TERENCE MCKENNA VS.

THE BLACK HOLE

TERENCE MCKENNA VS. THE BLACK HOLE

Note: The following are some excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence
McKenna in late October and early November 1999, in preparation for a profile that will
appear in the May issue of Wired. For obvious reasons, I have chosen selections
concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in
San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a craniotomy, and he therefore
spoke a bit more frankly about his condition than during November, when I spent a week
with him and his wonderful girlfriend Christie Silness during his sort-of recovery in
Hawaii.

The comments have been edited and are not chronological; I have included my questions
only when necessary. Perhaps someday the full text of our talks will be made available. In
Hawaii, we had an especially entertaining routine: during the day, I would ask him the
professional interviewer questions, and in the evening, after he had napped, we would get
thoroughly baked and ramble through the wilds of esoterica and bibliomania. The evening
chats were recorded on DAT; they need serious editing, but there's some mind-bending
loops in there.

I first met Terence in the early 90s, and I feel blessed to have been able to spend some time
getting to know him a little better during the last six months of his life. I found him kind,
generous, and unpretentious, although he clearly had a potent dark side. He was even more
brilliant and well-read than I had expected, with fistfuls of references at his command. But
most remarkable for me was how he seemed to face his situation: with an admirable blend
of humor, compassion, stoicism, and a willingness to stay open and awake in the midst of
the big awful questions without trying to console yourself with answers. And that, for my
money, is the ultimate lesson of the psychedelic path -- not the Gaian mind, or the
onrushing apocalypse, or those ridiculous elves, but a radical openness to ambiguity and
the unknown.

At one point I asked him what advice he had for someone about to down 100 ml of potent
ayahuasca alone in a rainforest. His words were spare, the utter opposite of the guru some
made him out to be: "Pay attention. And keep breathing." Words to live by, until you stop.

Erik Davis

TM: These cancer doctors give you very little hope. They tell you, Nobody escapes, it
will return, you have 6 to 9 months to live, go home and make your will, you can eat
anything you want do anything you want because, fella, there's nothing we can do for you.

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ED: How did you initially react?

TM: With disbelief. I still find it very hard to emotionally connect with it. When I was
taking high doses of steroids we had what I called the "tears and philosophy hour" ever
morning, where it all came into focus and the tragedy of my passing was starkly
confronted. [LAUGHS] But over the weeks, hell, we're used to it by now.

The paradox is that you don't feel bad, or at least I don't. So its like being an actor in a
play. Pretend you have a lethal disease.

ED: Tell me what that play is like.

TM: There are various options. One is cure-chasing, where you head off to Shanghai or
Brazil or the Dominican Republic to be with these great maestros who can save you. The
other thing is, do what you always wanted to do. So that means, head to Cape Canaveral to
see a shuttle launch, on to sunrise over the pyramids, on to a month in the Grand Hotel de
Paris, on to Jerusalem. I wasn't too keen on that either. My tendency was just to twist
another bomber and think about it all.

ED: What did you think about?

TM: I was interested in how I got into this mess. Was it my lifelong enthusiasm for
recreational drugs? Was it my messing around with rocket fuel as a kid, or chemicals
associated with collecting plants and insects? Was it sitting in front of my computer and
firing it up morning after morning? How do you get into a mess like this? There's only
about 16 of these glioblastoma multiformes a year, so its a rare disease. I never won
anything before, so why now?

ED: What about the fact that it's a brain tumor?

TM: The irony of it for me is incredible. I always made my living as a brain guy, thinking.
That was my department. Perturbing the brain physically, with drugs, ideas, and so forth.
And I offered these doctors the chance to scold me. So what about it? A lifetime of
recreational experimental drug taking, you wanna hammer on me about that? They said,
Oh no, absolutely not. Well how about a lifetime of daily cannabis smoking? Oh no, look,
we have data here, cannabis may actually retract tumors. I said, Listen, if cannabis retracts
tumors, we would not be having this conversation. I am a study of one that can be
considered definitive.

***

I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd

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have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and
talk to people and hear what they have to say, its a kind of blessing. Its certainly an
opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling
guy in a white coat that your going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights.

It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could
see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug
walking across the ground moved me to tears.

