Terence McKenna Interview

Back in the last decade of the twentieth century – Terence McKenna* sat on the grass at Newcastle University, NSW, as part of an East coast speaking tour, and chatted with me for an hour long student paper interview. I recently re-discovered the interview file, and have pasted below unedited. In person, Terence had a lovely presence – gentle, warm, and twinkle eyed – and he was very funny, imbuing his provocations with mischievious ambiguities.

*Terrance who? A famous ethnobotanist and author (1946-2000), renowned for his advocacy of psychedelic plants, and believe it or not – celebrated in ‘rave culture**’.
His wikipedia page has all the Terence McKenna rabbitholes you’ll need.
That Time Terence McKenna Toured Australia (audio interview at Rune Soup)
**Here, learn how to make a digital bust of Terence McKenna.

Sadly, Terence passed away a few short years after our interview:

Wired magazine’s 2000 story: Terence McKenna’s Last Trip:
“Listen,” McKenna told them, “if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation.”

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So there I was sitting on the grass with Terence McKenna. Yes, the elfish character who argues hallucinogens could have played a crucial role in human evolution. He’d just finished a speaking date at Newcastle Uni as part of a national tour, and yes he does have a distributed degree in ecology, resource conservation and shamanism to describe his exploration of consciousness, and back up his ideas. He’s also authored several books, such as Food of the Gods and The Archaic Revival, and helped found Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit foundation devoted to rescuing Amazonian plants with a history of shamanic uses.  And as I sat across from him, I couldn’t help thinking – what strange sunglasses you have on.

You talk about ufos as modern equivalent of angels and demons…

Well, yes…. I don’t think we’re being visited by extra terrestrials in metallic ships who want to help us over our political speed bump …. but I do think that the human mind is strangely haunted by the other, and the reasons for this are long and complicated. In the 20th century what is complicating it is the density of the media.. so people have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between memory, media and fantasy and so you know the media is almost like a system for amplifying anomaly.  If I go out and see the stars at night – this is not a news story – if I go out and see something I call a spacecraft, this then becomes amplified in the media and people who are in a similar state of mind… they pick this up and they transmit it along.. and so we have a lot of people who are subject to illusions and delusions about the nature of reality… I think you know for psychedelic culture its a puzzling thing..  because you know, we see aliens all the time and it doesn’t seem to attract any great attention..  People say of course not – it’s just in your mind…

Well where do you think aliens are likely to be – demanding that they be in the flesh is probably putting too great a constraint on aliens.. the fact that quantum physics is beginning to talk in terms of non-locality of information suggests to me that the imagination is a kind of organ for perceiving things which are not present at hand and probably all of the denizens of the imagination are in some sense real but they are so far away from us.. in newtonian space time… that they will never come in metallic ships and hover over the parliament.. they can only communicate with us through the mind.. so rather than demand physical evidence of these things we should accept that there will never be physical evidence but that mental evidence is sufficient to move us towards the question – not are there aliens – but what are aliens?

You talk a lot about language and mind over matter – or the world being made out of language…  do you see us living in pure imagination as some sort of end result we’re moving towards?

Well, virtual reality which is a tiny pimple on the surface of reality… and I’m sure in 15 years, reality will be a tiny pimple on virtual reality – in a sense this is virtual reality… i mean these buildings existed in someones mind.. i mean brick and concrete is an attractable medium in which to build virtual reality that show we’ve done it for 10,000 years.. now we’re about to do it in light..  all thats happening is that the medium is becoming more responsive to our needs .. virtual reality is an incredibly exciting frontier… because we are going to be able to show each other the contents of our minds.. I will build a DMT hallucination and I will describe it to you .. I’ll have you put on the helmet and then you can tell me whats wrong with according to your DMT experiences.. and then we together will redesign it and make it right and then we can show a third person .. by this means we’re gonna build up a walk thru consensual virtual reality that extends ordinary 3d space in all dimensions simultaneously…

Or maybe just virtual shopping malls?

