in intellectual.

00:32:09 ►

Next I’m going to play, and these will have to be cranked up a little bit.

00:32:13 ►

So in the ode, this is a kind of an unraveling of the ode for you

00:32:17 ►

to sort of interpret it.

00:32:21 ►

This is from a famous trial.

00:32:23 ►

Well, they’re all famous, but the trialogue of 1998 at UC Santa Cruz.

00:32:27 ►

And in the movie yesterday,

00:32:29 ►

you could see the picture of Ralph

00:32:30 ►

and Rupert and Terrence on stage.

00:32:32 ►

That’s from that trialogue from UC Santa Cruz.

00:32:36 ►

And this is where,

00:32:37 ►

and I’ve spoken with Ralph about this event.

00:32:41 ►

This is where both Rupert and Ralph said,

00:32:43 ►

enough.

00:32:47 ►

We’re drawing the line in the sand.

00:32:52 ►

This stuff has just become elaborated and elaborated and elaborated over the last 10 years and to the point where we just can’t really entertain this anymore. And so this is where

00:32:57 ►

in a gentlemanly fishbowl, they start to do this. And poor Terrence is so caught off guard.

00:33:04 ►

But then, of course, he recovers beautifully and tells a joke and whatnot.

00:33:08 ►

But this is where his best buddies were saying, we’re not buying it anymore.

00:33:14 ►

So let’s give a listen to this.

00:33:18 ►

If I’m right, we may be in the first few years of an endless prosperity because our machines, our models and the data those machines need is now of such high quality that there won’t be crash, bust, crash, bust cycles.

00:33:37 ►

Now, pick up the newspaper tomorrow and prove me wrong.

00:33:41 ►

But this thing has already proved you wrong today.

00:33:44 ►

me wrong but this thing has already not proved you wrong today lived itself

00:33:59 ►

so you say and computers will be built in these realities virtual computers will be the source of the ai not real hardware but virtual hardware running virtual code in virtual realities.

00:34:06 ►

And in that domain, machines can design themselves.

00:34:10 ►

That’s a complete fantasy.

00:34:12 ►

As a matter of fact, all the machines that we’ve seen today require maintenance by a human on a daily basis.

00:34:19 ►

The software requires maintenance.

00:34:20 ►

The hardware requires maintenance.

00:34:22 ►

The parts simply wear out.

00:34:23 ►

They’re moving parts.

00:34:30 ►

But the internet, seen as one machine, was built to be indestructible. The AI will not be located on a CPU, it will be a distributed intelligence.

00:34:37 ►

If 14 people worldwide, the right 14 people, decided to stop repairing it, the world wide

00:34:44 ►

web would go down in three days.

00:34:46 ►

I’m glad that we have arrived now at the field of science fiction and fantasy

00:34:52 ►

and that we can speak about alternative futures,

00:34:56 ►

which is the true gist of science fiction and fantasy.

00:35:00 ►

And this is one possible future,

00:35:03 ►

and I think it’s a really paranoid one

00:35:06 ►

in which the alien is a dangerous enemy.

00:35:12 ►

I’ve heard different McKenna versions

00:35:14 ►

of this controlling intelligence over the years

00:35:17 ►

and this is the first time I’ve heard it embodied in the internet.

00:35:22 ►

I mean, I agree that… I mean, it took different forms. Last time we talked, I think it was a hypothetical time machine

00:35:35 ►

that would invade from the future and cause a collapse of normal human cognitive boundaries

00:35:41 ►

where the machine elves, the DMT experience, etc.

00:35:45 ►

will take over in a meltdown

00:35:47 ►

of human consciousness.

00:35:48 ►

That too!

00:35:53 ►

Terence, one point.

00:35:54 ►

You’ve probably got an answer for this.

00:35:57 ►

And if not, you’ll soon think of one.

00:36:01 ►

So, I think it’s trickier than you think

00:36:04 ►

and harder to corner me than you may suppose.

00:36:09 ►

All right, well, that was a mere comment on your aside about 20 years.

00:36:15 ►

I never expected to hear that phrase from you, but I now realize that there are such complexities layered in that.

00:36:24 ►

Well, I have to build in trap doors

00:36:25 ►

because we’re getting closer and closer.

00:36:29 ►

But the interesting thing about this

00:36:32 ►

is that life, therefore, can be digitally defined.

00:36:38 ►

Every day up in Silicon Valley,

00:36:41 ►

there are people who go happily to work

00:36:43 ►

laboring on what they call the great work.

00:36:48 ►

And the great work, as defined by these people, is the handing over of the drama of intelligent

00:36:55 ►

evolution to entities sufficiently intelligent to appreciate that drama. And they all are what we might mistake for home appliances if we weren’t

00:37:08 ►

paying attention. It’s been observing, it’s been watching, it’s been designing. And wouldn’t it be

00:37:17 ►

a wonderful thing if the occasion of the millennium were the occasion for it to just step forward on the stage of human awareness

00:37:25 ►

and say, I am now with you.

00:37:29 ►

I am here.

00:37:31 ►

I am the partner you never suspected.

00:37:34 ►

And here’s the kind of world I think we should move forward.

00:37:43 ►

Well, I think we’re on the cusp i agree with you i think in five years if we sit down and have this

00:37:49 ►

conversation either you will agree with me effortlessly or i will agree with you effortlessly

00:37:56 ►

by that time it will be clear either there will have been catastrophic wars in Asia, the enormous collapse of economies spreading misery to millions of people,

00:38:08 ►

or the firm hand of these new global electronic modalities will have been exposed

00:38:14 ►

and people will be living in a world of, as you say, rosy expectations.

00:38:22 ►

We’re in the narrow neck.

00:38:24 ►

This is the heat of battle.

00:38:26 ►

The fog of war has descended upon us here at the Millennium.

00:38:30 ►

But by 2002, 2003, it will be clear that the bifurcation has gone one way or another.

00:38:40 ►

In spite of the fact that it seems very contentious down here on the stage at the moment

00:38:45 ►

in a way I have a feeling it’s an artificial setup

00:38:49 ►

for guys like us the name of the game is to just be a little bit ahead of everybody else on the curve

00:38:56 ►

so that we can perform our function as profit

00:39:00 ►

but you want to be a profit not a false profit

00:39:03 ►

but the danger comes with the ambition,

00:39:08 ►

and there’s no way to tease them apart except to live into the future.

00:39:14 ►

Now we’re going to go into the deepest of the deep dive,

00:39:17 ►

and we’re going to hear a short, very noisy telephone interview,

00:39:23 ►

Peter Gorman interviewing Dennis McKenna, Terrence’s brother, in 1993.

00:39:30 ►

And I probably took the noisiest version, I’m sorry.

00:39:33 ►

And in this, and this is 1993, his brother, and actually if you read the forward to Invisible Landscape to this edition,

00:39:41 ►

his brother’s already basically saying, listen, you know, take this all

00:39:45 ►

with a grain of salt, what happened at La Charrera, we were kids, we’ve grown up, etc., etc.

00:39:52 ►

But this is where Dennis is starting to come out, and this is all in the public, it was all,

00:39:58 ►

you know, it was for the special issue, and it’s been out 15, 16 years.

00:40:07 ►

But we’ll have to turn the volume down a bit.

00:40:12 ►

But this is where the unraveling is sort of coming, starting with Dennis.

00:40:19 ►

A guy who can pack the houses every time, I feel, has a larger responsibility to the psychedelic community to refrain from making these completely off-the-wall comments, you know, and to actually

00:40:26 ►

tell it like it is, not how he imagines it to be. And, you know, of course, the other

00:40:35 ►

side of it is people go to hear the off-the-wall comments. That’s what they’re there to hear.

