Terence McKenna explores psychedelics’ role in dissolving time and genetic perception, linking his Time Wave Zero theory to astrophysics’ accepted cosmological constant omega. He dismisses contrail conspiracy theories but notes DEA surveillance near his home, while callers debate DMT’s potential to reveal hyperdimensional realms—"elf machines," "dead souls," or quantum consciousness. McKenna ties Mayan 2012 prophecies to galactic alignments, suggesting psychedelics may unlock ancient visions of universal intelligences. Historical suppression of research, like LSD’s 50% success in treating alcoholism at Saskatoon Mental Hospital, underscores institutional resistance to consciousness-altering breakthroughs, hinting at a future where such therapies reclaim legitimacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you're going to tonight because around the corner is Terence McKenna.
You know who Terrence McKenna is?
If not, you will shortly.
He is a brilliant, fast mind with a lot to say.
And it shouldn't be that way, because his mind should be fried rice, actually.
But it's not.
We'll talk about that, too.
Well, listen, good morning, everybody.
I've got a couple of things I've got to get on.
Actually, several.
Our affiliate base continues to grow, and once again, I would like to welcome WMTK, New London, New Hampshire, 10 kilowatts on 1020, big time, huh?
KOTA, Rapid City, South Dakota, 5,000 watts, 1380.
WSKY Sky, FM, Gainesville, Florida, 100,000 watts on 97.3.
As we race, in fact, actually edge ever so close to the 450 affiliate mark.
We're operating under unusual conditions right now.
My entire valley is out of power.
I don't know if somebody's practicing for Y2K or what's going on, but the Perrump police report to me that the power is out over my entire valley.
And that's now a lot of people here in the Perrump Valley.
I have no idea how much more widespread the power outage is.
I do still see a glow over the hill, but that could be generators operating Las Vegas.
I have no way of knowing.
It's absolutely astounding.
So everything is dark.
The entire valley here is particularly dark.
We, however, are lit up thanks to a generator and a nearly endless supply of propane.
By the way, my guest who's coming up is also on a generator to be coming to us.
So you're really into generator city tonight.
Power outages.
All right, a lot of you will not, just before we get to Terrence, a lot of you will not have been privy to this since it went on on the internet on my website.
We, as an April Fool's joke, which really was not a joke, what I did I did for a very serious reason.
But I figured April 1st was a good day to do it.
We put up a page ostensibly berating NATO, a Yugoslav page, as if the Yugoslav hackers had hacked our site.
Well, they didn't.
We hacked our own site.
That's right.
We hacked our own site.
Now, I did it for a very serious reason, actually.
And I'm going to read to you, you may recall prior to my going on vacation, this is, of course, my first day back, I told you that I bet within hours of my going on vacation we would begin bombing in Yugoslavia, and of course we are doing that.
We did that.
I don't think it was six hours.
Six hours after I went on vacation, the bombing began.
So I'm afraid I was right about that.
And I'm afraid I'm right about what I'm going to read you now.
And a lot of you are going to disagree with it, so be it.
I want to read it to you.
This is what we put on our website, my answer.
I wrote the hack, computer hack, meaning computer hack.
The hack scene on this site was an April 1st prank by myself and Keith Rowland.
However, it was also, and I would add more importantly to make a point, though I do not agree in any way whatsoever with what the Serbs are reported to be doing, it's my view that it's none of our damn business, and I mean that.
The UN might make a case for intervention when one nation invades another.
Witness the Gulf War, of course.
But as a libertarian, even that causes me some pause.
To bomb until the Serbs agree to change their internal policy is absolute folly.
Will we bomb for a few more days?
Weeks?
Months?
Will we declare victory if they agree to talk?
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Will that end differences that have been festering longer than we've been a nation?
Would you see your son, your daughter, die to change attitudes in Serbia?
If war is to begin again, once again in Europe, that is indeed sad.
But we should not be the ones to light the views.
If this is the new world order, then where were we, pray tell, when half a million Africans were hacked to death?
Where were we, pray tell, when millions were slaughtered in Cambodia?
The world is not a nice place, ladies and gentlemen, and our bombs will not make it so.
And so I did what I did to drive exactly that point home.
I think what we're doing is absolute insanity.
Absolute insanity.
Anyway, coming up in a moment, by the way, quite a few of the press bit on our little April Fools item.
I won't name them.
Quite a few in the mainstream press bit.
But that was exactly the idea.
That's the way you drive a point home.
And I really wanted to drive this point home.
If we continue on our present course, then we've lost all direction as a sovereign nation.
How can we expect to remain ourselves sovereign if we do not respect the sovereignty of others?
Well, that's my soapbox on what's going on with the bombing.
Anybody out there know what the exit strategy is?
Do we simply declare victory?
Well, anyway, I could go on and on.
And I probably will because this one really sticks in my craw.
Terrence McKenna coming right up.
All right, well, actually, let's do it.
All the way across so much water we go to connect now with Terrence McKenna, who's safely tucked away, I think the side of a volcano or something, isn't it, Terrence?
Well, I'm glad I listened in on your reading of your statement so I know where you're coming from.
Well, as you said, it's a complete mess.
For the third time in the 20th century, the Balkans appear to be the place where Europe could potentially push itself into some kind of war nobody could foresee the end of.
I read analysis of Milosevic and his regime five years ago that predicted this would be the end game, that Kosovo was where push would come to shove.
And now here we are.
Only a few months left in the 20th century, but time for one more atrocity, apparently.
We're throwing, of course, these cruise missiles, firing these cruise missiles, beginning to run out of them, incidentally, but we are firing what we have.
When they run out, that means more airplanes.
And then eventually, when that strategy fails, then you're faced with the choice of either retreating and it's another Vietnam or putting in ground troops and starting down the same horrible road of no return.
