Terence McKenna and Ethnopharmacology

TERENCE MCKENNA AND ETHNOPHARMACOLOGY

BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER

COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD

THE LEADERSHIP I CHING

LEADERSHIP & CAREER IN THE 21ST CENTURY

CREATIVE-C LEARNING

INTEGRATE YOUR EMOTIONS

KRISHNAMURTI AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

THE NEW PARADIGM IN BUSINESS, LEADERSHIP AND CAREER

THE NEW PARADIGM IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SPIRITUALITY

THE NEW PARADIGM IN SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS THEORY

THE VIBRANT NATURE OF LIFE

SHAMANIC WISDOM MEETS THE WESTERN MIND

CREATIVE GENIUS

THE BETTER LIFE

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

CREATIVE LEARNING AND CAREER

FRITJOF CAPRA AND THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE

FRANOISE DOLTO AND CHILD PSYCHOANALYSIS

EDWARD DE BONO AND THE MECHANISM OF MIND

JOSEPH MURPHY AND THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE LUNAR BULL


TERENCE MCKENNAAND ETHNOPHARMACOLOGY

SHORT BIOGRAPHY, BOOK REVIEWS, QUOTES, AND COMMENTS

(GREAT MINDS SERIES, VOL, 8)

by Peter Fritz Walter

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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walterhttp://peterfritzwalter.com

About the Author

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) focused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical performance, social sciences and humanities.

He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a high school award for creative writing and editorial work for the school magazine.

After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in European Integration atSaarlandUniversity, Germany, and with a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1987.

He then took courses in psychology at the University of Gene-va and interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified through a hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hypnotherapist in Lausanne. This led him to the recovery and healing of his inner child.

In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child psycho-analystFranoise Dolto (1908-1988)in Paris and interviewed her. A long correspondence followed up to their encounter which was considered by the curators of the Dolto Trust interesting enough to be published in a book alongside all of Doltos other letter ex-changes byGallimard Publishers in Paris, in 2005.

After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach, Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher and consultant.

His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction works and short stories focus upon education, philosophy, perennial wis-dom, and the poetic formulation of an integrative worldview.

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He also reads source literature for his research works in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese.

All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published, de-signed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).

The idea of the simultaneous coexistence of an alien di-mension all around us is as strange an idea in the context of modern society as it must have been to the first sha-mans, whose experiments with psychoactive plants would have soon brought them to the same tryptamine doorway.

TERENCE MCKENNA, THE INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE

The authors profits from this book are being donated to charity.

ContentsIntroduction! 9About Great Minds Series

Chapter One! 13Short Biography

1. Paonia, Colorado (1946-1962)! 15

2. California (1963-1967)! 16

3. New York City (Fall 1968)! 17

4. Asia (1969-1970)! 18

5. La Chorrera (1971)! 19

6. Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide (1976)! 20

7. Ranting and raving (1980s)! 21

8. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992)! 22

9. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowl-edgeA Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (1992)! 23

10. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Authors Extraordi-nary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise (1993)! 23

Chapter Two! 25Book Reviews

The Archaic Revival! 26Review! 26Quotes! 40

Food of the Gods! 64

Review! 64Quotes! 73

The Invisible Landscape! 97Review! 97Quotes! 102

Chapter Three! 111Bonus Essay: The Shamanic Method

Common Assumptions! 111The Detractors of Shamanism! 116

The Age of Enlightenment! 117

Cartesian Science! 119

Reductionism! 122

Catholicism! 123

The Shamanic Revival! 125Sigmund Freud! 128

Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead! 131

Carl-Gustav Jung! 133

The Grand Opening! 136

The Shamanic Method! 138

Bibliography! 151Contextual Bibliography

Personal Notes! 163


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IntroductionAbout Great Minds Series

We are currently transiting as a human race a time of great challenge and adventure that opens to us new path-ways for rediscovering and integrating the perennial holis-tic wisdom of ancient civilizations into our modern science paradigm. These civilizations were thriving before patriar-chy was putting nature upside-down.

Currently, with the advent of the networked global so-ciety, and systems theory as its scientific paradigm, we are looking into a different world, with a rise of horizontal and sustainable structures both in our business culture, and in science, and last not least on the important areas of psychology, medicine, and spirituality.

A paradigm, from Greek paradeigma, is a pattern of things, a configuration of ideas, a set of dominant beliefs, a certain way of look-ing at the world, a set of assumptions, a frame of reference or lens, and even an entire worldview.

While most of this new and yet old path has yet to be trotted, we cannot any longer overlook the changes that happen all around us virtually every day.

Invariably, as students, scientists, doctors, consultants, lawyers, business executives or government officials, we face problems today that are so complex, entangled and novel that they cannot possibly be solved on the basis of our old paradigm, and our old way of thinking. As Albert Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem on the same level of thought that created it in the first place hence the need for changing our view of looking at things, the world, and our personal and collective predicaments.

What still about half a decade ago seemed unlikely is happening now all around us: we are rediscovering more and more fragments of an integrative and holistic wisdom that represents the cultural and scientific treasure of many ancient tribes and kingdoms that were based upon a per-ennial tradition which held that all in our universe is inter-connected and interrelated, and that humans are set in the world to live in unison with the infinite wisdom inherent in creation as a major task for driving evolution forward!

It happens in science, since the advent of relativity the-ory, quantum physics and string theory, it happens in neu-roscience and systems theory, it happens in molecular bi-ology, and in ecology, and as a result, and because science is a major motor in society, it happens now with increasing speed in the industrial and the business world, and in the


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way people earn their lives and manifest their innate tal-ents through their professional engagement.

And it happens also, and what this book is set to em-phasize, in psychology and psychoanalysis, for Franoise Dolto, while having been a member of the Freudian psy-choanalytic school, has created an approach to healing psychotic children that was really unknown to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

More and more people begin to realize that we cannot honestly continue to destroy our globe by disregarding the natural law of self-regulation, both outwardly, by polluting air and water, and inside, by tolerating our emotions to be in a state of repression and turmoil.

Self-regulation is built into the life function and it can be found as a consistent pattern in the lifestyle of natives peoples around the world. It is similar with our immense intuitive and imaginal faculties that were downplayed in centuries of darkness and fragmentation, and that now emerge anew as major key stones in a worldview that puts the whole human at the frontline, a human who uses their whole brain, and who knows to balance their emotions and natural passions so as to arrive at a state of inner peace and synergetic relationships with others that bring mutual benefit instead of one-sided egotistic satisfaction.

For lasting changes to happen, however, to paraphrase J. Krishnamurti, we need to change the thinker, we need to undergo a transformation that puts our higher self up as the caretaker of our lives, not our conditioned ego.

ABOUT GREAT MINDS SERIES

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Hence the need to really look over the fence and get beyond social, cultural and racial conditioning for adopt-ing an integrative and holistic worldview that is focused on more than problem-solving.

What this book tries to convey is that taking the exam-ple of one of the greatest child psychoanalysts of our time, we may see that its not too late, be it for our planet and for us humans, our careers, our science, our collective spiritual advancement, and our scientific understanding of nature, and that we can thrive in a world that is surely more dif-ferent in ten years from now that it was one hundred years in the past compared to now.

We are free to continue to feel like victims in this new reality, and wait for being taken care of by the state, or we may accept the state, and society, as human creations that will never be perfect, and venture into creating our lives and careers in accordance with our true mission, and based upon our real gifts and talents.

Let me say a last word about this series of books about great personalities of our time, which I came to call Great Minds Collection. The books within this collection do not just feature books but authors, you may call them author reviews instead of book reviews, and they are more exten-sive also in highlighting the personal mission and autobio-graphical details which are to note for each author, includ-ing extensive quotes from their books.