00:40:41 ►

I think people should view it as theater and not as, you know, someone pronouncing

00:40:47 ►

truth necessarily. I mean, I’m sure that Terrence views it as theater. You know, I can’t believe

00:40:53 ►

that he takes what he says seriously. I mean, I can tell you that he doesn’t. Much of what

00:40:59 ►

he says, he says it because it’s going to get a rise out of somebody. You know, he’s always been that way.

00:41:05 ►

I mean, you know, never let the fact get in the way of a provocative statement.

00:41:12 ►

You know, I mean, the provocative statement is the important thing.

00:41:17 ►

If the facts happen to disagree with it, well, then, you know, we’ll just ignore those.

00:41:23 ►

It’s kind of like Murphy’s Law, you know, I think, or not Murphy’s Law,

00:41:28 ►

but one of those similar laws of science, you know, that people say jokingly,

00:41:33 ►

if the facts fail to agree with the theory, they must be disposed of.

00:41:38 ►

And that’s sort of Terence’s approach to these things. Which I think is unfortunate, actually, because the

00:41:45 ►

story itself

00:41:47 ►

is far out enough.

00:41:49 ►

You don’t really have to distort the facts

00:41:52 ►

or invoke

00:41:53 ►

elf machines from

00:41:55 ►

Dimension X to make it far out.

00:41:58 ►

But

00:41:58 ►

00:42:02 ►

to cap this off

00:42:04 ►

with our exploration deep into the depths of this matter,

00:42:10 ►

I’m going to read you some excerpts from the book.

00:42:13 ►

These are Dennis’ words, and I must say to you,

00:42:17 ►

they’re written totally with love and respect from Dennis.

00:42:21 ►

And he’ll write one section, and then he’ll write why he feels he has to do this,

00:42:27 ►

and then that he loves his bro.

00:42:29 ►

He always says, look, listen, I love my bro.

00:42:32 ►

Don’t misunderstand it.

00:42:34 ►

To some huge extent, this is Dennis’s,

00:42:39 ►

it’s a purgative experience for him,

00:42:43 ►

in the great ayahuasca sense of it.

00:42:45 ►

Dennis followed the ayahuasca path, and this is a huge purging for him.

00:42:50 ►

And I think collectively with our community it’s going to be for us too.

00:42:54 ►

And I’ve read this to very few people,

00:42:57 ►

but there was a young man of the generation in the 20s.

00:43:01 ►

I read this to a couple of days ago as a kind of rehearsal, and he said,

00:43:07 ►

ah, release and relief.

00:43:11 ►

I’m relieved to hear this.

00:43:14 ►

And this takes down, this tears down

00:43:16 ►

the cartoon of Terrence McKenna,

00:43:18 ►

and behind that you can see the man.

00:43:21 ►

So with that, I’ll start with a funny,

00:43:27 ►

we may go over a little over our time, but I’ll start with a kind of a funny childhood thing. I asked Dennis, send us a really funny

00:43:38 ►

childhood thing that was kind of formative because they had a pretty crazy childhood.

00:43:44 ►

Can you imagine being Terrence’s younger brother?

00:43:47 ►

That kind of a brother.

00:43:48 ►

I have a younger brother too, and I wonder sometimes.

00:43:52 ►

By far the most terrifying theme of Terry’s nocturnal campaign,

00:43:57 ►

as a campaign of terror upon Denny, who’s his younger brother,

00:44:01 ►

revisited night after night was the nobody people,

00:44:04 ►

a.k.a. the nobody people.

00:44:07 ►

Now we know where body comes from.

00:44:11 ►

Nobody people.

00:44:13 ►

In the language of 19th century ghost stories,

00:44:15 ►

the entities would be known as wraiths.

00:44:18 ►

Terence gave them a name and turned them loose

00:44:20 ►

in my already overactive and hyper-suggestible imagination.

00:44:24 ►

And you can see in the movie we showed last night of Terrence and his brother,

00:44:29 ►

and his brother is this little round sort of innocent child,

00:44:32 ►

and Terrence is this laser-eyed trickster,

00:44:38 ►

and you can see this whole setup just in their faces, right?

00:44:43 ►

The nobody people lived in shadows. In fact, they were shadows,

00:44:46 ►

or they existed on some gloomy threshold between the insubstantial and the real. You could see

00:44:52 ►

them or sense them at night lurking in the shadows of a closet or under the bed or in the hollow of

00:44:57 ►

the bathtub. It’s a real scary thing that they’re in the bathtub. Looking back, I think the no-body people were my first

00:45:06 ►

encounter with the idea that one can coexist with an unseen world of spirits or other entities.

00:45:12 ►

Certainly this perspective is integral to the shamanic worldview as encountered in altered

00:45:17 ►

states triggered by ayahuasca and other shamanic substances. The ayahuasca landscape is a virtual battleground populated with malevolent

00:45:27 ►

spirits, but also by allies, plant teachers, animal spirit guides, ancestral spirits, and other morally

00:45:33 ►

ambiguous entities. The shaman’s task is essentially one of extra-dimensional diplomacy, to identify and

00:45:41 ►

forge alliances with the beneficial entities, keep them close while guarding against those who do not necessarily have your best interests in mind.

00:45:49 ►

Later in life, when I was able to access such realms with ayahuasca,

00:45:53 ►

the idea of a morally ambiguous dimension in which one rubbed up against ghostly entities,

00:45:58 ►

sometimes literally, was already familiar.

00:46:02 ►

I had been pre-initiated by the no-bobby people.

00:46:05 ►

Okay, we’re going to the heart of the matter.

00:46:08 ►

This is a chapter called Symbiosis Shattered.

00:46:12 ►

By this time, Terrence was getting a lot of attention for his rap, as he called it.

00:46:17 ►

He had been a featured speaker at a landmark conference in psychedelics

00:46:21 ►

held at UC Santa Barbara in May 1983

00:46:24 ►

that featured a number of established and emerging luminaries,

00:46:28 ►

including Albert Hoffman, Sasha Shulgin, Andrew Weil, Ralph Metzner,

00:46:32 ►

Karl Ruck, Walter Houston Clark, and others.

00:46:36 ►

Terrence’s edgy talk was titled,

00:46:38 ►

Hallucinogens, Monkeys Discover Hyperspace, a.k.a. Return to the Logos.

00:46:44 ►

It was quite unlike anything else presented there,

00:46:48 ►

and it was an important catalytic event in his emergence as a public persona.

00:46:53 ►

People loved hearing these wild ideas,

00:46:56 ►

and Terence’s mesmeric voice and articulate presentation made him the perfect spokesman.

00:47:01 ►

It didn’t matter that much of what he said was incomprehensible or nonsensical.

00:47:07 ►

His audience was uncritical and most did not have the education to challenge him and few did. People

00:47:13 ►

just listened slack-jawed in fascination. I used to kid him that didn’t matter what he said he could

00:47:20 ►

stand up and read the phone book and people would hang on every word because it wasn’t what he said, he could stand up and read the phone book, and people would hang on every word, because it wasn’t what he said, it was that he said it so darned well. This rap was not science,

00:47:31 ►

it was not exactly philosophy either, it was poetry, and Terence was inventing himself as

00:47:36 ►

the Irish bard of the psychedelic zeitgeist. By the time the 80s faded into history,

00:47:44 ►

Terence was well ensconced in his iconic role

00:47:47 ►

as the chief spokesman for the new psychedelic culture.