Well, and remember, ground troops couldn't make a difference in Vietnam either.
Yes, I think aerial bombing, how many times in the 20th century are we going to learn that it's insufficient and it's a very weak-kneed approach if you're talking about all-out war with fascists?
And then, Terence, also, even if we did bomb them, which I suppose is conceivable to the point where they said, okay, we'll talk about peace, and then we move peacekeepers, we're peacemakers now, not peacekeepers, but we finally get peacekeepers in there, there is no exit strategy at all.
Look at Bosnia.
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They said we'd be there for a year and then a year and a half and then on and on and on.
Well, you remember you and I talked when we were about six weeks into it last year, and I said that I didn't think this was going to bring happiness to the right wing.
Explorer means explorer of hallucinogenic plants, strange usages of exotic plants by exotic people, and then coming back and talking about these things, advocating them.
Alteration of consciousness leads to all the big philosophical issues.
What is culture?
What is history?
Where are we going?
And how are we going to get there?
And what's going to be so great about it when we get there.
So I'm an itinerant philosopher at the end of the 20th century.
Well, the average Joe out there, maybe driving a truck, you know, across Indiana somewhere, probably is saying to himself right now, well, why should I listen to anything emanating from this drug-scorched brain?
But of course, that's the only problem with you, Terrence, is your brain doesn't appear to be drug-scorched, and it should be.
If what the establishment tells us about drugs is even partly true, you should be a basket case.
Do you think that it would be fair to suggest it would be certainly something that would probably get us in a lot of trouble, but that there are some hallucinogenic drugs that do, in fact, give people legitimate, underline that word, insights that they would otherwise perhaps not realize.
I mean, you give me a lead-in to talk about one of the things I'm doing at the moment, which is after a conference in Mexico on hallucinogenic botany this year, a couple of friends of mine and I decided to organize a conference on the theme you just stated,
a conference on the creative process and hallucinogenic substances, because there's a huge amount of the art, design, and fashion world that has for years been using these things to fuel the engines of creativity.
Yeah, well, most of us probably would come in on the low end of that scale, although there are some spectacular counterexamples.
Samuel Taylor Coldridge wrote Kubla Kon stoned on opium.
The insight to the structure of the benzene molecule came to someone after a cognac-inspired dream.
The character of creative breakthrough is like a revelation, the aha experience.
And sometimes it's a bump on the head, and sometimes it's a hallucinogenic experience, but it always has the character of sort of arriving in a completed form.
Well, I think it's because of the larger effect of these drugs, which is that they dissolve boundaries.
And many of the boundaries which enclose us are boundaries of habit, convention, and under the influence of the drug, we see beyond those boundaries.
The job of artists has always been to sort of be an antenna into the future, and bohemians have always been associated with drug-taking to some degree.
So I think it's a very understandable process.
It's simply that we're now beginning to understand it, and we have to, because the number of substances available and being discovered all the time is beyond the power of the courts and the scientific establishment to really manage.
If you go to a doctor, you will notice these days, Terrence, I don't know whether you ever go to doctors, but when you do, a doctor will say, you know what, I know you're in a terrible amount of pain, and I really wish that I could prescribe more to keep you out of pain, because that's the way a doctor feels.
You know, they're trying to ease your suffering.
But the doctor will tell you, frankly, the DEA is looking right behind my shoulder, and a number of my colleagues have lost their licenses, and so, frankly, I can't really give you what you need.
The hysteria on drugs has made so many different people and institutions crazy in so many different ways.
I really, on the general larger question of hard drugs, I'm quite despairing because so many people and institutions make money off the present mess.
You know, the prison builders, the rehab people, the criminal syndicates, the bought-off cops, the paid-off judges, everybody is making money on this racket that they pretend to wring their hands over.
Well, I don't know if I've ever talked to you about this, but I'm interested, of course, in what these substances do to me and to other individuals.
But then there's a whole other area, which is what has the impact of substances and drugs been on large populations over long periods of time?
And I'm willing to argue that the evolution of human language and complex cultural forms themselves were caused by disruptions in the ordinary mental functioning of perfectly happy primates about 150,000 years ago.
In other words, that the evolution of complex human culture based on language is actually an effect of brain perturbations and unusual states of consciousness that were eventually assimilated and became part of the behavioral toolkit of early human beings.
Well, it would be a wonderful thing for Clinton to do for Gore and the country to make some headway in the end of this administration on this issue so that it doesn't all have to be left to the first term of a new Democrat.
I mean, how long are we going to dog this matter?
It really should be part of the agenda of the new century to make drug suppression a 20th century phenomenon along with racism, fascism, aerial bombing of civilians and so forth and so on.
As I said, it's a racket.
The insurance companies know that people who smoke cannabis are not at greater health risk.
But the fact is, cannabis is such an effective stress reducer that whatever effect the tar in it is having on you, it's more than offset by your low blood pressure, excellent digestion, good sleep, and so forth and so on.
I too think that a lot of the warnings that have gone out and a lot of the scare stuff really has motivated a lot of people to action.
But still, there may be lurking out there, Terence, hundreds of thousands of embedded chips in power companies around the country.
And it's going to be sort of interesting to see what happens.
And if we were to lose power on a major portion of the grid, for even some fairly serious amount of time, how long civilization, as we know it, would hang together?
The world's largest active volcano, which is Mauna Loa, which is a mighty, mighty mountain.
It actually is the world's highest mountain because it rises 13,000 feet from the sea floor and or about 17,000 feet from the seafloor to sea level and then 12,000 feet more.
We've been going through gigantic power spikes and drops here.
It's been amazing.
We're just now coming back onto commercial power.
My guest is Terrence McKenna.
He's a guy who'd know what it's like.
He'd know what it's like to be without commercial power, because I don't think he has any.
