The Archaic Revival
AN INTERVIEW WITH TERENCE MCKENNA
BY ROBERT FORTE AND NINA GRABOI
RF: Hello, Terence, it’s good to see you here at Esalen’s hot springs.
TM: You’re going to ask me some questions?
RF: Well, no, not too many, Terence. We thought we would just prod you a little bit. You know what we’re up to. . . . Let’s look at the choice Tim made in the ’60s to democratize the drugs and expound their virtues directly to society rather than through the respected research channels. There have been some important beneficial consequences of that we wanted you to speak to.
TM: Well, I certainly think it would have been a mistake for LSD to have remained the creature of behavioral psychologists and Swiss pharmaceutical companies. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone would argue otherwise, since the entire social tone of that decade was dictated by the social emergence of LSD. I’m a big enthusiast of psychedelics of all sorts, and I think they all catalyze creative social process and imagination, but clearly in terms of reaching the largest number of people in a short amount of time, the public phenomenon of LSD is unique in human history and had Tim really been more career oriented, more cautious, that probably never would have happened. Plus, LSD itself has the unique quality of being possible to manufacture in millions of doses. You couldn’t do that with any drug active in the milligram range. It would take the combined resources of several pharmaceutical companies to produce ten million hits of psilocybin, for example. So I think Leary was the right man for the right moment in history. I don’t understand people who criticize his role in all of that. I think as time went on, like everybody in the ’60s, he made statements and got into positions that don’t make a whole lot of sense in retrospect. I remember . . . I don’t know where I was in the world when he made the statement from Algeria that dynamite and the bright light were to be equated; however, I will say it was my opinion at the time—the same opinion—so I’m not knocking his opinion. It’s just we both then had some explaining to do somewhat down the line.
I remember when Leary left Harvard in 1963. I was fifteen at the time and following this story in the Evergreen Review and The Village Voice, which by some God-sent good fortune I subscribed to in the small cattle town I lived in in Colorado. As the Leary thing unfolded that spring, so did stories in the newspapers about morning glory seeds being used to intoxicate, and associated with the similar compound, which is true, that morning glory alkaloids are similar to LSD, although in order of magnitude less strong per unit dose. So at the end of that summer, when I was approaching sixteen, I took my first trip, and it was basically entirely under the inspiration of Leary and I knew then that they were doing the project in Mexico—IFIF I believe it was called then. Somewhere—I don’t know if it exists anymore—but somewhere there is a letter from fifteen-year-old Terence McKenna to Ralph Metzner pleading to be taken aboard the circus, but I think they were too loaded to ever reply. And I actually didn’t meet Ralph until much later. And I didn’t meet Leary really until I saw him speak. I was at the Human Be-in and I saw him speak in Berkeley several times. But I never actually sat down and had a conversation with him until he was in his space colonization phase, which was well after major controversies, after his incarceration and after the flight to Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria.
We seemed to encounter each other a lot in Europe when we were both speaking. And the thing I love about Tim—now that I have seen him in many situations—is he has unflagging energy and good humor. I mean it can be four in the morning in some German industrial town after hours of drinking, smoking, and carrying on, and he’s going for it. He is up for it. His implacable good humor is the thing that makes him so irresistible to so many people. I mean how can you hate a guy who ends every sentence with a kind of a laugh?
NG: How do you feel about being called “The New Leary”?
TM: [laughs] I’ve also been called “The Copernicus of Consciousness.” I don’t know in what sense I’m the new Leary. I get the feeling that Tim is a far more gregarious and nice person than I am. I’m sort of halfway between Tim Leary and William Burroughs. I can play it either way, you know. I have a fairly mordant and sarcastic side to myself that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in Tim. It’s an honor to be called the Tim Leary of the ’90s. I’m sure whoever said it meant it as an honor. Yeah. He told me a story—I mean this is a Leary story that addresses that question. One night we were in Mannheim, which is a real rough industrial town north of Stuttgart in Germany, and I had come to see him. It was a Leary event. But he found me an hour before the show eating in a restaurant with some friends of mine, and he said, “Oh, you have to be on stage with me. We’ll do it together.” So he was very insistent and there was also a Joyce scholar of some sort there, and so it was this threeway thing. So we were on stage. Well in Germany, unlike in the United States—if you have a noisy drunk in the United States, people will grab the guy and suppress him. In Germany they clear a path to the stage. So there’s this guy in the back screaming, “Tim Leary saved me! Tim Leary is Jesus!” this and that, and they cleared a path to the stage for this guy. And we tried to engage him for a few minutes. He came on stage with us and he was really drunk. And finally, we just left the stage and abandoned it to this guy, who then turned to the two thousand people there and was carrying on. And Tim and I moved off stage, sitting on the floor with our backs against a brick wall, and we were just watching this. And he turned to me and he said, “You know why I want it to go to you?” And I said, “No, Tim, why do you want it to go to me?” And he said, “So it stays with the Irish!”
