Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? It's just hard as hell to talk about! We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds.
We must decondition ourselves from 10, years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe. But flowers in the barrels of their guns spelled ruin and defeat, and they knew it.
There was an article in the Chronicle the other day about non-violent warfare. You know, the idea of what drugs or gases that will temporarily disable people to prevent physical aggression in war. So, back to basics. So, is it that the basic question, how to get to that without using the machinery?
Oh, yes. If, you know, you can tell them all to stick it up wherever, and you go on and you continue your religious, humbling, ego-dissolving experiences without [??? Well, the problem there is: is it possible? Is it possible to attain these states any way other than with drugs? And this usually comes around at some point in these weekends as a bone of contention, because we live in a society that offers an endless smorgasbord of non-pharmacological forms of spiritual advancement.
I am very lumpen, and this is where I feel myself to be the most crude among us, because none of this stuff works for me. The rest of us are going to spend their whole lives trying to get to it. And I think drugs are much safer than gurus. Or you can just sweep up around the ashram for ten or fifteen years, and make sure that Babaji always has a bowl of brown rice at his elbow, and he will lift you up and do the thing.
But I have felt certain experiences that are not exactly like that, but they were meaningful. And without judgment, absolutely. It was a deadening experience for me. It was a… you know, isolating experience. This world feels like shit, you know? And it certainly—. You can study yoga or meditation, or you can take drugs, or you can do good works like Mother Theresa or something like that.
I have certainly taken a lot of psychedelics. I certainly am no moral exemplar, nor have I ever felt pressure to be one while on a psychedelic trip. The psychedelic experience is weirder than that. Is that a spiritual experience? Hell, who knows what kind of an experience it is! And then there are altered states of consciousness which are drug-induced. I can feel an aspirin hit. I mean, I can actually feel the shift in my reality from two buffered aspirin.
None of this is psychedelic in the ordinary sense. And the psychedelic experience, for me, is this very narrowly defined thing where you see visions. Moving grids of color and little swimming things. And then you get the mice dancing in rows, and the little candies floating by, and…. But the real vision is a very mysterious thing; impossible by rational standards.
So a thing worth thinking about and worth talking about this weekend is whether or not the psychedelics are in fact part of what is ordinarily thought of as the spiritual quest or this quest for religious understanding.
Michael Taussig, I dare say, would be very uncomfortable in this room. He sees it in an entirely different way. Yeah, yeah. It does move you toward the dissolving whiteness, the oneness with the unspeakable of Meister Eckhart and that crowd. Originally, Leary and Alpert used psilocybin with these—.
Well, but they put them in a chapel on Good Friday! So the set and setting, then, highly determined the trip. A couple times during the morning, and actually once last night, I tripped; the topic of addiction came up and I heard a number of people say psychedelics can be addictive.
I believe that could possibly be true. In lighter doses. Well, you have to make a distinction between physiological and psychological addiction. Most addictions are psychological.
Addiction to eggs in the morning, addiction to having your newspaper on time, and addiction to—well, the controversial one, I think, is cannabis. Is it or is it not addicting? I think the answer is: yes, sometimes. Or: no, but sometimes, yes. A year or so ago I was in therapy with a—had a lot of problems with my relationship and so forth—and I was in therapy with this woman who I really respected a lot, and she seemed very bright.
But, strangely enough, she knew almost nothing about drugs, and it was a weird thing for me to have a therapist like that. And I had absolutely no problem with it, which amazed me. I had been whistling past the graveyard when I made these brave statements. It was no problem whatsoever. And I think that the setting has a great deal to do. In the 19 th century, the user of opiates was called the drug fiend.
You were a fiend. This means that the concept that is being evoked here is of demonic possession. In the 20 th century, addiction is viewed as a disease.
Like the flu or something. Oh no. Nobody can be addicted to psychedelics. Only if they use them as though it were another drug. This is not what LSD does, this is what methamphetamine does. All psychedelics, in low doses, appear to be the same drug. I think addiction is a disempowering concept. I noticed there seems to be a backlash building. And people now announce their addiction to everything at the bat of an eye.
Oh, well, I think that people who are very serious about AA are usually pretty open about agreeing to the power of psychedelics.
This is the right thing. You know, in the early sixties, when LSD was first being explored by psychiatrists, they began giving it to people—chronic alcoholics. And they were getting close to 80 percent cure of chronic alcoholism with a single exposure to LSD.
