From True Hallucinations to Modern Reality

[Intro] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: John O’Connor is from Kalamazoo, Michigan. His recent book, the Secret History of Bigfoot, Field Notes on a North American Monster, explores the obsessive world of Bigfoot believers. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, True Story series, and elsewhere. He teaches journalism at Boston College. His upcoming book traces a historical path from Terence and Dennis McKenna’s experiment at La Chorrera to our current psychedelic moment.

And he is one of the few people that I’ve talked to in recent memory who actually has revisited La Chorrera as it exists now, which has led to this podcast interview. I am more than pleased to welcome John O’Connor to the Brainforest Café. John, Thank you.

[00:01:29] John O´Connor: All right. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Dennis.

[00:01:31] Dennis McKenna: Very happy to have you on this.

So tell me a little background. Well, we read a little background. You’ve done a great deal of travel writing, adventure writing, and what led you to get interested in the La Chorrera story and actually go to La Chorrera, which is no small thing.

[00:01:56] John O´Connor: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. We were talking about before we came on, you mentioned this kind of adventure travelogue I had written about Antarctica, the early explorers there, Robert Falcon Scott, and other folks like that, and I am really drawn to those adventure narratives. And that’s kind of how I see Terence’s book and this whole experimental La Chorrera adventure and sort of multiple meanings of the word. And, you know, and I, when I read Terence’s book, I have to admit it was not what I expected it to be. I had owned it for a while, and I’m ashamed to say I’d sat on my shelf unread, and I pull it off the shelf one day and started reading and was instantly struck by his just gift at kind of linear narrative.

And I was just surprised that I had no really little inkling of who he was.

I kind of knew where he was because I knew about Roger Casement.

I had read Michael Taussig’s book on shamanism, and he talked a little bit about Walt Hardenberg and Roger Casement and early the rubber atrocities and the Putumayo in the early 20th century.

[00:03:04] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:03:05] John O´Connor: And when I found that out, I was like, huh? That’s really like, why haven’t I heard of McKenna and why haven’t I heard of this book? And why is not more made of this place and this connection? And so that was part of it. And also just my Inkling for adventure narrative. You know, I kind of, my bread and butter over the years has been travel writing, and especially this intersection of kind of landscape and literature. And so I’ve written about, you know, Antarctica and the early historians of that period. And I’ve written about Peter Mathieseen and the Florida Everglades and Ernest Hemingway in northern Michigan and so on. And so I thought of this as another kind of piece of that. But once I got into it, I realized how much of a story it was and what a bigger and potentially meteor story it was. So, and I knew right away that I had to go there. I’d never been to South America, I’m also embarrassed to say. And I knew that I wanted to see that place where you guys had been and see what had changed in the last half century.

[00:04:10] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, in the last 50 years. Yes.

I’m a fan of Peter Mathieseen’s, myself, very much so. And this kind of writing. And of course, you’re familiar with his book At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which in my opinion is probably the best novel about the Amazon ever written. I put it right up there with Wade Davis book One River, which is non fiction. But between those two, I think they’re both monumental work. And Wade and I have been good friends for many years. I recently did a podcast with him, and he’s another person who just has done incredible adventures. And there’s nothing egotistical about it. He just does these things. This is what he does. And Schultes, his mentor, was similar in his approach to this. It wasn’t that he either one of these guys that they visualize themselves as some kind of swashbuckling Indiana Jones sort. I mean, they were just explorers. And in Schultes cases, well, i’m a plant collector. I got to go where the plants are.

And he went to these crazy places and had all these amazing adventures which Wade chronicled in his book. Our narrative, the experiment at La Chorrera, which is chronicled probably best by Terence’s book. True hallucinations. When I compare it to your tales about these arctic explorers, it seems like ours was not.

I mean, our trip was a rough trip, for sure, but physically, we were never in the kind of danger that these explorers were in. We went to a place, we were driven by a vision, the search for the secret, whatever it was. The secret turned out to be this incredibly prolific field of mushrooms, which was not what we were looking for when we started out.

But when we got there, as you know from the book, we definitely got distracted and seriously distracted, you know, and that story is, is told in True Hallucinations. So, you know, it was a it was a kind of a heart of darkness story, I suppose, you know, that we came and we were. I was 20 when we went there, my brother was 24.