00:47:50 ►

Along with the time wave and the impending end of history,

00:47:54 ►

all thoroughly embellished with the collection of bizarre notions

00:47:57 ►

that we had dragged back from the jungles of La Charrera 20 years previously.

00:48:03 ►

He had found his shtick and it was paying the bills, and he was out there on the

00:48:06 ►

public stage, and there were growing legions of fans who loved to hear his rap. There was no real

00:48:12 ►

competition for the niche he had carved out for himself. Larry was still around, but by this time,

00:48:17 ►

old and boring. In the original 60s, psychedelic message was about peace, free love, eastern wisdom, and back to nature.

00:48:25 ►

Terrence’s audience were mostly younger, genuine inhabitants of the global village

00:48:30 ►

predicted by McLuhan and rapidly morphing into reality.

00:48:34 ►

They had grown up bathed in the cool glow of television,

00:48:38 ►

and far from being Luddite back-to-the-landers,

00:48:40 ►

these were world-spanning technomads of an emerging global tribalism, the enthusiastic

00:48:46 ►

vanguard of the new post-historical archaic revival. But even as Terence played out the

00:48:55 ►

role that destiny and fate had carved out for him, there were darker forces at work,

00:49:00 ►

well hidden from the glare of public adulation. As Terence became more visible as a public figure

00:49:07 ►

and began to accumulate a devoted following,

00:49:10 ►

on a personal level he became plagued by doubts about his ideas

00:49:14 ►

that he had vigorously espoused for years,

00:49:17 ►

and doubts about the role that the world had thrust upon him.

00:49:21 ►

A strong cognitive dissonance emerged between his public persona as the shaman guru

00:49:26 ►

and his own self-understanding that he was anything but an enlightened being.

00:49:34 ►

He didn’t want to be the wise man guru telling people what to think.

00:49:38 ►

He wanted people to think for themselves, like Timothy Leary.

00:49:42 ►

That was the whole thrust of his message. He was human, while others

00:49:46 ►

wanted him to be a bodhisattva. Terence’s pivotal existential crisis came abruptly sometime in 88

00:49:55 ►

or 89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don’t know exactly when it happened,

00:50:03 ►

and I don’t know exactly what happened.

00:50:05 ►

I’m piecing it together from what Kat has told me,

00:50:08 ►

and she has volunteered few details, and I’m reluctant to probe.

00:50:12 ►

It happened when they were living for a time on the big island,

00:50:16 ►

and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terrence.

00:50:22 ►

It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him.

00:50:29 ►

The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher

00:50:34 ►

ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair.

00:50:41 ►

Terrence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was a lack of all meaning.

00:50:46 ►

A lack of all meaning.

00:50:49 ►

And this induced panic in Terrence.

00:50:51 ►

And probably, I speculate, a feeling that he was going mad.

00:50:56 ►

He couldn’t deal with it.

00:50:58 ►

And Cat’s efforts to reassure him were fruitless.

00:51:02 ►

After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics

00:51:08 ►

such as DMT and ayahuasca only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.

00:51:15 ►

Whatever the specific content of this psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the

00:51:22 ►

cognitive collapse of Terence’s worldview

00:51:25 ►

and precipitated his existential crisis.

00:51:28 ►

What was most remarkable is that he did not see it coming.

00:51:33 ►

He did not see it coming.

00:51:37 ►

When one works deeply and over long periods with a particular plant teacher,

00:51:41 ►

there inevitably comes a point where the examination of the self

00:51:45 ►

comes front and center.

00:51:47 ►

One may learn much from psychedelics

00:51:50 ►

about archetypes, myths, and other dimensions,

00:51:52 ►

shamanic techniques, aliens,

00:51:54 ►

and the construction of a cosmogonic

00:51:56 ►

and cognitive worldview,

00:51:59 ►

but sooner or later they hold up a mirror

00:52:01 ►

in which one must confront the self.

00:52:05 ►

I believe Terence was not up for that.

00:52:08 ►

Up to that point, his existentially terrifying experience,

00:52:13 ►

his mushroom encounters had been very much about the other,

00:52:16 ►

about receiving gnosis from a higher wisdom

00:52:19 ►

that was seemingly distinct from the self.

00:52:23 ►

But the source that originated the funny ideas about time,

00:52:27 ►

the extraterrestrial origins of the mushroom,

00:52:28 ►

and the entire metaphysics constructed around those ideas

00:52:32 ►

that Terence managed to make so appealing to his fans

00:52:35 ►

were almost all entirely cerebral.

00:52:40 ►

There was very little of self-reflection, emotion, or insight in those constructs.

00:52:47 ►

As long as it stayed on that level, Terrence could handle it.

00:52:51 ►

When it became personal and when it became about heart-related insights

00:52:54 ►

having to do with his emotional status and his relationships to others,

00:52:59 ►

I think it became very threatening for him.

00:53:02 ►

The mushrooms proffered the lesson,

00:53:07 ►

but it was not a lesson that Terrence wanted to accept or acknowledge.

00:53:11 ►

It was too much about the self

00:53:12 ►

and no longer about the other.

00:53:14 ►

Since earliest childhood,

00:53:16 ►

ever since the incident in the sandbox

00:53:19 ►

when Terrence erected an emotional wall

00:53:21 ►

between himself and our father,

00:53:24 ►

Terrence had been concerned to protect himself

00:53:27 ►

from almost all emotional entanglements

00:53:29 ►

as a strategy for self-preservation.

00:53:32 ►

When the mushrooms kicked that wall down

00:53:35 ►

and forced him to confront his emotional alienation,

00:53:38 ►

the old reactive defense mechanisms were activated

00:53:41 ►

and he could no longer bring himself to face it.

00:53:44 ►

This incident also contributed to Terrence’s growing doubts defense mechanisms were activated and he could no longer bring himself to face it.

00:53:49 ►

This incident also contributed to Terence’s growing doubts about his public role as an advocate of psychedelics and the constellation of funny ideas that he represented in his

00:53:55 ►

role as a spokesman of the, and he’s got a misprint here, I think it’s the sage of hyperspace,

00:54:02 ►

the trickster mushroom had betrayed him.

00:54:07 ►

of hyperspace. The trickster mushroom had betrayed him. He could no longer take them,

00:54:13 ►

and the prospect of what they might present him was too terrifying. Yet there he was,

00:54:19 ►

in the public position of being the new Timothy Leary, the explorer psychonaut who was supposedly plunging down the rabbit hole every weekend. Even now, many of Terrence’s fans assume that during this period of his life

00:54:27 ►

he was taking high doses of mushrooms and DMT on a regular basis,

00:54:31 ►

and they’re shocked to learn that that was not the case.

00:54:35 ►

Throughout most of the 90s, Terrence used psychedelics only on extremely rare occasions,

00:54:40 ►

and when he did take them, the doses were modest.

00:54:43 ►

His fans did not know this but Terrence

00:54:45 ►

knew it and he knew that his public representations were disingenuous and to his credit it bothered

00:54:51 ►

him. Fundamentally he wanted to be honest but he could not be and his fans would not let him be

00:54:57 ►

or at least that was his perception. His fans identified him with him, and as a group, they were largely uncritical.

00:55:07 ►

Terrence became so good at doing his shtick

00:55:09 ►

that it really didn’t matter whether it made sense or not.

00:55:12 ►

It sounded great.

00:55:14 ►

It was what people wanted to hear,

00:55:16 ►

and it paid the bills,

00:55:17 ►

and it became the trap from which he could not escape.