No, he’s a very, very insisting person, and the only person in the drug establishment who really evidenced vision and courage. Everyone else did their jobs very competently. Albert Hofmann functioned as a brilliant analytical chemist. Wasson functioned as a brilliant independently financed scholar. This was not chance taking. Leary saw the potential for change and we forget how constipated and self-limiting American society was in the early ’60s. I mean we had had the Kennedy assassination the same year that all of this was getting going and I think the society always owes a great debt to the people who defy authority and force change, and I see Leary in the tradition of Thoreau, and Whitman, and the entire American transcendental impulse, you know. It was a New England impulse, it was a Harvard-based impulse, and he came out of that.
There are certainly, to my mind, amazing contradictions in the man. For example, in a way—and I don’t mean this as a criticism at all, it fascinates me and I respect it—but in a way, there’s not a spiritual bone in the guy. Not an iota of that, you know. I’ve heard him say many times, “God?—Fuck God!” You know, “No metaphysics!” And yet, how many people have explored metaphysical problems based on the substances and the techniques that Leary and his gang put in front of them. So probably like all major historical figures, there has to be this element of paradox. The behavioral psychologist, the reductionist athiest, and yet the mad visionary dreamer, a man with an immense amount of personal pain in his life history, even before fame and notoriety came, and yet a guy who’s probably made more people happy, arguably, than anybody else in history. A civil disobedient, a political figure—well, when it’s all sorted out, I think he will be one of the more interesting and important figures in the last half of the twentieth century.
RF: With respect to his spirituality, I think a role that Tim plays is to always get on the other side of whatever is being said. He detests dogmatism and fixed, unexamined ideas. Nina’s shaking her head.
NG: No, that’s not it, though it’s true he does that. But Timothy’s least favorite words are “soul” and “spirit.” He gets really uptight when anybody talks about soul or spirit. To him it’s the brain, the physical brain, that is the carrier of everything.
RF: There’s something very pragmatic about his philosophy too.
TM: It’s behaviorism. He began like that.
NG: But you know, when he took the mushrooms the first time, he said afterward, “This was the most powerful religious experience of my life,” and he went around calling himself “God intoxicated.” When I first met him in the ’60s he was wearing those white robes and he said, “I am God intoxicated.”
TM: That raises an interesting issue somewhat directly related to all this, which is, I think that LSD was the drug of choice in the ’60s for this reason that I mentioned earlier: that you could produce enough of it quickly to make social change. But I think that, had all other things been equal, those people at Harvard recognized that psilocybin was a preferable experience. There was just simply no way to deliver psilocybin to tens of millions of people. And Michael Hollingshead, who’s a very shadowy figure in all of this, played a role in that—basically in switching their loyalties from the religious mushroom-based experience that they were exploring to the more socially and politically effective, but less holistic, experience of LSD, and that’s an interesting bifurcation in the history of psychedelics, and I’ve always felt the decision was made because of the physical properties of LSD. Simply its transportability, the fact that micrograms were the effective dose and so forth.
RF: What do you mean by the holistic aspects of psilocybin? Do you mean the fact that it comes from a mushroom and from the earth in that regard? Or the experience itself?
TM: No, more the experience itself. I once had an opportunity to discuss this with Albert Hofmann, and I said, “You discovered LSD. You characterized psilocybin. You’ve taken both of these. Which do you prefer?” And he said, “Oh, well I prefer LSD.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because it’s less animate.” And I said, “You mean when you take psilocybin there’s somebody in there?” And he said, “Yes. And that unsettles me.” And that’s how I’ve always seen it. I’ve always felt that LSD—if you’ve never taken a psychedelic drug, LSD is sort of what you would expect: insight into your past, dissolving images, transformation of objects, insight into complex situations, a psychedelic drug. Psilocybin, on the other hand, has other dimensions that overshadow these sensory and information transformations and give you the feeling that you’re communicating with something that is aware and has an intentionality. And I think that raises the bar considerably on the issue of what are these things and what are they doing. So in a way—I’ve heard other people say that LSD has an emptiness to it, that you fill it with your own content, but that it is basically like a lens through which you magnify your own existence on different levels, but that psilocybin has an agenda, it comes with some software that it wants to run for you. And so in the historical framework of things it probably is a good thing that LSD preceded psilocybin. Certainly it did. Except for very privileged researchers, psilocybin was unknown until the ’70s by most people. In fact it wasn’t until well into the ’70s when home mushroom cultivation became feasible.