And we were at that stage of life, you know, when one thinks, when they know a lot and actually they know nothing.

And so we had these adventures. But tell me, what got you interested in enough in this whole Amazon’s area and this whole story to actually go to La Chorrera and what has that been like?

[00:07:30] John O´Connor: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. I was hoping we could compare notes because you said yours was a rough trip and I only got an inkling of that El Encanto to La Chorrera trail and enough to put me off of it for sure. I mean, I think we got 100 and 150ft in now. We started at a different location. We were kind of told there was a shortcut, so we journeyed up river, about 130 something kilometers, and started at a second point, at another point. And we were told that by our guide that it’d be about a day hike to El Encanto. And we got about 100 or so feet, 150ft in and we were up to our waists in water and it was just, you know, a snarl of vines. And I couldn’t have imagined, you know, a full day on that trail, let alone the four days that you guys. You guys did. So I was like, duly impressed by that. You guys did that. Now you’re in your twenties and I’m 50, so, you know, you had a bit of advantage over me, but still, I’ve done a fair amount of backcountry camping in my day and that was like nothing I’d ever seen before. So I was really.

[00:08:40] Dennis McKenna: Well, the trail. The trail might have been very much degraded too, by the time you got it. I understand. I’m not sure about the historical truth of this, but you may be able to shed some light on it. But I understand there was actually a railroad that was built, that was built to bring rubber out of La Chorrera down to El Encanto, which is where we started.

Did you start on the trail from El Encanto?

[00:09:11] John O´Connor: I did the reverse journey. I had the luxury of flying in and out of La Chorrera, where there is now a landing strip, and there has been for a decade or so. There are two flights a week there. Sorry, two flights a month officially. But there are actually, we discovered two more flights every week on cargo planes. So we flew in on a Columbia and airline, and then we flew out on a. Caught a ride on a cargo plane out and that guy comes twice a week. And so we had that luxury. And my original intention was to do the reverse of what you guys did and hike from La Chorrera to El Encanto and then take a speedboat, what they call a rapido, up to Puerto Leguízamo.

There, you might be interested to know, there lives John Brown’s grandson, Ramiro Rojas Brown lives in this very same house that John Brown lives in.

And I hope to meet him there and interview him. And that was my hopes there were dashed. Unfortunately, I did eventually get to talk with him on the telephone.

But, but that was my intent. It was to do the kind of reverse journey you guys did. And in many ways it was, you know, obviously much easier. The air, air flight is much different in your day. It was much different when you guys were there. But the trail was inoperable. And as far as we were concerned, and it was also, we were warned that there were Farc rebels, like a spinoff farc group along the main branch of the Putumayo there.

[00:10:44] Dennis McKenna: What were the dates of this visit, John? When were you there?

[00:10:48] John O´Connor: Mid, early December. So ten days in the early part of December. I think we left.

[00:10:53] Dennis McKenna: We flew out last year. Yeah.

[00:10:55] John O´Connor: Last year?

[00:10:57] Dennis McKenna: So this is very recent. Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah, you did. Exactly. You did it the other way. I mean, we, you know, what great effort. We walked this trail from El Encanto. We encountered this crazy anthropologist there who was very unhappy that we had showed up.

Back in those days, you couldn’t send a text or even make a phone call. It’s just his colleagues in Bogotá had told us that Doctor Kalier would be at El Encanto working with his people. So we show up in full hippie regalia. I mean, this was 1970s, 71, you know, beards, beads. You know, my brother insisted that everybody wear this, these white linen clothes that he’d adopted when he was butterfly hunting in Indonesia. So we were a colorful bunch, far more colorful than any of the Uitotos. And he was quite appalled, you know. And then when we got there and we said, you know, we’re here to look for a ukuhe, this legendary hallucinogen which we’d read about in a paper of Shultes´s. And he was really upset then because he said, oh, my God, you’re not even supposed to know this. This is their biggest secret. They’ll undoubtedly kill you if you even mention this.