For a long time, the only way he could get out by phone was some sort of radio phone, internet phone, and that's probably what I'm talking to him on right now.
He's a very, very interesting guy.
Terrence is fascinating, and I've got a lot of questions for him.
He'll be back in a moment.
Coast to coast AM back on commercial power and trying to get the computers back up.
Oh my, how we depend on technology.
Once again, Terren Kenna.
Terrence, you know, I talked, in fact, I'm going to be talking to one next week, another brilliant theoretical physicist.
I talk frequently with Dr. Michio Kaku.
And it is his view that the odds of our making it through to the other side of the discovery and dealing with Element 92, that our odds are very, very teeny weeny indeed.
In other words, when any civilization, and there must be many out there, discover Element 92 inevitably, almost inevitably, they end up destroying themselves.
Well, I think it's remarkable that we've had atomic weapons for over 50 years now, and they were only used very shortly within weeks after their perfection.
And after that, somehow in all the wars, revolutions, and posturing that's gone on, we've never resorted to the nuclear options.
So I would argue that maybe the discovery of the transuranium elements and their properties had a marvelously sobering effect On carnivorous monkeys like ourselves.
Then you may want to find one in the fact that seven Russian warships are now headed to meet up with and or, in their words, observe what we are doing with regard to the bombing of the Serbs.
Well, yeah, I think that's a very reasonable suggestion.
I first heard that notion put forth from Rupert Sheldrake, and I think he called it a necrophagen, a drug which simulates the symptoms of near-death.
It certainly is, the near-death experience is a dramatic analog to the DMT experience, but I also think we produce DMT in deep dream states.
I would lay money on that.
I mean, it's known that it's produced in cerebrospinal fluid at the same time that there's high REM activity in the brain, which usually indicates deep dreaming.
If we take the evidence seriously, the DMT state seems to indicate some kind of hyperdimensional matrix that is actually inhabited by some kind of language-using form of energy that can at least relate to the presence of human beings.
I said maybe these were dead souls, an ecology of souls.
This is certainly what shamans would claim.
If that's true and can be verified by something as simple as a psychoactive drug experience that lasts 15 minutes, then we really scientifically at the end of the 20th century have been looking in all the wrong places.
I think we have been looking in all the wrong places, and that the real frontier of science is the human mind and its potential.
And we're not going to unlock that until we get over all this queasiness and hand-wringing on the issue of drugs and drug research and drug use and so forth and so on.
Well, I guess you could either view the use of some of these hallucinogenics as a peek at the other side, a peek at what lies beyond the physical and truly lies beyond the physical.
In other words, there are a lot of things that I believe our brains can do.
After all, I think it's Princeton and other prestigious universities.
They're proving that the mind can affect random-numbered generators, that we can do that.
The proof is quite substantial, actually.
But that's something that a conscious mind does.
It's not something that a dead mind does.
There are many other things that our living minds can do.
For example, they can enable us to travel outside our bodies.
I did it once.
I know now it's true.
You can, in effect, be outside your body.
But I have not decided yet, Terrence, whether that experience represents something that I will find after my mortal existence.
Human brain, and we just lost it again.
Boy, we really are just having quite a night of it here, folks.
Poor Terrence.
After all that buildup, I'm going to have to do something and get him back on the line.
There are obvious severe power difficulties going on here right now, folks.
So all I can say is bear with us and Terrence will be right back.
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Yeah, that's right.
All right.
Well, we're really getting a Y2K example out here in the Prum Valley right now.
It's really a serious situation tonight with the power.
I have no idea what's going on, but whatever it is, it's not good.
And it's covering a great deal of geography.
So bear with us, everybody.
Once again, here's Terrence.
See, every time that happens, our phone connection separates.
And there's Terrence out in the middle of nowhere with a generator staying right online as I drop off.
Anyway, Terrence, look, I did this big build-up, and then the phone went away.
I was, I guess, approaching what I know about the conscious mind, I know to be true.
And what I wonder about.
And of course, what I wonder about is whether there really is some sort of continuation.
Yes, and it doesn't settle the metaphysical questions, except it certainly is strong evidence that everything we've been told about entities, about the capacity of the human mind, that things are a good deal more complicated than that.
To me, it's the great exception to all rules.
What it itself says, other than that all rules have exceptions, I'm not sure.
Well, in any city, I think push would come to shove in a hurry because water pumps would not work, and so the city water supply would be only what was in the pipes, and you can take the scenario from there.
I live on an island hundreds of miles from Honolulu, and thankfully so.
I'm not a survivalist, at least not consciously, but I've certainly built a system that is redundant, off-grid, wireless, and capable of maintaining itself without any help from anybody else.
I'm concerned about people in cities, even if Y2K does not bring the end of the world in very dense population centers like Tokyo and Manhattan, where simply the number of embedded chips is exponentially high, the possibility of some kind of chain reaction failure is consequently high as well.
So I think people should give consideration to moving out of those kinds of areas, even if just temporarily.
Now, understand that as you dispense that device, you're being heard right now in every major city in America, every single major city, New York City, Atlanta, I won't even go through them all, every major city in America.
You're speaking to these people, and so that's some serious advice you're handing out there.
Well, one of the things on this Y2K thing, Art, and today is an interesting day to discuss it, is it should clarify as we get closer.
There are going to be a couple of rollover dates this month, a big rollover date in August.
I can't believe that we're just going to slam into the millennial date with half the population thinking it's the end of the world and half assuring us it's no big deal.
I guess it is, but in the end, your advice is, in other words, you think there are going to be problems in cities, and how long do you think that threat of civilization would last?
And then, you know, of course, what the concern is, I suppose, is that the grid will fail in areas where there's bad weather and deep snow, and that it will be very hard to get it back up and going.
I am not an electrical engineer.