***

Nothing lasts. That's one thing I think you learn from life, psychedelics, or just paying
attention. Very little lasts.

These Buddhists aren't kidding: you are here for a very brief moment, and you can sit on
your thumb and do whatever you want, but in fact the clock is ticking. What are you gonna
do about it? Are you gonna blow it off, or be a hedonist? What are you gonna do with that?
If most people took it seriously, a hell of a lot more would be done with more attention to
quality and intent. And they're always talking about this stuff -- intent.

***

I have to say I do feel lucky, even at this late stage of the game, I feel lucky to have lived
the life I lived, and even though I have this horrific thing I feel lucky in terms of dealing
with it. I don't feel like its a death sentence.

***

TM: Until I'm able to run upstairs I think I just have to yield to fate. Its not clear entirely
what's happening with me. If I'm getting well, that's pretty easily managed. If I'm in fact
slowly slipping away, you just want to do it right and set a good example and not be a pain
to your relatives, friends, and fans. And that seems pretty easy to me. It all gets very
private once they tell you're about to kick.

ED: "It" being?...

TM: Life, or the management of your persona and reputation. So it's all about getting
through life without disgracing oneself in some fundamental way.

ED: Do you think your illness might be turned into a spectacle?

TM: Not unless I would cooperate. Leary must have originated all those plans of dying on

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the net. At this conference [AllChemical Arts, September, 1999], somebody kept coming
up to me and saying, Are you read for the cryogenic discussion yet? And I said, No, I don't
think were going to be doing that. I don't seek to live forever. I don't want the removal of
my head to become a Net event. I think part of what death is about biologically is
reshuffling the gene-pool. If genes were to last forever, death would never have entered the
scheme of things.

ED: Does it bother you that you probably wont be around for 2012?

TM: I'd always assumed I'd live to see 2012. It doesn't bother me very much. Very few
prophets live to see their prophecies -- Joachim de Fiore didn't, Marx didn't. If its gonna
happen, its gonna happen, it doesn't need cheerleading. Its built into the morphology of
space and time.

That's all a very funny thing about me and my career that's different from Leary, different
from all of these people: this strange relationship to prophecy and the eschaton. My fans
don't understand any of that stuff, and my critics don't understand much of it either. So we
all just have to put up with it until it clears itself out of the way.

***

I find to my surprise about myself, that I'm not really afraid of death. I'm pretty concerned
about dying. I don't want dying to turn into some kind of wet, sticky, thrashing kind of
thing. Death, hell, what are you buying? You have no idea, so why even give it a moments'
thought?

Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event
horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole. So people can stand around the
edge of the hole and say, Well it was this or that, but in fact, it represents some kind of
limit case in the thermodynamics of information. You just can't hand messages back over
that threshold. So get yourself pointed right, do not your mantras bungle, and that's about
it. When you're actually dead, all bets are off. The best answer I've gotten yet out of this is
from Don Delillo's Underworld, where the nun discovers that when you die you become
your website.

ED: Your website is pretty cool.

TM: It needs work, especially if its gonna be me for eternity. It definitely needs work.

***

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ED: What do psychedelics say about all this?

TM: I don't know what psychedelics say about death. I think they say a great deal about
dying. I think they model dying. In a way, shamanism is proto-Buddhism. Taking plants
and spending your life in esoteric philosophy and taking drugs is basically on a meditation
on death. Buddhism is some form of learning how to die. And that seems worth doing.
And unavoidable. If you're a serious person, how could you not confront this kind of stuff?

**

ED: How have you changed emotionally?

TM: I'm much more resonant and in tune with the Buddhist demand for compassion. The
world needs to be a more compassionate place. It is not moving toward that as I see it.
More and more people are exploited by fewer and fewer people, more and more
effectively. And the tools of exploitation, which are advertising and propaganda and all of
that, grow ever more powerful and irresistible.

This is really the challenge for the future. We can build a civilization like nothing the
world has ever seen. But can it be a human, a *human* civilization? Can it actually honor
human values? It's one thing, the rate of invention or gross national product or production
of industrial capacity -- all of these things are all very well. But the real dilemma for
human beings is how to build a compassionate human civilization. The means to do it
come into our ken at the same rate as all these tools which betray it. And if we betray our
humanness in the pursuit of civilization, then the dialogue has become mad.

