Hello and welcome to the very first
episode of Conversations with Terence,
the podcast where I talk about Terence
Mckenna because sadly we cannot talk to
Terence Mckenna. My goal here is to
connect you with some of Terrence's most
powerful ideas and discuss the
implications that those ideas have today
in a society which has changed
substantially since McKenna's death 20
years ago on April 3rd 2000. I want to
use this platform to discuss all the
questions that I personally wish I were
able to ask him and more broadly the
societal and political conversations I
wish he were able to participate in. Now,
it doesn't particularly matter who I am
but I will at least tell you that I am
28 years old and for that reason I'm too
young to have been able to attend any of
Terrence's lectures in person or at
least I'm too young to have been able to
attend them at an age when I could have
understood them. So I'm looking back on
his life and work from the perspective
of someone younger even than his
children, and I only connected to his
work through video lectures mostly on
YouTube on my computer screen. And you
know I think it's worth noting that
YouTube of course was not invented until
after Terrance's death. But still very
very little of what Terence Mckenna had
to say has been outdated by the
intervening years. His words have really
only compounded in their urgency
especially when it comes to issues of
climate change the central topic of
today's episode. Now if you're listening
to this and there's a pretty good chance
that you already know quite a bit about
Terence Mckenna but it still feels
necessary of course to start with an
introduction. And if you know a thing or
two about him then you can understand
how difficult it is to provide an
introduction because this is not an easy
person to summarize. His major areas of
study included shamanism, ethnobotany and
psychedelic drugs, but he also knew a
great deal about history, literature,
physics, chemistry, math and art. He
advocated for studying the obscure-
reading old books which nobody reads and
traveling to places where people
generally do not travel. In short, he knew
a lot about a lot and he synthesized
these areas of study into some of the
most peculiar ideas that you will ever
encounter. Now, the way that most people
would probably summarize terence
mckenna's life and work would be to say
that he was an advocate for the use of
psychedelic drugs, at least in healthy
willing participants, but I think it's a
lot more complicated than that and it's
very very to note that 
the main reason why he
advocated for psychedelic drugs was
because he believed that we are well on
our way towards planetary destruction
and that nothing else besides
psychedelic drugs can get a person to
change their perspective fast enough and
completely enough to solve this problem. So that is why you cannot talk about
Terence Mckenna without also discussing
climate change. Let me start off with an
example. Terence Mckenna was an amazing
speaker and much more interesting to
listen to than I am,
and it actually pains me to take sound
bytes of his lectures because every
minute is really essential. It's very
hard to decide what to share but here is
a clip of Terence discussing this issue
of why he spoke to crowds and why he
advocated for psychedelic drugs: "What motivates me to talk
to groups like this is the belief that
we do not have centuries of gently
unfolding time ahead of us in which to
you know gently tease apart the threads
of the human endeavor and create a
bright new world. That's not our
circumstance. This is a fire in a
madhouse. And to get a hold on the
situation I think we are going to have
to force the issue. Well one one way of
forcing the issue or a chemical
definition of forcing the issue when
you're talking about a chemical reaction
is catalysis. We want to catalyze
consciousness. We want to move it faster
toward its goals, whatever those goals
are. Well I believe that to the present
moment language- again in the broadest
sense, speech, dance, musical composition- language has just been allowed to grow
like topsy. It's been a kind of every man
for himself situation.
Now what we really need as we see
ourselves moving from one species among
tens of thousands of species on this
planet over the past ten thousand years,
we have redefined ourselves and now, like
it or not, we are the custodians of the
destiny of this planet. Our decisions
affect every life form on the planet and
yet we are still communicating with each
other with the extremely precise medium
of small mouth noises mediated by
ignorance and hate." That quote is from a
talk that Terence gave in 1990 called
opening the doors of creativity. 1990, on
a personal level, that was a year before
I was born. And one of the things that
Terrance's lectures teaches me
personally is that the reality of
climate change was evident at that time
to people who were willing to take an
honest look at human behavior and the
consequences that that behavior would
have in the future.
Now back to Terrance's life and work.
In terms of what he did specifically he
was an author and a traveling lecturer.
He co-wrote two books with his brother
Dennis they are, The Invisible Landscape:
Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.
