terence mckenna live at the fez

8/8/2019 Terence McKenna Live at the Fez

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Terence McKenna live at The FezJune 20th, 1993 0 comments

Produced by Nicholas Hill for live broadcast from The Fez on

The Music Faucet, WFMU-FM

New York City, June 20, 1993Well its great to be here. Its been kind of a long day for me, so I may not be able to maintain the ordinaryveneer of genteel, cultured affability. I may have to simply cut to the chase here.You know, weve worked ourselves into quite a little situation here. Weve got a rising youth culture, agovernment out of control, an environment thats all ripped up, and weve got no place to go. So, who yougonna call? My solution in a situation like that is to roll another one. [laughter] Because its been mysupposition for a long, long time that these vegetables that were pushing around on our plates are actuallytrying to talk to us. And theyre saying all kinds of things, among them some things which are fairlycounterintuitive. It seems to me that history has failed, and Western civilization has failed, and dominator-

primate politics has failed, object-fetish consumerism has failed, the national security government hasfailed. And so then, where do go from here? What kind of new world can we create? And what kind of

guidelines are there that we can follow?And I you know, every time you come to New York its obligatory to visit the museums, MOMA,thisn'that, see whats going on in Soho. The conclusion that I come to looking at this is that as we move

beyond modernity, its more and more clear that the real impulse of the Twentieth Century is towards thearchaic, toward the primitive. Everything from Freudianism to body piercing, from quantum physics toabstract expressionism, from Dada to house music, is saying BACK AWAY from the linear, constipatedworld of print-head materialism that is what we inherit from the Western/European past. That style ofthinking about life and human relations has essentially toxified the planet and allowed us to paint ourselvesinto a corner from which there is no escape.Or is there? You know, a deliberate derangement of the senses worked for Rimbaud; it might work for usas well. What we have to do is go to the rainforests, the aborigines, and check up check in on whatwe have always dismissed, which is the world of natural magic and wisdom obtained through intoxication.This is what weve lost, and this is why our creativity is insufficient to overwhelm the cultural crisis which

is confronting us. We have to stir it up. We have to mix it up. Ideas dictated out of the agenda of washed-upcapitalism and science and religion are simply insufficient. Reason has failed. History has failed. And whatwe all have to do, I think, is fall back on ourselves. We have to stop waiting for the revelation to come fromCNN or Time Magazine, and get lives! And what getting lives means is ignoring the idiotic laws that woulddictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain. [applause] You know, Im sure it wasalarming to Buddhists, but the Supreme Court decision last week that okayed animal sacrifice in a religiouscontext was a door swinging open on the possible legalization of psychedelics. [applause] The concept ofLife, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is enshrined in the documents upon which this nation of oursis supposedly founded. If the pursuit of happiness does not mean the right to experiment with your ownstate of mind, then those words arent worth the hemp theyre written on. [laughter]But the point of view that Ive come to evolve out of 25 years of looking at this problem and churningthrough culture and so forth and so on is not simply a call for individual self-responsibility and a pullingaway from these institutions. Thats pretty standard fare, I think. Theres something else going on which isworth talking about. And that is the fact that the human world is apparently under the influence of somekind of attractor, or force, that secular people have ignored because the only words to talk about it were thevocabularies of beastly, bankrupt religions. But nevertheless, this force, this unfolding agenda, this designwhich we seem to embody, needs to be talked about. Because I really believe that history is ending. AndIve taken a lot of flak for that, because no one can conceive of the breakdown of the system in whichwere embedded to that degree. Its a kind of transcendental faith that history is accelerating. The rate ofthe ingression of novelty into three-dimensional space is asymptotically increasing. The kind of knittingtogether that is taking place in the world is laying the stage for the emergence of new forms oforganization, new properties of being. And I really think that the drama of life on this planet is pointedtoward the time that we are living in, that were approaching a symmetry break on a scale of the kind of


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symmetry break that occurred when life pulled its slimy bottom out of the sea and crawled onto the land.We are approaching the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negativeanimal impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we approach thetranscendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, moreand more surreal does this sound familiar to you? Its the neighborhood, right? [laughter] Thats becausewe areso close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision andrevelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams ofmushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you see, then, the plan. You see what all thesehistorical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time across between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction . I mean the city ofRevelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is happening,and that what the Its as though we are boring through a mountain, towards someone else who is boringthrough that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain point in time. We are moving, literally,into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies. This has been understood by some

people since at least the time of William Blake.We are like creatures caught in a interrupted embryogenesis: halfway to angelhood, the worst among ussomehow got control of the social agenda, and weve been hammering on each other with monotheism,racism, sexism, materialism, for the past 10,000 years. We betrayed the aboriginal intellect, the aboriginalintelligence, that existed for probably a hundred thousand years with drama, with poetry, with altruism,

with courage, with self-sacrifice with all the higher values that we think of as human but without thedevastatingly toxifying habits of Western Man: slavery, city-building, kingship, and, the three Ms monogamy, monotony, and monotheism. [laughter] These things have to be pitched out!Or, maybe not. Who knows? [laughter]Woman in audience: Whats wrong with monogamy?Whats wrong with monogamy. Whats wrong with monogamy is that it, uh, it forbids and interferes with

polygamy! [laughter and applause] Otherwise, I think it has a lot to recommend it! Yeah, I know,monogamy is a tough one. Monogamy is a tough one, but I have more and more the feeling that as yougrow up, just as youre about to go across the great Golden Gate Bridge to adulthood, theres one last sign,which says, LAST EXIT BEFORE AUTHENTIC ADULTHOOD. BECOME ADDICTED TOSOMEONE AS LAME AS YOURSELF, AND MAYBE THE TWO OF YOU CAN PASS YOURSELFOFF AS ONE INDIVIDUAL AND STUMBLE THROUGH LIFE TO COMPLETION. [much laughter]Same woman: But whats wrong with it?