Well.. all the trivial things will be there, they’ll arrive first because the commercial and corp enterprises are pushing this.. but anybody who thinks virtual reality is a technology for kitchen design.. must have polio of the imagination.

When Edison invented the phonograph record he assumed it would be used for recording wills…. because he assumed no body could ever contest a will which was recorded on vinyl. Well I doubt that anyone has ever recorded a will on vinyl disc. Well maybe a couple of times. So inventors and those who profit in the early phase of given technology are probably not the best people to ask what will be done with it.

The internet itself.. this was never intended to escape into our hands.. this was a godlike tool created for the war planners at the height of the cold war.. they wanted to link universities and military databases together.

How will the net shape our perceptions? Given the huge effects of tv ?

Or even the automobile.. most people when it was invented, thought it was a better horse.. when what it really what was, was a portable bedroom.. it allowed people to have sex away from the eyes of their family… and it also allowed these couples to then move away from the nuclear family structure.. the extended family structure..

So people who saw the automobile who saw the automobile as a faster horse were completely unable to see its real social impact was which was a revolution in morals and a revolution in the relationship of the worker to the workplace, urban to world and so forth and so on..

And so with a technology like tv it can be even trickier to predict what its effect would be.. and the internet? – we would never have it if it hadn’t been assumed that it would very benignly serve the people who created it which it certainly doesn’t at this point…

You talk of machine elves .. characters fusion of tech and organic… is that phenomenon perceived by people from different cultures, who take DMT?

People have individual experiences on DMT.. but I would say they all go on under the aegis of what I would call the archetype of the circus. DMT somehow ahh.. activates a union with say the archetype of the circus.. what I mean by that is.. think about the circus.. three rings, brightly lit… splendid place to bring children.. it’s where you find the clowns, and these things are clowns, but … up in the top of the tent hangs the lady in the tiny spangled suit .. hanging by her teeth … working without nets… death and eros, death and eros.. so you have clowns but death and eros.. and then just off the main ring.. you’ve got the bearded lady, the bat faced boy the thing in the bottle and the goat feeted woman.. so freakery, strangeness…  mutation of form.. and you know the circus… when the circus comes to town.. decent people keep their children in after dark…

Carny people are strange …they may have bizarre sexual practices..  they represent otherness… and every child worth their salt wants to run off with the circus… and once the circus leaves town.. bourgeois reality seamlessly reasserts itself… its like it never happened.. the goat-faced boy… the clowns .. it never happened… The circuses of Fellini’s work -in 8 1/2 and Roma…. those are circuses which represent the forces of the unconscious, and they’re very DMT-like.. those scenes they’re almost shot with the consciousness of DMT…

Would people have experiences of machine elves if they’re from a culture without machines?

Well you have to understand machine elves is my description of something.. I think encountering the same thing.. somebody else might say ..have a completely set of metaphors.. they are not machines and they are not elves.. when I speak about them publicly about them I talk like that.. when I think about them in the privacy of my own mind… I’m more .. the world of DMT seems to me like a world where syntax which is something normally quite in the background of reality.. becomes reality.. in other words they’re not made out of light… well they’re made out of light, but they’re not made out of matter .. but they dynamic of their relationships to each other and to the world they’re in… is grammatical.  These are almost like sentences that .. .. the closest thing to the machine elves in this world is a pun.

A pun?

A pun.