RF: You’ve put forth the idea, elaborating on Wasson, that psilocybin or other psychedelic mushrooms were kind of the missing link in evolution. Do you see the ’60s as a recapitulation of that period? That this was an evolutionary leap?
TM: Yes, well, the ’60s was a kind of archaic revival. I’ve written about this kind of phenomenon. It’s a situation where when a culture gets confused, it tries to go back in time to other times when it felt more comfortable with itself. And in the ’60s, you know—sexual permissiveness, heavy rock ‘n’ roll, intoxication with psychedelic drugs—these are all efforts linked to other impulses in the twentieth century like jazz and abstract expressionism and surrealism and Dada. I see all of this as a nostalgia for the archaic. But it wasn’t until the psychedelics came on the scene that there was an effective tool for really making this feeling of archaic wholeness accessible to people. And it was the community of the hippies that made them so threatening. All forms of community are threatening to the establishment. Communism, community—it’s very, very threatening. The analogous situation in the present context is—and Leary’s enthusiasm has followed a similar insight—is the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which creates enormous tools of connectivity for previously marginal communities. It doesn’t really change things for the corporate elite. They had superb communications, have always had superb communications. But for marginal social groups, homosexuals, enthusiasts of psychedelic drugs, environmentalists—anyone who expresses a minority point of view—it’s incredibly empowering. And like LSD, it’s a technology which I don’t believe was ever intended to get loose and to become so commonly available to ordinary people at such reasonable prices. And, it’s interesting that so much of it is in the hands of people who were shaped in the ’60s. I mean they are the people who write the code, who design the machines, who organize these systems, maintain them and run them. The corporate elite doesn’t even know how to turn on its own machines. They have to hire guys with ponytails to do that for them.
RF: But the technology is so dependent upon an infrastructure that is controlled by the corporate elite. It’s all run by the phone company and they can just pull the plug out of this.
TM: Well, it’s more important to them than to us—in other words, they can only pull the plug on it by pulling the plug on themselves. The way I think of it is, here in the ’90s, what has happened after the fall of the Soviet Union is two power blocks have emerged: national governments and the world corporate state. National governments are terrified of the Internet. National governments are used to a game where information is closely held and controlled. Technology is closely held, classified, and controlled. The game plan of the world corporate state is a completely different game plan. Closely held technologies are useless. You want to rush the most advanced technology possible to market as quickly as possible. And information is the lifeblood of the world corporate state. So it is building and maintaining these networks and webs without really consulting national governments. It’s a transnational phenomenon. AT&T is going to put up a system of satellites that will link every point on the planet to the Internet at ISDN speed. Well this is not good news for national governments, for local political factions at all. But strangely enough, for world capitalism and for these marginalized—for the underground, it’s very good. So we’re seeing the transformation of the cultural landscape by technology. And I’m not pro-corporate-state or pro-nation-state. I think the freedom of the individual is in danger in all these situations and we have to be very alert. But this is what is happening. And the nation state is largely irrelevant now. They are going to be allowed to pick up garbage and to run schools and hospitals, I guess, but anything where money is concerned is going to be privatized to the world corporate state. And what this leads to, I’m not sure, because the world corporate state is in a position of great power and prominence at the moment, but is based on completely false premises: the premise of unlimited resources, the premise of unlimited availability of cheap labor. When these limits are finally reached, the world corporate state will undergo some kind of catastrophic retraction. When this will be, I don’t know. But I don’t think we’re going to have to wait decades for it.
RF: Tim is best known for being a countercultural agent of change, a reputation that sometimes obscures his scientific and literary achievements.
