"McKenna - Jun 20 1993" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

Terence McKenna

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Produced by Nicholas Hill for live broadcast on
The Music Faucet, WFMU-FM, East Orange, NJ
from The Fez, New York City
June 20, 1993

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Well it's great to be here. It's been kind of a long day for me, so I may not be able to maintain the ordinary veneer of genteel, cultured affability. I may have to simply cut to the chase here.

You know, we've worked ourselves into quite a little situation here. We've got a rising youth culture, a government out of control, an environment that's all ripped up, and we've got no place to go. So, who you gonna call? My solution in a situation like that is to roll another one. [laughter] Because it's been my supposition for a long, long time that these vegetables that we're pushing around on our plates are actually trying to talk to us. And they're saying all kinds of things, among them some things which are fairly counterintuitive. It seems to me that history has failed, and Western civilization has failed, and dominator-primate politics has failed, object-fetish consumerism has failed, the national security government has failed. And so then, where do go from here? What kind of new world can we create? And what kind of guidelines are there that we can follow?

And I--you know, every time you come to New York it's obligatory to visit the museums, MOMA, this'n'that, see what's going on in Soho. The conclusion that I come to looking at this is that as we move beyond modernity, it's more and more clear that the real impulse of the Twentieth Century is towards the archaic, toward the primitive. Everything from Freudianism to body piercing, from quantum physics to abstract expressionism, from Dada to house music, is saying "BACK AWAY" from the linear, constipated world of print-head materialism that is what we inherit from the Western/European past. That style of thinking about life and human relations has essentially toxified the planet and allowed us to paint ourselves into a corner from which there is no escape.

Or is there? You know, a deliberate derangement of the senses worked for Rimbaud; it might work for us as well. What we have to do is go to the rainforests, the aborigines, and check up--check in--on what we have always dismissed, which is the world of natural magic and wisdom obtained through intoxication. This is what we've lost, and this is why our creativity is insufficient to overwhelm the cultural crisis which is confronting us. We have to stir it up. We have to mix it up. Ideas dictated out of the agenda of washed-up capitalism and science and religion is simply insufficient. Reason has failed. History has failed. And what we all have to do, I think, is fall back on ourselves. We have to stop waiting for the revelation to come from CNN or Time Magazine, and get lives! And what getting lives means is ignoring the idiotic laws that would dictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain. [applause] You know, I'm sure it was alarming to Buddhists, but the Supreme Court decision last week that okayed animal sacrifice in a religious context was a door swinging open on the possible legalization of psychedelics. [applause] The concept of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" is enshrined in the documents upon which this nation of ours is supposedly founded. If the pursuit of happiness does not mean the right to experiment with your own state of mind, then those words aren't worth the hemp they're written on. [laughter]

But the point of view that I've come to evolve out of 25 years of looking at this problem and churning through culture and so forth and so on is not simply a call for individual self-responsibility and a pulling away from these institutions. That's pretty standard fare, I think. There's something else going on which is worth talking about. And that is the fact that the human world is apparently under the influence of some kind of attractor, or force, that secular people have ignored because the only words to talk about it were the vocabularies of beastly, bankrupt religions. But nevertheless, this force, this unfolding agenda, this design which we seem to embody, needs to be talked about. Because I really believe that history is ending. And I've taken a lot of flak for that, because no one can conceive of the breakdown of the system in which we're embedded to that degree. It's a kind of transcendental faith that history is accelerating. The rate of the ingression of novelty into three-dimensional space is asymptotically increasing. The kind of knitting together that is taking place in the world is laying the stage for the emergence of new forms of organization, new properties of being. And I really think that the drama of life on this planet is pointed toward the time that we are living in, that we're approaching a symmetry break on a scale of the kind of symmetry break that occurred when life pulled its slimy bottom out of the sea and crawled onto the land. We are approaching the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negative animal impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.