I don't think anybody who isn't can make an informed judgment on that.
But I guess all I can do is roll with the punches.
One good thing, we will get all of the commercials caught up as I continually go back and retrieve Terrence.
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Once again, Terrence McKenna will just have to keep getting him back as the power glitches.
And it's not, we can handle it either way, but what we're getting, Terrence, are these short little ba-boom-type breaks.
And when that happens, my phone system goes, goodbye, everybody.
It's absolutely amazing.
Even I'm getting a good lesson tonight.
I'm getting a really good lesson tonight.
So, anyway, Y2K.
So you think, as I do, that you simply aren't going to predict what will happen, but are pretty sure what will happen socially if it does happen?
Did you know, Terrence, the communist Chinese government has ordered all of the management personnel of all of the airlines to be in the air in a Chinese aircraft flying the 31st into the 1st.
Why?
Yes.
Well, I think twofold.
One, to give the people of China confidence that their airplanes will be safe.
And two, if they're not safe, then there won't be any concern about the management personnel who were on the flights.
I lecture about technology, shamanism, hallucinogens, human evolution, language of the virus from outer space, syntactical aliens, epistemic balkanization, stuff like that.
I do both, but usually my audiences are familiar with my material, and they come primed with questions, and it's usually pretty easy to get a self-generated discussion going based on what people there are interested in, you know.
Well, what I believe about it that is different from what you'll hear anywhere else is I believe that probability actually fluctuates in time, that time is not an abstract idea, it's actually a medium,
and that there's an ebb and flow in time on many scales of what I call novelty and habit, and that over time, novelty is in ascendancy.
You could say that the cosmos is a novelty producing and conserving system of some sort.
So the evolution of higher animals and human cultures and high technology is all in response to this universal appetite for complexification, which I call novelty.
And mathematically, we've produced graphs of this that allow you to predict where in historical time and where in the future there should have been great advances in novelty and a way of I think that I'm beginning to grasp the concept of novelty.
Nobody would argue that the development of novelty has been even in the historical past.
It's obviously preceded in spurts and then periods of quiescence and so forth.
And when you apply that to the future, you see the same thing, except that it leads to an observation which you and I have achieved by different means.
You call it the quickening, I call it the concrescence.
But I think both our notions have been drawn toward the idea that this explosion in novelty will keep accelerating.
Things become more and more and more novel, faster and faster.
And this is really the character of the world that we're living in, and it's destined to become ever more intense in this particular direction.
Surely it is headed toward a climax of some sort, or perhaps even a series of climaxes, if you were to be able to look down 200, 300 years, 400 years, 1,000 years, a series of climactic occurrences and changes.
Well, I think we're mastering energy, we're mastering our genetic code, time and space.
Yes, I agree.
A series of climaxes, each one more awesome and unimaginable than the ones that preceded it.
And this is becoming the dominant characteristic of human existence, is the anticipation and then the experiencing of these surges in the system toward ever greater self-expression of novelty.
Oh, well, the Italian Renaissance, the Greek Enlightenment that gave us Plato and Aristotle and mathematical theories of nature, eras where invention, movements of people, and the birth of ideas were very concentrated.
You know, there was a 40-year period in the 5th century BC when Lao Tzu, Mencius, Confucius, Parmenides, Ezekiel, and several other luminaries all, if they had air tickets, could have had a dinner party together.
And are we able in any way, based on what has occurred in the past with regard to these spikes, able to predict where this particular cycle is going, in other words, what's coming?
Well, I've noticed in trying to track different things with these curves that I produce, I look at movement of languages, immigration of people, energy production.
What the curves describe best is technological innovation.
So I've come to see human history as a kind of alchemical process of bootstrapping ourselves to higher levels of, I suppose you'd call spiritual existence, but through machines, through prosthesis.
The machine, far from being alienating and other, is in fact basic somehow.
The machines are the prosthesis of the new human.
Of course, the new human is the prosthesis Of the new machines.
Are we headed towards some brave new world where machines perhaps might even one day take the initiative from us and, in fact, become our masters, as many worry?
You know, the coming miniaturization of everything, the possibility of sentient computers, all the rest of it, that kind of world.
Well, I don't know if they will take control, but I think within 20 years, Art, you will encounter machines that will claim to be smarter than you are and be able to convincingly behave as though they were.
And the issue, are they more intelligent than the average human being?
But right now, in Europe, don't mean to interrupt, sorry, we are again demonstrating how we kill each other over religious ethnic differences.
We have always done that.
And would not some machine that became at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent and coldly logical, conclude that something has to be done about this and begin to, if it could, take steps?
Yes, well, so are we to turn ourselves into hamburger, or shall we have a gentle program of sexual education on the subject of abstinence and restraint?
Well, but it's a testament to our own primitive state if we have to rely on primitive Darwinian culling of the herd to keep us vital.
It indicates it's a failure of civilization.
It's precisely what it is.
It's a reversion to barbarism.
The 20th century has been embarrassingly scarred by these episodes where very supposedly advanced civilizations with long histories have slipped into the darkness.
And we need to understand what causes that because as weapons grow more deadly and populations more restive, there are recurring problems.
Matthew wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
And it simply concludes that man's greatest fear long ago and certainly now is of death.
It is our greatest fear.
It is the one fear our minds cannot contend with.
It is the fear we cannot face, and therefore, in the process of evolution, our brains have developed a God-part, what he calls a God-part of the brain, which demands that we worship something and believe in an afterlife.
And without that, there would be virtual anarchy.
And yet that is the very thing that causes us to kill each other constantly.
But even when you go down into the recesses, the wilds of Brazil, and you find a tribe that has never encountered civilization before, sure enough, inevitably you find they worship something, Terence.
It sounds like he's sort of working off some of the theories of Julian James.