TM: Leary’s Exopsychology and Neuropolitics were major contributions to American social theory. And the concept of set and setting has made it possible for millions of people to find their way to these things. Leary made legitimate the exploration of consciousness by effective means. You can just put it in a nutshell. Always before that it was questionnaires, it was at arm’s length, it was viewed as pathological. I remember people used to say, “States of consciousness? Well, there’s awake and asleep, right?” Well, turns out that was a hideous simplification. So he brought consciousness into science as a legitimate object of study. And I dare say, this is probably where science will find its deepest problems and its greatest satisfaction over the next few decades. Consciousness is already being described as a basic property of nature itself, in Scientific American two issues ago. So this is what Leary did. Not that other philosophers or psychologists hadn’t discussed consciousness, but Leary brought tools to it equivalent to the atom smasher or the cyclotron. And also he brought the incredibly important concept of the researcher experiencing the thing being researched. We’re not talking about giving things to rats or prisoners or graduate students. But the researcher of consciousness must accept that his or her own mind is the vessel and the field and the domain in which the study is to be done. And this ability to overcome the assumptions of reductionism and analytical European thinking was very American and very important. And probably, to my mind, his contribution. That he legitimated the study of consciousness. And everybody is derivative in that sense. Grof is derivative. And all the Transpersonal schools are derivative. And all the Encounter and Action schools are derivative. They may not acknowledge the debt, but there it is.
I think the important point is that he removed the notion of pathology from the notion of the exploration of consciousness and mental states and showed that ordinary consciousness is complex, transcendent, and he related all these things not to pathology, but to the tradition of mysticism. He wasn’t the first, but he made the point that the path to the mystical was potentially a neurochemical path. And that was an enormous breakthrough and allowed a lot of secularization of what had before been religiously oriented mumbo jumbo.
RF: It was with tremendous reluctance that they finally submitted to a religious paradigm for psychedelic research and as a way to introduce psychedelics into the culture. He writes about this in The Politics of Ecstasy. You know, he’s coming out of his Roman Catholic background. Religion was shit to him and now they’re coming around realizing maybe there is something to this. But now he’s come back around the other way again with repudiation of words like “soul” and “spirit”—I think he’s revised his earlier slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and he’s trying to get people to tune back in, and he himself has done that.
TM: Well, I think “Turn on, tune in, drop out” is a purer and more radical and better message than any of the later formulations, because it’s more radical in the sense that it represents a more thorough rejection of establishment values. And I think Leary, like all of us, when we realized we were not going to found utopias by 1970, has had to go through a series of retrenchments and personal coming-to-terms with the fact that, while we made great social change, we did not seize the ramparts as we thought we would, and in fact Richard Nixon did. So we are left with the moral conviction of the rightness of our cause, but the historical fact of the triumph of a very different point of view, and that’s the paradox that we all have to live with that is so large that we can barely fit it into the context of our lives.
RF: I don’t know if this is a paradox so much as maybe an inconsistency, but I noticed in the emerging technologies in the World Wide Web, etc., that it does not seem to me to be a continuation of the ’60s antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian trajectory, that a lot of the energy around the World Wide Web among our peers is a kind of acquisitive, almost, I hate to say this but sort of greed-oriented kind of culture. Wanting more and more information and not necessarily a step forward in wisdom . . .
TM: No, I understand. But we could have had this discussion in 1968 about the acid business. Because to make that LSD revolution there had to be some very hard-line people who didn’t dance in the park, who didn’t get down with the girls, who instead dealt LSD like a commodity and built criminal pyramids of syndicalist activity, and that was very troubling to people in the 1960s when LSD became a commodity. It’s very troubling in the 1990s to see the Internet become a commodity. But my faith is that the sale of transcendence may contaminate and damage a few people—the people who engage in it. But it’s very good for the rest of us. And so in a sense they are the expendible ones. I think the real impact of the Internet has not yet been felt at all, that if we make a parallel to LSD, then we are at about 1961 with the Internet. In eight or nine years we will reap the fruits of this incredible empowering of the margins. But it isn’t yet.
RF: I’d like you to respond to a thought that I have about these technologies—that they often appear as compensatory. When you hear people talk about the potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web, it sounds to me like what they’re talking about is the attainment of yogic siddhis, you know, powers—being everywhere at once, omniscience, a recognition of a psychic web that envelops us all—these kind of mystical terms. And I wonder if the emerging technologies are making it easier for us to access these dimensions which are germane to the psyche, or if they’re compensatory.