That one was written under pseudonym for
obvious reasons. He also wrote The
Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual
Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the
Rebirth of the Goddess and The End of
History. Yup that's the book title. You're
already beginning to see that this is a
rather verbose person. Probably his most
well known book is Food of the Gods: The
Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. That was written in 1992.
Sidenote and a little trivia for you.
Terence wanted to call that book: Why Eve
Was Right:
Plants, Drugs and, History. But his
publisher didn't go for it. Finally he
wrote True Hallucinations: Being an
Account of the Author's Extraordinary
Adventures in the Devil's Paradise. And
that was his last full-length book
published in 1993. So those are his major
written works. He contributed to other
collections as well. In some ways
researching turns McKenna
is very easy because he has hundreds of
hours of lecture content available on
the internet but the world is currently
suffering from a lack of a central
Terence Mckenna archive. In 2007
Terrence's own library of rare books and
personal notes housed at the Esalen
Institute in California it was destroyed
in a fire. Now I don't know how much of
that collection was Terrence's own
original work and how much of it was
rare books created by others but in any
case it is an intellectual tragedy that
the library was lost.
Terrence's brother Dennis has a list of
the items that was in that collection
but some of them are surely not going to
be able to be recovered. It's not really
much of a surprise to me that no
particular academic institution has come
forward to sort of claim Terence Mckenna
as their own although he graduated from
UC Berkeley in 1975 where he studied
ecology shamanism and the conservation
of natural resources. I checked and the
UC berkeley library does have all of
Terrence's major works but again what is
really needed here as an archive,
especially given that Terence had a lot
of smaller materials some of which I
believe are out of print. There are
definitely unavailable DVDs, probably a
great deal of VHS tapes as well which I
can imagine might be scattered in homes
throughout the country and really need
to just be digitized for preservation
and organized for access. And one of the
reasons that I wanted to start this
podcast was in order to draw attention
to this archival gap so as of right now,
spring 2020, there is a GoFundMe for a
Terence Mckenna
archival project by a man named Kevin
Whitesides. He also has a volunteer-based
transcription project. You can volunteer
to transcribe Terrance's lectures and
they'll be housed in a searchable text
database. Some of this has already been
done. I've used the database. It's very
very helpful if you're thinking of a
Terrence McKenna quote and you can't
remember off the top of your head,
understandably, which of the dozens of
lectures it's from. It's very useful and
I will link to those resources in the
description. Now another problem I found
is that Terrance's YouTube lectures are
basically never captioned by the people
who upload them. So as a short PSA,
automatic captions are not sufficient
and we are barring deaf
individuals from enjoying his
lectures, so please if you have hosted on
your YouTube channel one of his lectures
please caption it. That would be great. I
also want to say as an aside that if by
some miracle any of Terrence's current
living family members hears this podcast
and want to be on it and chat with me
that would be amazing.
I did try to contact his estate to make
sure that my use of his lectures falls
under fair use as I have no intention of
committing copyright infringement but
they have not yet responded which is
totally fine. I'm just going to proceed
assuming that it's okay. Now as I
mentioned Terence gave dozens and dozens
of very lengthy lectures many of which
are available in full on YouTube and I
recommend them more highly than I
recommend really any other piece of
media in existence. And it's worth noting
if you haven't already noticed that this
is going to be a laudatory podcast on my
part because Terence Mckenna has had the
single greatest impact of any author on
not just what I think but really more
the way that I think. Now that said I
will try my best to honestly and
accurately relay Terrance's ideas for
you to form your own opinion and I will
definitely include any solid criticism
of his theories which I come across in
my research. Among other things he did
think that we might be possibly headed
towards something like a singularity in
2012 and as far as I could tell that
does not appear to have happened. But in
my view evaluating the work of Terence
Mckenna
is more complex than just determining
whether or not specific predictions came
true or specific arguments were correct. Especially given that Terrence McKenna
himself didn't seem particularly
interested or invested in instilling
specific beliefs. I mean he actually
talked frequently about how he was
essentially anti the concept of belief
because once you believe something it
automatically, in his words, I believe
this is a quote, it "automatically
precludes you from believing the
opposite." You could discredit any number
of Terence Mckenna specific theories and
still appreciate his immense capacity
for thinking way outside the box and
communicating extremely complicated
ideas
that was both clear and beautiful. This
episode as I said is focused on climate
change because Terrance rarely gave a
lecture which did not at least touch
upon the urgency of planetary
destruction and as I mentioned earlier
that was the major driving force behind
his advocacy of psychedelics. What really
interests me personally is not simply
that Terence was talking about climate
change a good deal earlier than most
people but that he discussed it in a way
which no one really has ever before or
since.