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Chapter OneShort Biography

Terence McKenna (1946-2000) spent twenty-five years in exploring the ethnopharmacology of spiritual trans-formation and is as a specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon basin. He is coauthor, with his brother Dennis, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I

Ching, and author of the forthcoming Food of the Gods.From: The Archaic Revival (Back Cover)

Reviews of The Archaic Revival

Scholar, theoretician, explorer, dreamer, pioneer, fanatic, and spellbinder, as well as ontological tailor, McKenna combines an erudite, if somewhat original, overview of history with a genuinely visionary approach to the millennium. The result is a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas.Tom Robbins, from the Foreword

As wordsmith and logos laser [McKenna] stews his concep-tional imagination in language so potent that doors open into evolutionary destiny and possible worlds. A radically innovative natural philosophy is offered here, one that in-spires a new ecology of inner and outer space.Jean Houston, PhD, Director, Foundation for Mind Research, author of The Possible Human and The Search for the Beloved

[McKenna's] ideas are rare jewels discovered during expedi-tions to the heights and depths of inner space. () The Ar-chaic Revival is flammable to the drybrush and deadwood of the intellect. In the twilight of human history, McKennas prescription for salvation is just so crazy it might work.Alex Grey, artist, author of Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey

The three McKenna books I have chosen to review are jewels both in their quality as literary oeuvres and their value as testimonies of one of the greatest mind explorers of our times. But let me first tell a little about the authors


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life. I am grateful for Vice.coms One Version of One Ver-sion of Terence McKennas Life. They are saying his life would fit a 450 pages book and I dont doubt it, but here I limit myself to a short bio and some quotes.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

TERENCE MCKENNA, 1987

1. Paonia, Colorado (1946-1962)

Terence Kemp McKenna was born on November 16, 1946, in a Colorado cattle and coal-mining town of 1,500 people named Paonia, he said in an interview in 1993. He elaborated:

They wanted to name it Peony but didnt know how to spell it. In your last year of high school, you got your girlfriend pregnant, married her, and went to work in the coal mines. An intellectual was someone who read TIME.

Growing up, Terence was the persecuted, bespectacled type, he told San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. He subscribed to the Village Voice and the Evergreen Reviewa literary magazine that published Jack Kerouac, William S. Bur-roughs, and others from 1957 to 1973. He wrote, in True Hallucinations, of his childhood:

My interest in drugs, magic, and the more obscure backwa-ters of natural history and theology gave me the interest profile of an eccentric Florentine prince rather than a kid growing up in the heartland of the United States in the late

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50s. Dennis had shared all of these concerns, to the despair of our conventional and hardworking parents.

Dennis, Terences only sibling, wrote in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss that their parents enjoyed drinking alcohol. But in our fathers mind, alcohol was not a drug; its effects were on the muscles, in his thinking, and not the brain, wrote Dennis. He continued:

He viewed drinking as essentially benign ... All drugs, on the other hand, he equated to heroinall were addictive, de-structive, and evil. Part of his attitude toward drugs resulted from an experience he had during the war (so he said). On a bombing mission over Germany, one of his crew mates had been badly injured by flak shrapnel, but when his buddies broke open the medical kit to give him a shot for his terrible pain, they found that, as Dad said, Some hophead had sto-len the morphine.

2. California (1963-1967)

When Terence was 16, he convinced his parents to let him move to California, where he finished his last two years of high school at two different locations while living with an uncle and aunt in Los Altos, then a family friend in Lancaster. At age 18, in 1965, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. He was admitted into the Tussman Experimental College, a new program that, for 150 of Ber-keleys about 27,000 entering students, replaced the first two years of normal undergraduate curriculum.


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Dennis wrote about the program, founded by Joseph Tussman, a philosophy professor, in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss:

No grades were given; evaluations were based on intense dialogues with faculty members and fellow students, and extensive, eclectic reading lists that participants were en-couraged to develop on their own.

By the end of his second year of college, Terence had amassed a library of 1000+ books. Three years later, in the summer of 1970, this library would be destroyed in a fire.

Terences second library, which, at the time of his death in 2000, also contained 1000+ books, would also be de-stroyed by a fire, on February 7, 2007.

3. New York City (Fall 1968)

After leaving his undergraduate studies and traveling in Europe and North Africa, living for a time in an archi-pelago in the Indian Ocean called the Seychelles, Terence found himself in New York City, trying to sell a book he had written. He referred to this book in True Hallucinations as a rambling, sophomoric, McLuhanesque diatribe that was to die a born-in, fortunately. Seated at an outdoor res-taurant in Central Park with the only person he knew in NYC, Terence talked about an idea his brothersome sort of geniushad that some hallucinogens work by fitting into the DNA. The idea was startling and had a ring of truth he couldnt ignore. The political revolution has be-

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come too murky a thing to put ones hope in, he told his friend, referred to as Vanessa in True Hallucinations.

So far, the most interesting unlikelihood in our lives is DMT, right?

Reluctant agreement, said Vanessa.

Reluctant only because the conclusion that it leads to is so extreme, said Terence. Mainly that we should stop fucking around and go off and grapple with the DMT mys-tery.

But he had already committed to a hash thing in Asia in a few months.

4. Asia (1969-1970)

Terence lived and traveled in South Asia for around a year, studying the Tibetan language and smuggling hash-ish. In August 1969 one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments was intercepted by US Customs. Terences reaction, from True Hallucinations: I went underground and wandered throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia, viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the latter. He lived for a time in Taipei, then taught English in Tokyo, then lived in British Columbia for three months, during which (1) he and his brother, along with two friends, planned a trip to South America in search of the DMT-containing plant preparation oo-koo-h and (2) his mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer six years earlier, died.


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Terence McKenna, 1976. Photo byKathleen Harrison.

5. La Chorrera (1971)

On February 22, 1971, in the Colombian Amazon, a lit-tle more than 24 hours after arriving in La Chorrerafollow-ing a four-day walk through the jungle, Terence and his brother had their first Stropharia trips. I knew only that the mushroom was the best hallucinogen I had ever had and that it had a quality of aliveness I had never known be-fore, Terence wrote in True Hallucinations. It seemed to

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open doorways into places I had assumed would always be closed to me because of my insistence on analysis and realism.

On March 4, the McKenna brothers performed the ex-periment at La Chorrera, which involved using Ayahua-sca, Psilocybin, and the human bodys vocal cords and DNA to create, as Terence in True Hallucinations quoted Dennis journal entry from that day, a solid-state hyper-dimensional circuit that is quadripartite in structure.

He returned to Berkeley on April 13, but three months later, in July, went back to La Chorrera with his girlfriend, named Ev in True Hallucinations. Stropharia cubensis was scarcer this time. He gathered spore prints and brought them to America.

6. Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide (1976)

In 1976, five years after the experiment at La Chorrera, an intriguing book, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide by O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric, appeared. The book was written by the McKenna brothers under pen names. In less than 100 pages it provided precise, no-fail instructions for growing and preserving Stropharia cubensis, the star-born magic mushroom. This was their second co-written book.

The first, The Invisible Landscape, which was published a year earlierand sold no more than 1500 copies, Terence said in 1993examined what happened at La Chorrera and introduced Timewave Zero. I regard Timewave Zero as a fascinating model of a previously unmodeled sys-


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temwhich is human history, said Terence in a 1996 in-terview.

7. Ranting and raving (1980s)

In the early 1980s Terence began giving talks at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California as well as at other venues and events around the country. How did this be-gin? An interviewfrom 1993 offers one answer:

Interviewer: So you lived on the royalties of the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide alone?Terence:And something which we should probably de-scribe as consulting.