He was a little bit hyped up on coca. He was constantly chewing coke, and he was quite paranoid. And we sort of said okay, yeah, we understand. We get it. We won’t just walk in there and demand ukuhe. We’ll be cool, Doc. You know, and we were, we went up there and we hung around for a while, and then, you know, while we were waiting for the so called secret to be brought by someone, this ukuhe, the mushrooms were there, you know, and we knew what they were. We had very little experience with them, but we knew what they were, and we thought, well, these will be fun. We can play with these while we wait for the real secret. And then they quickly made it clear they were the real secret and started, you know, downloading all this information to us. And it’s like La Chorrera was this magical Shangri la type of place. You know, the rains were constant. The mist would come over the pasture every morning, and we could go out and see that there were many, many mushrooms that grown up during the night. And it was just this, it was a kind of a, you know, I mean, some of it was the physical environment, which was very magical, and some of it was the psychological environment. What we were projecting onto that as being this place where, you know, there dwelt this cosmic extraterrestrial. We weren’t sure what intelligence that was speaking to us through the mushrooms. And we were quite, we were anything but skeptical, you know, we were, we were quite open to it. I imagine that when you visited La Chorrera, well, you said the cattle are long gone, the mission is long gone.

Whatever pasture was there is now grown over.

So it’s kind of lost its magic. It’s not this magical place.

[00:14:45] John O´Connor: Well, it is still quite a magical place, but not in the way that you mean it. I mean, it is an earthly paradise. I mean, it is just unbelievably beautiful.

And it is, you know, it’s way still far off the tourist map. There’s no infrastructure there for tourism. You know, you still, you have to fly in and out. Like it’s, you know, it’s a two hour flight from Leticia, but it’s still, you know, there’s no hotels, they’re not set up for people. So it’s like there’s no air conditioning, you know, it’s not, it’s still a pretty rough place in many ways, but it’s. But, yeah, but it is still a paradisiacal place, just really magical in a lot of ways. And you have the falls there, the chorro, and it’s just a beautiful landscape they’re right at the edge of the Amazon, which didn’t exist.

What didn’t exist when you guys were there was predio Putumayo, which is this huge Indian reserve that the Indians are more or less autonomous. They’re essentially untouchable by the national government. They don’t have any interest in national politics for good reason. They sort of pretty much do what they want to do.

And it’s huge. I mean, it’s something like 15 million acres or something like that, which, just to give you a sense of scale, like Yosemite, which is the largest national park in the lower 58, is 2.2 million acres. So it’s just a vast, vast wilderness that they more or less have to themselves.

[00:16:21] Dennis McKenna: So the government has set this area aside?

[00:16:26] John O´Connor: Yep. In the new constitution in 1991, there were established many, many, several dozen indian reserves. I can’t remember the number now, but there are a substantial percentage of the national territory. It’s like twelve or 13% or something like that. Wade would view here, but it’s a lot.

[00:16:44] Dennis McKenna: A lot to hear that that was done. I think Schultes had a great deal of influence in Colombia and urged them to create these selva reservists, so to speak. And as Andy Weil once said, as far as in Colombia, Schultes es dios. Schultes is God. You know, he was so respected and so he was very influential with the environmental agencies in Colombia.

[00:17:25] John O´Connor: So he was successful. And, you know, they’re still desperately poor, and they, but they have cell phones.

As depressing as that is to us, they do have cell phones and they do have the Internet. And  you know, they need, they need things like money for school and school supplies and soccer balls and, you know, they don’t have that sort of thing. But, but it’s still, the place itself is, you know, at least naturally speaking, is still very much intact. So other places in the Amazon had a lot of pressure from illegal mining and logging and, you know, natural resource extraction, but not, not so much in the, in the predio. So that’s, it’s good for them.

[00:18:09] Dennis McKenna: Which reminds me, when I was there, when I was collecting in Peru in 1981, ten years after we went to La Chorrera, I did return to Peru as a graduate student, and I went down the Amazon and up the Ampiyacu, and there was some discussion about trying to cross the putumayo and get back to La Chorrera from the south, you know. And besides, my brother was with me for this part of my expedition, it was an Ethnobotanical expedition where we weren’t trying to collapse the space time continuum this time. And I was very firm about that. My brother was always egging me on, and I’m like, God damn it, this is an ethnobotanical expedition, and if you can’t behave yourself, you could leave.