Terence McKenna had a way of talking
about catastrophe and the extinction of
species and planetary destruction and
the fall of society as we know it in a
way that was somehow still very
optimistic. My personal experience of
this talks is that their cathartic. They
leave you feeling better,
even as he does not shy away from the
reality or the urgency of the situation
that we face at all. That's partly
because he had a lot of well, quirky
theories, about what the approaching
eschaton would look like and they were
not all entirely negative. He had a few
different terms used to discuss this.
Again, while he had an environmental
background an awareness of things like
mass extinctions,
he didn't usually use those terms. He
said that we were approaching what he
called the "transcendental object at the
end of time." He also referred to this
transition as the end of history. He
sometimes called our present moment "post-
technology, pre-apocalyptic." And he often
used the word eschaton which literally
means the final event in the divine plan
or simply the end of the world. Sometimes
he discussed the eschaton as a kind of
birthing process, arguing that for one
thing if you were to walk in on a birth
and you never seen it before and you
didn't know what it was it would not
look like a miracle it would look like a
disaster. And maybe that is the sort of
situation that we find ourselves in. I
have no idea if that has any merit to it
but I think about it all the time and it
makes me feel a lot better. To provide
just one example of how we spoke about
these matters I'm going to include the
following quote from Taxonomy of
Illusion, a talk from 1993: "Everything is
being left pretty much to develop on its
own because people are afraid to grab or
touch
the levers and buttons in the control
room of the historical vehicle. And what
that means then is that people who can
cut through these many many illusions-
the illusion of materialism, the illusion
of business as usual, the illusion of
benevolent institutions carefully
guiding us toward reasonable destinies-
if you cut through all that, if you
disabuse yourself of all that, you will
empower yourself to eventually be able
to stand up in delicate social and
political situations and just say
bullshit. And this is worth considering
doing simply because we have an
imperiled planet on our hands. We have
been for a long long time the victims of
illusion. Western civilization- Stefan
Daedalus was right, history is the
nightmare from which one must awaken
quite literally. I mean we have been
blind to what we have been doing. We are
blind at this moment to what we are
doing. If in a single moment the actual
nature of our predicament were to fully
make itself felt in the mind of any one
of us I think it would be paralyzing. It
would be horrifying. We have waited
till the last moment of the last hour,
the house is burning down around us, and
we rouse ourselves from the stupor of
materialism, the stupor of Christianity
and scientism, the stupor of male
dominance, sexism, and racism.
If we don't rouse ourselves from
this stupor, the momentum toward
extinction is now practically
irreversible." Terrence is quite clearly
talking about climate change here but he
is talking about it in a social context,
listing things like racism, materialism,
male dominance etc. as root causes rather
than rattling off the actual
environmental actions that are being
taken, although I'm sure he was perfectly
aware of those as well. So we have Terence
McKenna saying that the momentum towards
extinction in 1993 was practically
irreversible. And he's using this house
on fire metaphor which reminds me a lot
of what Greta Thunberg said at the
World Economic Forum in 2019. I'm sure
you've heard it before but let's play it
again. "Adults keep saying we owe it to
the young people to give them hope. But I
don't want your hope. I don't want you to
be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to
feel the fear I feel every day and then
I want you to act. I want you to act as you
would in a crisis. I want you to act as if
the house was on fire,
because it is." I find this really
interesting because Greta and Terence
are both speaking with comparable
urgency and awareness of the situation
but Greta Thunberg's speech makes me
frankly just want to cry and somehow the
way that Terence talks always manages to
be extremely uplifting and cathartic. Now
I do sometimes wonder if he would be
using the exact same tone today, but- and
speaking as someone who did not
personally know him but who has studied
his books and lectures quite a bit- I
honestly think that he would. I think
that he would be approaching our current
situation very very interested to see
what happens next. In that same talk the
Taxonomy of Illusion, Terence went on to
say the following. "So how can we even conceive
of this government making an impact on
the real problems. It is still government
by flim-flam. And that would be all very
well if we had 500 years to dig
ourselves out of this dilemma but if
there if a radical political alternative
is not opened up in this country then we
are essentially I think going to amuse
and entertain ourselves into extinction."