He suggested in a book about the evolution of consciousness from the bicameral mind, James suggested that as recently as the time of Homer, people had no egos.
They actually, God spoke directly to them in situations of crisis and threat, and that it was only after centuries of this that this God consciousness part of the psyche was incorporated into the structures of the psyche as the human ego, and that it's actually an invention less than 3,000 years old.
Do you believe that travel in time In any direction, actual travel in time will be possible, or perhaps even go out on a limb and suggest that not only is it possible, but no doubt we are being visited now.
They moved photons in some kind of teleportation experiment.
They moved them several meters at greater than the speed of light.
In fact, at a travel time of zero as far as anybody can tell.
And apparently, the quantum mechanical equations which allow this effect don't prohibit larger objects or even living objects.
It's just a matter of scaling up the power input.
Well, good Lord, if we're five or ten years away from being able to teleport objects and possibly human beings, you can't even begin to imagine the sociological and political consequences of something like that.
And a concept like that has to compete with a concept like nanotechnology or digital copying of human beings or cloning.
There are half a dozen of these potential technologies out there, any one of which would remake the world beyond recognition if it were to be perfected.
Well, but they're going to tell you, Art, that if you clone every soldier, then when he's wounded in battle, there'll be a nice crop of organs back on ice in the clone ward for him.
You've got a good break here, assuming that our power lasts.
When we come back, we will go to the lines.
Terrence McKenna is here.
He's more or less unlike anybody you've ever heard.
So assuming that our power stays up, he'll be back, and we'll get you on the air with him if you would so desire.
He kind of gave you a range of subjects that he enjoys.
It's a wide range indeed.
So, pick up that phone.
unidentified
Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have been...
Oh, wow, it's still music Oh, wow, it's still music Oh, wow Oh, wow, wow To talk with Artfell in the Kingdom of Nye from outside the U.S., first, dial your access number to the USA.
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This is Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Mine.
Well, it's not an elf and it's not a machine, but it's rapidly changing from one to the other right in front of your eyes.
Well, it's interesting to hear your story.
Yes, when it works, it makes an instant believer out of you.
I'm not sure, a believer in what, a believer in the power of possibilities, I would think.
unidentified
Oh, absolutely.
And the part of the experience that hit me hardest was they were actually, I believe, attempting to translate to me your time wave zero theory, the acceleration of technology to the point of just, I'm not sure.
Yes, well, there is something, the strange thing about these plant psychedelics is the sense at high doses that they want to communicate something, something very specific.
It's not love one another.
We have that message.
It's some kind of very specific message about time and genetics or humanity or something.
Well, time wave zero is this set of theories that I alluded to a few minutes ago that take the position that time is this flux of novelty and habit that has been built into the genes and natural processes from the quantum mechanical get-go way back at the Big Bang,
and that probability is actually a kind of blurred lens for looking at nature, and that until we understand the actual fractal nature of time, where the same patterns are repeated at many, many different scales and create an interference pattern that then accounts for what we experience as reality.
The zero part of the time wave theory is that this interference pattern, which keeps pushing habit and novelty around over very long periods of time, novelty begins building up faster and faster, and eventually it reaches infinity.
In other words, habit falls to zero and you get the notion of everything happening at once or somehow all possibilities becoming realized, that being the only logical consequence of this tendency of the universe to complex by itself faster and faster.
And I don't know if you and I have ever talked about it, Art, but the most fascinating scientific discovery of last year, according to Science Magazine, was this cosmological constant called omega.
I'm sure Michelle Caku can talk to this, but the discovery that all of space and time is ruled by an outward expulsive force that's embedded in the space-time matrix itself.
And the interesting thing about that force is like the time wave I theorized, it accelerates through time.
It's moving faster and faster.
So the new cosmology, just eight months old, holds that the universe is basically going to undergo this kind of inflationary expansion like the quickening, like the novelty concrescence that we've been talking about.
This has now emerged as the paradigmatic notion in astrophysics after being resisted for 50 years.
Einstein played with the idea, called it his biggest blunder and dumped it.
But now observational astrophysics is forcing them to realize this is actually, this force exists, and it is in time going to emerge as the dominant force shaping the physics of the universe.
I'm not oblivious to the possibility that, for example, let's just draw a quick little scenario.
If our government thought that we were on the verge of a biological attack of some sort, and they had what they thought was a remedy for it in terms of some sort of mass inoculation, I don't think for a second that they would not consider an inoculation without our specific permission.
And what better way to do that than to add to what to most people are just harmless little contrails cutting across the sky?
So that's one possibility.
There are other more sinister ones, but that's at least one that would make sense to me.
Well, do you remember those experiments that came out a few years ago where they spread powder in airports and railway stations back in the 60s, some kind of bacterial powder that they could then follow?
Yeah, well, so it would be nice to think that they're inoculating us for our own good against the evils hatched in the laboratories of Serbian fashisti.
Well, I mean, I really believe we have a major problem.
You're right.
I don't think we should look at it too lightly.
Nor do I. So anyway, if you think this would work, I would like to know, and that is to give the president over there, the dictator, three weeks to eliminate all the people in his town, Belgrave?
I also think that Belgrade may be being destroyed as we speak.
I keep going over to Reuters' top stories, but I don't think anybody's going to be given three weeks' notice.
I think it's tonight or tomorrow night, judging by the pace of things.
Will it have an effect?
I don't know.
Dictators are extremely immune to popular pressure unless their generals come to them and lay their pistols on the table.
These guys have a tendency to hang on.
I think we've bitten off a hell of a lot to chew, and I'm certainly in favor of confronting fascism, but I think you need to choose your fights carefully.
Well, I also think that some of the people who make these decisions, these goodwill decisions to go and bomb until there is peace, should be required themselves to do some of the heavy lifting, but they just make the intellectual decisions and spew out the orders to those who must go and do the work.