History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal--does this sound familiar to you? It's the neighborhood, right? [laughter] That's because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you seen, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is happening, and that what the-- It's as though we are boring through a mountain, towards someone else who is boring through that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain point in time. We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies. This has been understood by some people since at least the time of William Blake.

We are like creatures caught in a interrupted embryogenesis: halfway to angelhood, the worst among us somehow got control of the social agenda, and we've been hammering on each other with monotheism, racism, sexism, materialism, for the past 10,000 years. We betrayed the aboriginal intellect, the aboriginal intelligence, that existed for probably a hundred thousand years with drama, with poetry, with altruism, with courage, with self-sacrifice--with all the higher values that we think of as human--but without the devastatingly toxifying habits of Western Man: slavery, city-building, kingship, and, the three M's--monogamy, monotony, and monotheism. [laughter] These things have to be pitched out!

Or, maybe not. Who knows? [laughter]

Woman in audience: What's wrong with monogamy?

What's wrong with monogamy. What's wrong with monogamy is that it, uh, it forbids and interferes with polygamy! [laughter and applause] Otherwise, I think it has a lot to recommend it! Yeah, I know, monogamy is a tough one. Monogamy is a tough one, but I have more and more the feeling that as you grow up, just as you're about to go across the great Golden Gate Bridge to adulthood, there's one last sign, which says, "LAST EXIT BEFORE AUTHENTIC ADULTHOOD. BECOME ADDICTED TO SOMEONE AS LAME AS YOURSELF, AND MAYBE THE TWO OF YOU CAN PASS YOURSELF OFF AS ONE INDIVIDUAL AND STUMBLE THROUGH LIFE TO COMPLETION." [much laughter]

Same woman: But what's wrong with it?

TM: I don't think you should take me too seriously--I'm deeply into a divorce. [laughter] [sarcastically:] But I'm sure it's not distorting my judgment a single iota. [laughter]

Gee, I thought what you were going to object to was monotheism, but apparently not! No, see, here's the thing: back when mushrooms and nomadism ruled the world, monogamy was traded in for an orgiastic social style. And what's interesting about orgy--besides that--is that in an orgiastic situation, men cannot trace lines of male paternity. And consequently, loyalty goes to the children of the group. It's a tremendous force for group cohesion that the men collectively transfer their loyalty to the children as a collective group. And it creates a very tightly-knit social unit. I think that--I mean, it's absurd--you can't advocate orgy in a world riddled with epidemics of sexually-transmitted diseases and five and a half billion people. Nevertheless, the spirit of the thing can be worked out between you and your friends in any of a number of ways, and all of these arrangements which break the dominator mold are further permission for further breaking of the mold.

Why have we grown so polite as they have grown so much more treacherous and weasel-like? Why are we so content to allow the worst among us to set the social agenda? In the absence of Marxism, there is now no critique being carried out of the capitalist enterprise, and it'll peel your skin off and peddle it back to you. It is doing that. Capitalism in principle is not, I think, a bad thing, but it requires endlessly-exploitable natural resources. And since the exploration of space has been taken off the agenda, there is no endlessly-exploitable frontier. So capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed. You don't have to take psilocybin to figure this stuff out. You know, it isn't all elf machines from hyperspace! [laughter]

Somebody asked me what did I think was going to happen in 2012? And I said there were probably a number of scenarios. One of the most radical I can imagine is that everyone would begin to behave appropriately! I mean, can imagine what that would be like? You can imagine the first minute, because in the first minute, of course, everyone would turn off their console, take off their clothes, and walk outside. What happens after the first minute, in terms of appropriate activity, staggers the imagination! And where you would be three weeks into it is preposterous to even conceive. That's the soft version of the coming of the millennium. The hard version, I'm not really even sure... In the Amazon--in my book True Hallucinations I wrote about my brother and myself and our adventures down there. His expectation--once, he told me, "People are leaving their workbenches and offices with tears of joy streaming down their faces. They're staring at the sky." Fool that I was, I believed him. But it's a reasonable hope.

