Transcribed from audio tape of: "A Weekend with Terrance McKenna", Feb. '92,
Esalen Institute.

My take on science, I mean, just, I might as well couch it as a comment to you,
but it will come out in some other form anyway, is
"...science is excellent at doing what it was designed to do, but it has
expanded its province into all reality and seeks to pass judgment in areas where
it has no real business going.  It's a very limited method that achieves its
claim to universality by wildly exaggerating its accomplishments."
For example, science, to do its work--I mean, modern science, post-Newton--
depends on probability theory, but probability theory has a built-in assumption
that has never been thoroughly looked at, and that is the assumption of what
Newton called "pure duration."  Meaning that, science, if you describe a
scientific procedure to someone, they don't ask whether you did it on a
Wednesday or a Saturday.  Science seeks to be time independant, and in order to
do that it has to make the assumption that time is invariant.  There's no, this
is just a first try with Occam's razor.  In fact, in our own lives, what we
experience is endless variation.  In other words, it may be that the hydrogen
bond when it breaks always breaks the same way, but love affairs, investment
strategies, political campaigns, the building of empires, these things are
always characterized by a kind of uniqueness, and science, by invading these
domains with probabilistic conceptions, gives us the science of statistics,
polling, and hands to us mythical entities like the citizen or the average
white male or--I mean, these are just absurd abstractions that are generated by
a particular kind of world view that is not really examining its first
premesis.

So I would propose a modified definition of science that would then let it do
its work in peace, which is, science is the study of those phenomena which are
time independant, but that in many realms of nature, a new theory to replace
probability theory and flat duration is necessary.  The power of probability is
simply based on its success in these very very limited domains, and now there's
no way back from that.  Modern science is thoroughgoingly probabalistic.  If
you were to try and remake--I mean, they're always raving about the new
paradigm in science, and it's always usually some tiny diddling of what they've
already got.  If you were to really try and remake science, then you would have
to replace the assumption of invariability in time with a mathematical
statement about its variability.  And we'll talk more about that tomorrow,
because there is room for that.

I mean, science is not reason.  Reason is a different domain, and I think
anything which is unreasonable, ultimately unreasonable, is just patently
absurd.  That's why I don't feel great affinity with most of the marching
hordes of the New Age, because, you know, the fact of the matter is, they don't
possess any razors for separating the nuts from the berries.  But nevertheless,
our intellectual choices are not between the channellers of Lazares and the
American scientific establishment.  There's a vast set of possibilities in
between there and beyond those poles of discourse that can be worked out.

Every society that's always existed has had the built-in assumption that they
only needed to find out five percent more about reality, and then it would all
fall into place, and that they had the right tools for doing that.  But we look
back then with this great sense of superiority on the naivete of the ancient
Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, the Maya, the 17th century English--everybody
we look back on their naivete.  But in fact our own cultural enterprise is
obviously fraught with a peculiar illogic and childishness and naivete.  I mean
we're a culture that, you know, robs our children to create a pot luck culture
in the present.  This will look fairly, this would look fairly pathological
from any cultural perspective outside our own.

The thing--I mean, this is a segue but it makes sense--the thing that I
think psychedelics do that addresses this problem and many many problems or
choke points in our ideological effort to understand what's going on, is, the
contribution that they make is that they dissolve boundaries.  And culture--
I mean, the word "virtual reality" was used as we went around the circle.
Culture IS the sanctioned virtual reality.  And it is put in place by the
machinery of local language, you see.  And so then you're born into this
circumstance, and you're told, you know, "You are a male child.  You are a
citizen.  You are a citizen of the United States.  You are a Christian.  You
are a Jew.  You will go to college.  You will do this..."  And this you never
question.  It's called the social contract.  It hasn't gone unnoticed by
Western philosophers.  It's just, it's gone unnoticed by those of us who are
its foremost victims.  They try to tell you that you're in a social contract,
but when you ask to see your signature on the document, they tell you that
you were born into this contract.  Well, what the hell kind of contract is
that?  It means that you were born into a kind of enslavement to a
linguistically empowered paradigm, a virtual reality within which you will walk
around your entire life, you know, congratulating yourself on its
accomplishments and ignoring its contradictions and weaknesses.

So what psychedelics do, and why they are in all times and all places such
social dynamite, is, they dissolve the cultural machinery.  Doesn't matter, you
know, head-shrinking Amazon native, Hassidic Jew, Chinese merchant in
Singapore, whoever it is, the psychedelic dissolves their cultural construct
and puts them in touch with the fact of being an organism.  Being an organism
is like what you get when you take off your real clothing.  Not THIS clothing,
but the clothing of language, programming and assumption.  Then you find
yourself within the context of organism, outside the context of culture.