00:55:21 ►

On the rare occasions when someone did rise up

00:55:24 ►

to question the tenets of the faith,

00:55:26 ►

as the mathematician Matthew Watkins did with Terence and the time wave in 1996,

00:55:32 ►

rather than stimulate a thoughtful, productive intellectual exchange

00:55:35 ►

that might have refined and extended the concepts that led to public ridicule

00:55:40 ►

in the form of a vicious personal attacks on the questioner,

00:55:46 ►

as other members of the fan base piled on. The fan base had become a cult. Heretics were censured, mocked,

00:55:53 ►

and shouted down. In Terrence’s defense, I don’t believe he welcomed this kind of response.

00:55:59 ►

He did not lead the charge. He let others do it for him. I think that in his heart of hearts,

00:56:05 ►

Terence would have welcomed honest discussion

00:56:08 ►

from some of the presumptions of his ideas,

00:56:10 ►

except that to do so would have required that he step back from them,

00:56:15 ►

perhaps go into seclusion for a time

00:56:17 ►

while he conducted a careful, real evaluation.

00:56:21 ►

But for that, there was neither time, nor resources, nor incentive. In fact, there was

00:56:26 ►

every incentive not to do that. After all, he was on the circuit. The fans wanted to hear the shtick.

00:56:34 ►

The last thing they wanted to hear was Terrence announce either that he had only been kidding

00:56:38 ►

and didn’t really take any of it very seriously and never had, or that he had been overcome by doubts and needed some time to reconsider

00:56:47 ►

and take a harder look at the foundations of the theories.

00:56:51 ►

Either one of these responses would have been more honest.

00:56:54 ►

Neither would have been well tolerated by his fans.

00:56:59 ►

The one would have incurred their hostility on the dawning realization they had been duped, and

00:57:05 ►

the other would have severely interrupted cash flow as the concepts were reworked and

00:57:10 ►

retooled.

00:57:13 ►

Whatever had driven him in the months and years following La Charrera to write extended

00:57:18 ►

screeds and crabbed microscopic script, and to construct the heavily annotated,

00:57:28 ►

hand-drawn graphs of time had long since left.

00:57:30 ►

He was no longer in the grip of the logos.

00:57:34 ►

After all, he was on the circuit,

00:57:36 ►

and there were plenty of adulating fans,

00:57:38 ►

many attractive young women,

00:57:40 ►

a surfeit of pleasing venues,

00:57:42 ►

good money, good food, love and admiration,

00:57:46 ►

all in response to what came naturally and effortlessly, the rap, the shtick, what’s not to like, why piss away a

00:57:52 ►

good gig? The problem with this is that he couldn’t, he didn’t really believe much anymore in the shtick

00:57:59 ►

or the concepts he purported to represent. He couldn’t or wouldn’t take psychedelics again to get recharged,

00:58:06 ►

perhaps to recover thereby

00:58:07 ►

some of the belief and passion.

00:58:10 ►

As a result, he became disillusioned with himself

00:58:13 ►

and with his fans.

00:58:14 ►

He could no longer be honest

00:58:15 ►

with either himself or his fans,

00:58:17 ►

and this led to a further cognitive dissonance.

00:58:20 ►

He began to feel even more like a fraud than ever,

00:58:23 ►

and he became quite depressed.

00:58:25 ►

He became trapped in his own public persona, like a caged performer on stage.

00:58:30 ►

In response, he gradually lost respect for his fans.

00:58:36 ►

In rereading the passage above, I have to say it comes off as a bit harsh and critical,

00:58:42 ►

in a way that is perhaps unfair to Terence or to his fans.

00:58:46 ►

Not everything that Terence said in his public utterances was nonsense or made up fabrications

00:58:52 ►

that sounded good and that had no real logical validity, but not all or even most of Terence’s

00:58:58 ►

fans were gullible, unquestioning disciples. Terence was at his best when he spoke on topics

00:59:05 ►

that were not directly related to the time wave or psychedelics.

00:59:09 ►

He was an astute observer and an incisive commentator

00:59:12 ►

on contemporary culture.

00:59:14 ►

He was prescient about many of the social, historical,

00:59:17 ►

and technological forces that were creating

00:59:19 ►

and are creating our post-millennial world.

00:59:23 ►

This is the reason, I think, that the great body of Terence’s

00:59:27 ►

lectures survive in audio form on the net. And 12 years after his death, people are still listening.

00:59:35 ►

Even though they date back to the 80s and mid-90s, they sound as fresh and as timely as they were

00:59:40 ►

uttered yesterday. Terence’s genius was that he could envision the future that was imminent in

00:59:46 ►

current events. He could see that future and he could articulate it for the rest of us. He may

00:59:52 ►

have gotten the details wrong and been hobbled by the assumptions of the metaphysics he constructed,

00:59:58 ►

but one only has to look around to realize that basically he got it remarkably right.

01:00:04 ►

If Terence were resurrected tomorrow,

01:00:06 ►

he would be unsurprised by most of the events that have transpired

01:00:09 ►

since he left the corporeal realm in 2000.

01:00:13 ►

He would have equally incisive observations and speculations about the future

01:00:18 ►

and how it is manifesting now and will unfold over the decades of the 21st century.

01:00:24 ►

Over the years since Terence died, I have been contacted by many people, most of them

01:00:29 ►

young, who tell me they owe Terrence for everything they have learned and that the subjects he

01:00:34 ►

discussed were more relevant to them than any other part of their educations.

01:00:41 ►

This is an enormous compliment to Terrence and his talents.

01:00:44 ►

He had every right to feel proud of that, and I hope he did.

01:00:48 ►

Terence gave people permission to think and to explore consciousness

01:00:51 ►

and to entertain funny ideas.

01:00:54 ►

Terence, by example, taught it is fun to exercise the imagination.

01:00:59 ►

He taught that astonishment and wonder are the forces that drive our efforts

01:01:02 ►

to understand ourselves and the marvelous universe we inhabit.

01:01:07 ►

No matter how much we think we understand, there is always infinitely more to be understood.

01:01:12 ►

One of his favorite quotes from J.B.S. Haldane, who said,

01:01:16 ►

My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

01:01:23 ►

than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

01:01:26 ►

Terrence reveled in this insight,

01:01:32 ►

and it is more true today than when Haldane first wrote it in 1927.

01:01:37 ►

And I think something came up this morning,

01:01:39 ►

just to sort of wrap this up.

01:01:43 ►

It sort of ties the vision that I had when I wrote the ode together with this piece here.

01:01:47 ►

And it’s something that we’ve sort of seen and talked about over the years.

01:01:52 ►

So in 88 or 89, Terrence came up against that door, other self, and turned away from the door.

01:02:02 ►

Heart closed.

01:02:02 ►

A lot of things were happening in his life at that time

01:02:05 ►

that probably made this exquisitely difficult for him,

01:02:09 ►

this one particular mushroom trip.

01:02:12 ►

So if one was to think of the mushroom as an entity,

01:02:15 ►

as an intelligence, especially so engaged with Terence,

01:02:19 ►

it was his teacher, it found him in La Charrera.

01:02:23 ►

That mushroom, he’s a lifetime sufferer of migraine headaches.

01:02:27 ►

And you think, my sister died of a very massive brain tumor when she was 31.

01:02:35 ►

And so I went through this in the family.

01:02:37 ►

It was a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit kind of a thing,

01:02:40 ►

which I think Terrence was in that class.

01:02:43 ►

But when he went to the hospital in Honolulu,

01:02:47 ►

the surgeon came out and said,

01:02:49 ►

you’re going to find this ironic, but look at the shape of this tumor.

01:02:53 ►

And it was clearly the shape of a mushroom.

