HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/drugs/hightimes

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 25.9 KB | 438 lines

Newsgroups: alt.drugs
From: [e-mail] (Dave Gross)
Subject: Terence McKenna: The High Times interview
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 30 May 94 20:13:16 GMT

The HIGH TIMES Interview
Terence McKenna

    Did hallucinogens play a crucial role in human evolution?
    Terence McKenna has devoted most of his life to exploring this
    question.  A specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon
    Basin, McKenna along with his partner Kat Harrison McKenna
    founded Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit foundation devoted
    to rescuing Amazonian plants that have a history of shamanic
    uses.  They move the plants to a 19-acre site in Hawaii and
    preserve the details of the plant's uses by storing the
    information in a computer database.  In addition to preserving
    these important plants, as a nonprofit organization, Botanical
    Dimensions solicits donations to publish a newsletter and to
    aid in carrying out the preservation of the folk knowledge of
    the peoples native to the Amazon area.  The combination of
    McKenna's academic approach -- he has a BS from the University
    of California at Berkeley with a distributed degree in ecology,
    resource conservation and shamanism -- his vast travel experiences,
    and uniquely visionary perspective, combine to make him a most
    sought-after speaker and author.  His newest books include
    /Food of the Gods/ (Bantam) and /The Archaic Revival/ (Harper/
    San Francisco) -- in which an abridged version of this interview
    appears.  A slightly different version of this interview will
    also appear in a soon-to-be-published book by David Jay Brown
    and Rebecca McClen called /Voices of Vision/.

by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen
High Times Magazine, April 1992

HIGH TIMES:  Tell us how you became interested in shamanism and the exploration
of consciousness.

Terence McKenna:  I discovered shamanism through an interest in Tibetan folk
religion.  Bon, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, is a kind of shamanism.  In
going from the particular to the general with that concern, I studied shamanism
as a general phenomenon.  It all started out as an art historical interest in
the pre-Buddhist iconography of thankas.

HT:  This was how long ago?

TM:  This was in '67, when I was just a sophomore in college.  And the interest
in altered states of consciousness came simply from -- I don't know whether I
was a precocious kid or what -- but I was very early into the New York literary
scene.  Even though I lived in a small town in Colorado, I subscribed to the
/Village Voice/, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD, mescaline, and
all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in.  Then I read
/The Doors of Perception/ and /Heaven and Hell/, and it just rolled from there.
That was what really put me over.  I respected Huxley as a novelist, and I was
slowly reading everything he'd ever written, and when I got to /The Doors of
Perception/ I said to myself, "There's something going on here for sure."

HT:  Recently you addressed close to 2,000 people at the John Anson Ford
Theatre in Los Angeles.  To what do you attribute your increasing popularity,
and what role do you see yourself playing in the social sphere?

TM:  Well, without being cynical, the main thing I attribute to my increasing
popularity is better public relations.  As far as what role I'll play, I don't
know.  I mean I assume that anyone who has anything constructive to say about
our relationship to chemical substances -- natural or synthetic -- is going to
have a social role to play, because this drug issue is just going to loom
larger and larger on the social agenda until we get some resolution of it.  By
resolution I don't mean suppression or just saying no.  I anticipate a new
open-mindedness born of desperation on the part of the Establishment.  Drugs
are part of the human experience, and we have got to create a more
sophisticated way of dealing with them.

HT:  You have said that the term "New Age" trivializes the significance of the
next phase in human evolution and have referred instead to the emergence of
an archaic revival.  How do you differentiate between these two expressions?

TM:  The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology '80s-style, with the
addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing.  The archaic
revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are
recovering the social forms of the late neolithic, and reaches far back in the
20th century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism -- even to a
phenomenon like National Socialism -- which is a negative force.  But the
stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor-consciousness --
these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire 20th century,
and the archaic revival is an expression of that.

HT:  From your writings I have gleaned that you subscribe to the notion that
psilocybin mushrooms are a species of high intelligence -- that they arrived
on this planet as spores that migrated through outer space, and are attempting
to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings.  In a more holistic
perspective, how do you see this notion fitting into the context of Francis
Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this
planet and its directed evolution has been seeded, or perhaps fertilized,
by spores designed by a higher intelligence?