TM: I think that there is an element of both, but that as we model our technologies more and more on nature, they become more and more fulfilling. And I think, ultimately, being connected to the Internet and possessing siddhis will be indistinguishable from each other, that if we build the Internet so that it’s like nature, then it will get more and more unobtrusive, more and more biodegradable, more and more created and maintained by DNA-like polymers, less and less running on hard electricity and hard radiation, and it will eventually disappear. I think that the age of bulky, visible machines intruding into the human environment is just a nanosecond of human history, and that the machines of the future will look much more like mushrooms, spores, flowers, and worms than they will look like bulldozers, airplanes, so forth and so on.
NG: On the other hand, in the ’60s we felt like we were in the process of attaining heightened consciousness, which made me argue with Timothy at the time about space travel. I said, “What do we need progress for? We can do it without progress.” The same would apply to the hardware or even software of the Internet. Naturally, can’t we all be in communication without any hardware?
TM: Well I think the question may become moot. The hardware will become indistinguishable from the wetware. We are basically already designing large parts of our own prosthesis. The society is an extension of the body. I don’t see a problem with it. To me it’s convergence. The promise of nanotechnology is that we will build, as God builds, from the atoms up, out of air and water and soil and this is now within reach. So the idea that machines and technology are artificial is I think just a stage of human culture and that if we can keep on the beam, what we’re headed for is not only spiritual union with nature, but physical and technological union with nature. And then the question of whether a city is an artificial thing and a jungle is a natural thing will just be something philosophers worry about. I have great faith that if we take nature as our teacher, we can approach the transcendent in all dimensions. Nature is the example to follow, and we must be as nature is, we must build as nature builds, and we must organize our societies and our politics as nature is organized. Nature is not Darwinian, competitive and destructive. Nature is about cooperation, deal-cutting, mutual self-maintenance, so forth and so on.
For example, look at mushrooms. Mushrooms are what are called primary decomposers. They’re located at a place in the food chain where they eat nothing alive. A karmaless position in the food chain. If we became inspired by Buddhist ethics and high technology, we could probably download and design ourselves into that part of organic nature and then we would have found the karmaless dwell point in the chaos of Darwinian struggle. The mind will always lead us to higher levels of self-reflection and hence reflection of the order of being. That’s the psychedelic faith. And you can sign on for that whether you’re a scientist or a mystic. Really what we’re talking about here is the order of nature and the promise that it holds. End of speech.
RF: What did LSD do for you?
TM: I remember being nineteen years old, twelve hours into an LSD trip. I was sitting under a tree and I just started to weep, and I saw what my upbringing had done to me. I saw the resentment of my parents and my callowness and my immaturity and my—and I sat there for about an hour and cried this stuff out. And got up a better person. And to this day, I’ve never had to go back and revisit those things and then I could call up my parents and tell them I love them and I could accept their Catholicism and their conservatism and the differences. It was just like ten years of psychotherapy in an hour. And it was real. So that’s worth everything. And that’s what I saw LSD as. It wasn’t to me about the far-flung reaches of metaphysics or—it was about getting straightened out.
NG: We all have these intensely personal reactions to things, because I always argue with anybody who says LSD does this and mushrooms do that, because my first experience on LSD was that I totally went out of the body and into another realm and all I remember is trying to get back down to this earth, which was just so far away, I knew I had to put my foot down on it somehow but I didn’t know how to reach it, and later I knew that I had a body hanging around somewhere and I didn’t know where or what it was. So that was LSD for me. I never went on any personal trips with it.
TM: I remember my first LSD trip very clearly and I’ve never had a trip like that before or since. I mean it was so bizarre—
RF: Was that the one that you talked about?
TM: No, no. The first LSD trip I had, the world, after about—it didn’t come on for a long, long time, and I was with somebody who was basically trying to lead me through it, and then the world divided into two concepts. One concept was God-like, profound, dark, huge, awesome, impressive, and it was called the Iosteck—it came to me, yes, the name was what the trip was all about—the Iostecks. And the other thing was small, brightly colored and funny and reassuring and warm and silly and absurd, and it was called the Pinkastairs. And I for about four hours went from—I would just say one or the other of these words. I would say, “the Iostecks” and it would just like rise up, this thing, until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then I would say, “the Pinkastairs” and just dissolve into hysterical laughter. Finally my friend put me out on the front porch and said “Call me when it’s over.”
RF: Thanks, Terence. That sums it up perfectly.
TM: You guys want to do a bath now?