Very simply, drugs are for mysterious reasons deconditioning agents, and they cause people to question cultural values.
And every political system on earth is in the business of maintaining cultural boundaries.
So it's an implacable opposition there that's not easily negotiated away.
It's a very brave, self-confident society that can legalize all drugs because it means that society is not afraid of looking in its closets and playing with a fair deck.
Well, everyone talks about the Netherlands, you know, legal prostitution, lowest AIDS rate in Europe, legal heroin, lowest heroin addiction rate in Europe, no prison building going on.
Young people are using cannabis.
Yes, they are not using hard drugs.
The connection between the soft and hard drugs seems to have been broken by legalization there.
But our own drug czar completely distorted the Dutch position in public statements to the point where he later had to publicly retract what he was doing.
My son is going to take over the design process, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.
The new one is going to have a lot more links, so check it out.
unidentified
I've got to say also that you guys are talking about, I think the history of drug enforcement in this country is just sort of like a series of unhappy accidents.
But they used to say that Social Security was the third rail of American politics, and now it's drugs.
I don't think we can do anything about it.
And what really gets me is they start talking about kids using solvents.
Well, I think there's a natural urge to go out there and break down those boundaries, because language encodes stuff for you.
And I think one of the reasons people take psychedelics is because it breaks down the barriers and you get to see stuff real again.
Well, in shamanic societies, you know, they take the young kids out and the men give the young boys psychedelics and the women initiate the young girls.
And instead of the taking of a substance being a symbol of the rejection of social values, it becomes the doorway to the full acceptance of social values.
unidentified
So my answer to the drug problem was grow your own.
I think they should just make everybody pay their marijuana snap tax and we can just all grow our own.
And that would cut the black market right out of it.
Well, if the profit were removed by any means, either by legalization, grow your own, or what have you, the drug problem would shrink to a whole new dimension.
What just happened is that we had, now I'm realizing what's going on.
It's not that I'm going off the air.
It's that I'm so sorry, dear, in Texas and Terrence.
What's occurring when we lose power, apparently, is that the phone company is also instantly losing power.
And so it's not that I'm going off the air, but it's rather that my telephone connections, courtesy of the phone company, are simply disappearing on me.
In other words, even though I'm staying on the air here, we've got plenty of backup, when we have these instantaneous failures, what is occurring is that the phone company themselves is losing it for just a second.
So there really are some odd things going on with power tonight, folks.
Boy, I'll tell you, strange.
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I'm sorry, too, because she was about to say something profound.
I know it sounded like it.
But, you know, now I'm realizing what's occurring.
We're staying on the air here, but the phone company is also affected by the electricity bumping the way it is, and so they bump all my lines off the air.
Boy, I'll tell you, you know, the knee bones connected to the...
Yeah, of course.
I've got another line of people now in waiting.
You know, the phones are constantly full, but every time this occurs, it dumps everybody.
I'm wondering if Terrence could talk a little bit about what the Mayans predicted would happen in the year 2012 and how that coincides with his ideas about what might happen then too.
It's funny that you're from Boulder because Boulder is the home of John Major Jenkins, who wrote a very interesting book published this past year called Maya Cosmogenesis 2012.
And in that book, he discusses the various interpretations of the end of the Mayan calendar.
Basically, what happens in 2012 is it's the end of the 13th Bakhtun.
And Bakhtuns are periods of time longer than 500 years.
13 of them make up the full cycle of the Mayan calendar.
And it appears that this was linked by the Mayans to a certain astrological configuration where the winter solstice sun heliically rises at the galactic Center.
This is sort of technical stuff, but that's it in a nutshell.
It's an alignment with the galactic center and the winter solstice rising sun that pegged the whole Mayan world machinery, and it's coming around after 26,000 years in about 14 years.
13 years.
unidentified
So what sort of implications does that have for us?
Well, you know, very little of the literature of the Maya survives, so we don't know whether they - the best guess is that for the Maya, the end of the 13th bhakto indicated the beginnings of the first moments of true creation.
So rather than seeing it as the end of the world, they saw it as some kind of beginning of an era of perfection, sort of like the thousand years of the millennium predicted in Revelation.
So I think we can't know, but what we can know is that if you wanted to peg your calendar to the largest cosmic cycle that human beings have observed affecting the Earth, you would choose this 26,000-year processional cycle.
And they chose it with great accuracy, even though their own civilization didn't live to see the coming of that particular time.
And my question for Terrence is, do you think that with the way that technology and people's self-knowledge is progressing, that we're going to reach a point in time where all of our mental boundaries will be broken and we'll just be free of thought?
I think we're going to see all kinds of group mind activities and complicated games that will slowly teach us how to operate as group minds the way flocks of birds and schools of fish do.
I've been recently spending more time in the virtual and interactive worlds online, the worlds where you dress up as an avatar and meet other people in designed worlds.
And if you haven't checked in on that Lately, it's gotten a lot better, and you can see the potential for people creating worlds and then sharing them with other people online, so that really we're peeling open our heads and letting it all hang out.
And it's going to have a real impact on community and the human self-image and the way we think about the individual and the community.
Terrence, by email, can you shed some light on why some people have such apparent creative enlightenment call the wildcard lines, area 702-727-1295.
Emotionally and physically, and there we just went through it again.
Damn.
This is really getting to be bothersome.
This is just going on and on and on.
Now, what I'm going to do is get Terrence back one more time, and instead of continuing with him past the hour, I think we'll terminate at the top of the hour so that I can continue in some coherent fashion instead of being interrupted, and it pains me to do that, but I can have Terrence back, and I will have Terrence back.
He deserves better than this.
We all do.
It is, to say the least, interesting timing for this, is it not?