I was fairly upset with him at that point for that and a number of reasons.

So we talked about trying to get back to La Chorrera from continue on from the Ampiyacu, but we were told at that time that it was very dangerous to go to La Chorrera because it was a major cocaine production, extraction and transshipping point. Did you hear anything about that when you were there?

[00:19:37] John O´Connor: No, I don’t think that’s much of an issue anymore. There are these farc rebels or spin off farc groups along the Putumayo. Like, we had no way, really, of discerning the truth of what we were told, but of course, we also had no reason to doubt it. And once you’re told that there are potentially FARC rebels kind of waiting in ambush to take, you know, looking for a couple of gringos to ransom off, that was enough for us.

[00:20:01] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, just to stand still right there. 

[00:20:04] John O´Connor: Yeah, yeah, we were able to kind of hustle a way out aboard one of these flights, cargo flights. So, Dennis, I actually wanted to mention or just ask you about that later journey in 1980, 81. That was the. I think you write about this, the Heraclitus.

[00:20:25] Dennis McKenna: That’s right. That was Heraclitus debacle or misadventure. I mean, was really a misadventure. It just wasn’t what we expected. And it’s sort of like, well, that’s the Amazon. You go to the Amazon and you don’t necessarily.

It doesn’t conform to your expectations. You know, as it turned out, that has been, you know, when the Heraclitus sent the. When the Institute for Ecotechnics sent the Heraclitus to Iquitos, they had managed to bash it into a barge on the way upriver. So it limped into Iquitos and it was not in any shape to go anywhere. They had to put it into dry dock to repair it, but they had managed. They had a smaller boat that we were able to take down and we were able to hire a collectivo. So we’re actually a couple of boats. And actually Wade Davis was on that trip with me. That’s when I really got to know Wade, because the institute had hired him to be the chief scientific officer for the expedition. And he just showed up one day in Iquitos. And of course I recognized him because, I mean, we´d encountered each other in Vancouver. I knew he was connected some way. And he showed up and we pretty much were very blessed to have him with us because he, unlike me and my colleagues, we were not experienced amazonian travelers. But he knew the ropes and he knew Spanish perfectly. So he went with us up, up to Pebus or down the Amazon to Pebas and then up the Ampiyacu. The reason we were going to the Ampiyacu was because the Uitoto people had largely been forced out of La Chorrera to the south during the rubber boom, and that La Chorrera was kind of an ancestral place for the Uitoto. But there were Uitoto Bora and Muenane communities around Pukurakiyo, up the Ampiyacu. And we were looking for this legendary hallucinogen, but this time in a very focused, scientific way.

So that’s why we went to the Ampiyacu and tried to find people who could make this drug for us.

But the formulation for the drug was kind of a lost art.

The informants we talked to said that, well, we sort of remember how our grandfathers did it or our fathers did it. We can take a crack at it.

And they did.

They didn’t regard it as a big secret or giving away knowledge, unlike what doctor Kawtier said. They didn’t regard it as a big secret, probably because they weren’t really part of the tradition, but they were willing to try to make it for us. And they did. They made several samples and we had bora and Uitoto curanderos that were making it. And we bioassay all of the samples that we got on the spot because, well, that’s the job. If you’re ethnopharmacologist, you got to know if the things work. We got, I think, about seven or eight samples from different sources, and two of them worked quite profoundly. They were very strong.

A couple others sort of were active and the rest were not very active at all that we could perceive. But at least they gave it a try.

And so then I was able to take these samples back to the lab in British Columbia and sort out the chemistry and take a look at the tryptamine profiles in these extracts. And remarkably, there was an exact match between what the informants we collected a bunch of kubalahs. You know, that kubalahs are virolas. There are many species, many species in that area. We collected samples from a lot of species and asked the informants, well, is this one strong? Is this one strong?

What is their take on them? And they would evaluate them, look at them and taste them, says, yeah, esto es fuerte. This one not so fuerte.

And there was an almost perfect correlation when I got it to the lab between what they said was strong in the presence of these tryptamines. What they said wasn’t strong was largely devoid of the alkaloids. So that’s kind of a testament to, I guess, folk medicine. They don’t have gas chromatographs, but they have taste and smell and of course, the ultimate bioassay tool, which is the human body.