Here's the deal. We have the science, the technology, the money, the infrastructure, to do almost anything that we want to do. The problem is changing our minds. We have a hell of a time changing our minds. And yet, we must. There is no choice about it. The reason I'm a psychedelic advocate is not because I think it's easy, or because I think it's a sure thing--I don't think it's easy or a sure thing. It's simply that it's the only game in town. Nothing else can change your mind on a dime like we are going to have to change our minds on a dime. If we had 500 years to sort this out, we could maybe have a fighting chance without radical pharmacological intervention. As it is, if we don't awaken, we are going to let it slip through our fingers.

And if hortatory preaching could do it, then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the trick. It didn't and it won't. You have to somehow give people an experience--an experience that is not somebody else's experience--their experience, that radically recrystallizes their understanding of the world. And these shamanic plants that have been quietly growing and maintaining themselves for millennia, are in fact--and for what reason? it's beyond me--for some reason, these are pipelines into a kind of planetary mind. The big bugaboo of Western civ is that we deny the existence of spirit. It's been a thousand-year project to eliminate the spirit from all explanations of how reality works, or the personality works, or anything works. The absence of spirit permits the murder of the planet. But the cost of the denial of spirit is life empty of meaning, which doesn't mean we have to return to the world of beady-eyed priestcraft and its slimy minions. But it does mean that we have to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental. And apparently what this means, then, is fusion with Nature, and the psychedelics do this. They dissolve boundaries. They open the way to the Gaian mind.

Now you can believe this is bullshit, but you cannot believe it's bullshit unless you have made the experiment yourself and found it to be wanting--this isn't a philosophy course, here. We're talking about something real. And if the critics are not willing to invest time in it, then the critics have already declared their terror and fear of the solution. You know, it reminds me a little of something that Tim Leary--well, I always thought Tim Leary said this, but when I asked him, he completely disowned this brilliant remark, which let me know he was an enlightened man cause I never would have disowned it. So, somebody said--not Tim Leary--"LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally cases psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it." [laughter, clapping] Now a lot of drugs are like that, and we have a lot of psychotic people running around who have been driven mad by drugs they never took. But what they did take was your civil rights, your freedom to guide your own life, and your right to make your own decisions. This kind of thing is intolerable. If there is an iota of possibility that these substances enhance consciousness--and remember, they used to be called "consciousness expanding" drugs (just a straight phenomenological description)--if there's an iota of possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to the metal in this matter. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward extinction, that is causing us to loot our children's future, that is causing us to accept the elimination of thousands of species per month without pouring into the streets to loot and smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to go forward. I think the era of politeness has gone on just about long enough. And there's going to have to come a moment where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we have seen our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it, and take it, and take it. You know, being counter-cultural is more than a fashion statement. I recall an obscure Chinese philosopher named Mao Tse Tung, who once said, "The Revolution is not a dinner party!" Of course, he went on to say it's an armed struggle, prosecuted by the forces of the people. I don't think we're ready to call for armed struggle, but I think it is time to call for "HANDS OFF THE AMERICAN MIND. GIVE US BACK OUR MIND." The American mind is one of the most creative minds in the world, and it is being confined, compromised, and sold down the river by people who can't think of anything better to do with the world than fabricate it into stupid products and sell it at twice its natural worth. [applause]

Well, I could go on and on--and do, you may have noticed--but I think it's much more fruitful when these things are interactive and driven by questions. And I'm not fragile; you don't have to hold back. I'm from Berkeley--we throw chairs when we're displeased. So, feel free to have at it. But is there anybody who'd like to comment or participate in this discussion?

Man in audience: Thank you, Mr. McKenna. The whole bit about quoting Mao was kind of interesting if you think of the arms in terms of modems--I mean, the fact that we now live in a point in time when it's possible to completely transfer power without shedding a drop of blood if you have the right passwords and access codes. There is a unique tilt on Mao's "armed struggle" coming up real soon, if you think in terms of information war rather than the kind of bloodshed that's been marking history up until now.