TM: I dont think you should take me too seriously Im deeply into a divorce. [laughter] [sarcastically:]But Im sure its not distorting my judgment a single iota. [laughter]Gee, I thought what you were going to object to was monotheism, but apparently not! No, see, heres thething: back when mushrooms and nomadism ruled the world, monogamy was traded in for an orgiasticsocial style. And whats interesting about orgy besides that is that in an orgiastic situation, mencannot trace lines of male paternity. And consequently, loyalty goes to the children of the group. Its atremendous force for group cohesion that the men collectively transfer their loyalty to the children as acollective group. And it creates a very tightly-knit social unit. I think that I mean, its absurd youcant advocate orgy in a world riddled with epidemics of sexually-transmitted diseases and five and a half

billion people. Nevertheless, thespiritof the thing can be worked out between you and your friends in anyof a number of ways, and all of these arrangements which break the dominator mold are further permissionfor further breaking of the mold.Why have we grown so polite as they have grown so much more treacherous and weasel-like? Why are we

so content to allow the worst among us to set the social agenda? In the absence of Marxism, there is now nocritique being carried out of the capitalist enterprise, and itll peel your skin off and peddle it back to you. Itis doing that. Capitalism in principle is not, I think, a bad thing, but it requires endlessly-exploitable naturalresources. And since the exploration of space has been taken off the agenda, there is no endlessly-exploitable frontier. So capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, youregonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed offenough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create

billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed. You donthave to take psilocybin to figure this stuff out. You know, it isnt allelf machines from hyperspace![laughter]


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Somebody asked me what did I think was going to happen in 2012? And I said there were probably anumber of scenarios. One of the most radical I can imagine is that everyone would begin to behaveappropriately! I mean, can imagine what that would be like? You can imagine the first minute, because inthe first minute, of course, everyone would turn off their console, take off their clothes, and walk outside.What happens after the first minute, in terms of appropriate activity, staggers the imagination! And whereyou would be three weeks into it is preposterous to even conceive. Thats the soft version of the coming ofthe millennium. The hard version, Im not really even sure In the Amazon in my book True

Hallucinations I wrote about my brother and myself and our adventures down there. His expectation once, he told me, People are leaving their workbenches and offices with tears of joy streaming down theirfaces. Theyre staring at the sky. Fool that I was, I believed him. But its a reasonable hope.Heres the deal. We have the science, the technology, the money, the infrastructure, to do almost anythingthat we want to do. The problem is changing our minds. We have a hell of a time changing our minds. Andyet, we must. There is no choice about it. The reason Im a psychedelic advocate is not because I think itseasy, or because I think its a sure thing I dontthink its easy ora sure thing. Its simply that its theonly game in town. Nothing else can change your mind on a dime like we are going to have to change ourminds on a dime. If we had 500 years to sort this out, we could maybe have a fighting chance withoutradical pharmacological intervention. As it is, if we dont awaken, we are going to let it slip through ourfingers.And if hortatory preaching could do it, then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the trick. It didntand it wont. You have to somehow give people an experience an experience that is not somebody elses

experience theirexperience, that radically recrystallizes their understanding of the world. And theseshamanic plants that have been quietly growing and maintaining themselves for millennia, are in fact and for what reason? its beyond me for some reason, these are pipelines into a kind of planetary mind.The big bugaboo of Western civ is that we deny the existence of spirit. Its been a thousand-year project toeliminate the spirit from all explanations of how reality works, or the personality works, or anythingworks.The absence of spirit permits the murder of the planet. But the cost of the denial of spirit is life empty ofmeaning, which doesnt mean we have to return to the world of beady-eyed priestcraft and its slimyminions. But it does mean that we have to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental. Andapparently what this means, then, is fusion with Nature, and the psychedelics do this. They dissolve

boundaries. They open the way to the Gaian mind.Now you can believe this is bullshit, but you cannot believe its bullshit unless you have made theexperiment yourself and found it to be wanting this isnt a philosophy course, here. Were talking aboutsomething real. And if the critics are not willing to invest time in it, then the critics have already declared

their terror and fear of the solution. You know, it reminds me a little of something that Tim Leary well, Ialways thoughtTim Leary said this, but when I asked him, he completely disowned this brilliant remark,which let me know he was an enlightened man cause I never would have disowned it. So,somebody said notTim Leary LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people whohave NOT taken it. [laughter, clapping]