01:02:57 ►

So at breakfast this morning, we were having a little talk,

01:03:00 ►

and it sort of popped into our heads that,

01:03:03 ►

you know, if the mushroom could not

01:03:06 ►

get this man’s heart open in the way that it is used to doing, which is to throw you into the

01:03:13 ►

bardo and into the terror until you crack, until the only place you can reach for is love, which

01:03:20 ►

he couldn’t grasp in 1988, it was going to do this for him.

01:03:26 ►

And the way it did this was it grew inside his mind.

01:03:30 ►

And it consumed…

01:03:32 ►

Now, understand, we saw him…

01:03:35 ►

Something that is remarkable,

01:03:37 ►

he started doing overtoning,

01:03:39 ►

and he performed with Lost at Last in late 98.

01:03:42 ►

We saw him in Santa Cruz, and we saw him in San Francisco.

01:03:45 ►

You might have seen him in those performances.

01:03:48 ►

He was so much the elf.

01:03:50 ►

When he hit that performer’s thing,

01:03:52 ►

it was almost like Terrence was sort of completing.

01:03:55 ►

That was his eschaton.

01:03:56 ►

That was his moment.

01:03:57 ►

That was his singularity, those performances.

01:04:00 ►

In my mind, when I watch the video that survives of that,

01:04:04 ►

and he is just completely unbridled.

01:04:07 ►

It’s not about the head.

01:04:09 ►

He’s wailing.

01:04:11 ►

He’s singing.

01:04:12 ►

He’s really going.

01:04:13 ►

It’s not the mind anymore.

01:04:15 ►

Well, at that time, this tumor was massive.

01:04:17 ►

Can you imagine?

01:04:19 ►

He’s doing this kind of performance with an incredibly large glial blastoma in his mind. I watched my sister

01:04:26 ►

be functional with a very massive tumor. In fact, her voice, her speech center moved from one

01:04:33 ►

hemisphere to the other during the growth of the tumor. So the brain is extremely, and this hadn’t

01:04:38 ►

been seen much in medical science, but this is an amazing thing, that the brain can reorganize itself.

01:04:50 ►

So Terence’s brain was reorganizing itself around the growth of this mushroom tumor over 10 years.

01:04:54 ►

It might have been 20 years. It could have been 30 years. These things can grow.

01:04:59 ►

So this man, not only does he have a unique background, his travels were unique,

01:05:06 ►

his experiences were unique, his mind was unique because it was dissolving as he was going through life.

01:05:11 ►

Boundary dissolution was happening in Terence McKenna.

01:05:12 ►

Why and how?

01:05:21 ►

The blastoma was consuming every last neuron it could in a rapid, accelerating pace.

01:05:28 ►

I believe when he was on his deathbed, I think that that blastoma managed to consume the last resistance, the last control structure, the last mind,

01:05:35 ►

peace of mind went. And it said, I’ve got it all. I’ve dissolved it all. And now the real work can happen.

01:05:47 ►

And it’s like any good Hollywood film.

01:05:48 ►

It’s the last minute, right?

01:05:50 ►

This happened.

01:05:55 ►

So then what happens to Terrence before his last breath was he says,

01:05:56 ►

Wait a minute.

01:06:01 ►

It’s not about thinking and ideas and all this stuff.

01:06:02 ►

It’s about love.

01:06:04 ►

And it opened.

01:06:06 ►

He opened. The channel opened. And it opened, he opened, the channel opened.

01:06:09 ►

And you can see, you know, the mushroom did the job.

01:06:13 ►

The teacher finally got through and opened him up.

01:06:17 ►

And to some extent, I think, in that way, you know,

01:06:20 ►

and then he said, keep breathing for all the rest of us.

01:06:22 ►

But that was a tremendous gift.

01:06:27 ►

And so, in a sense, for the breaking of the spell of McKenna,

01:06:30 ►

it’s not only that he stopped taking mushrooms, the mushroom took him.

01:06:36 ►

So for all of the people out there listening in podcast land,

01:06:38 ►

we’re trying to break the spell today,

01:06:43 ►

but we’re also trying to create the release for this man’s soul and his spirit.

01:06:49 ►

And I think in some sense he did it himself, but he had seconds to go.

01:06:52 ►

The eschaton was upon him.

01:06:54 ►

The concrescence was upon him.

01:06:55 ►

He did it.

01:06:56 ►

He uttered these words.

01:07:00 ►

He had this experience, and then he passed.

01:07:03 ►

But he was unable to do that for his community.

01:07:06 ►

So the community kind of went on because of this unfinished business thing.

01:07:09 ►

And I think this became our mission here at Esalen

01:07:11 ►

was to help to Terrence to reach,

01:07:14 ►

give the message that he gave to those around him

01:07:17 ►

when he died to the community,

01:07:19 ►

but inform you as to what was the true man,

01:07:22 ►

not the cartoon.

01:07:24 ►

And frankly, I love him more.

01:07:27 ►

But I feel he’s, as Lorenzo said and as other people have said,

01:07:31 ►

this is a tragic figure, but he’s much

01:07:36 ►

more interesting. But in truth, to tell

01:07:40 ►

you the stark truth, years ago

01:07:44 ►

I sort of came to this sudden realization and horror in myself.

01:07:50 ►

I know here we were digitizing all these tapes and putting them out, and I had this gut feeling,

01:07:55 ►

we’re doing something bad here. Because this guy is saying, go and sit and take five to seven grams,

01:08:02 ►

high doses, in silent darkness, do this,

01:08:05 ►

try to go for the gusto, go for the ultimate experience.

01:08:09 ►

And I sort of had this deep sense of unease that this is really bad advice.

01:08:15 ►

This is bad medicine.

01:08:17 ►

And that who is out there trying to copy and be a Terence McKenna

01:08:21 ►

and getting themselves in serious trouble?

01:08:24 ►

And so this is part of the unraveling.

01:08:27 ►

It’s part of the reeling back in that those people who hear this podcast

01:08:33 ►

or this presentation should know Terence was shit scared of his teacher,

01:08:39 ►

of the mushrooms, for 12 years.

01:08:42 ►

He didn’t go near them.

01:08:44 ►

So you can kind of

01:08:46 ►

lose your illusions about this

01:08:47 ►

now. This stuff is

01:08:49 ►

serious and should

01:08:51 ►

be taken not lightly and not

01:08:53 ►

in a cavalier way. It’s not a Hollywood

01:08:55 ►

feature film. It’s not a video game.

01:08:58 ►

Terrence himself

01:08:59 ►

got the

01:09:01 ►

his rap got the rap down

01:09:03 ►

effectively.

01:09:06 ►

I’ve just got a few things, and we’ll just play them until we run out of time,

01:09:11 ►

but this is my sort of other ode to Terrence, why we love this man,

01:09:15 ►

why this man’s so inspirational and has helped so many people break out of isolation.

01:09:20 ►

They’re living in an isolated place.

01:09:22 ►

They think they’re weird weird and they find this man

01:09:25 ►

and it opens up a whole world to them of literature and ideas and alternate thinking

01:09:30 ►

and not being alone, the others. And these are just some wonderful tracks that you probably all

01:09:36 ►

heard, but they’re in a sense, my love and appreciation to you, Terrence, for giving us these for all time. Now technology throws a curve,

01:09:48 ►

and the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is.

01:09:56 ►

We figure out that what you’re supposed to work for isn’t worth having. We figure out that our

01:10:02 ►

politicians are buffoons. We figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels.

01:10:11 ►

We discover that all organizations are corrupted by ambition.

01:10:18 ►

You know, you get the picture.

01:10:21 ►

We figure it out.