Interviewer: I see [laughs].Terence: [laughs loudly]

Interviewer: [regaining composure] Well, I guess thats what I was shooting for with that question.Terence: Yes, there was a lot of consulting in the 70s [laughs].

Interviewer: How did your success with the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide steamroll into a career?Terence:As the new age got going, say 80, 81, 82, I just found it incredibly irritating, and I was busy consulting and staying home and I also had small children, but I just thought it was such a bunch of crap.

Interviewer: Talking about crystals and such?Terence: Yeah, the crystal, aura, past life, channeling business, and I said, you know, why dont these people check out drugs? Whats the matter with them, my god?

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And finally someone persuaded me to say that in a public situation, and its been constant ever since.

By the late 1980s he was married, with two children. Due in part to his innate Irish ability to rave [which] had been turbo-charged by years of psilocybin mushroom use, he wrote in True Hallucinations, his popularity had increas-edhe sometimes spoke now to audiences of around 1,000 peopleand publishers were suddenly interested in his work.

8. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mush-rooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shaman-ism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992)

The first book Terence published without his brothers collaboration was a collection of six interviews, four tran-scribed talks, and seven essays: Temporal Resonance (in which Terence observes: The experience we have of time is much more closely related to the description that we in-herit from a tradition such as Taoism [than Western sci-ence]), Among Ayahuasqueros (a reflective diary of Ter-ence and his future wife Kathleen Harrisons 1976 trip to the Amazon), Mushrooms and Evolution, The Voynich Manuscript, Wassons Literary Precursors (on Gordon Wasson, the Abraham of the reborn awareness in Western civilization of the presence of the shamanically empower-ing mushroom), Plan/Plant/Planet (The notion of ille-gal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous), Vir-tual Reality and Electronic Highs (Or On Becoming Virtual Octopi). Terence explained the books title:


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When the medieval world shifted its worldview, secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of clas-sical Greek and Roman approaches to law, philosophy, aes-thetics, city planning, and agriculture. Our dilemma will cast us further back into time in search for models and answers.

9. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowl-edgeA Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolu-

tion (1992)

Terences second book expanded on an idea introduced in Mushrooms and Evolution, that hallucinogenic mush-rooms have been used by humans for perhaps tens of mil-lennia, and that the interaction is not a static symbiotic relationship, but rather a dynamic one through which at least one of the parties has been bootstrapped to higher and higher cultural levels. It also elucidated the histories of sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, opium, tobacco, heroin, and cocaine.

10. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Authors Ex-traordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise (1993)

With his third book, a chronological narrative of a story that is both true and extraordinarya beautiful, poignant, delightful memoir, in my opinionTerence fi-nally, at age 46, externalized the version of the story of his life that most people now know. True Hallucinations, which Terence called the easy-to-read narrative anecdotal ver-sion of what The Invisible Landscape is the no-holds-barred, all the footnotes, all the citations [version of], focused on

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his experiences at La Chorrera, but also explored the years before and after that, and briefly examined his childhood.

He wrote of the every-colored stars. He wrote of imagining what one can imagine. In one passage, he de-scribed what he felt while smoking a joint in 1971 on a boat on the river Putumayo:

The flow of the river was like the rich smoke I inhaled. The flow of smoke, the flow of water, and of time. All flows, said a beloved Greek. Heraclitus was called the crying phi-losopher, as if he spoke in desperation. But, why crying? I love what he saysit does not make me cry. Rather than interpret pante rhea as nothing lasts, I had always consid-ered it a Western expression of the idea of Tao. And here we were, going with the Putumayos flow. What a luxury to be smoking, again in the tropics, again in the light, away from the season and places of death. Away from living under Canadas State of Emergency, on the edge of war-bloated, mad America. Mothers death and coincidentally the loss of all my books and art, which had been collected, carefully shipped back and stored, and then had burned in one of the periodic brushfires that decimate the Berkeley hills. Cancer and Fire. Fire and Cancer. Away from these terrible things, where Monopoly houses, waxy green, go tumbling into fis-sures in the animated psychic landscape.

On May 22, 1999, Terence had a brain seizure and col-lapsed at home. A CAT scan revealed a tumor in his right frontal cortex, which was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiform, a rare form of brain cancer. He died on April 6, 2000 at age 53.


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Chapter TwoBook Reviews

The Archaic Revival (1992)

Food of the Gods (1993)

The Invisible Landscape (1993)

The Archaic RevivalSpeculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess and the End

of History, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992

ReviewIn The Archaic Revival, McKenna lays the groundwork

for something like a psychedelic culture, a society based on new values. In the etiology of the group alienation that is


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so typical for our culture, the author detects a basic denial of ecstasy.

McKennas views are deliberately political in the sense that he claims nobody can develop a sane mind within an insane culture, without rejecting that culture in the first place:

In addition to choosing to repress the strange abilities of the shaman and the psychic potential of contact with the Other, Western tradition has a built-in bias against self experimen-tation with hallucinogens. One of the consequences of this is that not enough has been written about the phenomenology of personal experiences with the visionary hallucinogens. /3

I am a political activist, but I think that the first duty of a political activist is to become psychedelic. Otherwise youre not making your moves cognizant of the entire field of ac-tion. /13

There is a parallel here with Krishnamurti who had a similar position with the difference only that he did not endorse psychedelics. But K is quoted to have said that it is not a proof of mental health to be well adjusted to a pro-foundly sick society. McKenna sees no way around the citizens perversity than by civilizing him or her psyche-delically, while Krishnamurti sees the way out through to-tal attention:

So the issue finally comes down to the citizen versus the self. The citizen is an extremely limited definition of human po-tential. The self is a definition of human potential so broad that it threatens the obligations of the citizen./12

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When we give a primacy to the self, the individual, and hence see society or the group as secondary, we still can build group values from such a starting point, and we can build them with ecstasy as a primary value in place. This is exactly the outcome of my own shamanism research, and I have found no other author who saw this with an even remotely similar lucidity as Terence McKenna. He writes:

Shamanism is use of the archaic techniques of ecstasy that were developed independent of any religious philosophy the empirically validated, experientially operable techniques that produce ecstasy. Ecstasy is the contemplation of whole-ness. Thats why when you experience ecstasywhen you contemplate wholenessyou come down remade in terms of the political and social arena because you have seen the larger picture./13

When we ask what shamanism is we need to focus our research on the shaman as the central figure. The shaman is a mind-alterer, a reality-shifter, a magician, and at the same time, a healer. But hes an outcast nonetheless, and this is his crux:

So it is the form of the mind that the shaman works with: he has a larger view because he is not really in his culture. () The shaman may appear a member of the culture, but hes broader, deeper, higher, and wider than the culture that cre-ated him./14

As a culture-founder and psychedelic politician, McKenna asked who or what is going to be supportive of his quest? He decided that shamanism was part of this


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special branch of popular culture he became the spokes-man of. Then, he discussed why he did not embrace Bud-dhism as a religion, and his answer is conclusive and makes sense:

I think of Mahayana Buddhism, the multileveled, many-inhabited, demon-haunted, Buddha-haunted realms of peace and joy. The insistence of Mahayana Buddhism that there is really no center, that everything is a construct of time and space, is the most sophisticated psychology. But Im not will-ing to climb aboard the Buddhist ethic because Buddhism says suffering is inevitable. Thats not a psychedelic point of view./17

I always thought that the Buddha was judging life in-stead of embracing life, and this is pretty much a cultural bias in the whole of Indian philosophy. The psychedelic sage, and there is wide agreement here, is definitely not somebody who judges life, but who embraces life. But McKennas criti-cal stance on religion is more general than that:

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Unfortunately, religion for the past five hundred years has been a hierarchical pyramid at whose top were theologians interpreting dogma. This interpretation was handed down through a hierarchy to the faithful. I think religious hierar-chies are very unsettled by the idea of direct revelation. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is certainly thriving in pre-literate cultures all over the world. We discovered in dealing with this that the only people you could talk to about it or who seemed to have familiarity with it were shamans./28

Now, we got shamanism and the spirits of nature in our cultural soup, and we got no religion besides natures religions, and direct perception as our awareness para-digm. But what is missing? McKenna puts a unique stress on language, and the evolution of language through psy-chedelics, as an essential characteristic of his new, and yet perennial, cultural paradigm.