Now a lot of drugs are like that, and we have a lot of psychotic people running around who have beendriven mad by drugs they never took. But what they didtake was your civil rights, your freedom to guideyour own life, and your right to make your own decisions. This kind of thing is intolerable. If there is aniota of possibility that these substances enhance consciousness and remember, they used to be calledconsciousness expanding drugs (just a straight phenomenological description) if theres an iota of

possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to the metal in this matter.Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward extinction, that is causing us to lootour childrens future, that is causing us to accept the elimination of thousands of species per month without

pouring into the streets to loot and smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to goforward. I think the era of politeness has gone on just about long enough. And theres going to have tocome a moment where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we haveseen our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it, and takeit, and take it.You know, being counter-cultural is more than a fashion statement. I recall an obscure Chinese philosophernamed Mao Tse Tung, who once said, The Revolution is not a dinner party! Of course, he went on to sayits an armed struggle, prosecuted by the forces of the people. I dont think were ready to call for armedstruggle, but I think it is time to call for HANDS OFF THE AMERICAN MIND. GIVE US BACK OURMIND. The American mind is one of the most creative minds in the world, and it is being confined,


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compromised, and sold down the river by people who cant think of anything better to do with the worldthan fabricate it into stupid products and sell it at twice its natural worth. [applause]

Q& AWell, I could go on and on and do, you may have noticed but I think its much more fruitful whenthese things are interactive and driven by questions. And Im not fragile; you dont have to hold back. Imfrom Berkeley we throw chairs when were displeased. So, feel free to have at it. But is there anybody

whod like to comment or participate in this discussion?Man in audience: Thank you, Mr. McKenna. The whole bit about quoting Mao was kind of interesting ifyou think of the arms in terms of modems I mean, the fact that we now live in a point in time when its

possible to completely transfer power without shedding a drop of blood if you have the right passwords andaccess codes. There is a unique tilt on Maos armed struggle coming up real soon, if you think in terms ofinformation war rather than the kind of bloodshed thats been marking history up until now.Vis a vis your whole thing with the organic psychedelics versus LSD, for instance which is enjoying agreat revival right now, presently, in this city I dont know about elsewhere [laughter] vis a vis theLSD thing theres a point in the temporal flow with LSD where it drops, slows down, and then theresthe sensation of temporal cessation wherein one generally tends to perceive a presence behind the world which sounds a lot like the robot elves of yours. Im just interested in your take, in the distinction thatyoudraw between the organic psychedelics and for example LSD.TM: Well LSD kind of has a foot in both worlds. You know, you start, when you make LSD, with

ergonomine, which you get from ergot, which is grown on plantations in Pakistan. But then you elaboratethe molecule and make it synthetic. I certainly think we wouldnt be here, and Iwouldnt be here, if itwerent for LSD. The wonderful thing about LSD is that its possible to manufacture so much in theunderground. I mean, there is a problem with that in that it tends to promote criminal syndicalism. [sameman in audience: "Not if you give it away!"] Good point! [laughter, applause] But, if you have a trust fundand your roommate is a first-year biochemist, in a long weekend you can produce ten million hits. Thismeans youre not, of course, involved in helping out the folks in your building, you have some moreambitious agenda. But this is a unique situation with LSD, because you need so little of it. You see, if youset out to create ten thousand doses or ten million doses of psilocybin, the facilities of Upjohn corporationwould be insufficient. You would need stainless-steel vats of thousand-gallon capacity and incrediblequality-control equipment.So LSD came along at the perfect moment in the life of the collectivity tofocus us on the psychedelicexperience. But I dont think LSD is what I would call a full-spectrum psychedelic, because what I wasalways obsessed with was visions. And psilocybin and the tryptamines are much more reliable visionary

activators. People say, Why are you so into this vision thing? Youre just some kind ofvision fascist.[laughter] No, no I mean, or: Maybe, but! [laughter] Maybe but heres the thing the reason thevisions were so impressive to me is because that was, to me, the proof that it wasntme. You know, whenyou take LSD, you have strange thoughts, many thoughts, illuminating thoughts[unintelligible question from audience]You mean, what do I think of that in terms of DMT? [more from audience member] Well, I neverencountered elves on LSD, but I did hear a story recently. And since all we have are anecdotes, Ill pass iton, for whatever its worth.A friend of mine told me a story. He and a friend of his miscalculated a dose and took LSD, and then theywent to a dance. And they realized they were too loaded to be there. So they just backed up against the walland slid down the wall and sat there. And as they sat, shoulder to shoulder, mouths hanging, watching these

people dance, slowly, slowly, the dance came to a complete halt. Everything was frozen. And at thatmoment, the door swung open, and an elfcame into the room [laughter] and waltzed through all these

people, looked around, actually picked up a skirt or two and looked under it, and then exited. And then themovie started up again. [more laughter]Well now, Im not a theosophist or an Alice Bailey-ist or any of that malarkey. But on the other hand, thisseems to suggest this old theosophical idea of vibratory levels of existence you know, that if youremoving at a zillion hertz you do not see things moving at very much higher or lower frequencies. Now Inever was so aware of the time-stopping thing on DMT, but it is definitely true that when you smoke DMT,if you do sufficiently, you burst in to a place that is inhabited by these what I call self-transformingmachine elves, these jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs that are squealing and squeaking in this alienlanguage that condenses like metallic rain and falls out of the air of the room and is able to morph itself into