TM:  As I understand the Crick theory of panspermia, it's a theory of how life
spread through the universe.  What I was suggesting -- and I don't believe it
as strongly as you imply -- is that intelligence, not life, but intelligence
may have come here in this spore-bearing life form. This is a more radical
version of the panspermia theory of Crick and Ponampurama.  In fact I think
that theory will probably be vindicated.  I think in a hundred years if people
do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores
could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation
pressure.  As far as the role of the psilocybin mushroom, or its relationship
to us and to intelligence, this is something that we need to consider.  It
really isn't important that I claim that it's an extraterrestrial, what we
need is a body of people claiming this, or a body of people denying it,
because what we're talking about is the experience of the mushroom.  Few
people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few
people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of
psychedelic effects that are unleashed.  One cannot find out whether or not
there's an extraterrestrial intelligence inside the mushroom unless one is
willing to take the mushroom.

HT:  You have a unique theory about the role that psilocybin mushrooms play
in the process of human evolution.  Can you tell us about this?

TM:  Whether the mushrooms came from outer space or not, the presence of
psychedelic substances in the diet of early human beings created a number
of changes in our evolutionary situation.  When a person takes small amounts
of psilocybin visual acuity improves.  They can actually see slightly better,
and this means that animals allowing psilocybin into their food chain would
have increased hunting success, which means increased food supply, which
means increased reproductive success, which is the name of the game in
evolution.  It is the organism that manages to propagate itself numerically
that is successful.  The presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack-
hunting primates caused the individuals that were ingesting the psilocybin
to have increased visual acuity.  At slightly higher doses of psilocybin
there is sexual arousal, erection, and everything that goes under the term
arousal of the central nervous system.  Again, a factor which would increase
reproductive success is reinforced.

HT:  Isn't it true that psilocybin inhibits orgasm?

TM:  Not at the doses I'm talking about.  At a psychedelic dose it might, but
at just slightly above the "you can feel it" dose, it acts as a stimulant.
Sexual arousal means paying attention, it means jumpiness, it indicates a
certain energy level in the organism.  And then, of course, at still higher
doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of
the brain that manifests as song and vision.  It is as though it is an enzyme
which stimulates eyesight, sexual interest, and imagination.  And the three of
these going together produce language-using primates.  Psilocybin may have
synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of
primitive protohuman animals.  It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary
enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.

HT:  There is a lot of current interest in the ancient art of sound technology.
In a recent article you said that in certain states of consciousness you're
able to create a kind of visual resonance and manipulate a "topological
manifold" using sound vibrations.  Can you tell us more about this technique,
its ethnic origins, and potential applications?

TM:  Yes, it has to do with shamanism that is based on the use of DMT in
plants.  DMT is a near- or pseudo-neurotransmitter, that when ingested and
allowed to come to rest in the synapses of the brain, allows one to see sound,
so that one can use the voice to produce, not musical compositions, but
pictoral and visual compositions.  This, to my mind, indicates that we're on
the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming
area, we are going to go from a language that is heard, to a language that
is seen, through a shift in interior processing.  The language will still be
made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual
impression.  This is actually being done by shamans in the Amazon.  The songs
they sing sound as they do in order to look a certain way.  They are not
musical compositions as we're used to thinking of them.  They are pictoral
art created by audio signals.

HT:  You're recognized by many as one of the great explorers of the 20th
century.  You've trekked through the Amazonian jungles and soared through the
uncharted regions of the brain, but perhaps your ultimate voyages lie in the
future, when humanity has mastered space technology and time travel.  What
possibilities for travel in these two areas do you forsee, and how do you
think these new technologies will affect the future evolution of the human
species?