So anyway, that became half of my thesis, was evaluating these samples of ukuhé.

So, yeah, that was the story.

[00:26:12] John O´Connor: Dennis, was that your first, your very first time that you found and tried the ukuhé?

[00:26:18] Dennis McKenna: It was, yes, it was. But, you know, when Terrence and I went to La Chorrera the first time, we didn’t get it, you know, but then he actually went back to La Chorrera. There was a second trip that he made into La Chorrera after I’d come home, after we’d come home and I went back to college, to the University of Colorado, where I was still an undergraduate. I’ve taken a semester off. And I said, after all this crazy adventure and going crazy in the jungle and all that, I said, I just want to study science. I don’t want to. I want to get my feet on the ground, basically. Well, he was still totally into the myth. He was chasing the dragon and was convinced that we had almost done it. And so he and his girlfriend at the time, Kume, they went back to La Chorrera and they spent another six months there. And it was a very rough trip. They didn’t go on the trail. They went down to the base of, I think it’s Igar, Paraná, and then up to Arica.

And they stayed at Arica for several months because there was no boat coming by and it was apparently a mosquito ridden hell hole. But they finally did make it. And on the second trip, they found an informant who gave them one sample of ukuhé. And I was able to include that in my analysis, even though it was ten years older than the ones I collected.

[00:28:08] John O´Connor: And Dennis, was it a snuff? How was it prepared?

[00:28:11] Dennis McKenna: Well, no, that was the thing. It was not a snuff. Right. The virolas are made into snuffs by many tribes and the SAP is extracted and dried down and powdered, mixed with ash and. And used as a snuff. And the reason it’s effective as a snuff is that these tryptamines are not orally active.

And that was the whole thing about Ukuhé. They didn’t make a stuff out of it, they made a paste out of it, they boiled it down, but not to a powder. And then they mixed that with ashes and it became these little pastillas, these little pills that you would take.

And they said a sample of this paste, maybe the size of your thumb, was enough, and you would have a very rapid and very strong reaction. And we were interested in all that, because what had motivated us initially to go after this thing was that Terence and I were both obsessed with DMT.

And DMT is not orally active. And when you smoke it, it’s extremely short. It only lasts about 20 minutes. And we wanted to find something that we figured if we find it orally active for, it would last longer and then we’d be able to spend more time in this place. And we were working, I mean, we were working under a delusion, effectively, that this was really a portal to another dimension. I mean, we were anything but scientifically rigorous. And at the time it wasn’t understood that ayahuasca is actually an orally active form of DMT. The whole thing about the ayahuasca admixture plants, interaction with the monoamine oxidase inhibitors and all that, this was not understood in 1971 that the admixtures were even important.

So we went for this basically on the strength of this paper by Schultes, which was titled Virola as an orally active hallucinogen. So when we found this paper, we thought, this has got to be it, lets go there. And we did. We dropped everything and I dropped out of school and you know, Terrence was on the top at the time on the lamb from Interpol for hashish smuggling out of India, but he was hanging out in Canada. So we went there and we went on this crazy adventure.

[00:31:04] John O´Connor: Yeah, well I asked because in La Chorrera I met two shamans, mother and and her daughter, and shaman isn’t quite the right word. That’s not they. The Uitoto word is namurango, which means more like healer kind of. I don’t mean it in a pejorative sense, but kind of a bush doctor sort of, you know, healer and indigenous medicine and. But they did. I actually happen to have Schultes paper with me. I asked about Ukehé had that 1969 paper with its very beautiful drawing by HW Smith.

[00:31:48] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:31:48] John O´Connor: The daughter took the illustration. And she kind of took my pen and sketched and narrowed the leaves and kind of drew some serrations out. Just corrected that drawing and scratched out the snuff part. And they prepare it not as a pastilla. We didn’t see it prepared, but she said they prepared as a tea.

Almost like how you would prepare ayahuasca. Except there’s no admixture.

[00:32:20] Dennis McKenna: It could be prepared that way. Yeah.

[00:32:24] John O´Connor: She just said, oh, you know, it’s over there somewhere in the jungle. You know, it’s out in the jungle, kind of. But, um. But yeah, it was not. It was not a snuff. It was tea. So I thought that was fascinating.