And this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language. And no culture, so far as I am aware, has ever consciously tried to evolve its lan-guage with the awareness that evolving language was evolv-ing reality. () The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinkingwhich trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech./21

McKennas detractors cunningly argue that his highly refined use of language was not the result of psychedelics but of his Irish tradition, and that he was using his obvious literary talent for making up a cultural pretension, as a matter of show, and for establishing his particular niche in popu-lar culture.


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It is true that McKenna had the ability to render com-plex and convoluted speeches in a crystal-clear premedi-tated logic, that, as his voice is rather monotonous, sug-gests someone reading from an invisible book in front of his eyes. I havent seen or heard anything comparable in my life. This being said, it seems obvious that McKenna, when molding his cultural Pygmalion cannot rely on proven theories, but proceeds by drafting hypotheses, such as the following one, that bears however some anthropo-logical backup:

Anthropologists have commented on the absence of serious mental disease in many preliterate cultures. I believe that the mediation of the shaman and through him the contact to the centering Logos, this source of information or gnosis, is

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probably the cause of this ability to heal or minimize psy-chological disorders./29

The open question is if this ability of the shaman to seize the Centering Logos for healing purposes requires a culture to be preliterate? The question hits home because in my unique experience with Ayahuasca in 2004, the plant intelligence communicated to me that I was more or less unable to perceiving reality directly, and that this atrophy had come about through the strong language training I had received, so that language had become in my life an obstacle to the real understanding of nature, and natures wisdom.

Thus, my psychedelic experience seems to confirm McKennas view that language is in the way of under-standing nature when its not transformed, modulated psy-chedelically, and rendered a philosophers stone through the unique alchemy of entheogens impacting, over long periods of time, on our mindbody chemistry.

And this, in turn, is exactly what McKenna has sum-marized as the essential in the Archaic Revival. It is his mind-boggling assumption that only through psychedelics


32

humankind was able to build civilization, and that origi-nally entheogens were really laid in our cultural cradle, and have served over millennia their good purpose, until exactly the moment when in the 20th century, our paranoid leaders put them on the index of forbidden plants. In his book Food of the Gods, McKenna lucidly comments on this prohibition with the words that the notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place. And he points to the degree of barbarous misinformation and anti-cultural propaganda that this this cultural denial has brought us, with the result that civilization, from that mo-ment, was in a backward trend:

Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the eyes of the law, is lumped together with LSD and mescaline, when in fact each of these compounds is a phenomenologi-cally defined universe unto itself. Psilocybin and DMT in-voke the Logos, although DMT is more intense and more brief in its action. This means that they work directly on the language centers, so that an important aspect of the experi-ence is the interior dialogue./36

Interestingly enough, McKenna shows a parallel of this 20th century anti-psychedelic paranoia with the former worldview under Christianity that regarded any wisdom from nature as diabolic and abject, and that destroyed much of the direct knowledge that ancient civilizations possessed about life:

The Stropharia cubensis mushroom, if one can believe what it says in one of its moods, is a symbiote, and it desires ever

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deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved sym-biosis with human society early by associating itself with domesticated cattle and through them human nomads. Like the plants men and women grew and the animals they hus-banded, the mushroom was able to inculcate itself into the human family, so that where human genes went these other genes would be carried. But the classic mushroom cults of Mexico were destroyed by the coming of the Spanish con-quest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute mo-nopoly on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in the New World they came upon people calling a mushroom teo-nanacatl, the flesh of the gods; yet in the New World they came upon people calling a mushroom teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. They set to work, and the Inquisition was able to push the old religion into the mountains of Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages when Valentina and Gordon Wasson found it there in the 1950s./40

Our symbiosis with the Other, that unique intelligence which speaks through psychedelic mushrooms, and that is accessible through their ritualistic ingestion, McKenna ar-gues, was cut, as through still another cultural circumci-sion we were subjected to, on the basis of spiritual domi-nance taken as religion, and as a matter of power abuse and tyranny.

Ignorance burned the libraries of the Hellenistic world at an earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowledge, shatter-ing the stellar and astronomical machinery that had been the work of centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic tradition. The inheritors of this tradition built a triumph of mechanism. It was they who later realized the alchemical dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuri-


34

esand the twentieth centurywith the transformation of elements and the discovery of gene transplants. But then, having conquered the New World and driven its people into cultural fragmentation and diaspora, they came unexpect-edly upon the body of Osiristhe condensed body of Erosin the mountains of / Mexico where Eros has retreated at the coming of the Christos. And by finding the mushroom, they unleashed it./40-41

I have forwarded the point of view, and I am not the only one, that psychoanalysis was meant to be, from the start, more than a medical technique, but had, especially in its Freudian vintage, a strong underlying idea of shaman-ism to it. The importance of the shaman as an integrative and sacred figure in a highly technologically alienated cul-ture such as ours is obvious. McKenna writes:

The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily techniques, not ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out over millennia that make it possible, though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these areas. People of predilection are noticed and encouraged. In archaic societies where shaman-ism is a thriving institution, the signs are fairly easy to rec-ognize: oddness and uniqueness in an individual. /45

Among aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states. In traveling around the world and dealing with shamans, I find the dis-tinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary centeredness. Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is alienated from society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says, Ah, heres somebody to have a conversation with. The an-

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thropological literature always presents shamans as embed-ded in a tradition, but once one gets to know them they are always very sophisticated about what they are doing. They are the true phenomenologists of this world; they know plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields spirits. /Id.

The integrative philosophy that McKennas Archaic Re-vival represents and that we are the inheritors of, after the passing away of its creator requires us to build relation-ships between phenomena we dont usually think of as related.

McKenna teaches that this synthetic view of the uni-verse is immensely facilitated through what he calls the mediation of the plant teachers:

A voice that gave guidance and revelation to Western civili-zation has been silent for about seventeen hundred years. This is the Logos and all ancient philosophers strove to in-voke it. For Hellenistic / philosophy it was a voice that told self-evident truth. With the passing of the Aeon and the death of the pagan gods, awareness of this phenomenon faded. However, it is still available through the mediation of the plant teachers. If we could intelligently examine dimen-sions that the psychedelic plants make available, we could contact the Oversoul and leave behind this era where domi-nance hierarchies must be disciplined by UFOs and messi-ahs, and where progress is halted for millennia because cul-ture cannot advance ethics at the same rate as technology. /61-62

In fact, contrary to many who claim their Ayahuasca experience was but a spectacle of colorful visions, I can tes-


36

tify as a direct witness of what McKenna writes about the Logos coming through as an intelligence or plant teacher, manifesting in the psychedelic state as an immediately pre-sent telepathic voice and response-giver that teaches a wisdom not from this earth. And it has taught me a wisdom, not general, but very much tailored to my own needs, telling me through direct insight that I needed to give love in-stead of waiting to receive love from others, and that by doing so without wavering in my attitude, I could over-come the pitfall of perception that my overindulgence of language-related thinking has brought about. From 2004 to 2007, and thus within three consecutive years, I have fun-damentally changed not only concepts and relationships, but also my daily life and habits, and there are no more depressions, no more outbursts of hate and violence, no more sad remembrances of my terrible childhood, and I have simply become wiser in all I think and do.