So it is a kind of individual challenge for every single person to demand that

compassionate civilization. It calls for a uniquely human response from each person. And
the way to be motivated to do that is to take on the fact of human mortality, your own and
other peoples'.

***

When I think about dying, the thing that surprises me is how much of the future I regard as
history, and how I don't want to miss it. I want to know how it all comes out. I haven't a lot
of money riding on my vision of things, but I would like to know how the universe came to
be, what's up with extraterrestrials, where biotech is going, where the Internet is going,
about robot/man space-flight to the outer planets. Because the next century will be it. We
are on the brink of a posthuman existence, or we are into the early phase of the posthuman
existence. So what's it gonna look like? What's it gonna feel like?

Hipparchus, in the second century BC, was asked what he feared most
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about death, and he said, Not being able to follow the latest
discoveries in astronomy.

Well, that's precisely my position.

END

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Thoughts on Death

Thoughts on Death
We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a
shadow into matter.

We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of
epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects
of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical
organism.

At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material
form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained
against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the
form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point
of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic
dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to
life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be
familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.

The metaphor of a vehicle--an after-death vehicle, an astral body--is used by several

traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the
purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying
will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will
know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility
of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff
it through ignorance.

Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth--the

metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity.
The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the
possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a
moment--a crisis of passage--and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly
lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that
this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position...

Psychedelics may do more than model this state;

they may reveal the nature of it.

What psychedelics encourage, and where I hope attention will focus once
hallucinogens are culturally integrated to the point where large groups of people can plan

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research programs without fear of persecution, is the modeling of the after-death state.
Psychedelics may do more than model this state; they may reveal the nature of it.
Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of appearance and understanding can be
shifted so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind
contains all experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian
universe, deployed throughout light-years of three-dimensional space, and the interior
mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same thing.

We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the code we
customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has built-in dualisms. This is
a problem of language. All codes have relative code qualities, except the Logos. The
Logos is perfect and, therefore, partakes of no quality other than itself. I am here using the
word Logos in the sense in which Philo Judaeus uses it--that of the Divine Reason that
embraces the archetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As
long as one maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems of code
quality. The dualism built into our language makes the death of the species and the death
of the individual appear to be opposed things.

From a talk given at the invitation of Ruth and Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for
the Study of Consciousness, 1984. New Maps of Hyperspace is chapter 7 of The Archaic
Revival by Terence McKenna.

What I imagine happens is that for the self time begins

to flow backward

DB: Do you have any thoughts on what happens to human consciousness after
biological death?

TM: I've thought about it. When I think about it I feel like I'm on my own. The Logos
doesn't want to help here. The Logos has nothing to say to me on the subject of biological
death. What I imagine happens is that for the self time begins to flow backward, even
before death; the act of dying is the act of reliving an entire life, and at the end of the dying
process consciousness divides into the consciousness of one's parents and one's children,
and then it moves through these modalities, and then divides again. It's moving forward
into the future through the people who come after you, and backward into the past through
your ancestors. The further away from the moment of death it is, the faster it moves, so
that after a period of time, the Tibetans say 42 days, one is reconnected to everything that
ever lived, and the previous ego-pointed existence is allowed to dissolve, returned to the
ocean, the morphogenetic field, or the One of Plotinus-you choose your term. A person is a
focused illusion of being, and death occurs when the illusion of being is no longer
sustained. Then everything flows out, and away from the disequilibrium state that is life. It
is a state of disequilibrium, yet it is maintained for decades, but finally, like all

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disequilibrium states, it must yield to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and at that
point it runs down, its specific character disappears into the general character of the world
around it. It has returned then to the void/plenum.

DB: What if you don't have children?