And for the reason this is not a mass movement, is, many people hear that and
they say, "I know what that is.  That's called being nuts.  I don't want that.
That sounds absolutely terrifying."  Well, these are the people for whom that
cultural machinery is necessary armoring, almost in a Reichian sense.
Necessary armoring.  They cannot face the world without culture because they
are in fact defined by culture.  Now, who are these people?  These are the
people--and we each to some degree imbibe in this category--these are the
people whose values are set by the engines of commerce and propaganda.  These
are the people who dress as they are told to dress, spend as they are told to
spend, believe as they are told to believe.  But within every human being there
is a kind of, at least the possibility of a revulsion against this kind of
anesthesia of uniqueness, because that's what it is.  You can put your
uniqueness to sleep, and then, you know, you dress Gucci and you invest with
these people and you drive this car and you KNOW you're correct, because your
accountants, your managers, your agents, your public, whoever, your husband,
your lover is telling you that you're correct.  Definition from without means
being defined by the cultural machinery.

Cultures other than our own have somehow always known--perhaps because nature
is a huge force outside the Western industrial democracies--people have always
known that this was a fiction, that the world of cultural values is a necessary
illusion, if you will.  And so they create a class of people called shamans, or
seers, or magicians, or transecstatics, or what have you, and these people are
deputized by the cultural machinery to go beyond it, to go beyond it and to
return with truth.  Not culturally sanctioned truth, but just truth, the felt
experience of being an organism that I'm talking about.  And by this process,
cultures conduct their evolution, if you're an evolutionary thinker, or their
random walk through time, if you're more of a phenomenologist.  But whatever
they're doing, we're not doing that, because the mechanism that we have used to
close off access to the beyond-culture dimension have in our hands grown so
strong that we have in a sense succeeded to the point where we've put ourselves
out of business.

And the people to blame for this are these wily Greeks, because while everybody
else was carving horned masks and painting themselves with cross-hatching and
stuff like that, the Greeks got the idea, "We'll do it differently.  We will
portray the surface of the naked human body in marble."  What this means is
that the eye rises to the surface of reality and looks around for the first
time from the point of view that we would call naive realism.  But what a
cultural journey it took to reach naive realism, because you had to sever
yourself endlessly from the intuition of a symbolic, magical spirit-haunted
universe.  And the Greeks, through a series of cultural accidents, and I would
say mistakes ultimately, achieved this, and they had then an alphabet, a
phoenetic alphabet which empowered a further severing of linguistic
intentionality from the essence of the object intended, because you see, a
phoenetic alphabet symbolizes sound.  It doesn't symbolize the way something
looks or its "thinghood."  It just symbolizes sound.  And the phoenetic
alphabet then issued into a series of cultural styles, science, rationalism,
mathematical analysis of phenomenon--I mean, this was something absolutely
unheard of and is the unique contribution of the Western mind, that, you know,
people noticed that you could take a gut string and shorten it by half and the
tone would shift one octave, and stuff like that, and they got the idea of
numberical analysis, which opened up the path into culture to the present
world.

Well, each of these steps into realism, and remember I said we would call it
naive realism--now that word takes on a different meaning from the context of
the 20th century.  It WAS naive.  It was horribly naive.  In fact, we were led
down the primrose path by such simplistic notions, because what was surpressed
was the invisible, messy world of the spirit and the human unconscious.  This
is the great tension that illuminates Greek civilization, you know, I mean,
it's all--take Plato as an example, because here in one thinker these distict
strains of thought, these antithetical strains of thought are perfectly
present.  You have, you know, an overarching realism, a drive to categorize and
to arrange in rational relationships, and you have a thoroughgoing mysticism
with roots back into the Minoan religion of Crete and back into Egypt and
Africa.  I mean, it's really extraordinary.  And that was the last moment in
the Western cultural enterprise when these things were in balance.  And they
were not in balance in any one person.  If you lived in that world, you
probably had to pick and choose, and, you know, the Skeptics were sneering at
the Gnostics, who were saying secret knowledge came from an unspeakable place
beyond the machinery of cosmic fate.  The Skeptics just thought, you know,
"Baloney.  What kind of talk is that?"

Now we live in the consequences of this naive realism, because like all forms
of innocence, if allowed to grow beyond the proper bounds it becomes festering.
It becomes decadent.  It becomes not innocence but idiocy.  It turns on itself.
And this is I think the kind of world that we're living in.