McKennas vision of the Archaic Revival targets at the creation of nothing less but a psychedelic science, while he localized himself to be an avatar in the creation of that sci-ence, in similar ways as our technological explorers some centuries back on the road of technological progress, only that this progress will not be fragmented, but holistic:

The early approach with psychedelics was the correct one. This is the notion that intelligent, thoughtful people should take psychedelics and try and understand whats going on. Not groups of prisoners, not graduate students, but mature, intelligent people need to share their experiences. Its too early for a science. What we need now are the diaries of ex-

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plorers. We need many diaries of many explorers so we can begin to get a feeling for the territory./69

And as a parallel movement with the creation of that psychedelic science that McKenna envisions, he predicts the ultimate encounter with the Other, whenever on a timeline of events this may occur:

Eventually this contact will occur. We are now in the pubes-cent stage of yearning, of forming an image of the thing de-sired. This image of the thing desired will eventually cause that thing come into being. In other words, our cultural di-rection is being touched by the notion of / alien love, and it comes to us through the rebirth of the use of plant hallu-cinogens. The shamanic vision plants seem to be the carriers of this pervasive entelechy that speaks and that can present itself to us in this particular way. () The appetite for this fusion is what is propelling global culture toward an apoca-lyptic transformation. () But it could also slip away. We could harden; there are dominator, hypertechnological fu-tures that we could sail toward and realize. That would eliminate this possibility of opening to the Other./73-74

While McKenna seems to see this encounter with the Other a bit in the way of science fiction novels, as a spec-tacular one-time event, described by some as the prover-bial UFO landing on the ground of the White House, he acknowledges, what can be called a consensus now, that this Presence, this Other does not need to come here, be-cause the eternal present aligns all dimensions as superpo-sitions, and not in horizontal space. But what is the barrier, then, between them and us? According to McKenna, it is


38

language, and its by the evolution of language that we are going to get over the fence and face the Other:

As human history goes forward, we develop the linguistic discrimination to be able to recognize the extraterrestrials that are already insinuated into the planetary environment around us, some of which may have been here millions and millions of years. In other words, space is not an imperme-able barrier to life; there is slow drift. There is genetic mate-rial that is transferred through space and time over vast distances./80

Let me come to the end of this rather extended book review with a brief discussion of Novelty Theory, and what McKenna says about it in this book. Timewave Zero or Nov-elty Theory is a graph-based mathematical construct that depicts novelty in the universe as an inherent property of time. The idea was initiated by Terence McKenna in the 1970s and was worked out mathematically by the Swiss mathematician Peter Meyer. It is a wild and unconfirmed assumption when Wikipedia writes that the theory lacks any credible basis in peer-reviewed science and is gener-ally dismissed as pseudoscience. In personal correspon-dence with Meyer, I was informed that the theory basically is to be explained with the fractal nature of time; when nov-elty is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as Timewave Zero results.

The graph shows at what times novelty is increasing or decreasing. Now, this is what McKenna comments on the theory in the present book:

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What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called concrescence, a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The autopoietic lapis, the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when eve-rything flows together. When the laws of physics are obvi-ated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its re-flection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that concrescence will occur soonaround 2012 A.D. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will ap-pear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the re-lease of the mind into the imagination./101

Novelty, then, is put forward as a primary term necessary to a description of any temporal system much in the way that spin, velocity, and angular momentum are primary terms necessary to the description of any physical system. Syno-nyms for novelty are degree of connectedness or complexity. /109

Quotes In addition to choosing to repress the strange abilities

of the shaman and the psychic potential of contact with the Other, Western tradition has a built-in bias against self-experimentation with hallucinogens. One of the consequences of this is that not enough has been written about the phenomenology of personal experi-ences with the visionary hallucinogens. /3

And I think whats really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more inte-


40

grated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view. Ego may be a fairly modern invention meaning the last one or two thousand years a fairly modern adaptation of the psyche to its environment. One of the things happening in the Amazon is that forest people say they enter into a group mind when they take ayahuasca, and on it they make decisions for the tribe where to hunt, who to make war on, where to move to, these kinds of things. /10

So the issue finally comes down to the citizen versus the self. The citizen is an extremely limited definition of human potential. The self is a definition of human potential so broad that it threatens the obligations of the citizen. /12

I am a political activist, but I think that the first duty of a political activist is to become psychedelic. Otherwise youre not making your moves cognizant of the entire field of action. /13

Shamanism is use of the archaic techniques of ecstasy that were developed independent of any religious phi-losophythe empirically validated, experientially op-erable techniques that produce ecstasy. Ecstasy is the contemplation of wholeness. Thats why when you experience ecstasywhen you contemplate wholeness you come down remade in terms of the political and social arena because you have seen the larger picture. /13

So it is the form of the mind that the shaman works with: he has a larger view because he is not really in his culture. () The shaman may appear a member of the culture, but hes broader, deeper, higher, and wider than the culture that created him. /14

I admire transpersonal psychotherapists. I think they are trying to remake the shamanistic institution in a

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modern form. What they have to realize is that theyre wasting their time unless they use the shamanistic tools. And the foremost tool of the shamans is the technique of ecstasy, and that means the hallucino-genic plants. /14

There are three questions that you should ask yourself about a drug youre considering taking. Number one, does it occur naturally in a plant or an animal? / Be-cause nature has use-tested these compounds over millions and millions of years. Something that came out of the laboratory four or five years agowho knows? So it should be a product of the natural world. Number two, does it have a history of human usage? Mushrooms do. Mescaline does. LSD doesnt. Ecstasy doesnt. And number three, and most important, it should have some affinity to brain chemistry. It shouldnt be just like landing on the moon; it should be related to what is driving ordinary consciousness. The last criteria is the most narrow, because mescaline wont get through that. I think that drugs should be as noninvasive as possible, and I know Im on the right track because the strongest psychedelic drugs there are are the ones that last the shortest amount of time. Now, what does that mean? It means that your brain recognizes the compound and within a few minutes can completely neutralize it. DMT is the strongest psy-chedelic there is, yet it lasts only five minutes. Twenty minutes after you do it, its like you never did it at all. /16

Nature is the great guide in all of this. The natural chemistry of the brain. The natural history of the plant. The naturally evolved shamanic institutions of small groups of human beings that are still in touch with reasonable social values. /15-16

I think of Mahayana Buddhism, the multileveled, many-inhabited, demon-haunted, Buddha-haunted


42

realms of peace and joy. The insistence of Mahayana Buddhism that there is really no center, that every-thing is a construct of time and space, is the most so-phisticated psychology. But Im not willing to climb aboard the Buddhist ethic because Buddhism says suf-fering is inevitable. Thats not a psychedelic point of view. /17

And this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language. And no culture, so far as I am aware, has ever consciously tried to evolve its language with the awareness that evolving language was evolving reality. () The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinkingwhich trickles down as clear speech. Em-powered speech. /21

What is not well known is the communication model that is happening in the octopus. Octopi change their color not for camouflage purposes, as might be sup-posed, but as a mode of communication. The blushes, spots, and traveling bands of color that an ordinary octopus can manifest are reflective of its linguistic in-tent. Its language appears on the surface of its skin. /22