That would be hard to feature. The drugs that do the most social harm, we create mega-industries out of them. And this is a situation that has been exacerbated since the middle of the 19 th century. You see, we forget that all of this information about drugs has arrived in Western civilization only in the last to years.
I mean, ayahuasca is a good example. Other drug—well, psilocybin: an even more dramatic example. In , the use of psilocybin was restricted to certain Mazatecan Indian tribes in central Mexico. A shibboleth , is that the word?
I mean, our real addictions are to status, property, money, and power over others. But we love to demonize the exotic and to pat ourselves on the back. Alcohol culture—cultures that tolerate and encourage alcohol are just besotted with alcohol. It touches every aspect of life. For instance, there are certain subcultures that I think are more besotted than others.
Academe is just a nightmare of alcoholic abuse and misbehavior, and carrying on of the most bestial and depressing sort. That academic culture runs very heavily on alcohol. I think you would be suspect as a pariah; not one of the boys, not a team player. Because a lot of hard drinking goes on in those situations. Incredible—you know, Washington… if you want to go to a hard-drinking town.
These guys that stumble across the front page of our newspaper are just the ones who get caught. I mean, everybody is juicing it real strong inside the beltway. Yeah, having a belt inside the beltway. Yeah, a couple of weeks ago a CBS reporter [??? He said if you had to eliminate everybody who had sexual problems or drinking problems in Washington, about 10 percent would qualify to run for anything. The guy was such a beast that he frightened Hunter Thompson with his drug-abused treatment of women and antics.
Talking about institutions being rife with alcohol: with alcohol cultures it seems that business is the one place that seems to be changing. And that these new models are taking hold. I just wondered [??? That it was just botched. The book is one of the most wonderful—it is, I would say, the most wonderful piece of fiction ever written about the Amazon. And—without naming names—I understand these actors did a terrible job.
And Babenco, who directed it, they thought they were so smart to get a guy, a Third World director. What kind of an Amazon picture is this? Yeah, I heard it was wide off the mark. I mean, I just—you probably ought to go see it just so—. But what it did do—I thought, personally—was that at least it did give people, the audience, a somewhat more vivid and somewhat more accurate picture of this kind of tribal reality.
More authentic. But I thought John did a good job with that, considering he had never had a psychedelic experience at that point. He was feeling by theory, and he got pretty close to it. There have been attempts in Hollywood to deal with this theme, most of them quite unhappy.
What was that awful thing with Richard Chamber? Altered States —pshh. Well, we want to encourage them. Keep trying, folks. They may get it sooner or later. Showing an internalized world, and especially one that is different from person to person, is very, very tricky. One last comment about the alcoholism and LSD thing. But if they worked at all, [???
For instance, the Chinese school of poetry surrounding Li Bo —who was a Tang Dynasty poet—was alcohol. Alcohol was their drug of transcendence. And these groups of poets would get together, and they would drink heavily, and then they would declaim poetry, and scribes would write it down, and we inherit this as a corpus of sublime artistic outpouring.
And yet, it was created in an environment which we identify with a very low-consciousness state. So yeah, it is a contextualized thing, definitely. Well, I thought—I sort of try to divide these things into different domains of concern, and I thought of the morning as sort of the sociological, anthropological, historical shtick.
This does not set you up for the psychedelic experience. So if you have a double espresso, you enter an altered state. If you climb a mountain in three minutes, you have an altered state.
If you dive into cold water, altered state. And there are an infinitude of these altered states. The moment-to-moment experience of being is an experience of altering states.
These are all altered states. Substances of some sort. And it includes foods. I mean, you all know what an MSG flush is like. Well—or do you? Chinese Restaurant Syndrome? You could think of it as a drug. Anything which changes your mind can be abused as a drug. Well, then there are the more traditional psychoactive states. Or states of agitation: methadrine, benzadrene, dexadrine, amphetamine, white sugar, caffeine, theobromine the active agent in cocoa and chocolate.
And each one of these things pushes you into a different state which is largely emotive and rooted in the body. For instance, you may know about datura. Datura is jimsonweed and these ornamental plants with the large white bell-like flowers. Well, if you make a tea out of the leaves, root, flowers, or seed of that plant, it will turn you every way but loose.
It is a completely disorienting, freaky kind of experience with loss of memory, confusion of sequence, delusion of reference, amnesia, projective imagining, so forth and so on. To my mind it is not a psychedelic state. I call it a deliriant or a confusant. I remember—I always usually end up telling this story—what put me off datura was, years ago, when I lived in Nepal, I had this English friend and we experimented with all kinds of drugs.
