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Terence McKenna believes that we have lost contact with nature and are on the brink of ecological destruction if we don’t re-establish the link. And he claims the only way to do it is through psychedelic drugs and shamanism…
“Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it’s no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.”
When writer, philosopher, ethno-pharmacologist Terence McKenna talks about psychedelics, he’s not referring to cheap trips and dodgy acid knocked up by some traveller with a chemistry degree. Instead he’s talking about weird mushroom preparation, recepies for boiling up plants held by Amazon shamen. He’s talking about natural plant psychedelics like DMT – mind-blowing substances used in shamanic rituals throughout ancient and pre-history. This is a drug culture that connects with mysticism and spirituality as opposed to addiction and death. This drug culture is about birth.
In his new book, Food Of The Gods, McKenna argues that the use of DMT and similar substances can re-establish a direct link with nature, one that has been lost through centuries of argriculture, organized religion, and Newtonian science. He has examined and spent time with shamanic cultures because he believes they have kept that link intact. He believes that western culture has severed its link, preferring to see nature as something to be controlled and exploited, and as a result our industrial capitalistic society has replaced the psychedelic mushroom with the mushroom cloud of nuclear argmageddon.
INTERVIEW
How important was discovering DMT to your work and ideas?
Terence McKenna: In the summer of ’65 I encountered cannabis and a few months later, LSD, and these two were very powerful in transforming my personality. But in early ’67 I discovered DMT and it was of a different order. It raises questions that science and philosophy need to look at. I mean it’s not like other drugs, it conveys you not into a mental space our of your own past or projected future, it moves you into a dimension that seems to be co-existing with reality and there are entities in that place, hundreds of them, these elf-life self-transforming machine elves are seem[ing] to be frantically trying to convey some information.
Is it dangerous?
Terence McKenna: Only if you fear death by astonishment. The fact that it is so brief in its activity, lasting only about 15 minutes and that is clears your system so quickly is reasonable proof that its virtually harmless. You don’t even feel like you’ve taken a drug a half hour after you’ve come down, there is no residual toxicity. Remember, DMT occurs naturally in the brain anyway, it’s a human neuro-transmitter.
You don’t like referring to psychedelics as drugs, do you?
Terence McKenna: No, I think the real drugs of the 20th Century are petroleum, propane, and nuclear fissionable material. We are sinking towards grim death by our inability to reverse our habitual use of these things. When you take psychedelics at large doses you have to be straight with yourself. If you’re hiding a part of yourself you’re not going to enjoy your psychedelic experience. It’s essentially an anti-drug position because it really demands and empowers an examination of conscience that I think leads to a better human being.
Do you think everyone needs to take DMT?
Terence McKenna: No, because the way ideas spread and triumph is not by saturation but by stealth. It’s estimated that the Russian Revolution needed only six per cent of the population. Yet the only tool available to us that changes human personality and minds as quickly as we must in order to avoid catastrophe is psychedelics. If preaching could have done it, the Sermon On The Mount would have turned the corner for us. If legal hassling could have done it, it would be a done thing. We are emotionally dead to the consequences of our actions. We are poisioning the oceans, destroying the atmosphere and looting our children’s future. It’s time for a change.
Do you think the world is ready for change?
Terence McKenna: I believe we are headed into a major cultural crisis. Depletion of the ozone, toxificiation of the ozone, mass political unrest, and so forth. We are on a death trip, this is a sinking submarine and we are no longer pretending that the officers are giving orders and everybody else is following. Unless we want to go down in some grand homage to the failure of western civilization, people are going to have to ask ‘Does anybody have any reasonable notions? Does anybody have any ideas?’ I think the answer lies in presenting what is happening to society as an archaic revival. This means speaking the language of shamanism and a return to the archaic world, a return of the world of psychedelic ecstacy, sexual orgy, and percussive music. We must recover the sense of nature as a living mystery and regain the archaic appreciation of our near-symbiotic relationship with the vegetable world through psychedelic plants.
In shamanic cultures it wasn’t necessary for everyone in the community to indulge in the psychedelic experience. It was up to the shaman to trip out and then return with new insights.
Terence McKenna: That’s right, he’s the exemplar. And with electronic culture you can create shamans for the global planetary village and this to my mind is the function that rock’n’roll played in the 60’s and that house music should play in the 90’s; to create exemplars for the youth culture and then it isn’t necessary for everyone to indulge, it’s just necessary for the society to be psychedelic.
And this works?
Terence McKenna: One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there’s a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it’s a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60’s are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind …
So what happens next?
Terence McKenna: Our material civilization will not survive, but we are not going backwards, we are going forwards. As a realist and a student I know that as the world gets weirder there will be confusion and panic. There’s nothing unusual going on, this planet is ready to bring forth intelligent, spiritualised, dematerialised consciousness. How this will be done, I cannot say, but by virtual reality, psychedelics, technology, by science driven by psychedelic visions, it could happen along any number of lines. Maybe we’ll find a way to detach consciousness from the body and put ourselves into seagulls and redwood trees and just spread out in nature.
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McKenna sees psychedelic explorers into other dimensions as the vanguard of the future, the most important people alive today. Anything else (yoga, meditation, breathing exercises) he describes as mere “razzmatazz”. “I’m not talking about sweeping around the ashram for years. Psychedelics actually deliver, first-hand, in an hour.”
What he’s offering is a means for mankind to reconnect with the life-force or planetary intelligence. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, his writings can empower the reader with a profound sense of liberation. Like the shamans he admires so much, he has made contact with The Other. The ideas and awareness he has brought back tear the heart out of the social conditioning and accepted norms of Western Civilization. Read him and your appreciation of our culture will be transformed.
McKenna himself certainly seems to be gaining an increasing popularity – making live appearances at ‘playshop’ events organized by psychedelic/house culture magazine Evolution and featuring on their compilation album ‘Shamanarchy In The UK’, as well as being heavily sampled for a track on The Shamen’s forthcoming LP ‘Boss Drum’. He travels worldwide giving lectures, seminars and workshops, presenting a set of very powerful and seductive ideas. Yet he’s not offering an ideology, a set of beliefs or dogma. It’ the antithesis of this. He does not want followers or believers, just mere travellers and explorers. “I’m not trying to sign people up to a creed, I’m much more interested in people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn’t mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.”
Transcribed From:
Psychedelic Prophet – An Interview with Terence McKenna
Shamanic Arts Magazine, Interview by Karen Peet and Tony Marcus