Good Lord.
I guess we're getting through our commercial load here rather quickly, but this is astounding.
This has been the wildest night of power outages that we've had.
Let me think now.
Since the Western power outage, the entire western third of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico went out, this is the worst night, and maybe even a little worse in some respects because it has been extremely unstable.
I wonder what's going on.
Terence, did you get the question before we blipped out?
And the simple answer is there's a lot to be said for going back and looking at the concept that Leary and his colleagues put forth in the 60s of set and setting.
Setting is, you know, you take these things, you don't do it in a noisy nightclub, you do it in a place that's secure, comfortable, familiar.
And then the set, your mindset, you do it calmly, you aren't hysterical, you aren't emotionally wrought up, you aren't drunk.
And if people will follow these simple rules, which are basically rules of reasonable behavior and respect for the substance, most people do fine.
Been with the wrong people in the wrong places at the wrong time.
That doesn't cover 100% of all unpleasant experiences.
I mean, some people are on prescription drugs that tangle with these things unpleasantly.
And some people, you know, if psychedelics dissolve boundaries, there's probably two or three percent of the population that is involved in trying to maintain boundaries.
And those people should stay away from psychedelics.
In terms of life-changing, I mean, certainly psilocybin at one point changed my life, LSD at another point, DMT all along the way.
It seems to be this small family of tryptamines, and then, of course, LSD isn't a tryptamine, but at high doses, and these safe but high doses, all of these things have had life-changing impact on me and the people that I'm aware of.
We're experiencing all night long now an outage that lasted about 45 minutes and then sporadic bumps and surges that have been almost non-stop.
And I hope my surge suppressors can handle the work.
It's been pretty rough, let me tell you.
The timing is at least odd.
So, Terence McKenna will be right back.
Now, again, the interesting thing with the power is that I'm experiencing, and my phone system is on an uninterruptible power supply.
So, as you may have noted, you can actually hear it when it occurs.
You'll hear a little bleeping sound.
And the phones, nevertheless, are disconnecting all of you, so I apologize, including, of course, my guest.
And the reason that apparently is occurring is because I guess the phone company also is dependent to some degree on the electricity.
And it may be that when, you know, where I am at least, when there's a problem, it just instantaneously glitches the phone lines, and I lose everybody here.
Does he think that due to the fact that the government's losing control of information through the Internet and the cable news and everything, that it's going to try to become more repressive in other ways, like in the drug enforcement and things like that?
I just called to tell you that this morning, around 3 o'clock at our time, we had a couple of flashes.
Then about 5, our power went out.
And they gave us this, I don't know, it sounds kind of screwy to me.
They were saying because we had a light rain shower and hadn't used, there was salt, and the salt had caused some 50 telephone poles to catch on, I mean, electric poles to catch on fire.
No, we've discussed this here in the last 24 hours, and I was shown to be inadequate.
I have noticed in virtual reality that sometimes the landscape builds out ahead of you if you have good processes and you can actually watch the landscape springing into existence.
I can sort of imagine the end of life is like that process in reverse.
You know, just more and more is subtracted.
And my ketamine experiences have convinced me that a consciousness without a body is an entertainable idea.
Consciousness without a body is simply like the volume of your mind turned up until it's all there is.
And then I can imagine just unfolding into thought without a spatial locus.
But does that go on forever?
That's a little hard to feature.
Of course, nothing that we know of goes on forever.
So to imagine that when you find out what lies beyond death, you found out what eternity is, maybe that's why we maybe reincarnate.
I think that these entities communicate with sound and light, sound which you can see, and they seem to have some kind of a language which has more dimensions than acoustical language.
It's not telepathy, but it's something that you is sculptural.
We could be on the brink of engineering something like that as a human mode of communication if we could unleash psychopharmacology and really understand what's going on.
unidentified
It's really fine.
We live really an incredible time.
Do you think all these prophecies and all these things in place from the past are ways for us to actually be moving into this new dimension, this new paradigm?
Well, we're at the end of a thousand-year period, and we're at the climax of the agenda of modern science, and we're moving off the planet, and we're going digital.
There are so many transformative tendencies in play that I think you would have to really be resisting the tide to not see that we're ready to make some kind of leap.
unidentified
That's incredible.
I mean, I really see that this paradigm of thought is overtaking the old paradigm, and the old paradigm needs to firmly hold control.
And I just think we just keep what we're doing, keep doing like with our show, everything's going to be all right.
Somebody wants to know, and I really am not sure myself, wants to ask you your opinion on Tim Leary's work with prisoners and the reasons his findings were suppressed.
What I know is that there was a whole wing of Vacaville in the 60s that was basically a CIA laboratory for experimenting on controlling and programming people with drugs.
What Tim Leary had to do with it, I'm not a historian of his life.
I couldn't say.
I do think that Sirhan Sirhan passed through that facility.
So did Charlie Manson.
So did General Sin Kew, the character who led the Symbionese Liberation Army, remember them?
Oh, yes.
And so there was, you know, it's well documented that there was CIA interest in all these things.
Recently, you probably noticed Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran that MKUltra program, he died recently.
If you were out in public, I think most people would leap to the conclusion first that they had been poisoned and then a few minutes later that they were losing their mind.
And I think it's one of the most fundamental violations of a person's dignity to give them a drug without discussing it with them and them being fully consensual.
Not at the ruin, but in the mountains, which begin immediately behind the ruin, all bets are off.
unidentified
Huh, I gotcha.
I just want to also thank you very much for the electronic music culture that's going on, for the work that you've done and the, I guess the spoken word that you've done with them.
Well, what happened was my brother was into some sort of satanic rituals with his buddies, and they thought it'd be a great joke to go ahead and flip me four-way window pane.
And I remember getting really violently ill initially because I didn't know what was going on.