Now, parallel to this cultural adventure of several thousand years...the rain
forest peoples of the warm tropics of the world kept intact the high
paleolithic style of cultural relativism mitigated by natural magic.  And what
did natural magic mean?  It meant these boundary dissolving experiences with
hallucinogens.  Now it isn't simply, I don't want to make it sound
reductionist, it isn't simply that culture builds up structure, and
psychedelics dissolve structure and then conduct you into some shimmering,
existential realm of transcultural being.  It isn't that.  It's that, in that
shimmering transcultural realm of being, you discover new modalities, new
rules.  There's something there when you dissolve all the boundaries that you
can.  And the paradox of what is there, from the point of view of the legacy of
rationalism, is, what is there is an immense love and affection and
intentionality, waiting to engulf suffering mankind, or the individual.  This
is what I call the mind behind nature, what people call Gaia, the mind of the
planet, the organized intellechy that somehow is the mothering force that
encloses the whole of planetary life.  This is a real thing.  And I would never
have thought so had I not had experiences which forced me to consider this.  I
think without the experiences, that rap comes off as horribly namby-pamby, you
know, I mean, it's just, "Oh my God, not another one of these Gaia people," you
know.  But, in fact, this is a fact of reality which anyone who has the courage
to make the proper investigations can satisfy themselves is a real object of
experience.

You see, I guess, I mean, I'm 45.  I grew up through the 50's and I can
remember these movies where the white people get captured by the cannibals and
put in the pot to be boiled.  And there was always a witch doctor.  Well, this
guy just epitomized the most nightmarish forces of unbridled primitivism and
ignorance imaginable.  Now this has become, or is in the act of becoming I
hope, the guiding paradigm of the culture, because what the shaman is, is the
person who is still, and it's men and women, the person who is still in touch
with this organic intelligence that lies behind nature.

Now, the puzzle behind all of this...I really don't think that there would be
much of a problem if what we were dealing with was a planet with teeming
oceans, teeming jungles, climaxed forests in the temperate and tropical zone,
arctic tundras and so forth and so on.  The clue that something weird is going
on on this planet is ourselves, obviously.  I mean, we are like a fart at the
opera.  Everything else makes sense.  We don't make sense.  And the speed with
which the human type emerged from the protohominids is unparalleled in the
evolutionary history of life.  Edmund O. Wilson called the doubling of the
human brain in size in under three million years the most rapid doubling of
organ size in a major animal in the entire history of life on this planet.  Us.
There's something weird about human beings.  And so much of the explanatory
machinery of culture is designed to make it go away, you see.  Even something
as respectable and expressive of liberal values as Darwinism is in fact an
effort to explain how it's all okay.  It's natural.  Don't worry.  It's
natural.  You just get mutation, and you have natural selection, and you have
traits, and these traits extend themselves--but, heh, it's a great step, you
know, to Milton, to the Space Shuttle, to an integrated global economy.  I
mean, are these the products of animal existence?  The Darwinist says yes, and
we tend to huddle under his umbrella because, you know, these shit-slinging
Fundamentalists seem to be the only other people out there.

But, obviously, when you're impaled on the horns of that kind of dilemma, there
needs to be a breakthrough to a third, fourth, or fifth possibility.  And what
I will argue for this weekend is that something very very peculiar adheres to
the adventure of being human, and that it is not all business as usual.  We are
not simply an advanced chimpanzee.  Neither are we the sons and daughters of
the Lord God Almighty.  I mean, that also seems to me a stretch and to raise
certain problems not easily swept under the rug.  There has to be a third
possibility.  And I think that when we start, as we will tomorrow, talking
about the way psychedelics synergize and stabilize certain abilities within a
hominid population, and the way in which then other cultural reinforcements can
be built upon that, you will see at least part of the story has to do with the
way in which, by being forced toward an omniverous diet by virtue of having to
leave the canopy homeland for a bipedal existence in the grasslands, we had to
undergo a huge dietary change.  And part of our strangeness has to do with the
evolutionary changes worked upon us by virtue of our exposing ourselves to
unusually high amounts of mutagens in foods as we expanded our diet, and drugs
and foods come in here.

The other part of the equation, which is much more speculative and which we'll
talk about tomorrow night, has to do with the notion of an attractor, and of
trying to look at humanness not as a mistake, a cosmic error, or as Heideger
said of man, he said we are flung into being, the idea always being that it
doesn't make sense, that there's an arbitrariness to us.  but I think that
there's a way of analyzing process that will show that we are not only part of
what is going on, an embedded part of what is going on, but that we actually
represent the place where all the eggs are poured into one basket.  And I'll
just say a little bit about this tonight.