[00:32:37] Dennis McKenna: That’s very interesting. Those folks. So were they.

But they were not at La Chorrera, and we were. Or maybe some of their older relatives were.

[00:32:51] John O´Connor: Well, as it happens, the husband. Um, so there’s some confusion about this. I’d love to be able to. To figure this out. I’m not sure if we will be able to. But the older woman, her husband was Busilio.

[00:33:05] Dennis McKenna: Busilio. You mentioned that to me. Yes.

[00:33:10] John O´Connor: Now, he spelled it differently. He spelled it with a u.

But he, you know, terrence mentions a Basilio in True Hallucinations, of course, who takes him in upriver to get some Ayahuasca.

[00:33:26] Dennis McKenna: Ayahuasca, Right.

[00:33:26] John O´Connor: And now this Busilio. He would have been. It could. He would have been about 21 at the time. He was married to this woman, this shaman woman. They would have been a young couple then. He claimed to remember you guys, but he had no kind of further memory beyond that. He didn’t remember any kind of river journey or being asked for ayahuasca or anything like that. Which, of course, they call yagé, not ayahuasca. There is a very kind of a tantalizing kind of potential point of connectivity there. I was never able to totally establish beyond that. If there was actually one to you guys? But they lived there then when you guys were there. In fact, their house would have been kind of just uphill from where you were. Kind of straight almost directly west. So kind of downhill from the mission. And then to the west, almost forming a kind of l shape between you guys. Where the knoll house was. The mission and their house.

So there was some cross paths there. But I don’t know if it’s possible to establish any kind of, you know, any narrative beyond that.

[00:34:34] Dennis McKenna: I think that that was probably the guy. I mean, his age would have been right. You know, he was about our age at the time. I was 20, you say he was 20. And I never met Basilio. But I do remember that Terence had talked to some people in the village, or it was the village, but around there about getting some ayahuasca. And then there was arrangements were made for him to go upriver with this person, Basilio, at Gitia. Either they went up there together and they gathered it, or Basilio brought it. But I remember we had it. And it came from somebody that lived there who went out to get it specifically for us. So that had to be the same guy.

[00:35:28] John O´Connor: Yeah.

[00:35:29] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

[00:35:30] John O´Connor: It seems like it. I have still have hope of kind of sorting this out. I’ll definitely let you know. I would love to kind of put a, you know, exclamation point on that in my book. So, um, but I’m not sure at this point. Did you guys ever encounter, um, you know, the drugs that are sort of the drugs of choice there that are, um, really part and parcel of the whole. Their whole way of life were coca and tobacco. Um, and they call Coca is Mambe. They don’t chew the leaves. They grind it into a powder. I’m telling you something you already know, I’m sure. But but that was a something that we encountered quite a bit was Mambe and tobacco. They have a whole Maloka set aside just for making mambe. And a great deal of time and energy is spent on that. And it’s very kind of serious spiritual implications. And it goes right to the heart of their origin stories and so on. And the whole Uitoto cosmology, did you guys ever encounter that? Was that part of the kind of lingua franca while you were there?

[00:36:34] Dennis McKenna: Well, yes, yes and no. I encountered it. We encountered it when we did the expedition to the Ampiaku.

Spent time in the Uitoto community there, and they were using mambe. And we watched how it was prepared. And it was a whole thing. You know, as you say, it was very important to them. We in some ways didn’t relate to it because we thought, well, you know, it’s coca. It’s coca. It’s no big deal. And we totally misunderstood how significant it was. Since then, I largely, thanks to Wade Davis, I’ve come to understand how important it is. I mean, he is really very interested in Mambe and uses it himself almost daily. And we’re actually in the process of organizing a forum on coca in Peru, hopefully later this year because, well, we’re getting off topic, but with his help, we’re going to have a symposium on coca that will address some of the policy issues around using coca as a medicine rather than the source of cocaine.

[00:37:52] John O´Connor: It’s actually illegal in Colombia still.

[00:37:55] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:37:56] John O´Connor: But Wade.

[00:37:57] Dennis McKenna: Yes.

[00:37:58] John O´Connor: Is selectively enforced, as Wade says in his book.