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Faberge-like objects that are scintillating and faceted and reflective of other possibilities and objects[side one of tape ends]Woman in audience: Hi, Terence, I wanted to know what products you have available. [laughter]TM: Hey. Listen. The point guy cant make the sale! [laughter] But, one of the things that I think is bestabout the thing I do, or one of the things that I like best about what I do is provide an excuse for the

psychedelic community to assemble. Because, believe it or not, these days we look like everybody else outthere. How the hell thathappened, I dont know! [laughter] So its very important for you to pay attentionto whos here, because without a doubt, somebody here has what you need! [laughter] Whateveryou need

you know, what do you need? A loan? A girlfriend? Well, we all need different things besides thefact that we all need DMT.[question from audience]Where do we go from DMT? Well, where do we go from there? I think the idea is to use psychedelics toremove anxiety without undercutting political action. In other words, we can do political work, ulceratedand clenched with terror and fear and always looking over our shoulders; or we can do that same work witha sense of play and lightheartedness. Its the same work, so why not have a good time while we do it? Itsthegood time we have that drives them so crazy and pisses them so off! [applause][question from audience]Whats new and fun that you havent experienced? Oh, well heres something new and fun. Theres a plant,called Salvia divinorum, which is absolutely legal. Its not only legal, the active principle is unknown toscience therefore it cantbe made illegal! [sings:] S-A-L-V-I-A D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M Salvia divinorum

remember you heard it here first! [laughter] Okay, so heres the deal with this. This is a plant that wascarried on the books for years as a hallucinogen, but nobody took it seriously because when the botanistsand the chemists would test for alkaloids, its alkaloid negative. So they said, Well then, to Hell with it, it

just cant be. But recently, an anthropologist who will remain nameless spent some time with the Indianswhere this stuff is happening, and they showed him how to do it. And he has been telling everyone how todo it. And, you know, true to the spirit of that, heres how you do it.First of all, this is a plant that looks like a coleus, which is a common houseplant. You could grow this stuffin your window box or your apartment; it would pose no problem whatsoever. Its also cuttings areavailable from plant dealers. And what you do is you take about fifteen leaves, which are about like[hand gesture] that, and you pull out the mid-rib, so you just have the soft, leafy material. And you roll it upinto a quid, and you put it in your cheek, and you lie down in darkness where you can see one of thoseilluminated digital clocks, you know? Lay there for fifteen minutes by the clock, slowly squeezing the stuffdown. And its very bitter. I mean you feel like the whole front of your mouth wraps around this stuff, but

its worth it. Its worth it. And after about fifteen minutes, if you will just spit this into a receptacle,Kleenex, whatever, uh, hygienic product is your choice [snickering] then, about two minutes later, it will

begin tostream. In other words, these afterimage-colored lights begin to form and come past you. Andabout two minutes after that, these cobalt-blue, magenta hallucinations begin to unfold. And what itreminded me of was Nude Descending a Staircase but as if Duchamp had done it in ultraviolet and blueand cobalt, and just this [question from audience] Where did I learn about this plant? Well Ive known about it for years, but likeeverybody else I just didnt take it seriously. [question] No no, its in the Oaxaca Mountains, its in theSierra Mazateca of central Mexico. And after about 45 minutes, it all gently goes away. And believe me,Im a skeptic, Im hard to move off the dime, Im not an airhead. And it worked, it worked. And veryinteresting I called the guy who gave it to me the next morning and I said, It looks to me like it has the

potential to be a craze! And he said, The very word that occurred to me craze! CRAZE! [laughter]So, like I said, you heard it here first.

Man in audience: I have a question. As a physician whos interested in medical anthropology, what aboutthe effect of this in terms of human development in utero?TM: You mean the effect on the developing fetus? ["Yes"] OfSalvia divinorum? ["No. Psilocybin."] Oh,

psilocybin. Well, heres my approach to this, and this is why I advocate the use of plants with a history ofshamanic usage. Because these things are illegal, human research is essentially outlawed. As users wesuffer under the prohibition, but imagine that science, one of the most powerful forces in our society, has

been told, GET LOST. Forget about psychedelic chemistry and forget about human studies. This is why Idont advocate MDMA use. In answer to your question, the human data on psilocybin is provided by thefact that it has a history of at least a millennium of human usage. If a plant has been accepted into a societyas that one has, as a regularly-applied shamanic tool, then I think you can be relatively certain that


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blindness, miscarriage, tumors, and so forth, are not a problem. Probably a lot of human beings have giventheir lives and their health for that data to be available to us in that way. Do you want to follow up? No?["Thank you."] Did I satisfy you? Great! Great.Woman in audience: As a poet and an art historian who has lived in a lot of cultures where Ive workedwith indigenous peoples amongst the Yamamoto I had the blowgun done up my nose, in Peru I tried SanPedro, in Sichuan province in China with the baini I tried many of the old herbs. One of the things Id liketo mention, which I think a lot of Americans and Europeans dont understand, is the ritualuse of thesehallucinogenics within the culture. I think its very important. Im heading off now to work to make afilm with the indigenous people in Taiwan, Formosa. Its a shamanic culture. I think the problem is thatwhen these things are removed from the mythological stance within a community the biggest problem inthis country which strikes me as a writer also is this lack of mythology that exists anymore. Its onething for hallucinogenics, but its another thing for also creating a use as you mentioned before, which Iliked very much of the imagination, a sense that a human being has the right to expand their ownhorizons, within whatever powers they wish and with whatever means. And Id like to see a greaterawareness that these things can expand an already fertile ground whichfirsthas to be created.TM: Thats right! And what might be, [laughter, applause] wellWoman: Thank you! And, what Id like to ask, when I come back, is I used to be on WBAI andwhen I come back, Id like to do something on these people that very few people have worked with. In fact,I have a military permit to go out, and its a culture that unlike the Ainu and the Reipus(?) Im doinganother exhibition on now, soon, at the museum but, the group in Formosa, AKA Taiwan, was first