Because pun works because they’re two things at once… and a really good pun is three things at once and a great pun is 4 things at once.. everything in DMT-land has this peculiar quality. We say if you’re a rock you’re not a tree.. if you’re a bird you’re not a rat.. it doesn’t work like that…

This either /or buddhist boolean categorisation seems to break down.. things have multiple identities… that’s why one is unavoidably pushed towards a metaphor of hyper or multi dimensionality… you could almost say of a pun.. it’s a word or statement that has more than the ordinary dimensions usually tolerated in a word or a statement .. and for some reason we find that funny… for some reason the things in the DMT world are funny… i mean the main feeling you have while you’re there is that …

…This is fucking funnnnnny.. this is zany.. this is like a bugs bunny cartoon running backwards, or a max zemit(??) cartoon… it’s even funnier than that.. and yet the funniness.. it’s a funny kind of funny too. The DMT elves… sing objects into existence thats mainly what they do …and then they show you these objects and you look at them.. but they’re not like any objects I’ve ever seen because they don’t stay still … they seem to be made of ice-water… opal, flesh, lust, yesterday, aluminium and Blake.. well, can an object be made of lust, aluminium and Blake?

An object can’t – but these things can .. because they are not made of matter – they are made of something else… and we could take a stab at it and call it conscious intentionality or syntactical hypergoo or what I’ve called it – translinguistic matter.. matter that is made of language somehow.. I mean we say this world is made of language… meaning we have a language.. and in order to say anything or in order to make sense of the world we describe it back to ourselves … now we have quantum physics which tells us what you see is not to be taken seriously at all.. is not real.. what you see is some kind of lower dimensional slice of a hyper dimensional multiphasic transforming equation that very few people on this planet can even wrap their minds around.

So I think DMT rubs your nose in the mud of language.. and makes you recognise the linguistical and syntactical nature of reality….

Do people with different linguistic backgrounds experience DMT differently?

I think whatever you bring to it, it transforms.. the people who come out of DMT least surprised are hyperdimensional topologists.. in other words people who have spent their lives using mathemethical methods to study hyperdimensional objects.. My friend Ralph Abraham, who I’ve written books with, he is a world class research mathematician.. he says there is nothing mysterious about DMT – it just shows you the world from a 6 dimensional point of view.. and that’s what it is… it’s a 6 dimensional point of view… and he has produced papers and theorems in the wake of DMT trips.

I’m not sure he has the last word… but I do think ..it seems reasonable to me that the human mind in the course of evolving, because at the centre of the whole thing is this piece of meat – which must be preserved at all costs otherwise the whole game comes to an end.. so our senses, our eyes, our ears, our musculature has all evolved to take account of 3d space… nearby space and nearby time…. because thats where the problem will come… the sabre toothed tiger creeping on its belly towards you its coming through 3d and it’s coming in the next 10 seconds… so the animal body has evolved these senses which extend at different distances.. a few minutes into the past a few minutes into the future…  but DMT seems to say, well… there’s also a kind of hyper perception which is not any good for detecting sabre toothed tigers… or  becoming aware of dinner slinking off through the grass… it’s a non localised perception… so it only has relevance to the mind, not the body.

We have a poorly developed organ.. it’s not as keen as eyes, it’s not as keen as our nose, it’s not as keen as our ears, but it’s called the imagination. And the purpose of this.. we think of this as a generative organ… it isn’t .. it’s a perceiving organ.. what is going on when you say Im imagining something, is  – you’re perceiving something.

..and you know, all this stuff coming out of quantum physics, bells theorem and all that argues that information is non-local

I think that what the psychedelic experience is, is that the non-local information suddenly moves from the background of the unconscious right to front of centre stage where the ego normally stands in 3d space…

People say I became everything.. well, thats a statement of non-locality..

People say I saw god…. well, another statement of non-locality..

When you listen into what people say about their psychedelic experiences.. the general theme seems to be boundary dissolution from local space time into some larger modality well thats this non-local information field…

..and as we become less animal and more godlike.. whatever that means.. non-locality is how it manifests…

The internet is a perfect example.. I remember when I first went online 4 years ago .. I was constantly saying to myself.. this is so far out.. I’ve just gone from a site in Heidelberg, Germany to a site in Alice Springs to a site in Northern California… but now.. I never think about that.. I just think of the earth is a point… it doesn’t impress that I leap from..