When you look at the history of the universe, if you look with unbiased eyes, I
think that what you will see is that the universe is a novelty producing and
conserving system of some sort.  The early universe was so simple that, and
we're going with science here for a minute, we're asked to believe that it
sprang from nothingness in a single moment, that its diameter was less than
that of an electron, and then in a very short period of time, a number of very
dramatic things happened.  But they are all couched in terms of an expansion,
and cooling.  From the moment the universe is born it begins to cool.  And as
it cools, complexity magically crystallizes out.  The original universe, there
weren't even atoms, because there was such high temperatures that atoms could
not stabilize themselves into orbits around atomic nuclei.  So there was what's
called a plasma, just a soup of naked electrons.  And then, gradually, as the
universe cooled, the simplest of all atomic systems was able to form, the
hydrogen atom.  And these hydrogen atoms were produced in staggering amounts.
And they began to clump together--and this is tricky, but not our problem.
This is a problem for science.  They don't know why they clumped, 'cuz it
should have all been smooth, right down to today, but it isn't.  So, in this
clumping process, of course, great temperatures and pressures were created at
the center of these masses of hydrogen.  And, a *novel* process could therefore
spring into existence, the process of fusion.  And fusion of hydrogen in early
stars cooked out heavier elements--iron, sulphur, and especially carbon.  Well,
after that then, you get all those atomic species, and then they can aggregate
into molecular species, and then, because of the presence of forvalent carbon,
very complex molecules called polymers, which are chain molecules, can form.
Some of them acquire the quality of being able to replicate, some of THEM
acquire the ability to enclose themselves in a membrane, and so forth and so
on, and in short, the march is on toward you and I here this evening.

But, what's interesting to note is that each successive stage in this process
happens more rapidly than the process which preceded it.  So that, the early
universe, ten billion years goes on, and it's all about this star formation
cookout thing.  And then, you know, planetary formation.  Then once you get,
and then a billion years they wait for primitive procariotic life, and then,
once it happens, the eucariots follow fast, and after them the ciliated
protozoas, and you know, it's just a moment to Madonna.  Both of them.

Okay.  Now, what science says about this process is that what we're seeing is
an illusion, or that it doesn't matter.  They're saying it is not a law of the
universe that novelty be conserved and that each new level of novelty proceed
more quickly than the one which was its parent.  And so, by chopping it off
like that, human history is denied any relevance in the natural order.  It is
not part of the natural order.  Even though we think we're a secular society,
our assumptions about history are straight out of Genesis, you know.  We do not
think of history as a branch of biology, which it obviously is.

So, what I believe is happening is an accelerating process of novelty
conservation that has reached such a point now, at the close of the second
millenium, that it is absurd to try to propagate the human future by fantasy
centuries into the future.  There is no future, because the rate of
acceleration is so close to approaching infinity that no possible future can be
imagined.

Now, people talk about this, but they never draw the implications.  You've
probably seen some show on television where they say, you know, "Here's the
curve of human energy release, and here's the Stone Age, and here's the 16th
century, and here's the 20th century, and it's headed for infinity.  Okay, next
slide.  Here's the curve of human speed.  In 1750 people could go as fast as a
horse could gallop, in 1820 the steam engine, and then the 20th century, and
then it goes to infinity."  And they say, "Okay, here's the human population
curve.  In the year 1000 there were 400 million people on Earth, in the year
1850, and so forth, and it goes to infinity."  So, nobody takes, they don't
believe it.  They don't believe that the rational extrapolation of the trends
visibly beheld in the present preclude the possibility of any imaginable
future, or at least, I don't believe so.

I believe that we're actually in the grip of a process that cannot be halted or
accelerated but which is now in a process of tightening its gyres, as William
Butler Yeats said, that what we call the chaos of 20th century history is in
fact the speeding up of this temporal process to the point where it is now
visible within a single human lifetime.  I mean, we're like mayflies or
something, you know, we're born one day and we die the next.  So only the most
incredibly accelerated kinds of change make any impression on us whatsoever.  I
mean, mostly we say nothing happens.  But in fact, you know, in the 20th
century, it's incredible.  In the last twelve months, there has been more
change that in the previous twenty years.  And those twenty years had more
change in them than the previous hundred years.  And that hundred years had
more change in it than the previous thousand years, and that thousand years
had more change in it than the previous ten thousand years.  But science tells
us this is meaningless.  This is not a real, legitimate phenomenon that we're
talking about.  You're just lining up facts to make it appear as though there
is an attractor, to make it appear as though the human historical enterprise is
about to run itself into a stone wall, or off a cliff, or into another
dimension.