occupied by the Japanese but have a history for thousands of years. And I have to have a military permit tonow get out granted, I have lived in warzones before, you know, with the Hmong in Laos, etc. etc. etc.,so as you might say, I get very bored living here! But [TM: "Why? They're all here." [snickers] Wellthats what I think, also, but, the key is, in a sense, these are ways, too. So I was going to ask you, when Icome back, if youd like to do something, maybe a radio show on some shamanic [unintelligible].TM: Sure, absolutely. Let me follow up on this. The issue of ritual and style of drug taking: I think that its

well, heres how I do psilocybin. I do it on an empty stomach in silent darkness. And I think that this isthe way to do it, because Im interested, essentially, in the pure phenomenology of it. I dont want to knowwhat it does to Bach, or Coil. I want to know what it does to nothin. I dont want to see how it can affectRembrandt or a natural scene. I just want it where I can study the ding ansich of the thing, you know? AndI have nothing against a good time, and hanging out, but it is no substitute for serious psychedelic taking.And, you know, people forget, or people dont realize, if you take a drug that you dont like, then anexcellent strategy for getting rid of it is to exercise like a crazy person, like go out and chop a bunch of

wood or something. Well, so then what I see is people taking low doses and dancing their asses off, in verynoisy environments dense with social signals. This is like a strategy for avoiding the psychedelic

breakthrough. How could it everfind you in all of that? [applause]So I smoke pot and confine myself to vodka gimlets most of the time in public, and then really pile it on in

private, really pile it on. These things cant hurt you, not at any reasonable dose. I mean, for instance, letstake psilocybin. The effective dose is 15 milligrams; the LD50 is something like 225 milligrams perkilogram. Your stomach wont even holdthat many mushrooms. So death is not a possibility. DMT same thing. I mean, DMT is a neurotransmitter. People sometimes say, Is it dangerous? The answer is,Only if you fear death by astonishment!Man in audience [Dmitry from "Dee-Lite"]: Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the thing about taking

psychedelics in noisy environments. I just happen to disagree with what you said, because, first of all Ithink collective tripping is really important, and it creates a communal vibe thats really terrific and hasevery advantage to advancing your mind within it. Also you can theres something to be said about

getting lost in thegroove. It can join the music and take you to a new and open your mind with themusic, because music is the tool to open your mind. And dancing dancing is spiritual, dancing makesyour[falters] Excuse me, Im getting very nervous.TM: Well, heres the thing. These things are not mutually exclusive, its not like you have to choose. My

problem is, I know people are dancing and theyre having these collective experiences. My fear is thattheyre not having the otherexperiences. And you have to have both. [man: "Absolutely."] Thats all.And as far as the dance thing, let me say, I mean, I think that whats happening with house music and theambient music thing is the most healthy sign out of the culture in 25 years at last, you know. Becausethe truth is, rock and roll became a tool of the very people it was supposed to discomfort. [applause] Youknow? [comment from crowd] Pardon me? Well, but whats wrong with ambient and house music? We


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dont need to free the harpsichord, you know. [laughter] Its a done deal, I think. And there is so muchtalent waiting in the wings. I mean, Im on my way tomorrow to London, on to Frankfurt these areenormous cauldrons of creativity that are exporting this music all over the world. And the message isabsolutely the message that needs to be put out. Its a message of community, of sensuality, and ofintelligence. I mean: love, sex, intelligence thats what the shamen are talking about.Dimitri: Well, the music comes from here, too. This is one of major centers of world dance music.TM: Oh, you dont have to have an inferiority complex in New York! [laughter]New man in audience: Terence, it was wonderful to meet you tonight. Your editor Dan Levy is a goodfriend of mine. Im a musician, and I just wanted to say, yeah, music is terribly important to everybodyslife. But I want to thank you, and one of the things I respect most about you is your research, as far as textgoes, because youve really traveled the world and youve dug up a lot of things that I want to thankyour translators, too, because thats one of the most unsung arts in the world. When you dig up something,its not everybody that can just know what it means. Translators lets put in a plug for them. [TM: "Theunsung heroes!"] Its true! ["Yes, it's true."] But I just wanted to take one second and ask you I wasraised in a quote-unquote Christian environment, and one of the things I learned about Christianity as Igrew up and came through it was that were all here to learn something, and Im not telling anybody inthis room anything but I was curious about the Book of Urantia, if you had heard of it and you might beable to comment on it.TM: [snickers from audience] Well, heres the thing. My tendency is to think that if you can channelwithout drugs, youre probably mentally ill. [laughter] However, the Urantia book is the most extravagant

and baroque and earliestof these things; they definitely got in ahead of the trend. So, to my mind, thesethings are like synthetic scripture, or efforts to resacralize language by casting it in a scriptural mode. Mymethod a lot of people are irritated with me, because if you really spend time with me, Im actually arationalist, and a kind of reductionist; Im not woo-woo. Because I really think that the truth can stand onits own. And so I tend to be very conservative in my choice of facts. For instance, if were dating the