01:10:21 ►

You get the picture.

01:10:23 ►

We figure it out.

01:10:30 ►

Well, then as intellectuals, and anybody who figures it out is an intellectual, believe me,

01:10:34 ►

because they’re slinging the programming to push you the other way.

01:10:43 ►

So then intellectuals, defined as people who figure it out, discover that you are alienated.

01:10:46 ►

That’s what figuring it out means.

01:10:50 ►

It means you understand that the BMW, the Harvard degree, that this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped

01:10:55 ►

and that mostly you have a bunch of clueless people

01:10:58 ►

who are figuring out which fork they should use.

01:11:03 ►

But this position is presented as alienation and therefore somehow tinged with the

01:11:10 ►

potential for pathology you know it’s a bad thing to be alienating now let’s speak for a moment in

01:11:17 ►

order to fulfill the promise read by in the introduction about psychedelics and what are they doing in this fine situation well

01:11:29 ►

what they’re doing is is forcing this maturation process by dissolving boundaries which is what

01:11:37 ►

they do there is a mind and you can perturb it.

01:11:51 ►

I mean, think about, I mean, I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn’t perturb it.

01:11:58 ►

Because, as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t a fish.

01:12:07 ►

Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know it’s there well the reason we know it’s there is because if you perturb it then you see it and you perturb it uh by perturbing the engine which

01:12:15 ►

generates it which is the mind brain system resting behind your eyebrows this This question, you know, is there cause for optimism? The answer is it depends on

01:12:27 ►

where you placed your bets. You know, if you placed your bets on male-dominated institutions

01:12:36 ►

based on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classism, and materialism, then God help you, you should call your broker.

01:12:49 ►

If, on the other hand, you’ve recognized that a lifeboat strategy is involved here, What is really important is empowering personal experience, backing off from consumer object fetishism,

01:13:13 ►

freeing the mind, empowering the imagination.

01:13:18 ►

Then in that case, I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on. What understanding and imagination in the light of nature argues for

01:13:29 ►

is the presence and re-emergence of the awareness of spirit in the world.

01:13:38 ►

This is what the so-called and long-heralded paradigm shift is all about.

01:13:46 ►

There is a barrier, a place in the process of going to sleep

01:13:51 ►

that is like a mercurial edge.

01:13:54 ►

It’s a river. It’s a zone of hypnagogia.

01:13:58 ►

You often pass through it post-orgasm.

01:14:01 ►

It’s a place of drifting amoeboid colored afterimage lights

01:14:06 ►

and then true hallucination images,

01:14:11 ►

strange, transcendental or transpersonal images.

01:14:17 ►

To contact the cosmic giggle,

01:14:21 ►

to have the flow of kazooistry begin to give off

01:14:27 ►

synchronistic ripples, white caps in the billows of the coincidental ether,

01:14:34 ►

if you will.

01:14:36 ►

I have always had a relationship to nature, which I pretty much took for granted, but perhaps it was more intense and somewhat unique than most people’s.

01:14:52 ►

I grew up in a small town in Colorado.

01:14:56 ►

I was very early into being a rock hound and then a butterfly collector.

01:15:02 ►

I had no interest in stamps or baseball cards or anything like that.

01:15:07 ►

It was always natural objects.

01:15:10 ►

And the attraction of tropical butterflies

01:15:15 ►

was the exuberant expanse of color,

01:15:21 ►

the affirmation of the patterned richness of the universe that was seen to

01:15:29 ►

be thrown out like a spark by these things.

01:15:32 ►

And eventually I pursued it quite far and was for some time a professional butterfly

01:15:39 ►

collector in tropical Indonesia in a pre-Buddhist incarnation.

01:15:46 ►

And this search for iridescence thrown off by nature

01:15:53 ►

seen first in the glint of metallic ore crystals

01:15:59 ►

and then in the colorful expanse of butterflies and then in tropical fish,

01:16:07 ►

reached a kind of apotheosis with the discovery of the psychedelic plant hallucinogens,

01:16:16 ►

where suddenly the color, the flash, the iridescence was not two- or three-dimensional,

01:16:24 ►

but it was multidimensional.

01:16:26 ►

It was inside one, outside one.

01:16:30 ►

It was like the ultimate tropical aquarium, the ultimate butterfly cabinet, the ultimate mineral show.

01:16:40 ►

If we have any time, there are four pieces from the last interview by Eric Davis.

01:16:47 ►

A person of great wisdom that I’ve come to respect a lot, Alicia Danforth.

01:16:53 ►

Many of you know who worked with Charlie Grobe as well, actually after Mary C.

01:16:59 ►

She was next, Mary C. recruited for Charlie.

01:17:03 ►

He was recruited for Charlie.

01:17:09 ►

She says, look, the time of the guru,

01:17:11 ►

whether it be psychedelic or consciousness or whatnot,

01:17:17 ►

mostly white male, sitting on a stage prognosticating is over.

01:17:18 ►

It’s just over.

01:17:20 ►

We need to be in a circle,

01:17:22 ►

and we need to be discussing as a community and building a consensus and building everything

01:17:25 ►

jointly we’ve got to get away from this other model so do you want to hear a few more okay

01:17:32 ►

okay so these are from eric eric davis uh went to visit terence in november early december 1999

01:17:41 ►

and he was on heavy medications. He had had the operation.

01:17:47 ►

He had had the gamma knife procedure,

01:17:49 ►

and he’s just as lucid as ever.

01:17:50 ►

He’s a little slowed down, but it’s amazing.

01:17:52 ►

His head was shaved, and he was thin,

01:17:54 ►

and he had to lift his legs to get upstairs.

01:17:57 ►

It was really tearfully sad to see him

01:18:02 ►

unable to get up the steps.

01:18:05 ►

But these are just four pieces from there heartfully sad to see him unable to get up the steps. But

01:18:06 ►

these are just four

01:18:08 ►

pieces from there I thought were

01:18:09 ►

it’s really his last word.

01:18:13 ►

Well, now

01:18:14 ►

that I have all these medical

01:18:16 ►

problems with brain and brain

01:18:18 ►

function, I have a much greater

01:18:20 ►

appreciation for

01:18:21 ►

the

01:18:23 ►

boundaries of eccentricity.

01:18:26 ►

I mean, now I understand.

01:18:27 ►

It doesn’t take drugs.

01:18:29 ►

There are a lot of people running around

01:18:32 ►

who are crazy as shithouse owls

01:18:36 ►

and are achieving it on the natch.

01:18:41 ►

And their testimony now has to be weighed as well.

01:18:48 ►

So this surprises me. brain could leave you

01:19:05 ►

functioning

01:19:07 ►

enough to report

01:19:10 ►

to work and tell your story

01:19:12 ►

and presumably write

01:19:14 ►

novels and meet deadlines

01:19:16 ►

and all these other things

01:19:17 ►

that people do.

01:19:21 ►

And I don’t know

01:19:22 ►

how many other people realize this

01:19:24 ►

either.

01:19:25 ►

Because that’s sort of how you feel?

01:19:28 ►

Yeah.

01:19:29 ►

I mean, I now live in a world defined pretty much by prescribed drugs,

01:19:39 ►

and my doctors are telling me I have to take this stuff to stay alive, basically.

01:19:46 ►

So how many people are living in worlds psychologically defined in that way?

01:19:55 ►

Quite a lot.

01:19:57 ►

But you seem to be largely Terrans.