And one day I was in the market buying potatoes and tomatoes—the only two things you could get in Boudhanath at that time—and I encountered this guy, and we started just exchanging the news of the day. And in the course of the conversation I became aware that he thought I was visiting him in his apartment. He thought I had come by his rooms. Nobody needs to be that twisted around. To my mind, the psychedelics can be chemically defined with very few exceptions as indoles.
Now, the only exception to this is mescaline. I am not fond of mescaline. These are wonderful descriptions of full-on psychedelic states. But they were using pure mescaline, and close to a gram a throw, which is a lot. If you look in the Merck Manual or the PDR , the clinically recommended dose of pure mescaline is milligrams. Three quarters of a gram of alkaloid. Very few people actually take that.
And this brings us to one of the issues around psychedelics. What they deliver is the periphery of the psychedelic experience: accelerated thought processes, a kind of depth and richness to cognition that is unfamiliar, an ability to analyze situations from unusual perspectives, or to reach unexpected conclusions.
And I found this reluctance to come to grips with the full psychedelic experience even among Amazonian shaman. People are reluctant to go the full distance. We were with shamans at one point in Peru—ayahuasca shamans—and I was aware of an admixture plant that was stronger than the admixture plant that they were using.
But I kept pressing. And then all of the psychedelics—they deliver differing levels of this. And then, what you always have to bear in mind when you listen to me talk about this, is: there are physiological differences among people. We are genetically different in this area of drug receptors. The Irish are always singled out as special offenders in this area.
The stereotype of the Irish is that they have a peculiarly intense relationship to intoxication and to little people in a nearby but invisible world. What are people talking about? And to my mind, the compound that is most interesting for doing that is DMT.
DMT is the most interesting, in some ways, of the psychedelics because more issues are raised by it than any other. DMT, when smoked, in most people, return you to normal in under ten minutes.
Under ten minutes! I got it. Another very interesting thing about DMT is: it occurs naturally in the human brain. No, a human metabolite which takes only ten minutes to undergo its entire exfoliation and quenching is the strongest of all.
What is a strong psychedelic? Every psychedelic trip is. You may have had the expectation—you might think if you had never had a psychedelic experience, it sort of begins like the Bach B Minor Fugue and goes from there as you rise into the realms of light and union with the deity, or something like that. What happens on DMT I referred to this morning: a troop of elves smashes down your front door and rotates and balances the wheels on the after-death vehicle, present you with the bill, and then depart.
Union with the white light you could handle! An invasion of your apartment by jeweled self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace that are speaking in demotic Greek is not something that you anticipated and could handle. It sounds so crazy.
Is it dangerous? Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised, and a moment will come that will wipe the smile right off your face! And this death by astonishment thing—well, one thing about it. Let me say a little bit more about it. What happens is: the world is completely replaced. Instantly, percent. And what is put in its place… not one iota of what is put in its place was taken from this world.
And when you try to say what it is you realize that language has evolved in this world, and it can serve no other. Or it takes years of practice. And so this is like you try to pour water over the trans-dimensional objects in front of you. The water of language. Just two large tokes away at any given time is this non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, irrational, un-Englishable place! What gives it its indescribability is its utter weirdness, its alienness, its power to astonish.
I mean, you take a toke: you feel strange, your whole body feels odd. You take a second toke: all the oxygen seems to have been pumped out of the room. Everything jumps into clarity. And then you break through it. Some of you may know the Pink Floyd song about how the gnomes have learned a new way to say hoo-ray? Am I alright? Yeah, normal. Heartbeat: normal. Breathe, breathe, breathe… yes. This is crystalline clear, solid; you can see the light reflected in the depths of these objects, and everything is very brightly colored, and everything is moving very, very rapidly.
And there are entities there. And then they jump out. Hang on. Pay attention! They are very aware of the fleeting nature of this encounter.
Forget that. They make offerings. And they love you. They say this. You come so rarely! And here you are. And the offerings are objects of some sort.
And now remember: you are not changed. These objects are, themselves, somehow alive, and transforming, and changing. So when these creatures—I call them tykes—when these tykes offer you these objects, you grok it. You look at it and immediately—because you are yourself—you have this realization: my god, if I could get this thing back into my world, history would never be the same.