Ordinarily, telepathy is imagined to be you hearing me think, then me hearing you think. But a richer notion of telepathy would be if you could see my words, rather than hear themif they were actually sculp-tural objects. I would make an utterance, then you and I would stand and regard this utterance from all an-gles. There would be no ambiguity. And this is exactly what is going on with the octopi. Shamans do the same thing. These shamanistic songs that are sung are not intended to be heard, they are intended to be seen by other people who are intoxicated. This crossing from the heard to the seen is a very important part of the revelation of the transcendental object. /22

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We are going to go from a linguistic mode that is heard to a linguistic mode that is beheld. When this transi-tion is complete, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, and the subterfuge that haunt our efforts at communica-tion will be obsolete. And it will be in this environ-ment of beheld communication that the new world of the Logos will be realized. /22

This experience of an interior guiding voice with a higher level of knowledge is not alien in Western his-tory; however, the intellectual adventure of the last thousand years has made an idea like that seem / pre-posterous if not psychopathological. /27-28

Unfortunately, religion for the past five hundred years has been a hierarchical pyramid at whose top were theologians interpreting dogma. This interpretation was handed down through a hierarchy to the faithful. I think religious hierarchies are very unsettled by the idea of direct revelation. Nevertheless, this phenome-non is certainly thriving in preliterate cultures all over the world. We discovered in dealing with this that the only people you could talk to about it or who seemed to have familiarity with it were shamans. /28

Anthropologists have commented on the absence of serious mental disease in many preliterate cultures. I believe that the mediation of the shaman and through him the contact to the centering Logos, this source of information or gnosis, is probably the cause of this ability to heal or minimize psychological disorders. /29

Unless you shed your language and enter into these cultures entirely, you will always have the point of view of a stranger and an outsider. /29

Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the eyes of the law, is lumped together with LSD


44

and mescaline, when in fact each of these compounds is a phenomenologically defined universe unto itself. Psilocybin and DMT invoke the Logos, although DMT is more intense and more brief in its action. This means that they work directly on the language centers, so that an important aspect of the experience is the interior dialogue. /36

The Stropharia cubensis mushroom, if one can believe what it says in one of its moods, is a symbiote, and it desires ever deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved symbiosis with human society early by associating itself with domesticated cattle and through them human nomads. Like the plants men and women grew and the animals they husbanded, the mushroom was able to inculcate itself into the human family, so that where human genes went these other genes would be carried. /40

But the classic mushroom cults of Mexico were de-stroyed by the coming of the Spanish conquest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute monopoly on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in the New World they came upon people calling a mushroom teo-nanacatl, the flesh of the gods; yet in the New World they came upon people calling a mushroom teo-nanacatl, the flesh of the gods. They set to work, and the Inquisition was able to push the old religion into the mountains of Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages when Valentina and Gordon Wasson found it there in the 1950s. /40

Ignorance burned the libraries of the Hellenistic world at an earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowl-edge, shattering the stellar and astronomical machin-ery that had been the work of centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic tradition. The inheritors of this tradition built a triumph of mecha-nism. It was they who later realized the alchemical

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dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - and the twentieth century - with the transformation of elements and the discovery of gene transplants. But then, having conquered the New World and driven its people into cultural fragmentation and diaspora, they came unexpectedly upon the body of Osiristhe con-densed body of Erosin the mountains of / Mexico where Eros has retreated at the coming of the Christos. And by finding the mushroom, they unleashed it. /40-41

As I said, I am an explorer, not a scientist. If I were unique, then none of my conclusions would have any meaning outside the context of myself. My experi-ences, like yours, have to be more or less a part of the human condition. Some may have more facility for such exploration than others, and these states may be difficult to achieve, but they are part of the human condition. There are a few clues that these extradimen-sional places exist. If art carries images out of the Other from the Logos to the worlddrawing ideas down into matterwhy is human art history so de-void of what psychedelic voyagers have experienced so totally? Perhaps the flying saucer or UFO is the cen-tral motif to be understood in order to get a handle on reality here and now. We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimen-sions that it encompasses. When we can love the alien, then we will have begun to heal the psychic disconti-nuity that has plagued us since at least the sixteenth century, possibly earlier. /43

My testimony is that magic is alive in hyperspace. It is not necessary to believe me, only to form a relation-ship with these hallucinogenic plants. The fact is that the gnosis comes from plants. /43


46

I will add a cautionary note. I always feel odd telling people to verify my observations since the sine qua non is the hallucinogenic plant. Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being over-whelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosophical and religious accom-plishments / of the species. /43-44

The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily tech-niques, not ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out over millennia that make it possible, though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these ar-eas. People of predilection are noticed and encour-aged. /45

In archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving in-stitution, the signs are fairly easy to recognize: odd-ness and uniqueness in an individual. () Among as-piring shamans there must be some sign of inner strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states. In trav-eling around the world and dealing with shamans, I find the distinguishing characteristic is an extraordi-nary centeredness. Usually the shaman is an intellec-tual and is alienated from society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says, Ah, heres somebody to have a conversation with. The anthropological litera-ture always presents shamans as embedded in a tradi-tion, but once one gets to know them they are always very sophisticated about what they are doing. They are the true phenomenologists of this world; they know plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields spirits. /45

Shamans are peripheral to societys goings on in ordi-nary social life in every sense of the word. /46

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What good is a theory of how the universe works if its a series of tensor equations that, even when under-stood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth fol-lowing is one that builds on personal experience. /46

What the mushroom says about itself is this: that it is an extraterrestrial organism, that spores can survive the conditions of interstellar space. () Is it possible that these mushrooms never evolved on earth? That is what Stropharia cubensis itself suggests. Global cur-rents may form on the outside of the spore. The spores are very light and by Brownian motion are capable of percolation to the edge of a planets atmosphere. Then, through interaction with energetic particles, some small number could actually escape into space. Under-stand that this is an evolutionary strategy where only one in many billions of spores actually makes the tran-sition between the stars a biological strategy of radiat-ing throughout the galaxy without a technology. Of course, this happens over very long periods of time. /46-47

I couldnt figure out whether the mushroom is the alien or the mushroom is some kind of technological artifact allowing me to hear the alien when the alien is actually light-years away, using some kind of Bell non-locality principle to communicate. /47

The mushroom states its own position very clearly. It says, I require the nervous system of a mammal. Do you have one handy? /47

The Italian Renaissance ran on spices; they had to get spices from somewhere, so they bought them. Spices is a very ambiguous term. If we could get psychedelics classified as spices they would come under the control not of psychotherapists and mental health care people but of chefs and matre ds. Then we would have an


48

entirely different approach to the administration of psychedelic substances, set, setting, goals. /55

[Follows a very interesting dialog with Ralph Metzner that is important word for word].