pyramid, Id probably call the American Archaeology Society before I would call the priests of the Covenof Atlantis. But I know theres disagreement on these things. [laughter]I think, you know with the Urantia book and the Seth material, and then all little Sethettes that camealong afterwards I think basically its like anything else: you have to have your crap detector turned upon HIGH, and then just move forward with it, and what works for you, works for you. And all of thesethings should be taken as provisional. You know, when you rise as I have, from a cowtown in Colorado togiving speeches at very exclusive and chic New York nightclubs, you realize because you tend to meetquote-unquote celebrities along the way you realize that thats all a racket. And you further realize it

must have always been a racket. So, Lorenzo de Medici, Genghis Khan, Hitler LAME! [laughter]Idiotic, ordinary, dreary, boring to have dinner with!So, part of this psychedelic thing, I think, is really about self-empowerment. You know, Robert AntonWilson has this wonderful rap, he says: Define the world as a conspiracy run by you and your friends. Ifyou dont have that as your model, then you probably have a losers model, and who wants to be a loser?So, just assume, you know, that you and your friends are gaining power, moving into positions ofinfluence, and shortly about to take control! What does this have to do with the Urantia book? I dontknow, but heres where we ended up, folks!Woman in audience: I think a lot of people would agree that evolution is at a pretty questionable pointright now. In fact, I personally believe that since the car has been introduced that weve been de-evolving. Iguess my question to you is, through your hallucinogenic experiences, what do you think the lesson is tohuman society, that were supposed to learn, to sort of transcend the point were at now?TM: You mean generally, whats the lesson?

Woman: Generally, yeah. What are we supposed to do to sort of make this breach, cause I think were at apretty precarious point.TM: Well, its a complicated question, and I dont want to unveil my whole cosmology this late in thegame. But why not have a stab at it? [laughter] Heres the problem, as I see it. For a very long time, aswe evolved out of the animal nature, perhaps a hundred thousand years, psilocybin was part of our diet andour rituals and our religion. And though those individuals taking the psilocybin didnt know it, it washaving a very profound effect upon them. What it was doing was suppressing a primate behavior that is so

basic to primates that it goes clear back to squirrel monkeys. And what that behavior is is a tendency toform what are called male-dominance hierarchies. And we all know what this is, because it bedevils ourown political situation, and our own effort to create a reasonable society. But there was a great long period


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in the human past when this tendency was pharmacologically suppressed, in the same way that you wouldgive Prozac to somebody to suppress a tendency to manic-depression. In other words, what the shamans ofthe High Paleolithic figured out was how to medicate people so that they would live together in harmony,decency, and dignity.The problem is, that that strategy depended upon the simultaneity of psilocybin intoxication and theorgiastic sexual style that I talked about earlier. And when the mushrooms ceased to be available, men andwomen were simultaneously becoming able to coordinate cause and effect, to the point that women wererealizing that when they returned in their yearly wanderings to old camps, there would be food growing inthe discard piles. And at the same time, men were realizing that the consequences of the sex act was the

birth of a child. In other words, there came a certain point in human intellectual maturity when a distantcause and its effect were finally connected, and at that moment, agriculture was born. And agriculture was

born as a response to the drying of the African continent. And we literally wefellinto history.Youve heard me talk about Genesis as the story of historys first drug bust. It was historys first drug bust.I mean, that story is the story of the suppression of an earlier, feminine-driven mushroom religion. Andonce we stopped taking psilocybin, that old, old primate behavior pattern male dominance reasserteditself. But now, not in an animal species, but in a species with language, technology, agriculture, strategic

planning, memory, recall, so forth and so on. And we used the re-emergence of that tendency to establishcities, kingship, slavery, property the whole grab bag of pathologies that characterize Westerncivilization were born around the re-emergence of male dominance.And now were in a similar situation. And you know, no less conservative and sober a character than

Arthur Koestlerwrote a book called The Ghost in the Machine twenty years ago, and he reached the sameconclusion. He said, We are best at bashing each others brains out. And since thats no longer appropriate

if it ever was we need a drug to make us able to live together in ways that we mustlive together ifwere going to have cities of 10 million people and a global civilization. I think his analysis was on theright track, but shallow. I think we have that drug, and the anxiety and the restlessness and thedissatisfaction that has attended the historical experience is because we have this itch that we cant scratch.This is the key to our weird relationship to substances. I mean, think about it. Of course, elephants will

push down fences to get to rotting papaya and butterflies will fall over beside bowls of sugar. But we addictto dozens of substances. We not only addict to substances, we addict to behaviors. You know, guy goes tothe front door in the morning and if the paper isnt rolled at his feet, he turns into a beast! We also addict toeach other. You know? Our most sublime human relationships when they fall into difficulty, weexperience the condition of a broken heart, which looks in terms of its presentation of symptoms verymuch like junk withdrawal. Probably because it is, because there has been some kind of pheromonal lock-

on that has gone on because youve been hanging out with this person so much. And now that thepheromonal thing is broken and interrupted, you can barely function, you know? And it takes weeks, if notmonths, to reclaim your identity. We have an itch that we cant scratch, until we make our way back to the

primary chemical mediator of our human-ness. And that was Im convinced psilocybin. And that thisis the missing link; this would allow us to understand the sudden doubling of the human brain in less than amillion and a half years one of the great mysteries of evolutionary theory so forth and so on.And the fact that the society is so anxious on this subject is an indication that this is the real taboo. We havefound it. This is IT. And therefore, it has to be brought out of the closet. And it wouldnt hurt forus tocome out of the closet. I mean, when we are secretive, when we deny it, we are carrying out the Manswork for him. They dont have to arrest us if were willing to be our own guards and police. Its absurd.This is part of your birthright. It is part of our lives. We pay taxes; were legitimate. And it should not beswept under the rug. Are we going to be the lastminority on this planet to claim its civil rights? Why?When what we represent is an impulse back toward the aboriginal totality that gives life meaning.

