Terence McKenna - KPFK Interview - Poets And Prophesiers - 9 May 1996McKenna Interviewed by Pam Burton for KPFK Pacifica Radio
Poets And Prophesiers - 9 May 1996
Image - Eros (From McKenna's Website)
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/hypersextext3.html
Terence McKenna - Interview - 16th June 1999http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
A longtime sufferer of migraines, in mid-1999 McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii after a long lecturing tour. He began to suffer from increasingly painful headaches. This culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. Upon his emergency trip to the hospital on Oahu, Terence was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. He died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53, with his loved ones at his bedside. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, and his daughter Klea.
" I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd 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, it's a kind of blessing. It's 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 you're 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. "
~ Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna - Interview On WFMU - 21 April 1994Found this and a few others I've yet to upload on an old hard drive, it was originally labeled as 1993 but appears to be an interview from 1994 given a week before this event...
"Terence McKenna will be lecturing in NYC on Friday evening,
April 29, 1994 at 8:00 PM at Julia Richmond High School,
317 East 67th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues for $10.
He will be giving a weekend workshop on Saturday and Sunday April 30 - May 1
from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM at 83 Spring Street for $150.
On Saturday evening, April 30, at 7:30 PM, Terence will join with Peter
Lamborn Wilson, Erik Davis, Alex Grey and other surprise guests for a 100th
anniversary tribute to Aldous Huxley, also being held at Julia Richmond High
School, 317 East 67th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues for $10."
Much love to Zarquon for the McKenna image.
Terence McKenna - Gender Talk Interview - 15 July 1998http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Terence Interviewed on Gender Talk 162: July 15, 1998
Good short interview this one, where he highlights that taking large doses is not for everyone. In the west we've lost the context for many people to take these plants responsibly and they are not best served for recreational use.
I wish the recent spat of haters would hear this one but they obviously have never listened to any of these talks in the first place.
We all know someone who has lost the plot on these substances. Rather than blame the substance, understand that some people's minds are fragile and can't take the shock. Likewise some people's minds can't take certain radical ideas like libertarian socialism, equality, being fair to people or just being a decent human being who respects other people's right to choose.
~blimp:)
Full show here: http://www.archive.org/details/gt162
Terence McKenna - New Dimensions Interview - 10 July 1991http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Terence McKenna interviewed by Michael Toms on New Dimensions Radio, (10 July, 1991)
Reviving The Archaic: A New View Of Evolution.
Art: Vladimir Kush - Departure Of The Winged Ship
Terence McKenna - Interview Hawaii - October 1998http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Terence McKenna describes Novelty Theory to director John Hazard with an elaboration of its core principles involving hyper-complexification and the compression of Time. He holds forth on the correspondences between the structure of the DNA molecule and the Chinese I-Ching, then shows how his notion of an Archaic Revival leads from the theories of mind and the art movements of the early 20th century to the Shaman as the quintessential figure of the 21st century, with psychedelic substances being the bridge between these worldviews.
By way of explaining why he's finally releasing this footage, Director John Hazard has the following to say:
"On meeting Terence: I had just finished shooting a film which profiled George Wallace for American Experience, and I was looking for a subject for a film that I might make that would engage me in a compelling way. I stumbled upon Terence and Novelty Theory, and I liked the correspondences between his work and the Mayan calendar.
Terence agreed to work with me, and I went to his home on the Big Island of Hawaii to conduct what I assumed would be the first of several interviews. We were just beginning to work together when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
I've always believed that my interview with Terence worked especially well as a long form conversation, because of his gifted way with language. When Jeremy Narby began his 'Awakening the Cosmic Serpent' Evolver Intensives sessions, I was struck by how engaging his long form interviews were, and I noticed how week after week his guests would tell a story about Terence. I'm inspired to release this interview on Reality Sandwich within the context of Jeremy's Evolver Intensives.
With the psychedelic movement undergoing a renaissance, many in the new generation, the core participants who are finding their way to the Evolver/RS nexus, were children when Terence conducted his interview with me. I think this audience may consider his remarks to be prescient."
Terence McKenna - NPR Interview - March 1999http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
This may be the last radio interview given by the bard Terence McKenna. The date was sometime in March of 1999, just a few weeks before the discovery of his brain tumor. Over a dozen new McKenna quotes from this podcast are posted on our blog at PsychedelicSalon (dot) org, and among the other little gems he at last clearly defines what he means by "the end of history".
Terence McKenna - The Last Interview - November 1999http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Terence McKenna's Last Trip
The "altered statesman" emerged from Leary's long shadow to push a magical blend of psychedelics, technology, and revelatory rap. He had less time than he knew.
By Erik Davis
In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii's Big Island after six weeks on the road. He was relieved to be home. Since claiming the mantle of Tripster King from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales involving mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. Weird stuff, and wonderfully told. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the Web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatán.
Soon after McKenna arrived home, however, he was hit with ferocious headaches. He'd long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his 52 years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna's mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure.
When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Then he swooned again. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6'2" frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a poem his grandfather used to chant, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold.
The ambulance guys knew McKenna's rep and were convinced he had OD'd. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue - mycological lingo straight out of theMagic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. "No one escapes," said the doctor.
McKenna was facing something that no shaman's rattle or peyote button was going to cure. With barely time to breathe, he had to choose from among chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife - a machine that could blast the tumor with 201 converging beams of cobalt radiation.
At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. He meditated about McKenna and was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend.
From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell was planning a different kind of intervention. Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. 8." At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell's listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. "It's not something I really believe in," says McKenna. "But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it."
Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame.
"So what about it?" he asked his doctors. "You wanna hammer on me about that?" They assured him there was no causal link.
"So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors.
"Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation."
"If the words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on." ~ Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna - Radio Valve Interviewhttp://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience and this is, I think much, of the problem of the modern dilemma, is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kind of belief systems have been erected... If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.
Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, and what is lacking is the clear vision of what should be done... What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language we must have a new reality... A new reality will generate a new language, a new language will fix a new reality, and make it part of this reality.
I believe that liberation, or let's even say, decency as a human quality, is an actual resonance and anticipation of this future perfected state of humanity. We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future, and no longer casting blame outward on institutions or hierarchies of responsibility and control, but by realizing the opportunities here, the responsibilities here, and the two may never be congruent again, and the salvation of your immortal soul may depend on what you do with the opportunity.
Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the uncounscious does not exist, humanity will invent it" — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.
Because too much we have lived in the light of the idea that your ideology will be dictated to you essentially by geography! And if you're born in India, you'll find out that the Cosmos is one way; if you're born in Brooklyn, you find out it's another way. What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate, which make us what we are but don't want to be.
History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue, ethical issue, whatever the term for it is, and it is precisely because they are a deconditioning agents: they will cast doubt in you if you are a Hasidic rabbi, a Marxist anthropologist, or an altar boy, because their business is to dissolve belief systems, and they do this very well and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience, what William James called in infants 'the blooming, buzzing experience.' And out of that you reconstruct the world, and you need to understand that it is a dialog where your decisions, the projection of your grammar onto the intellectual space in front of you, is going to gel into the mode of being. We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.
Terence McKenna - KUT Public Radio Interview - I Ching, Habit & Novelty - October 1997http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Interview on KUT Public Radio, Austin (October, 1997)
In 1971 Terence and Dennis Mckenna took a trip to Columbia to try to explore the landscape made evident by the psychedelic experience more fully and came back with information about Time and the I Ching. This journey is explored in the book, True Hallucinations.
Though often thought of as a simple divination tool, Mckenna called the I Ching one of the "oldest structured abstractions known." I Ching symbols have been found scratched on the 6,000 year old shoulder bone of a sheep. Official record of it appears in the 7th or 8th century BCE. The Tarim Basin, from whence the I Ching hailed, was a pre-Han civilization. It is the classic home of shamanism and has very little to do with what many people think of as Chinese cosmology.
The I Ching is translated as The Book of Changes. Terence Mckenna decided the I Ching was the book of Time. Since Time is change, this makes perfect sense. Through years of research and mathematical analysis he deduced that the I Ching is an ancient shamanic understanding of Time as made up of individual units with separate and distinct qualities. Time is composed of discrete units of energy with discernable differences. Therefore it follows that certain Times would be more or less auspicious for certain activities. Terence believed the I Ching is to Time what the periodic table is to elements. Most probably the creators of the I Ching understood Time the way western science has come to understand matter. As Western science broke matter down into component parts, the I Ching applies the same system to cycles of Time. It is possible the people who created the I Ching understood Time as intimately as we now understand matter. These ideas are fully explored in the book he co-wrote with Dennis, The Invisible Landscape.
He turned his mathematical analysis of the 64 Hexagrams of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching into a graph and created a computer program he called Timewave Zero. He spread his graph out onto the linear line of human history and saw patterns emerge. He began to see that Time is a duality between what he called "habit" and "novelty." In periods of habit, not much new happens, patterns are entrenched and change is difficult. Periods of novelty, however, are the opposite, leading to great transformative ideas and events. Certain Times tend toward novelty and others for habit. He also noticed that certain epochs in history were resonant with each other. We will delve more deeply into the resonances on the timewave in a future post. Curiously his timewave graph had an end to it. It ended at 2012, which he interpreted as a Time of ultimate possibility and infinite novelty.
Image: I-Ching Holitzka Deck by Klaus Holitzka (1994)
Terence McKenna - Toward The End Of History - Interview - 10th July 1996http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.co.uk/
Terence is the author of five books & the famous software program "TimeWave". Based upon the mathematics underlying the ancient Chinese oracle The I Ching, he discussed this unique time in human history and discusses "The Big Picture". McKenna's contributions to science include the theory that psychedelic mushrooms spurred humans to develop consciousness and language; and the "Timewave" theory, described by chaos pioneer Ralph Abraham as "the first model for history that significantly transcends that of the ancients." Learn About: • Art, Novelty, the Internet, Time & the Future as Terence & his software see it. • Implications for us during the "first-time-ever" period of extraordinary novelty as we enter the 21st century. • How we can align with "The Transcendent Object at the End of Time"
Terence McKenna - Towards The Unknown - Interview - 10 June 1983Towards The Unknown
Terence McKenna in conversation with Michael Toms
New Dimensions Radio, 10 June 1983
This interview has surfaced elsewhere under different titles.
Notably on The Psychedelic Salon Podcasts...
#339 as "A Necessary Chaos"
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=659
#258 as "The Angel In The Monkey"
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=354
The interview is currently not listed on the New Dimensions website but is noted here...
http://www.terencemckenna.com/tmbib/tmbib.f.php#Toms-1983
Art: Vladimir Kush ~ Metaphorical Journey
Terence McKenna - Poolside Interview, Palenque Mexico - 28 Jan 1996Terence McKenna Poolside Interview,
Palenque Mexico, 28 Jan 1996
Many thanks to Débora de Oliveira Almeida Silva for the original upload.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgw7HROlCo