TM: Well, then you flow backward into the past, into your parents and their parents,
and their parents, and eventually all life, and back into the primal protozoa. It's very
interesting that in the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, when they took the
sacrament, what the god said was, "Procreate, procreate." It is uncanny the way history is
determined by who sleeps with whom, who gets born, what lines are drawn forward, what
tendencies are accelerated. Most people experience what they call magic only in the
dimension of mate seeking, and this is where even the dullest people have astonishing
coincidences, and unbelievable things go on-it's almost as though hidden strings were
being pulled. There's an esoteric tradition that the genes, the matings, are where it's all
being run from. It is how I think a superextraterrestrial would intervene. It wouldn't
intervene at all; it would make us who it wanted us to be by controlling synchronicity.

From an interview by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen in the summer 1989 issue
of Critique (now Sacred Fire), and chapter 14 of The Archaic Revival by Terence
McKenna.

As the esoteric traditions say, life is an opportunity to

prepare for death

ND: You have said that an important part of the mystical quest is to face up to death
and recognize it as a rhythm of life. Would you like to enlarge on your view on the
implications of the dying process?

TM: I take seriously the notion that these psychedelic states are an anticipation of the
dying process-or, as the Tibetans refer to it, the Bardo level beyond physical death. It
seems likely that our physical lives are a type of launching pad for the soul. As the esoteric
traditions say, life is an opportunity to prepare for death, and we should learn to recognize
the signposts along the way, so that when death comes, we can make the transition
smoothly. I think the psychedelics show you the transcendental nature of reality. It would
be hard to die gracefully as an atheist or existentialist. Why should you? Why not rage
against the dying of the light? But if in fact this is not the dying of the light but the
Dawning of the Great Light, then one should certainly not rage against that. There's a
tendency in the New Age to deny death. We have people pursuing physical immortality
and freezing their heads until the fifth millennium, when they can be thawed out. All of
this indicates a lack of balance or equilibrium. The Tao flows through the realms of life
and nonlife with equal ease.

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ND: Do you personally regard the death process as a journey into one's own belief
system?

TM: Like the psychedelic experience, death must be poured into the vessel of
language. But dying is essentially physiological. It may be that there are certain
compounds in the brain that are only released when it is impossible to reverse the dying
process. And yet the near-death experience has a curious affinity to the shamanic voyage
and the psychedelic experience.

I believe that the best map we have of consciousness is the shamanic map. According
to this viewpoint, the world has a "center," and when you go to the center-which is inside
yourself-there is a vertical axis that allows you to travel up or down. There are celestial
worlds, there are infernal worlds, there are paradisiacal worlds. These are the worlds that
open up to us on our shamanic journeys, and I feel we have an obligation to explore these
domains and pass on that inforrnation to others interested in mapping the psyche. At this
time in our history, it's perhaps the most awe-inspiring journey anyone could hope to
make.

From an interview with Nevill Drury from the autumn 1990, vol. 11, no. 1, issue of the
Australian magazine Nature and Health, and chapter 17 of The Archaic Revival by
Terence McKenna.

Seeing into after-death existence before death

In discussing the ordinarily invisible spiritual world of the after-death state, called
menog existence in the Avestan religion, Flattery says this:

The consumption of sauma [Soma] may have been the only means
recognized in Iranian religion of seeing into menog existence before death;
at all events, it is the only means acknowledged in Zoroastrian literature . . . .
and, as we have seen, is the means used by Ohrmazd when he wishes to
make the menog existence visible to living persons. In ancient Iranian
religion there is little evidence of concern with meditative practice which
might foster development of alternative, non-pharmacological means to such
vision. In Iran, vision into the spirit world was not thought to come about
simply by divine grace or as a reward for saintliness. From the apparent role
of sauma in initiation rites, experience of the effects of sauma, which is to
say vision of menog existence, must have at one time been required of all
priests (or the shamans antecedent to them).10

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10. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz, Haoma and Harmaline,

Near Eastern Studies, vol. 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989)

From Food Of The Gods by Terence McKenna.

"When consciousness is finally understood, it will mean that the absence of consciousness
will be understood. The study of consciousness leads, inevitably, to the study of death.
Death is both a historical and an individual phenomenon about which we, as monkeys,
have great anxiety. But what the psychedelic experience seems to be pointing out is that
actually the reductionist view of death has missed the point and that there is something
more. Death isn't simple extinction. The universe does not build up such complex forms as
ourselves without conserving them in some astonishing and surprising way that relates to
the intuitions that we have from the psychedelic experience." Terence McKenna

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