[applause]Man in audience: Youve proclaimed that there is this hyperdimensional reality which is accessiblethrough these psychedelics, that we are immersed in it. And youre somewhat surprised that there is verylittle being done about this. Its something that is so as you say unbelievable and unfathomable andtheres so little research being done. The majority of people dont even care or know about this. Now, wegathered in this room, we care very much and we might have some connection to this and access to thisreality. Maybe its only certain people have a predilection or interest in it, such as like people who want togo rock climbing or surfing, and thats what they go to all extents to. But most people, if they were exposedto what you say the five grams in silent darkness would come back and not want anythingto do withthat experience, not have any understanding, any connection, and just want to hold on to the very simple


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reality which our consensus has constructed for most people to exist in. And that it really is just this fringething, and thats why there isnt much more interest in this then how can the psychedelic actually affectthe masses that dont really have much connection to that?TM: Well, revolutions are made with between five and ten percent of a population. No revolution in historyhas had more than that level of support. Im not saying everybody should take psilocybin. I mean, Godknows, there are plenty of people among us who dont needtheir boundaries dissolved, and if they aregoing to dissolve their boundaries, please dont do it when Im around. [laughter] But those people are

people who have been damagedin any of the dozens and hundreds of ways that this society has figured outto damage people. But I do think that it should be an option, and it should be an option that people areeducated about. One thing that weve done is that weve completely poisoned the well of language when itcomes to the subject of substances. Because the word drug reaches from heroin to aspirin through

psilocybin to propaganda. I mean, its a word so widely-used that its meaningless. And we are living in anatmosphere of complete hypocrisy; the most dangerous drugs ever discovered by human beings are beingfreely dispensed all over the place. I mean, tobacco, sugar, alcohol these are the great addictive anddestroying drugs, and they are the least interfered-with and the most commercialized. And the psychedelics

no claim of addiction was ever made, even by their critics.The issue with psychedelics is that they call into question the illusions of the masters. And I think it doesntmatter who the masters are. It doesnt matter whether were talking about a fascist dictatorship, a high-techindustrial democracy, or a Third World banana republic if you start taking psychedelics, you will startquestioning the reality around you, and question-asking is not what the control freaks are interested in.

They want you to work at your idiotic job, buy the crap theyre peddling you over the media, and keep youropinions to yourself, please. Or, there is spectrum of opinion offered, and its all represented on theMcLaughlin Group and if you go beyond that, then youre some kind of mad person.This is all nonsense we are allowing the least among us to control the agenda. That would be badenough under any circumstances, but were in an emergency. This is a crisis. We should be going throughlifeboat drills at this point, and instead, the band plays on, and the game continues to be played. Thenarcotics game, the government role in it, apparent suppression/tacit support, millions and billions ofdollars in hot money being used to finance the murder of editors of left-wing newspapers and the financingof private armies in various rathole countries that are the client states of the remnants of the empire wecreated to oppose the Soviet Union. Its all CRAP. And as soon as we call a halt to it, well all be better off,I think. [applause]Man in audience: I do recognize a lot ofAlfred Korzybski in what you are saying, and I wonder, isKorzybskis time-binding effect is the drug going to be the trigger for the time-binding effect?

TM: It could very well be. Korzybski was very influenced by Whitehead, and I was very influenced byWhitehead. And Whitehead has this idea that he calls concrescence. And he says, The world is growingtoward concrescence. And thats what I call the transcendental object at the end of time. I really thinkthat we are we are not going to disappoint ourselves. History is a psychedelic experience, and we havecome through, now, the darkerbardos, and are about to potentially enter the payoff zone, thetranscendental zone, the zone where it all makes sense. You know, a huge number of people have sufferedunimaginably that we could be here this evening. Nine times in the last million years, ice, miles deep, hasmoved south from the poles, pushing everything in front of it. There have been upheavals, epidemics,droughts everything and yet we arrive, on time and under budget, here this evening. Thats the kindof tradition we have to continue, a tradition of human nobility and human striving. And enough of thewhining from those who have piled up uncounted millions of dollars, and still are willing to suppress us inorder to obtain more. Its obscene. Its obscene. [applause]Man in audience: Yeah. Sorry to bother you one more time, but you just quoted Koestler. And Mike

Murphy in his new book, The Future of theB

ody, he quotes Koestler, talking about Koestler at one pointtook a very fatalistic approach to humanity, with the idea that the big problem, in his view, was that wedidnt have a vertical equivalent of the corpus callosum that allows the two horizontal hemispheres tospeak to each other. And he says that it may be a fatal flaw in our species that theres nothing that willlink the vertical components of the serpent brain out to the neocortex. And I was wondering if your take onthis, of these vegetable drugs, might be that they might be inducing if there would be anything towardsthe inducement of possible growth in that area?TM: Yeah, I think thats a very interesting idea. You may know a book by Julian Jaynes, called The Originof Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It may well be that there has to be some kind ofneural correction in us. For one thing, we cannot tolerate the luxury of an unconscious mind. That belongs