In this particular cultural moment I
write this podcast self isolating in my
home from a pandemic with clearly
environmental origins. Many of my friends
have lost their jobs and we are seeing
exactly what capitalism leads to. And I
have never felt more like this is our
situation. People at home, isolated,
feeling powerless,
turning to distractions and yeah amusing
ourselves into extinction. That is
precisely our situation and it's not the
fault of individuals but we I think
can't help but feel the weight of some
responsibility and it is a truly bizarre
time to be alive. But what Terence
McKenna's lectures really illuminate for
me is that we have been in a truly
bizarre historical moment for quite a
few decades now. Even as it feels like
things are ramping up. Because they are
ramping up. So here Terence says that a
solution to climate change and the
interlocking problems of materialism,
sexism, racism, etc., can really only be
found in a quote "radical political
alternative" and he clearly did not
believe that a radical political
alternative would be handed down from
the government because those
institutions are inherently corrupt. I
think that what he wanted was for
individual citizens to radically change
their own thinking. So in that same talk
the taxonomy of Illusion he goes on to
explain a little bit about what he would
like for a society to be based on and
how he thought that we could get there:
"And what it has to do with is resisting
images that are coming from the reality
studio. Resisting the images that are
coming off the tube, coming through the
newspapers, and creating a community
based on psychedelics, sexuality,
sensitivity, and good sense. And what good sense will mean in
this situation is the preservation of
the earth. The preservation of diversity.
Deconditioning from product fetishism.
Deconditioning from energy
overconsumption. All these things we
understand but we seem to lack the power
to change our minds or if we have that
power than the power to change other
people's minds. And I am into
psychedelics not because I think it's a
sure thing but because I think it is the
only game in town. In other words it's
the only thing I've ever seen change an
individual on a time scale similar to
the time scale that we have if we're
going to make a difference. I've seen
over and over again, I'm sure many of you
have, people go into a psychedelic jerks
and come out halfway decent human beings.
You know eight hours later." I should also
explain that what Terence meant by a
catalyst here was essentially a catalyst
of language. He made the argument that we
can't evolve society any faster than we
can evolve linguistically. Or to put it
differently, we can't achieve something
if we can't even describe it. And
psychedelics in Terence's view, force the
evolution of language. He spoke about
this in his talk Sacred Plants as Guides
and in many other lectures and his book
Food of the Gods goes into great detail
about the relationship between
psychedelics and language. So again
Terence was an advocate for psychedelic
drugs but really he was an advocate for
what he called the archaic revival. He
was an advocate for the radical
transformation of society and for saving
the planet. He simply thought that
psychedelics were
the best way of getting there. The
fastest way of getting there, given that
we don't have a lot of time to work on
this. Now I want to share one last longer
quote so you can get a better idea of
precisely how Terence McKenna tended to
speak about the end of the world, the
sort of language that he used and the
role that he believed psychedelics could
play in our handling of the situation.
This quote is in response to an audience
members question. "'What role does an individual
psychedelic experience play in the
massive changes that you're anticipating?'
It would seem to me...well my model for
the psychedelic experience, there have
been a number of them. The idea that it mimics madness that was one idea.
That it takes you into the
unconscious, that was one notion. That it
somehow illuminates the concepts of
Indian yoga or after death models such
as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. All of
these have been tried. My assumption has
been a mathematical one. What
psychedelics are about is that mind
under the pressure of
evolutionary constraints turns itself
into a threat detection device and
that's how we use it in
three-dimensional space, to anticipate
the threat and to meet it. But that
is as it were a lower order application
of mind and that in silent darkness what
happens on psychedelics
is that you the mind unfolds literally
into a kind of super space or a higher
dimension in the mathematical sense.