[00:38:01] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. It’s a wonderful, it’s a wonderful thing. I chewed it a little bit. Well, you don’t exactly chew Mambe, but I tried it a few times when I was on the, on the putumayo, and it was interesting. I mean, it’s a very good thing, and it’s a great thing to start your morning off. You know, and, I mean, as a habitual coffee drinker, I use that, but it has its drawbacks, I think. I think mambe has a future if it could ever be legally. You know, it’s interesting.

[00:38:39] John O´Connor: I mean, it just has that, you have that sudden uptick in mood and almost a euphoric kind of feeling, but without this existential crash of cocaine. You know, it just has, it’s definitely an acquired taste, but it has this numbing feeling that just feels it is a little bit like caffeine in that you do feel it’s slightly euphoric, but again, you don’t crash in my experience.

[00:39:04] Dennis McKenna: Have you read Wade’s essay on Coca called The Divine Leaf of Immortality?

[00:39:11] John O´Connor: I haven’t, no.

[00:39:12] Dennis McKenna: Okay, I’ll link you to it. He presented it at our ESPD conference a couple of years ago, and he’s given the same talk many places. So it’s linked on our website. I’ll send you the link. One of the best presentations on coca I’ve ever seen.

[00:39:30] John O´Connor: Okay.

[00:39:31] Dennis McKenna: Really wonderful, wonderful presentation.

[00:39:37] John O´Connor: Did you ever, you never went back to La Chorrera, right? You just went the one time.

[00:39:42] Dennis McKenna: Never, I never went back.

[00:39:46] John O´Connor: Would you go again?

[00:39:46] Dennis McKenna: There’s flights that go there twice a week now. I mean, I always thought it would be impossible to go back, but in some sense, why go back? You know, because it’s not the same place in space or time. You know, it’s not this magical place anymore. It has a different kind of magic. I was amused by one of your photographs that you gave that show that says something like, me amour La Chorrera, all in rainbow colors. That was kind of neat.

[00:40:22] John O´Connor: Yeah.

[00:40:23] Dennis McKenna: We’ll put up some of your pictures on the podcast website, and we’ll add some of the ones I have from back in the day that one of our members made.

You probably looked at him in the book.

We’ve got some great pictures made by Sarah Hartley, who is one of our merry band. And it’ll be quite a contrast.

[00:40:50] John O´Connor: Yeah. You probably don’t want to go back again. That was one of Hemingway’s kind of big takeaways when he went back to Monte Casino, where he was injured during the war and just was disappointed. And same with Palermo. He just, you know, all of those, there’s this, the places that were so formative for him, he wanted to keep them kind of behind glass in a way and not have them too disturbed.

[00:41:21] Dennis McKenna: Can we go the same way? I feel that way somewhat about La Chorrera, the only reason that we might go back there. People keep coming and saying they want to make a movie about True Hallucinations and so on. Nobody’s actually come forward and said they have the resources and the funding and all that. So I tend to say, well, you know, when you, we can have that conversation when you’re ready to do it, but I don’t really want to. In some ways, I think it should remain a myth, basically, because that’s what it is.

[00:42:00] John O´Connor: Yeah.

Can I ask Dennis,

So when you guys went, you were, I mean, you were 20. You were 20, Terrence was 24.

And, you know, as you had mentioned, Terrence was basically on the run for importing hash to Colorado. Your mom had recently passed away.

[00:42:23] Dennis McKenna: Yes.

[00:42:24] John O´Connor: And you had, you know, you guys were kind of children of the sixties, of the counterculture. So you have, you have all of this kind of weight of expectation, all this grief bearing down on you as well.

And the word you used earlier was, I think you said project or projection. And I wondered how much of all that had kind of prepared you or primed you to have the experience that you guys had. You talk a little bit about this in the book, especially in connection to the passing of your mom, who tragically passed away quite young.

And so I just was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, about your kind of expectations, where you came from or what you expected to find there.

[00:43:11] Dennis McKenna: Well, yes. I mean, actually, it was a huge part of the experience, I think. I think that, yes, our mother had passed away the previous October. We were both, of course, very, we were grieving still for her. And because my brother was not able to come into the country at the time when she was on her deathbed, he was desperately trying to get from Victoria to Grand Juntion, Colorado, where she was in the hospital.