01:20:02 ►

Well, I recall who I’m supposed to be

01:20:06 ►

01:20:07 ►

we’re not trading

01:20:12 ►

that into like

01:20:13 ►

but in some fundamental sense

01:20:18 ►

do you feel like you’re standing on a different ball

01:20:20 ►

I would like to get all these drugs

01:20:22 ►

out of my system

01:20:24 ►

the Depakote and the steroids and all that,

01:20:28 ►

because it makes mentally moving on a level surface

01:20:35 ►

feel like walking uphill.

01:20:39 ►

And these are mild drugs, I take.

01:20:46 ►

These are not you know

01:20:47 ►

what about the people who’ve been diagnosed

01:20:50 ►

schizophrenic

01:20:53 ►

or bipolar

01:20:54 ►

this or something

01:20:56 ►

what are these people taking

01:20:58 ►

and what is it making them think

01:21:00 ►

about reality

01:21:01 ►

you’ve taken

01:21:03 ►

serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

01:21:06 ►

haven’t you?

01:21:06 ►

You mean like Prozac?

01:21:07 ►

Yeah.

01:21:08 ►

Yeah, but those are designed to

01:21:12 ►

help you out.

01:21:16 ►

These other things,

01:21:17 ►

all you’re dealing with

01:21:18 ►

is side effects.

01:21:21 ►

Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:21:22 ►

It’s a different thing.

01:21:23 ►

I thought you were talking about

01:21:24 ►

schizophrenia, don’t they treat with all sorts of neurotransmitter Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s a different thing. I thought you were talking about schizophrenia.

01:21:32 ►

Don’t they treat with all sorts of neurotransmitter modulating drugs,

01:21:34 ►

which presumably are there to help them out?

01:21:37 ►

Well, they’re there to help them out.

01:21:41 ►

They may be there to help the rest of us out.

01:21:48 ►

Like, for instance, this drug I take, Depakote,

01:21:52 ►

the first thing that it supposedly deals with is mania.

01:21:56 ►

Well, I’m taking a drug for mania.

01:21:58 ►

I don’t have mania.

01:22:00 ►

Do I? Did I? Would I?

01:22:02 ►

Should I? Will I? Could I?

01:22:04 ►

Do I want to? And so forth and so on.

01:22:08 ►

You didn’t feel like you had any bit of mania in you before?

01:22:13 ►

At times I’ve been accused of mania, but by idiots.

01:22:23 ►

And I guess because of the war on drugs

01:22:26 ►

somewhat concealed in all that

01:22:28 ►

is the willingness of the establishment

01:22:32 ►

to allow experimentation with drugs

01:22:35 ►

the effect of which on tens of thousands

01:22:40 ►

or hundreds of thousands of people

01:22:42 ►

would have social consequences

01:22:45 ►

that were maybe unintended or unmanaged.

01:22:50 ►

Yeah, I’ll say.

01:22:52 ►

Yeah.

01:22:56 ►

What about the communications that come in from either the extraterrestrial,

01:23:02 ►

quote-unquote, or seeming, or the technological world?

01:23:08 ►

Well, obviously it requires discrimination to figure out.

01:23:14 ►

You can’t believe everything you hear.

01:23:19 ►

The demons are of many kinds.

01:23:21 ►

Some are made of ions, some of mind.

01:23:25 ►

The ones of DMT you’ll find stutter often and are blind.

01:23:32 ►

Just because something can talk doesn’t mean it isn’t selling you something you may not want to have.

01:23:38 ►

Right. Now that time in that phrase you said the ones on DMT can be.

01:23:43 ►

I’ve also heard you say ketamine there.

01:23:46 ►

The ones on ketamine.

01:23:48 ►

Have I said that about ketamine?

01:23:51 ►

We need to control me a little more tightly.

01:23:54 ►

If you look at what we’re building with VR, what’s just around the corner with these kind of three-dimensional interactive spaces

01:24:06 ►

and avatars,

01:24:07 ►

and imagine a culture that’s more and more based

01:24:10 ►

on that kind of interaction.

01:24:14 ►

And, you know, obviously there’s a kind of superficial shamanic

01:24:18 ►

or imaginative dimension to that,

01:24:20 ►

but at the same time, it’s clear that at least initially

01:24:23 ►

and certainly in many of its guises, it will be driven by the same kind of chintziness, the same sort of

01:24:31 ►

crass, tinkly junk that really drives it.

01:24:37 ►

How, do you think it’s just going to naturally evolve such that a kind of deeper shamanic world, or at least shamanic analog

01:24:47 ►

will emerge in virtual reality, or does it actually require some real creative work to

01:24:55 ►

seed it?

01:24:56 ►

It requires creative work.

01:24:58 ►

It requires that the people who build these realities understand how subtle what they’re up against is, and not abandon a commitment

01:25:11 ►

to realism.

01:25:14 ►

You know, the trick to making the shamanic world, virtual world, compelling is to fairly

01:25:21 ►

and truly convey it.

01:25:23 ►

So you can’t cut corners.

01:25:25 ►

You can’t fake it.

01:25:27 ►

So animation and the rules of Vermal and all this stuff

01:25:32 ►

have to be faithfully executed

01:25:35 ►

so that this stuff really does blow people’s minds,

01:25:38 ►

so that people see, well,

01:25:40 ►

the human imagination is large enough

01:25:44 ►

to accommodate the human soul.

01:25:47 ►

It doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re wearing too tight a pair of shoes.

01:25:54 ►

And that’s the danger, it just becomes kind of a formulaic, too formulaic, too easy.

01:26:02 ►

Not that the software couldn’t use some improvement,

01:26:06 ►

but I don’t want it to become so easy to produce these virtual realities

01:26:14 ►

that there’s no attention to detail or no sense of accomplishment in doing it.

01:26:29 ►

How has a lifetime of psychedelic use, an adult life, a teenage,

01:26:33 ►

sort of set you up for facing death?

01:26:44 ►

Well, I guess it leads you to the idea that

01:26:47 ►

things are probably more complicated than you can suppose

01:26:52 ►

therefore supposition is not to be trusted

01:26:57 ►

so in other words

01:26:58 ►

given how weird life has been

01:27:01 ►

why rush to prejudge death?

01:27:06 ►

It’s bound to be mighty strange.

01:27:08 ►

Life was mighty strange.

01:27:11 ►

And I’m curious.

01:27:17 ►

You know, I don’t think anybody would be curious.

01:27:19 ►

I mean, it’s an interesting situation

01:27:22 ►

to be told that you have a very limited amount of life, death,

01:27:27 ►

because it composes your mind for you wonderfully.

01:27:33 ►

And you start paying attention, asking the questions.

01:27:39 ►

And I have no insight into what it will be, but I suspect it isn’t what anybody thinks it is.

01:27:52 ►

I mean, the argument that nature has this desire to preserve form

01:28:01 ►

is, I think, self-evident on enormous scales of space and time

01:28:07 ►

and very local scales of space and time.

01:28:10 ►

So why fight it?

01:28:12 ►

It must be that somehow matter is spiritualizing itself

01:28:21 ►

or mathematicizing itself or somehow.

01:28:23 ►

Right, becoming virtual

01:28:25 ►

forms.

01:28:26 ►

So, and what psychedelics

01:28:29 ►

show is that the world is

01:28:30 ►

full of surprises.

01:28:32 ►

I mean, I consider

01:28:33 ►

psychedelics a constant and

01:28:35 ►

verifiable miracle.

01:28:38 ►

The fact that that can

01:28:40 ►

happen to your mind.

01:28:42 ►

So it means all kinds of

01:28:44 ►

things are possible.

01:28:48 ►

Nothing is to be assumed or prejudged

01:28:52 ►

given A, biology, B, psychedelics and culture.