And this is really the question, I think, because psychedelics are, or were
once, described as consciousness expanding drugs.  Phenomenonlogical
description: consciousness expanding drugs.  Well, if that's true, or if
there's even the slimmest possibility that that's true, then we have to avail
ourselves of these things, because consciousness is precisely what we are
starving for the lack of.  And, history is no longer rationally apprehendible
by the systems which created it.  I mean, everybody who's running around
gloating over what happened to Marxist-Leninism should understand that Marxist-
Leninism is traceable right back to the social contract theory of Rousseau, and
that Western liberalism is traceable to the same root, and the crisis of
Marxism is they just died first, that's all.  But all these ideologies are on
the brink of a coronary thrombosis, and we're going to have to catch the
falling bodies when it hits.  I mean, do you think that mercantile capitalism,
which extracts the environmental reserves at an ever-accelerating rate, has any
future whatsoever on this planet?  I mean, they're just looting the last few
billion dollars worth of stuff before they announce that everybody's going to
have to go on a diet that will drop your jaw, you know?  So we've come to the
end of our rope.

So then, what do we have to do about it?  Well, what we have to do is look back
in time and find cultural models that served in the past.  And, you know, many
of you have been here before, have heard me talk about the archaic revival, an
effort to jerk 20th century culture 180 degrees, and send it right back to the
value systems of the high paleolithic, because that's the last moment that
intelligence, language, religion co-existed with nature on this planet in a
less than fatal arrangement, you know?  From the moment that agriculture was
invented, the die was cast, because first of all, agriculture is a strategy for
dumping a huge database, the database of the hunter-gatherer, and replacing it
with a database that is important for only five or six species of plant.  You
then give up nomadism, which begins to concentrate your impact on the land into
one place.  You then plant these crops, and you have such success producing
food that now, moving anywhere is unthinkable, plus, the big project after the
fall harvest festival is, now we have to build a wall to keep the starving
people from stealing our surplus.  So immediately there is a Us Successful
People and those people who weren't successful and who have different cultural
values, and who didn't produce a food surplus.  So, you know, we've decided
we're going to sharpen sticks and kill all of them, so then you have warfare,
thicker walls, retreat into cities, standing armies, defense of territory,
class structure emerges, the notion of wealth as an abstraction--because wealth
in an aboriginal society is a sharpened stone, not your portfolio with your
investments neatly listed, you see.

So this is, you know, just a pass over these themes.  The idea is that the
psychedelics are more than the best fun there is, which they are; more than a
tool for exploring your own psyche and straightening out your own kinks, which
they are; they are, in fact, the key to understanding the pathology that
culture has become, and the way out.  I mean, there has to be a way out, and it
really is this archaic revival.  I mean, and if you're resisting it, think of
it this way.  If we don't organize the archaic revival, it will be handed to us
on a platter in the form of failed agriculture, because the ozone hole is
screwed up, infrastructures falling apart, financial systems falling apart, the
rise of Fundamentalist religion...in other words, we are GOING to have a return
to a previous historical model, and it can either be managed humanely, through
an honoring of the feminine, an honoring of the Earth, a return to the
techniques of ecstasy that characterized the high paleolithic shamanism, or it
can be handed to us in the form of shortages, famines, disease, internesine
warfare, nuclear proliferation, toxic dumping, so forth and so on.  But one way
or another, this whole edifice, put in place by the Renaissance and jacked up
to speed by the European Enlightenment and delivered into this hellish climax
by mathematical analysis and the rise of global technology--I mean, remember,
each of us has never seen these changes within a lifetime, and yet within the
past two hundred years, the world has gotten tremendously more pathological,
tremendously more ill.  The size of cities, the power to extract natural
resources, to mine Siberia and the mountains of Chile and the interior of the
Amazon and Borneo, and these unimaginable technological infrastructures have
been put in place to sustain a dying patient.  That's what we have here.  We're
on respirators.  We're getting intravenous feeding.  They are monitoring
everything, because it's not healthy.  It can only be sustained through the
most extraordinary and heroic means. We're taking bone marrow from the children
of the future in order to keep a corpse alive.  And people don't find their
voice.  They don't seem to know how to call a halt, you know?



--- Blue Wave/TG v2.12 [NR]
 * Origin: The Writer's Block, Jacksonville FL * 904/399-8854 (1:112/38.0)