TM:  I suppose most people believe space travel is right around the corner.
I certainly hope so.  I think we should all learn Russian in anticipation of
it, because apparently the US government is incapable of sustaining a space
program.  The time travel question is more interesting.  Possibly the world
is experiencing a compression of technological novelty that is going to lead
to developments that are very much like what we would imagine time travel to
be.  We may be closing in on the ability to transmit information forward into
the future, and to create an informational domain of communication between
various points in time.  How this will be done is difficult to imagine, but
things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and nanotechnology offer
new and novel approaches to the realization of these old dreams.  We shouldn't
assume time travel is impossible simply because it hasn't been done.  There's
plenty of latitude in the laws of quantum physics to allow for moving
information through time in various ways.  Apparently you can move information
through time, as long as you don't move it through time faster than light.

HT:  Why is that?

TM:  I haven't the faintest idea.  What am I, Einstein?  [Laughter.]

HT:  What do you think the ultimate goal of human evolution is?

TM:  Oh, a good party.... [Laughter.]

HT:  Have you ever had any experiences with lucid dreaming -- the process by
which one can become aware and conscious within a dream that one is dreaming --
and if so, how do they compare with your other shamanic experiences?

TM:  I really haven't had experiences with lucid dreaming.  It's one of those
things that I'm very interested in.  I'm sort of skeptical of it.  I hope it's
true, because what a wonderful thing that would be.

HT:  You've never had one?

TM:  I've had lucid dreams, but I have no technique for repeating them on
demand.  The dream state is possibly anticipating this cultural frontier that
we're moving toward.  That we're moving toward something very much like
eternal dreaming, going into the imagination, and staying there, and that
would be like a lucid dream that knew no end, but what a tight, simple
solution.  One of the things that interests me about dreams is this -- I have
dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works.  To me that's extremely interesting,
because it seems to imply that one does not have to smoke DMT to have the
experience.  You only have to convince your brain that you have done this,
and it then delivers this staggering altered state.

HT:  Wow.

TM:  How many people who have had DMT dream occasionally of smoking it and have
it happen?  Do people who have never had DMT ever have that kid of an
experience in a dream?  I bet not.  I bet you have to have done it in life,
to have established the knowledge of its existence, and the image of how it's
possible, but then this thing can happen to you without any chemical
intervention.  It is more powerful than any yoga, so taking control of the
dream state would certainly be an advantageous thing and carry us a great
distance toward the kind of cultural transformation that we're talking about.
How exactly to do it, I'm not sure.  The psychedelics, the near death
experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries ... all of these
things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension
that we can all live in a little more sanely than we're living in these
dimensions.

HT:  Rupert Sheldrake has recently refined the theory of the morphogenetic
field -- a nonmaterial, organizing, collective-memory field which affects all
biological systems.  This field can be envisioned as a hyperspatial information
reservoir which brims and spills over into a much larger region of influence
when critical mass is reached -- a point referred to as morphic resonance.  Do
you think this morphic resonance could be regarded as a possible explanation
for the phenomena of spirits and other metaphysical entities, and can the
method of evoking beings from the spirit world be simply a case of cracking the
morphic code?

TM:  That sounds right.  If what you're trying to get at is do I think morpho-
genetic fields are a good thing, or do they exist, yes, I think some kind of
theory like that is clearly becoming necessary.  And that the next great step
to be taken in the intellectual conquest of nature, if you will, is a theory
about how out of the class of possible things, some things actually happen.

HT:  How do you view the increasing waves of designer psychedelics and brain
enhancement machines in the context of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morpho-
genetic fields?

TM:  Well I'm hopeful, but somewhat suspicious.  I think drugs should come from
the natural world, and be use-tested by shamanically-oriented cultures, then
they have a very deep morphogenetic field, because they've been used for
thousands and thousands of years in magical contexts.  A drug produced in the
laboratory, and suddenly distributed worldwide simply amplifies the global
noise present in the historical crisis.  And then there's the very practical
consideration that one cannot predict the long term effects of a drug produced
in a laboratory.  Something like peyote, or morning glories, or mushrooms have
been used for vast stretches of time without detrimental social consequences.
We know that.  As far as the technological question is concerned -- brain
machines and all -- I wish them luck.  I'm willing to test anything that
somebody will send me, but I'm skeptical.  I think it's somehow like the
speech-operated typewriter.  It will recede ahead of us.  The problems will be
found to have been far more complex than first supposed.