Ralph Metzner: Your ideas, as well as Albert Hof-manns idea about the role of ergotlike plants in Ele-usis, tie into the notion of the reawakening of the old gods. These are sacred plants that were treated as sa-cred beings, divine beings, basically deities. If we are in fact able to identify what soma was, we will be able to identify and re-create the original source-energy behind the Indo-European civilization. Similarly, if we rediscover and are able to incorporate whatever was used at Eleusis, we will have the original impetus be-hind Greek-European civilization that carried it for two thousand years as the primary vehicle of religious experience. /56

Terence McKenna: Soma is the light at the beginning and end of history. This is the notion. It infuses history. History is a process that it created for its own pur-poses. We are involved in a symbiotic relationship with a biological creature that is like a god because it is so advanced, different, and in possession of such a peculiar body of information compared with our-selves. /56

Ralph Metzner: Another brief point about soma: Whatever soma was, why did it disappear? There are not any Stropharia cubensis or Amanita or any of these other hallucinogens in India now. If it is there, it is fairly remote and not a widespread thing like alcohol or wine, which became a widespread religious-social drug in all of Western culture. My theory about what happened then is the same as what happens now, that the use of soma, which was a genuine religious intoxi-cant in the sense that it produced a religious experi-

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ence and direct knowledge of God, was stamped out systematically by the priesthoods, who were primarily intent upon maintaining their own power structure. If people could have a direct experience of God by tak-ing mushrooms or any other plant they would not be interested in priestly power structures they couldnt care less. Why should they talk to a priest if they could talk directly to God? /56

Terence McKenna: This is the deconditioning factor. /56

Ralph Metzner: We saw in the sixties and we see now that the power holders in society do not want large numbers of people taking substances or plants that expand their consciousness. A few here or there do not bother them. But if it grows into large numbers that make a lot of noise, they dont want it. /56

Terence McKenna: This is why the vertical approach is better. Deeper experiences for a harder core. /56

My brother and I discovered during our expedition to the Amazon in 1971 that accumulation of the trypta-mines in ones system seems to confer the ability to inhabit more than one world at once, as though an-other world were superimposed over reality. This is a super-reality, a hyperdimensional world where infor-mation is accessible in magical ways. /58

It is not, strictly speaking, a contact from a space-faring race that has come from the stars, nor is it mass hysteria or delusion. /59

The UFO is an idea intended to confound science, be-cause science has begun to threaten the existence of the human species as well as the ecosystem of the planet. At this point, a shock is necessary for the cul-ture, a shock equivalent to the Resurrection on Roman


50

imperialism. () I think that to some degree science has betrayed human destiny. We have been led to brink of star flight, but weve also been led to the brink of thermonuclear holocaust. The result of this betrayal is that science may well be swept away by the revela-tion of the UFO. /61

A voice that gave guidance and revelation to Western civilization has been silent for about seventeen hun-dred years. This is the Logos and all ancient philoso-phers strove to invoke it. For Hellenistic philosophy it was a voice that told self-evident truth. With the pass-ing of the Aeon and the death of the pagan gods, awareness of this phenomenon faded. However, it is still available through the mediation of the plant teachers. If we could intelligently examine dimensions that the psychedelic plants make available, we could contact the Oversoul and leave behind this era where dominance hierarchies must be disciplined by UFOs and messiahs, and where progress is halted for mil-lennia because culture cannot advance ethics at the same rate as technology. /61-62

We need to face the fact that there is a level of hierar-chical control being exerted on the human species as a whole and that our destiny is not ours to decide. It is in the hands of a weirdly democratic, amoeboid, hyperintelligent superorganism that is called Every-body. As we come to terms with this, as we take our place embedded in the body of Everybody, informa-tion flows more freely and the reality of this informa-tional creature is seen more clearly. The fact is that we are in a symbiotic relationship with an organism made of information, and this is the situation classic sha-manic plant hallucinogens reinforce very strongly. /64

The great majority of people interested in flying sau-cers are hardware nuts convinced that UFOs are ships

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from Zeta Reticuli. The shamanic and psychological explanation is not particularly welcome anywhere. /67

The early approach with psychedelics was the correct one. This is the notion that intelligent, thoughtful peo-ple should take psychedelics and try and understand whats going on. Not groups of prisoners, not gradu-ate students, but mature, intelligent people need to share their experiences. Its too early for a science. What we need now are the diaries of explorers. We need many diaries of many explorers so we can begin to get a feeling for the territory. /69

The UFO comes form this murky region, beyond the end of history, beyond the end of life. It is both supra-historical and supraorganic. It is uncanny, alien; it raises the hair on the back of ones neck. It is both the apotheosis and the antithesis of the monkeys journey toward mind. It is the mind revealing itself. This is what all religion is about: shock waves given off by an event at the end of history. We are now very close to that event, and Psilocybin can help us to understand it because Psilocybin conveys one into the place where it is happening constantly. The Aeon, eternity, and the millennium are accomplished facts, not an anticipa-tion. Hence the mushroom stands at the end of history. It stands for an object that pulls all history toward it-self. Its a causal force that operates upon us backward through time. It is why things happen the way they do; because everything is being pulled forward toward a nexus of transformation. /70

To sum up what Ive said about religion, it is as though the Father-God notion were being replaced by the alien-partner notion. The alien-partner is like the angelic tetramorph. It is androgynous, hermaphro-ditic, transhuman; it is all these things that the uncon-scious chooses to project upon it until we have enough


52

information to define what it might actually be for it-self. /73

Eventually this contact will occur. We are now in the pubescent stage of yearning, of forming an image of the thing desired. This image of the thing desired will eventually cause that thing come into being. In other words, our cultural direction is being touched by the notion of / alien love, and it comes to us through the rebirth of the use of plant hallucinogens. The shamanic vision plants seem to be the carriers of this pervasive entelechy that speaks and that can present itself to us in this particular way. /73-74

The appetite for this fusion is what is propelling global culture toward an apocalyptic transformation. () But it could also slip away. We could harden; there are dominator, hypertechnological futures that we could sail toward and realize. That would eliminate this pos-sibility of opening to the Other. /74

There is tension around the flying saucer, aside from the erotic connotation, because the flying saucer repre-sents a tremendous challenge to science, perhaps the ultimate challenge. It may be as confounding to sci-ence as the resurrection of Christ was to Greek empiri-cism and Roman imperialism. The flying saucer is es-sentially an agent of cultural change. /75-76

The zeitgeist of hyperspace that is emerging, initially freighted with technology and cybernetics, requires that it be consciously tuned to an erotic ideal. It is im-portant to articulate the presence of this erotic ideal of the Other early. This is an opportunity to fall in love with the Other, get married, and go off to the stars; but its only an opportunity and not evolutionarily neces-sary. /76

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But in the Amazon and other places where plant hal-lucinogens are understood and used, you are con-veyed into worlds that are appallingly different from ordinary reality. Their vividness cannot be stressed enough. They are more real than real. And thats some-thing that you sense intuitively. They establish an on-tological priority. They are more real than real, and once you get that under your belt and let it rattle around in your mind, then the compass of your life begins to spin and you realize that you are not looking in on the Other; the Other is looking in on you. /78

The story you tell yourself about how the world works cant explain to you how forming the wish to close your open hand into a fist makes it happen. This is the true status of present science. It cannot offer so much as a clue about how that happens. Scientists know how muscles contract all that they know. Its the initi-ating phenomenon, that which decides I will close my hand. They know as much about that as and perhaps less than Western or Eastern philosophy knew in the twelfth century. /78

As human history goes forward, we develop the lin-guistic discrimination to be able to recognize the extra-terrestrials that are already insinuated into the plane-tary environment around us, some of which may have been here millions and millions of years. In other words, space is not an impermeable barrier to life; there is slow drift. There is genetic material that is transferred through space and time over vast dis-tances. /80

I dont think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority a shamanic professional class, if you will whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep, black water and show them to the rest of us. Such people would perform for


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our culture some of the cultural functions that sha-mans performed in preliterate cultures. /82

Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an un-evolving species. Some time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the biological evo-lution of humans ceased and evolution became an epi-genetic, cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but the human soma-type remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much like people of a long time ago. But technol-ogy is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gos-pels, space shuttles. /92-93

The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time what-soever. There is an experience of time zero. So if one imagines for a moment oneself to be made of light, or in possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light, one can traverse from any point in the universe to any other with a subjective experience of time zero. This means that one crosses to Alpha Centauri in time zero, but the amount of time that has passed in the relativistic universe is four and a half years. But if one moves very great distances, of one crosses two hun-dred and fifty thousand light-years to Andromeda, one would still have a subjective experience of time zero. /95