A single one of these objects is—somehow, you can tell by looking at it—this would confound my world beyond hope of recovery. It cannot exist. And the creatures—the tykes—are singing. They are speaking in a kind of trans-linguistic glossolalia. They are actually making these objects with their voices. They are singing these things into existence.
Do it! And they get quite pushy about this. Do it now! They just go mad with delight and turn somersaults, and turn themselves inside-out, and they all jump into your chest at once. And I think a lot of people have this experience. The helping spirits. Those are the helping spirits. Dead person. This is what happens to people who die. And somehow this drug—or whatever it is—is allowing me to see across the bay at the veil.
This is the lifting—you want to talk about boundary-dissolution! What these creatures want, according to them, is: they want us to transform our language somehow. At this point in the weekend and in my life, we all are on the cutting edge.
And nobody is ahead of anybody else. Clearly, we need to transform our language, because our culture is created by our language, and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer.
Somehow we need to transform our language, but is this what they mean? Chapter eight of The Invisible Landscape , which McKenna co-wrote with his brother, elucidated the idea of "resonance thinking in Chinese intellectual constructs" with an excerpt from Science and Civilisation in China by Joseph Needham; the excerpt cited a 5th century text in which a Taoist monk answered a question about the fundamental idea of the I Ching by saying that it could be expressed in one word, resonance:.
As he wrote in True Hallucinations : "I succeeded finally in in achieving a completely formal, mathematical quantification of the fractal structure that I had unearthed inside the structure of the I Ching. Heraclitus BC McKenna expressed his fondness for Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who wasn't considered to be part of any school of thought, in True Hallucinations :. Heraclitus was called the crying philosopher, as if he spoke in desperation.
But, why crying? I love what he says—it does not make me cry. Rather than interpret pante rhea as "nothing lasts," I had always considered it a Western expression of the idea of Tao.
In True Hallucinations , McKenna wrote:. Like the shift of epoch called the apocalypse and anticipated by religious hysterics, DMT seems to illuminate the regions beyond death. And what is the dimension beyond life as illuminated by DMT? If we can trust our own perceptions, then it is a place in which thrives an ecology of souls whose stuff of being is more syntactical than material.
It seems to be a nearby realm inhabited by eternal elfin entelechies made entirely of information and joyous self-expression. Wei Boyang 2nd century AD McKenna often referenced Wei Boyang, "a semimythical figure from the Kuaji area of modern Zhejiang believed to have been active in the middle of the second century," according to Taoism and the Arts of China by Stephen Little, on the topic of worry.
Alfred North Whitehead Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He co-wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica , , with Bertrand Russell, who had been his student at Trinity College, Cambridge. I mean, that's a direct quote from Whitehead. The only thing you can trust at this point--and some of you have heard me say this before--is the felt presence of immediate experience, otherwise known as feelings, and mathematics.
And mathematics is something that most of you have been denied in order to keep you marks. So all you have are feelings. And so it's very important to empower this dimension, which Husserl or Merle Ponte or somebody called the felt presence of immediate experience.
Everything proceeds from that. Even thought is subsequent to feeling. He collects Redon when nobody had ever heard of Redon. He buys turtles and has jewels affixed to their backs. Then he sits in a half-lit room and smokes hashish and watches the turtles crawl around on his Persian rugs.
Let's all go home and do this. Arthur C. Clarke Discussing his and his brother Terence's love of science-fiction authors in the early s, Dennis McKenna wrote in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss that "it was Clarke who had the greatest impact on our thinking, thanks largely to his novels Childhood's End and The City and the Stars Only a fraction of the populace is incarnate at a given time; the rest are stored as solid-state templates in the Central Computer.
Just as the Soviets and Americans near the furious end of their race to launch the first space probe, mile-wide starships appear, poised over every major city in the world.
And there they remain, or seem to, asserting their presence but otherwise hardly communicating. Decades pass; eventually the population becomes so accustomed to the vessels they are all but ignored. It is then that the visitors send an emissary to the surface, a figure whose shocking appearance activates a number of archetypes long buried in the human psyche.
Clarke called Star Maker , "Probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written. Kathleen Harrison McKenna, who was born in , met Kathleen Harrison —his future-wife and future-divorcee—in , four years before "the experiment at La Chorrera. Eight years had passed since we had circumambulated the Mosque of Omar. She was a tide pool gazer and a solitary traveler. The mushroom had made good its promise to send another partner to share the ongoing journey through the interior world.