HT:  Don't you think it's true that the designer psychedelics and the brain
machines don't have any morphogenetic field, so in a sense one is carving a new
morphogenetic field with their use.  Consequently, there would be more
possibilities for new things to happen -- unlike the psychoactive substances
which you speak of that have ancient morphogenetic fields, and are much more
entrenched in predictability and pattern -- and therefore not as free for new
types of expression?

TM:  Possibly, although I don't know how you grab the morphogenetic field of a
new designer drug.  For instance, I'll speak of my own experience, which is
ketamine.  My impression of ketamine was -- it's like a brand new skyscraper,
all the walls, all the floors are carpeted in white, all the drinking fountains
work, the elevators run smoothly, the fluorescent lights recede endlessly in
all directions down the hallways.  It's just that there's nobody there.
There's no office machinery, there's no hurrying secretaries, there's no
telephones -- it's just this immense empty structure waiting.  Well I can't
move into a 60-story office building.  I have only enought stuff to fill a few
small rooms, so it gives me a slightly spooked-out feeling to enter into these
empty morphogenetic fields.  If you take mushrooms, you know, you're climbing
on board a starship manned by every shaman who ever did it in front of you,
and this is quite a crew, and they've really pulled some stunts over the
millenia, and it's all there, the tapes, to be played, but the designer things
should be very cautiously dealt with.

HT:  It's interesting that John Lilly had very different experiences with
ketamine.  Do you think that there's any relationship between the self-
transforming machine elves that you've encountered on your shamanic voyages
and the solid-state entities that John Lilly has contacted in his inter-
dimensional travels?

TM:  I don't think there is much congruence.  The solid state entities that he
contacted seem to make him quite upset.  The elf machine entities that I
encounter are the embodiment of merriment and humor, but I have had a thought
about this recently which I will tell you.  One of the science fiction
fantasies that haunts the collective unconscious is expressed in the phrase
"a world run by machines."  In the 1950s this was first articulated in the
notion, "perhaps the future will be a terrible place where the world is run by
machines."  Well now, let's think about machines for a moment.  They are
extremely impartial, very predictable, not subject to moral suasion, value
neutral, and very long-lived in their functioning.  Now let's think about what
machines are made of, in the light of Sheldrake's morphogenetic field theory.
Machines are made of metal, glass, gold, silicon, plastic -- they are made of
what the earth is made of.  Now wouldn't it be strange if biology is a way for
the earth to alchemically transform itself into a self-reflecting thing.  In
which case then, what we're headed for inevitably, what we are in fact
creating, is a world run by machines.  And once these machines are in place,
they can be expected to manage our economies, languages, social aspirations,
and so forth, in such a way that we stop killing each other, stop starving
each other, stop destroying land, and so forth.  Actually, the fear of being
ruled by machines is the male ego's fear of relinquishing control of the planet
to the maternal matrix of Gaia.  Ha.  That's it.  Just a thought.  [Laughter.]

HT:  The recent development of fractal images seems to imply that visions and
hallucinations can be broken down into a precise mathematical code.  With this
in mind, do you think the abilities of the human imagination can be replicated
in a super-computer?

TM:  Yes.  Saying that the components of hallucinations can be broken down and
duplicated by mathematical code isn't taking anything away from them.  Reality
can be taken apart and reduplicated with this same mathematical code -- that's
what makes the fractal ideal so powerful.  One can type in half a page of code,
and on the screen get river systems, mountain ranges, deserts, ferns, coral
reefs, all being generated out of half a page of computer coding.  This seems
to imply that we are finally discovering really powerful mathematical rules
that stand behind visual appearances.  And yes, I think super-computers,
computer graphics and simulated environments, this is very promising stuff.
When the world's being run by machines, we'll be at the movies.  [Laughter.]
Oh boy.

HT:  Or making movies.

TM:  Or being movies.

HT:  I've thought at times that what you view as a symbiosis forming between
humans and psychoactive plants may in fact be the plants taking over control of
our lives and commanding us to do their bidding.  Have you any thoughts on
this?