Because I take seriously the claim
made all in all times and places for
millennia that shamans can locate lost
objects, predict weather, see where the
game has gone, and predict the outcome of
disease situations. In all cases what is
involved is a higher dimensional
relationship to the manifold of history.
So I think that...you all
understand that a locked box if we had a
padlock box here on stage, a locked box
is not locked in hyperspace. It has a
dimension in hyperspace from which the
contents of the locked box are easily
removed, taken out and put back . I our
world this looks like magic. Shamanism is
like this. And so to answer the question
'what role does an individual psychedelic
experience play in the massive changes
anticipated' the role is that the
individual gets in on the joke. At this
stage in history to be a shaman is to
have seen the end. And if you've seen the
end it's like you know taking on Anna
Karenina and reading the last five pages
and then as you make your way through
this bewildering morass of material you
do have the faith that it's all going to
end up as you discerned. So that's the
political act you see. Terror of the
future is one of the weapons by which
the rationalists are holding everybody
in line. Terror of the future can be put
out to pasture through psychedelic
shamanism." So perhaps you can start to
see there what I mean about his ability
to talk about literally the end of the
world in a way that was still somehow
cathartic and
optimistic. Terence referred to himself very
frequently as an optimist and that
particular portion of that talk where
he's explaining how psychedelics could
be used to essentially mediate fear
about the end of the world, that reminds
me a lot of recent studies which have
utilized psilocybin to help mediate
depression and anxiety and individuals
who are dying. So in that sense it makes
perfect sense to me.
And I mean Terence was an optimist
because he seemed to believe in a sort
of fate or destiny or whatever you want
to call it. He believed that we were
being pulled forward by an attractive
force which he called the transcendental
object at the end of the time. I don't
really have time to discuss that here.
It's an extremely complicated idea and
it would not do the idea justice to cut
it down to a short sound bite but it is
an essential aspect of his optimism
along with the fact that he seemed to
put, as I've mentioned, most of his
efforts into mobilizing individuals, into
changing their minds rather than vying
for governmental changes. And again I
happen to be writing this at a very
peculiar time in human history-
specifically the outbreak of the coronavirus
in the US and the world. Which is
the fault of capitalism and a product of
our destruction of the planet. Factory
farming, deforestation and the
destruction of natural resources are
definitely factors in these increasingly
dangerous zoonotic viruses and diseases
and that is radically changing the way
that we live our lives in the moment. And
there's a reason to believe that it
could happen again unless we dismantle
these systems with capitalism at the
root. We are probably going to see more
pandemics. So it is a very difficult time
to be optimistic. But at the same time
the situation is illuminating deep
far-reaching flaws of our society.
Terence called our current systems
lifeboats, arguing that they are really
not meant made to last. We have a health
care system in the United States that
essentially requires people to work in
order to live and we have an
environmentally caused pandemic
currently requiring people not to work
in order to live. So this is clearly
unsustainable. All the seams
bursting at once. But one way to look at
that would be to recognize that we are
sort of poised for a revolution, on the
one hand. On the other hand we aren't
even able to gather in groups so that
makes the transformation of society
pretty darn difficult. And these are the
moments where I really wish I could
speak to Terence Mckenna even though I
never personally knew him. Or I wish I
could at least hear him weigh in on
what's going on because I know he would
have a lot of fascinating things to say
and I know he would be saying things
completely unique that no one else is
saying and I suspect that he probably
would still be optimistic and hopeful
although I can't know that for sure. So
that is all for today thank you so much
for listening. There will probably be a
climate change part two since I've
really only scratched the surface of
what Terence Mckenna had to say about
the topic. But today I just wanted to
achieve two tasks which were to
introduce you to Terence Mckenna
and generally touch upon his feelings
about the end of the world. I will admit
that I was a little hasty in my making
this. I didn't really want to wait. It
just seemed sort of like the perfect
time on the 20th anniversary of Terence
Mckenna is unfortunate untimely death
and also in the midst of all of this
worldwide crisis I wanted to chat with
you about the end of the world. So thank
you so much for listening. Take care. I do
intend to hopefully improve upon my
quality in terms of especially audio in
the future. So thank you if you made it all the way
through this rough episode. Take care.