Actually Newcastle University is where I downloaded the latest version of Netscape from..it was the middle of the night.. the Palo Alto server was crowded.. it was just as easy to click on Australia as California.. and had this University not been serving, I would have moved onto Bangkok.. so the earth has become a non-local environment of some sort.. there’ll be more and more and more of this..

Somebody could say well before the internet the invention of international jet flight, or maybe before that the four masted schooner… I don’t know.. the earth has been shrinking very rapidly and faster and faster for at least 500 years…

…and now if you’re willing to leave the body out of the picture.. you can visit websites in Paris, and a moment later Tel-Aviv, and a moment later, Sydney and there will be more and more of this I’m sure. We’ll see probes set up on the deserts of mars and the moons of Jupiter for virtual reality tourist arrival sites, lonnnggg before any human foot  trods deserts in mars.

What sort of problems do you foresee in such a future?

Well, mainly resistance on the part of the old order. A lot of people are terrified of these technologies.. it’s deeply disturbing to me that older people can’t get with the program. Millions of people who are my age or older are just accepting warehouse lives watching daytime TV because they have technophobia.. They don’t know how to log on.. they can’t write HTML, they haven’t a clue about all this stuff and they think it’s incredibly remote and difficult, but of course as we all know, any fool can learn HTML in a long morning.. but if you don’t think you can learn .. it’s like being 1905… and everybody’s driving cars and you’re saying.. oh no, not me.. well fine you can ride a horse for the rest of your life.. but it’s happening faster than that it’s happening at such a rate that anybody that doesn’t embrace it wholeheartedly is going to do themselves an enormous disservice… The job of every single one of us now is to stay current with the new technologies.. the internet that’s all fantastic and the new drugs, that’s equally fantastic, but it ain’t gonna stop there.

What about nanotechnology? In a way nanotechnology is more closely related to pharmacology.. I mean if I go into the lab and make a million doses of LSD, if we zoom in on that LSD, these are little machines that I am all methylating, decarboxylating, and building up their ring structures… the LSD molecule can be properly thought of as a little physiologically active machine. Eventually I think pharmacology will be recognised as the parent science of nanotechnology. They’re the people who’ve been moving things around atom by atom for 60 years…

You described ketamine as like walking through a skyscraper full of empty rooms, in comparing natural versus synthetic drugs..

It has an empty morphogenetic field because very few people have ever been there..

What do think then that suggests genetically engineered and nanotech drugs will be like?

Well.. who knows what we would find out if straight pharmacology actually set its sights on psychedelic research.. Psychedelic research is not done by any commercial enterprise anywhere.. because of their dependency on Government vetting of these things.. and so forth.. they are basically operating at the pleasure of Governments.

Suppose we were to take half a billion dollars, which in this world we’re talking about is not a lot of money, the world of pharmaceutical R&D… Half a billion dollars, and throw it at the problem of, we want a drug which allows people to remember their dreams… nothing more, nothing less, … if such a thing is possible, and I suspect it is… because observing dreams and how hard they are to remember, it’s clearly that there’s something about the dream-state – it does not transcribe into RNA so it doesn’t transcribe into memory.. well, there’s a chemical strategy for making that happen…

A drug that lets you remember your dreams is probably within a billion dollars of being available right now. But what drug company would dare market such a thing. But beyond that is the question – what would you know, if you could remember your dreams?.. I maintain that none of us remember our deeper dreams.. I think in fact that every night you go into a DMT flash.. but it’s at the centre of the dream-state and evolutionary mechanisms in the brain somehow, because that is non-local information, but if you could block that through an engineer, a pharmaceutical engineer strategy.. people might never watch tv.. you talk of the dreamtime.. what if the dreamtime were accessible to us all with perfect clarity?

And that’s all only one fantasy of what pharmacology could do unfettered from cultural values and government agendas…

“We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.”
–  Terence McKenna

“A woman on the upper east side of New York or in Malibu..has a child. That child will have between eight hundred and a thousand times more negative impact on the environment of the Earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh. Where do we preach birth control? Bangladesh.”
– Terence McKenna