TM:  Well symbiosis is not parasitism, symbiosis is a situation of mutual
benefit to both parties, so we have to presume that the plants are getting as
much out of this as we are.  What we're getting is information from another
spiritual level, their point of view -- in other words -- is what they're
giving us.  What we're giving them is care, and feeding, and propagation, and
survival, so they give us their elevated higher dimensional point of view.  We
in turn respond by making the way easier for them in the physical world.  And
this seems a reasonable trade-off.  Obviously they have difficulty in the
physical world, plants don't move around much.  You talk about Tao, a plant has
the Tao.  It doesn't /even/ chop wood and carry water.  [Laughter.]

HT:  Future predictions are often based upon the study of previous patterns and
trends which are then extended like the contours of a map to extrapolate the
shape of things to come.  The future can also be seen as an ongoing dynamic and
creative interaction between the past and the present -- the current
interpretation of past events actively serves to formulate these future
patterns and trends.  Have you been able to reconcile these two perspectives
so that humanity is able to learn from its experiences without being bound by
the habits of history?

TM:  The two are antithetical.  You must not be bound by the habits of history
if you want to learn from your experience.  It was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the
inventor of general systems theory, who made the famous statement that "people
are not machines, but in all situations where they are given the opportunity,
they will act like machines," so you have to keep disturbing them, 'cause they
always settle down into a routine.  So, historical patterns are largely
cyclical, but not entirely, there is ultimately a highest level of the pattern,
which does not repeat, and that's the part which is responsible for the advance
into true novelty.

HT:  The part that doesn't repeat.  Hmm.  The positive futurists tend to fall
into two groups.  Some visualize the future as becoming progressively brighter
every day and that global illumination will occur as a result of this
progression, others envision a period of actual devolution -- a dark age
through which human consciousness must pass, before more advanced stages are
reached.  Which scenario do you see as being the most likely to emerge, and
why do you hold this view?

TM:  I guess I'm a soft Dark Ager.  I think there will be a mild Dark Age.  I
don't think it will be anything like the Dark Ages which lasted a thousand
years -- I think it will last more like five years -- and will be a time of
economic retraction, religious fundamentalism, retreat into closed communities
by certain segments of the society, feudal warfare among minor states, and this
sort of thing.  I think it will give way in the late '90s to the actual global
future that we're all yearning for.  Then there will be basically a 15-year
period where all these things are drawn together with progressively greater
and greater sophistication, much in the way that modern science, and philosophy
has grown with greater and greater sophistication in a single direction since
the Renaissance.  Sometime around the end of 2012, all of this will be boiled
down into a kind of alchemical distillation of the historical experience that
will be a doorway into the life of the imagination.

HT:  Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, Ralph Abraham's chaos theory, and
your time wave model all appear to contain complementary patterns which operate
on similar underlying principles -- that energy systems store information until
a certain level is reached and the information is then transduced into a larger
frame of reference, like water in a tiered fountain.  Have you worked these
theories into an all-encompassing metatheory of how the universe functions and
operates?

TM:  No, but we're working on it.  [Laughter.]  Well it is true that the three
of us, and I would add Frank Barr in there, who is less well known, but has a
piece of the puzzle as well.  We're all complementary.  Rupert's theory is --
at this point -- a hypothesis.  There are no equations -- there's no predictive
machinery -- it's a way of speaking about experimental approaches.  My time
wave thing is like an extremely formal and specific example of what he's
talking about in a general way.  And then what Ralph's doing is providing a
bridge from the kind of things Rupert and I are doing back into the frontier
branch of ordinary mathematics called dynamic modeling.  Frank is an expert in
the repetition of fractal process.  He can show you the same thing happening on
many many levels, in many many different expressions.  So I have named us
Compressionists, or Psychedelic Compressionists.  Compressionism holds that the
world is growing more and more complex, compressed, knitted together, and
therefore holographically complete at every point, and that's basically where
the four of us stand, I think, but from different points of view.

**

To contribute to Botanical Dimensions, send check or money order to:
Botanical Dimensions, P.O. Box 807, Occidental, CA 95465

--
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"Time had no kaleidoscope for me; nothing grew faint, nothing shifted, nothing
 changed except my ecstasy, which heightened through interminable degrees to
 behold the same rose-radiance lighting us up along all our immense journey."