I was spinning.
I laid down and I laid down in a water bed.
And the vacuum started running on itself, and it started vacuuming the room methodically, you know?
So I realized I knew at that point that obviously my brother and his friends had obviously done something to me.
What they had done, I don't know.
They didn't tell me at that time.
Then I started changing colors, okay?
Like blue, green.
Then I started going into what they would say kind of like a bad trip, but I was still basically barely able to keep sense of reality, you could say, you know, because that was a pretty serious dose at that kind of age.
And I guess in youth, thank you, you would handle such a thing better.
But I would imagine, Terence, not only would somebody who had that done to them feel like they were losing their mind, but probably could actually slip out of reality and stay out of reality under such conditions.
And I read in Timothy Leary's Timothy Leary's autobiography flashbacks about some experiments they had done at some prisons back east, I think when he was still at Harvard, using psilocybin to rehabilitate inmates.
And the thing about it was they had a far lower recidivism rate.
And that just basically got covered up and ignored.
And then they got bounced out of Harvard, so it just kind of disappeared.
But I thought that was one thing that was pretty interesting.
And I d I want to put in a plug for uh a book by Dale Pendell.
Uh the name of it is Pharmaco Poea.
And uh it's an excellent um explication of all the varieties of mind-altering substances.
I went through Vacaville and another state mental institution in California.
They have used those mental institutions not only for programming, but to destroy any political prisoner that they deem a threat to, quote-unquote, society.
So that was well after all these things that were charged about the 60s.
But I'm sure, you know, all this work goes on.
I mean, as Art said, these black budget agencies wouldn't be fulfilling the taxpayers' mandate if they weren't pursuing all these horrifying technologies and possibilities.
This is always the argument.
unidentified
Yes, they continually do their little tricks of the trade.
I was very aware of it due to some connections that I had prior to going in, and that's one of the reasons that I was in.
And they, in fact, held me six and a half years illegally without due process of law.
I wish that I believed that we had had some great transformation, that we are now this moral, ethical government that we thought we had years ago and now have found out, of course, we didn't have.
But I don't think anything's changed.
I think the players have changed, and I think 25 or 30 years or 50 years from now, we'll find out all the crap we're doing now.
Gee, well, it's really a treat to hear you're on the air again there, Terence.
Anyway, one of the things I wanted to ask you is about specifically DMT, and I've read most of your books, and they're amazing.
The connection, the possible connections, have you looked into, or has there been any more research into the possible connection of the tryptamines being a connection to what was known as Soma or what we know as Soma from the Illusion Mysteries.
There's endless discussion about what was this fantastic hallucinogen that inspired the writing of the Vedas.
Let's see, in the recent issue of Eleusis, Jonathan Ott reviews all theories, including my own, and finds mine inadequate and everybody else's as well.
I think it's pretty clear it was psilocybin.
Some people want to say it was Amanita muscaria, but Amanita muscaria is an unreliable and sometimes dangerous intoxicant.
If it was neither a psilocybin mushroom nor Amanita muscaria, then the candidates are not very promising.
So this is an area that needs to be looked at.
It was all regarded as settled and that Watson had figured it out, but now we know that there was a lot of evidence that's come to light since he did his work that pushes the argument in new directions.
I talk about this in Food of the Gods.
There are two chapters related to Soma.
unidentified
Yeah, I was asking if there was anything new has come to light since then?
Well, Giorgio Samarini, who studies the Boga cults in Gabon, told me that in the inner mysteries of these Iboga cults, there is mushroom symbolism and the use of the colors red and white.
So that's evidence of a possible mushroom cult connected with hallucinogenic substances in Africa.
That was a previously missing piece of the puzzle.
But no, I wouldn't say this argument has advanced dramatically.
I think until Algeria is politically stable enough to permit archaeology in the southern Sahara, the early human use of hallucinogens in Africa and the Middle East is going to remain unclear.
Well, you know, we were experiencing power surges then and fluctuations.
And the whole idea was shut it off.
So everything was shut down.
So that's like what's kind of really weird about it is it's either possibly the power beforehand, but these lighting boards and controllers, which is all high-tech computer-controlled stuff, and everything was just unbelievably out tonight.
Well, Cicotria viridus is the preferred source of DMT in the Amazon.
I know it's hard to get and hard to grow.
The mimosa hostiles and the Mexican conspecific species, the name of which escapes me because it's so late at night, those two in the root bark are pretty competitive.
There's also Anodenanthroperegrina variety sibiled.
The seeds of that also contain a fair concentration, in fact, a high concentration.
Acacia confusa is an eastern, meaning an oriental acacia that has a lot of DMT in it.
In other words, technologies seem to be converging toward opening up the Bell non-local quantum realm where presumably all the intelligences of the universe are communicating in some kind of standing waveform.
So I don't know how it is that it's key to this conjunction with the galactic center, but I do think that we will fulfill the dreams of the ancient Maya.
We will fulfill the dreams of the medieval alchemists.
We are on a collision course with some kind of revelation of our own place in the cosmos.
And exactly how it's all going to hang out, we can't say.
But that it is happening is visibly evident all around us.
I still think that gives us ample room to put in place the understandings, the technologies.
I think we have to get over the millennial speed bump.
I think a lot of squirrels have seized the high ground, and we have to sort through the prophecies and the revelations one by one, but that the wiser voices will be discerned in this process.
This is something you contribute to, Art, by letting everybody tell their story and letting the Darwinian selection of these memes take place.
No, I think we're talking about something, well, bad medication can go any direction, but psychedelics are certainly more than simply misprescribed responses to drugs.
Well, because once LSD was demonized, the idea that it might cure addiction to the drug of choice of the culture just contained too many contradictions for the scientific and medical establishment to want to plow ahead with it, you know.