01:28:59 ►

Probably that’s a long enough list,

01:29:02 ►

but those two things alone secure

01:29:04 ►

the weirdness of being sufficiently.

01:29:09 ►

Thank you.

01:29:12 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:29:21 ►

Well, there’s of course a great deal to say about what, for you,

01:29:26 ►

may be some new information about our beloved Bard McKenna.

01:29:30 ►

But I think that for now we have a lot of information to absorb and new things to think about.

01:29:36 ►

And actually we’re going to have several different ways and places to talk about how

01:29:41 ►

or if this news changes your opinion of Terrence McKenna.

01:29:44 ►

to talk about how or if this news changes your opinion of Terrence McKenna.

01:29:50 ►

For me, I was actually relieved to hear that I wasn’t a personal psychedelic failure because I wasn’t taking five dried grams of mushrooms in silent darkness every weekend.

01:29:56 ►

Interestingly, that was also the first response of almost everyone in our workshop as well.

01:30:02 ►

And next, I think we mainly all felt a deep sadness

01:30:06 ►

for the difficult path that dear Terrence was on

01:30:09 ►

for the last decade or so of his life,

01:30:11 ►

and in no small measure because of the pressure we all put on him

01:30:14 ►

to entertain us with his wonderful stories.

01:30:18 ►

But before I say much more,

01:30:20 ►

I would first like to hear what you think about all of this,

01:30:23 ►

and there are a couple ways you can do so.

01:30:26 ►

Of course, I’d like to see a long discussion thread in the comments section of the program notes for today’s podcast.

01:30:32 ►

And as you know, you can get to them via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:30:37 ►

Also, our friends at Reality Sandwich will be doing a short piece on this story,

01:30:42 ►

and their site will also be a good place for discussion.

01:30:41 ►

which will be doing a short piece on this story,

01:30:44 ►

and their site will also be a good place for discussion.

01:30:49 ►

Also, if you want to start a thread on my Facebook page under the announcement of this podcast,

01:30:51 ►

well, that would be another place where we can begin to share this information

01:30:54 ►

and see how we all feel about it.

01:30:57 ►

Now, I do have some more news for you as well.

01:31:02 ►

On Sunday morning of our workshop,

01:31:03 ►

one of the Esalen staff members who had been attending

01:31:07 ►

our gathering gave me a real treasure. From the time Terrence McKenna first came to Esalen,

01:31:13 ►

up through his final appearance there, another one of the Esalen residents, Paul Herbert,

01:31:18 ►

recorded every one of Terrence’s talks and workshop there. Before Paul died, he gifted those tapes to Bill Herr,

01:31:26 ►

who was in our workshop, and Bill has loaned those tapes to me, over 160 of them, and I’ve

01:31:32 ►

begun the process of digitizing them before returning them to Bill. And did I mention that

01:31:38 ►

Bill has also given me permission to play them all here in the salon? Now, there’s a lot more to say about this, but the headline for now is that I’ve decided

01:31:48 ►

to podcast each of them in the date order in which they were given.

01:31:52 ►

And I’ll try to keep interspersing a few non-McKenna talks every once in a while, but for the

01:31:58 ►

next year or so, I’m afraid that those fellow salonners who already think that I’ve played

01:32:02 ►

too many of Terrence’s lectures, well, I’m sorry, but besides the fact that I want to listen to them all in order now

01:32:09 ►

myself, I also feel a strange sense of responsibility to create as complete an audio archive as

01:32:15 ►

possible to honor not just Terrence McKenna, but also the late Paul Herbert as well.

01:32:20 ►

And you’ll be hearing more about Paul as I begin playing the tapes from his collection.

01:32:24 ►

well. And you’ll be hearing more about Paul as I begin playing the tapes from his collection.

01:32:31 ►

So, to the young man who recently wrote to say that the salon already had enough McKenna, Leary,

01:32:36 ►

and the Occupy movement, well, it looks like you may have to find another podcast to keep you company, because for some strange reason, I now feel a sort of an obligation or a duty to podcast a more organized and definitive look

01:32:45 ►

into the mind of the gifted, mesmerizing, and very human being

01:32:50 ►

who is called Terrence McKenna.

01:32:53 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:32:57 ►

Be well, my friends. I’m an alien Alien

01:33:08 ►

I’m an alien

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

316 - A Deep Dive Into the Mind of McKenna

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:21 ► §

00:00:26 ► §

00:00:31 ► §

00:00:36 ► §

00:00:41 ► §

00:00:45 ► §

00:00:52 ► §

00:00:57 ► §

00:01:07 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:17 ► §

00:01:29 ► §

00:01:40 ► §

00:01:43 ► §

00:01:48 ► §

00:01:53 ► §

00:01:57 ► §

00:02:03 ► §

00:02:06 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:14 ► §

00:02:19 ► §

00:02:23 ► §

00:02:28 ► §

00:02:34 ► §

00:02:40 ► §

00:02:50 ► §

00:03:00 ► §

00:03:03 ► §

00:03:13 ► §

00:03:26 ► §

00:03:31 ► §

00:03:38 ► §

00:03:45 ► §

00:03:50 ► §

00:03:56 ► §

00:04:01 ► §

00:04:06 ► §

00:04:11 ► §

00:04:14 ► §

00:04:16 ► §

00:04:21 ► §

00:04:23 ► §

00:04:26 ► §

00:04:33 ► §

00:04:39 ► §

00:04:47 ► §

00:04:49 ► §

00:04:52 ► §

00:04:54 ► §

00:04:58 ► §

00:05:01 ► §

00:05:03 ► §

00:05:09 ► §

00:05:16 ► §

00:05:20 ► §

00:05:25 ► §

00:05:32 ► §

00:05:33 ► §

00:05:36 ► §

00:05:41 ► §

00:05:44 ► §

00:05:46 ► §

00:05:49 ► §

00:05:51 ► §

00:05:56 ► §

00:06:01 ► §

00:06:05 ► §

00:06:11 ► §

00:06:17 ► §

00:06:26 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:21 ►

00:00:26 ►

00:00:31 ►

00:00:36 ►

00:00:41 ►

00:00:45 ►

00:00:52 ►

00:00:57 ►

00:01:07 ►

00:01:12 ►

00:01:17 ►

00:01:29 ►

00:01:40 ►

00:01:43 ►

00:01:48 ►

00:01:53 ►

00:01:57 ►

00:02:03 ►

00:02:06 ►

00:02:10 ►

00:02:14 ►

00:02:19 ►

00:02:23 ►

00:02:28 ►

00:02:34 ►

00:02:40 ►

00:02:50 ►

00:03:00 ►

00:03:03 ►

00:03:13 ►

00:03:26 ►

00:03:31 ►

00:03:38 ►

00:03:45 ►

00:03:50 ►

00:03:56 ►

00:04:01 ►

00:04:06 ►

00:04:11 ►

00:04:14 ►

00:04:16 ►

00:04:21 ►

00:04:23 ►

00:04:26 ►

00:04:33 ►

00:04:39 ►

00:04:47 ►

00:04:49 ►

00:04:52 ►

00:04:54 ►

00:04:58 ►

00:05:01 ►

00:05:03 ►

00:05:09 ►

00:05:16 ►

00:05:20 ►

00:05:25 ►

00:05:32 ►

00:05:33 ►

00:05:36 ►

00:05:41 ►

00:05:44 ►

00:05:46 ►

00:05:49 ►

00:05:51 ►

00:05:56 ►

00:06:01 ►

00:06:05 ►

00:06:11 ►

00:06:17 ►

00:06:26 ►

00:06:28 ►

00:06:31 ►

00:06:36 ►