They married on November 22, , created two children— Finn in and Klea in —and in founded Botanical Dimensions to "collect, protect, propagate and understand plants of ethno-medical significance and their lore. Also available is her lecture on Salvia at the same gathering. In , McKenna and Harrison divorced. From True Hallucinations :. This despite our two children, the house we built together, and both our efforts to be decent people.
Apparently the presence of the Logos has done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Like the Soul in Yeats's poem I am still an eternal thing fastened to the body of a dying animal. In our voyages to the Amazon and elsewhere she has been the best possible companion, colleague, and muse. With his widely set and heavy-lidded eyes, McKenna looks like a seasoned nomad merchant. Silness has shorn McKenna's usually full head of hair down to gray stubble, and the upper right side of his forehead is gently swollen and graced with a Frankensteinian scar.
Though he is desperately ill, his spirits are as alive as ever: gracious and funny, brilliant and biting. But he tires quickly, and seems intensely energized only when the prospect of chocolate cookies or ice cream arises.
He is also very skinny, having lost a lot of muscle in his thighs, and he moves painfully slowly when he moves at all. McKenna and Silness have hosted a regular stream of visitors and well-wishers over the last months, but the scene is definitely not Learyland. They are living life as close to normal as possible - which is how McKenna prefers it.
The other thing is to do what you always wanted to do. I wasn't too keen on that, either. My tendency was just to twist another bomber and think about it all. An early popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, he argued that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike.
There's a lot to think about in McKenna's lair. An altar lies on top of a cabinet over which hangs a frightening old Tibetan tangka. With McKenna at my side, the altar's objects are like icons in a computer game: Click and a story emerges. Click on the tangka and get a tale of art-dealing in Nepal. Click on the carved Mayan stones and hear about a smoking god who will arrive far in the future.
Click on an earthen bowl and wind up in the stone age. Gamers know that the most interesting objects usually lie near the obvious ones, and indeed, the real prizes here lurk inside the narrow cabinet drawers: butterflies. Click on these hummingbird-sized beauties and you'll be transported back 30 years to the remote islands of Indonesia, where McKenna dodged snakes and earthquakes in order to capture prize specimens for the butterfly otaku of Japan.
The most prominent feature of the room are the 14 large bookcases that line the walls, stuffed with more than 3, volumes: alchemy, natural history, Beat poetry, science fiction, Mayan codexes, symbolist art, hashish memoirs, systems theory, Indian erotica, computer manuals.
Deeply attuned to the future of consciousness, McKenna remains a devoted Gutenberg man. McKenna derives great pleasure from pushing the envelope of the human mind, but he is equally turned on by technology.
On the one hand, the house, which was only finished last year, is completely off the grid, irrigated with rainwater collected in a large cistern up the hill, and powered by solar panels and a gas generator. There are no phone lines. At the same time, Ethernet connections are built in everywhere, even out on the deck.
His plan was to eventually stream lectures over the Net, thus eliminating the need to travel in order to "appear" at conferences and symposia. McKenna normally spends four or five hours a day online, devouring sites, weeding through lists, exploring virtual worlds, corresponding with strangers, tracking down stray facts. Sometimes he treats the Net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google's search field just to see what comes up.
Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with. As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we'll lose our grasp on the tiller. That's where psychedelics come in. Who would want to do machine architecture or write software without taking psychedelics at some point in the design process?
It's a typical McKenna question: simultaneously outrageous and, in some twisty way, true. For obvious reasons, hard statistics on the extent of psychedelic use in the high tech industry are tough to come by.
Psychedelics have certainly left their mark on computer graphics, virtual reality, and animation. Well, why? C'mon - it's because it was created by tripsters. Together father and son would get high and go to museums to analyze the objects. How would you get this Minoan vase, this Etruscan statue, up on the screen in 3-D?
If you look at a seashell or a glass vase as a modeling problem, then everything is an animation. The Net, says McKenna, is "an oracle," fostering an unprecedented dialog between human beings and the sum total of human knowledge. Ultimately, McKenna wants something more than trippy images.
He hopes that computer graphics will blossom into a universal lingo, a language of constantly morphing hieroglyphic information that he claims to have glimpsed on high doses of mushrooms. Something about how we process language holds us back. That's why I encourage everybody to think about computer animation, and think about it in practical terms.
Because out of that will come a visual language rich enough to support a new form of human communication. In McKenna's mind we are not just conjuring a new virtual language. We are also, in good old shamanic style, conjuring the ineffable Other.
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