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to a more primitive stage of human development. When you have hydrogen bombs and can deliversynthetic plagues by missile to the other side of the planet, then you cannot be driven by the agendas ofanimals and half-conscious human beings. I mean, its like placing Jeffrey Dahmer at the head of thePentagon, or something. [laughter] And thats the Hey, we probably got it. Hes there.But this is what I meant when I said we can do anything. What we have inherited from the past asmisguided as it may be may have been are tools of immense power. And tools are neutral things, youknow? Its the monkey wieldingthe tool that you have to keep your eye on. And so, we are now challengedto apply the tools that have been created. Are we to clean up the Earth? de-emphasize the material side ofour technology? recognize the right of every human being to a healthy, secure existence? de-emphasize themarketing of violence as a patina on product fetishism? de-emphasize the objectification of women asanother patina on object fetishism? stop the peddling of loser scenarios to everyone? stop tying up ouraccumulated wealth in a useless standing crop of ever-more-obsolete arsenals and delivery systems?I mean, its okay to live like theres no tomorrow if youre at some primitive stage of culture with endlessfrontiers of exploitable resources in all directions. Thats not where were at. We have burned through allthat, and yet still we party on. And the signs are on the wall. We have invented a sin that no other cultureever even conceived of: its the sin oflooting the future. No other culture was ever so narcissistic and self-indulgent that it cared nothing for the future of its children. Children have always been the value focus for acivilization. But when you pile up four trillion dollars in debt, when you cut down the rainforests and blowoff the atmosphere, it means you are in the grip of such an orgy of narcissistic excess that the best thing forit would be for somebody to just walk over and put a bullet through your head as a favor to everybody else.

We dont needthat kind of a fate. We need to be as noble as the people who preceded us, and a hell of a lotsmarter, because nobility by itself is not sufficient. Were going to have to play a very cagey game now.And its okay with me; I anticipate it. I mean, I think primates love a hell of a good fight, and weve gotone on our hands. We have unleashed processes that, if not skillfully controlled, are extraordinarilyterminal even in the short term. And again, I see psychedelics as the only way to react fast enough tohave an impact on the runaway momentum of historical error.Man in audience: I wonder if you could say something about the relationship between psychedelics andour inherent structure and chemistry. I mean, is it unlocking something thats latent in us that we should beand should have been aware of all along?TM: Sure. Im very interested in this. Heres the great paradox in this domain, as far as Im concerned.DMT, without contest, is the most powerful psychedelic that I know of and I hope theres nothingstronger, cause if there is, I dont wanna know about it! [laughter] Its very brief and fast acting, and itclears your system very quickly. It occurs as a neurotransmitter in ordinary human metabolism. Now isnt

that interesting? That the most powerful and radical and alien of all these hallucinogens is the one most like in fact, exactly like whats in your own body. This is also a Catch 22 for the Establishment cause itmeans were allholding, allthe time! They can come and get you, folks! Its worse than a U. A. youhavent got a prayer!And one thing very interesting about DMT is that, if youve had it, its possible to have a dream, yearslater, in which somethings going on, and going on, and then someone whips out a little glass pipe, and putsit in your mouth, and you have the complete experience. Not a pale memory or a vivid memory the realthinghappens in the dream. Well this is big news, because what its saying is that human metabolism isvery, very close to being able to produce this at any time, and sometimes it can produce it. Now, its knownthat DMT is at its highest concentration in cerebrospinal fluid between 3 and 4 AM in most people. Andthats the time of day when the deep REM sleep occurs, accompanied by deep dreaming. So, it looks to melike the chemistry of dream and the chemistry of the psychedelic experience are the same. In fact, youknow, if the government is really serious in eliminating psychedelics, then throw down the 10 million

dollars or 20 million dollars that it would take to develop a drug that allows people to remember theirdreams. Because I think every night, we return to the psychedelic source, that the dreams you remember arethesurface of the dream, and that every single night, we sink back down in to the primordial field of mindout of which we reconstruct ourselves.

Now, Im telling you, if DMT were legal, in six months, a skilled laboratory team trained in the study ofbiofeedback techniques, could train a human being to trigger that on the natch. Well then, this is somethingthat we would teach our children in the seventh grade, and from then on, that would solve the entire issueof the hallucinogenic substances, their availability, their legality, and so forth. Legalize the dream! Reclaimthe human mind! Lets make dreams legal, lets make plants legal, lets legalize the imagination, empowerhope, and begin to build the kind of world that we would feel alright about handing our children on to.


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Because if we dont do that, were going to come off as the lamest generation in human history, and wearent. The creativity, the connectedness, the potential for good is enormous.And most people in this planet are embedded in pre-potent systems of relationship, meaning obligation andinherited religious and cultural ideas. So you may think that you dont count, but actually we all probablyare part of a sub-population of about 5% of the global population people who have disposable income,can read, follow global advances, get good data, and feel a political and moral obligation to do somethingabout it. We tend to feel as powerless as a Guatemalan peasant or something like that, but in fact, thats amyth They want you to accept. The real responsibility for saving the world rests on the literate middle- andupper-middle-class masses of the high-tech industrial democracies. Thats US. Its our responsibility tomake a change and to act for all those silent, downtrodden people who have been so victimized by thesystem that they couldnt turn out at a New York nightclub and hear an aesthete rail against the evils of theEstablishment. And thats probably enough railing against the evils of the Establishment.Thank you very much, thank you. [applause]

terence mckenna live at the fez

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