Our institutions, our epistemologies are bankrupt and exhausted; we must start anew and hope that with the

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help of shamanically inspired personalities, we can cultivate the ancient mystery once again. /98

In my opinion the unique quality of Psilocybin is that it reveals not colored lights and moving grids, but places jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic forms of incredible complexity. There is no possibility that this could be construed as neurological noise of any sort. It is, in fact, the most highly ordered visual information that one can experience, much more highly ordered than the normal waking vision. /98

What is happening to our world is ingression of nov-elty toward what Whitehead called concrescence, a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The autopoetic lapis, the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disap-pears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tight-ening, I predict that concrescence will occur soon around 2012 A.D. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination. /101

Novelty, then, is put forward as a primary term neces-sary to a description of any temporal system much in the way that spin, velocity, and angular momentum are primary terms necessary to the description of any physical system. Synonyms for novelty are degree of connectedness or complexity. /109

In my confrontations with the personified Other that is resident in the mushroom, part of its message was its


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species-specific uniqueness and its desire for a symbi-otic relationship with humans. At other times it pre-sented itself not so much as a personage but as a giant network that many sorts of beings in different parts of the universe were using for their own purposes. I felt like a two-year-old child who struggles with the ques-tion, Are there little people in the radio? Perhaps the psilocybin-revealed dimension is a kind of network of information and images, or something even more sub-stantial. /117

Chemists who made the early attempts to isolate the alkaloids in B. caapi gave their compound the roman-tic name telepathine, reflecting the deep forest reputa-tion of yag as a genuinely telepathic drug. /117

Ecstatic is a word unnecessary to define except opera-tionally: an ecstatic experience is one that one wishes to have over and over again. /144

One view of plant hallucinogens is to see them as inter-species pheromones or exopheronomes. Phero-mones are chemical compounds exuded by an organ-ism for the purpose of carrying messages between or-ganisms of the same species. () If hallucinogens are operating as exopheronomes, then the dynamic sym-biotic relationship between primate and hallucino-genic plant is actually a transfer of information from one species to another. /145

It is reasonable to suggest that human language arose out of the synergy of primate organizational potential by plant hallucinogens. Indeed, this possibility was brilliantly anticipated by Henry Munn in his essay The Mushrooms of Language (1973). Munn writes:

Language is an ecstatic activity of signification. Intoxi-cated by the mushroom, the fluency, the ease, the apt-ness of expression one becomes capable of are of such

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that one is astounded by the words that issue forth from the contact of the intention of articulation with the matter of experience. The spontaneity the mush-rooms liberate is not only perceptual, but linguistic. For the shaman, it is as if existence were uttering itself through him.

The people of atal Hyk and other Mesopotamian peoples existed undisturbed in the ancient Middle East for a long time, practicing their Mother Goddess religion. Then, around five to seven thousand B.P., a different kind of people with wheeled chariots, patri-archy and a ritual involving horse sacrifice swept down from north of the Caspian Sea into Turkey and Anatolia, and what is now Iraq and Iran, encountering the pastoral, mushroom-using lowlanders. /150

The Ninth Mandala of the Rig Veda especially goes into great detail about soma and states that soma stands above the gods. Soma is the supreme entity. Soma is the moon; soma is masculine. Here we have a rare phenomenon: a male lunar deity. The connection between the feminine and the moon is so deep and obvious that a lunar male deity stands out, making its traditional history in the region easy to trace. /152

It is my suggestion that the mushroom religion is ac-tually the generic religion of human beings and that all later adumbrations of religion stem from the cult of ritual ingestion of mushrooms to induce ecstasy. /153

A rethinking of the role that hallucinogenic plants and fungi have played in the promotion of human emer-gence from the substrata of primate organization can help to lay the basis for a new appreciation of the unique confluence of factors responsible and necessary for the evolution of human beings. The widely felt in-tuition of the presence of the Other as a female com-panion to the human navigation of history can, I be-


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lieve, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind that provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-articulation: the light of the Great Goddess. /153

This dualism of the interior and the exterior may have to be overcome. It obviously transcends the individ-ual. But I suspect it is something like an Overmind of the species and that the highest form of human or-ganization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us has ever pene-trated - the mind of the species. It is the hand at the tiller of history. It is no government, no religious group, but actually what we call the human uncon-scious; however, it is not unconscious, and it is not simply a cybernetic repository of myth and memory. It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and though human history is its signature on the primates, it is very different from the primates. It is like a creature of pure information. It is made of language. It releases ideas into the flowing stream of history to boost the primates toward higher and higher levels of self-reflection. /159

[M]odern theories are that hallucinogens shift empha-sis from left- to right-brain thinking. /189

DMT is a neurotransmitter that, when ingested and allowed to come to rest in unusually large amounts in the synapses of the brain, allows one to see sound, so that one can use the voice to produce not musical compositions, but pictorial and visual compositions. This, to my mind, indicates that were on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, so that we are going to go from a lan-guage 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

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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 were used to thinking of them. They are pictorial art that is caused by audio signals. /209

One of the things that interests me about dreams is this: I have dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works. To me thats 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 deliv-ers this staggering altered state. /210

There are times and this would be a great study for somebody to do there have been periods in English when there were emotions that dont exist anymore, because the words have been lost. This is getting very close to this business of how reality is made by lan-guage. Can we recover a lost emotion by creating a word for it? There are colors that dont exist anymore because the words have been lost. Im thinking of the word jacinth. This is a certain kind of orange. Once you know the word jacinth, you always can recognize it, but if you dont have it, all you can say is its a little darker orange than something else. Weve never tried to consciously evolve our language, weve just let it evolve, but now we have this level of awareness, and this level of cultural need where we really must plan where the new words should be generated. There are areas where words should be gotten rid of that em-power political wrong thinking. The propagandists for the fascists already understand this; they understand that if you make something unsayable, youve made it unthinkable. So it doesnt plague you anymore. So planned evolution of language is the way to speed it toward expressing the frontier of consciousness. /214


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Botanical Dimensions is a nonprofit foundation that attempts to rescue plants with a history of shamanic and human usage in the warm topics, and rescue the information about how theyre used, store the infor-mation in computers, and move the plants to a nineteen-acre site in Hawaii, in a rain forest belt that reasonably replicates the Amazon situation. There we are keeping them toward the day when someone will want to do serious research on them. As a nonprofit foundation, we solicit donations, publish a newsletter, support a number of collectors in the field, and carry on this work, which nobody else is really doing. Theres a lot of rain forest conservation going on, but very little effort to conserve the folk knowledge of na-tive peoples. Amazonian people are going off to saw-mills and learning to repair outboard motors, and this whole body of knowledge about plants is going to be lost in the next generation. Were saving it, and saving the plants in a botanical garden in Hawaii. /216

Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the last best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of lenses to see our way in the world. When the medieval world shifted its worldview, secu-larized European society sought salvation in the re-vivifying of classical Greek and Roman approaches to law, philosophy, / aesthetics, city planning, and agri-culture. Our dilemma will cast us further back into time in a search for models and answers. /218-219

The solution of much of modern malaise, including chemical dependencies and repressed psychoses and neuroses, is direct exposure to the authentic dimen-sions of risk represented by the experience of psyche-delic plants. The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrug position. Drug dependencies are

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the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive be-havior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psy-chological makeup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motiva-tions up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual. /219

What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of re-awakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The Archaic Revival spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization, something that cannot be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective awareness. /219

The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vege-table mind the Gaian collectivity of organic life the closer their connection to the archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style of social organiza-tion. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic Era, before the Mystery religions were finally suppres

Documents

Terence McKenna and Ethnopharmacology