But we were afraid.

Not knowing the realities of law, we thought that he would. I mean, he was an international fugitive. He was wanted by Interpol. What does that mean in the actual context? They’re not tracking his every move. He probably could have come in and seen her and left without any problem because he traveled all over the place after the bust of a false passport on a passport that he’d gotten from a friend in Japan, but he didn’t.

And he was trying to get to see her at that time, and we were desperately trying. And when she died, I was with my dad at the hospital, and we were trying to reach Terence by, you know, there were, like, there were no cell phones. There was nothing like that. There was no way to reach him. But we were trying to call the airline to tell them to, you know, tell him not to get on the plane, or if he’s on the plane, get off the plane, don’t come, you know, and, of course, if this has happened in the post 911 era, it would have instantly been suspicious, and there’d been a lot of scrutiny. At that time, nobody thought about it. But at the end of the day, he ended up not coming. And so when we went to La Chorrera, we were carrying this burden of grief, and I think we both had a lot of guilt about how, what disappointed children we must have been, you know, to my mom and my dad, because it was the whole drug thing. And, you know, you’re just hippies. You’re just irresponsible drug addicts. And they completely didn’t understand about psychedelics, and they were not receptive to it. And so when we went to La Chorrera and did this whole experiment, a lot of it did have to do, at least in my mind, that it was some kind of redemption, that we were going to save our mother, even if we had to tear space time apart in order to do it. It was a big dynamic. I think it was not exactly articulated as part of the experimental protocol, but there was the idea that if we succeeded with this utterly mad goal, well, we would be effectively. We´d have all kinds of power at our. At our disposal. We’d be masters of time and space and bringing back my mom, no problem.

And I really think that that was a big part of it. I mean, this is not something that I would. Well, it’s been so long, I don’t really mind sharing it, but that was a part of this grand delusion, effectively, that we were immersed in. It was certainly a part of the idea that if we can do this, we can heal these wounds in our family, and we can bring our sainted mother back, and it will all be good. It will be a healing experience, and that was a big if, unarticulated part of it. That was a big part of it, yeah.

[00:47:28] John O´Connor: You think Terence felt similarly?

[00:47:31] Dennis McKenna: Absolutely. Even more so. I mean, because he was the bigger disappointment. I was the good brother. He was the bad brother. He was the one that led me down all the. All the wrong paths, you know?

[00:47:45] John O´Connor: Yeah.

[00:47:46] Dennis McKenna: Which I’m, of course, extremely grateful because, you know, he was the leader. You’ve read my book. He was the one that. He was the pioneer of a certain case, and a lot of our lives were in the dynamic of the family. I was the younger brother, and I was the less.

I don’t know what the term is. The less I was always at the role of trying to lessen some of the emotional impacts that his. That his selfishness created in our family, you know? So that was definitely a big part of it.

[00:48:36] John O´Connor: You guys had. You write a lot about your early childhood in the book. You write very well of it.

[00:48:44] John O´Connor: You and Terence had a difficult relationship from the very beginning. A lot of kind of tension and combativeness. And some sounds like just outright kind of sadomasochism on his part. And Sado, my guess. Yeah.

Was, I think you referred to it elsewhere as, like, the brother, saying, you guys had this tension even later on in the Rio Ampicayo, the river of poisons. Was that something that.

Can you speak a little bit about that? Was that something that was ever kind of out in the open and that you ever attempted to resolve, or was it always just kind of permeating beneath the surface or.

[00:49:24] Dennis McKenna: Well, it went through phases, you know? Of course, when we were younger, you know, when I was younger, and he was. When he was still living at home, he left home early to finish his high school in California. But when he was there, there was a lot of sibling rivalry, you know, and a lot of. And he was.

He was mean, you know. But he was very creative about his meanness, you know, and took a great deal of pleasure in making me miserable. But then, you know, when he left for California, our relationship improved because I didn’t see him so much, and we were corresponding. I’d see him at Christmas and in the summertime and so I was just free to pursue my own thing. And I was passionate about astrophysics and cosmology at the time. That’s what I wanted to get into. And at some point Terence kind of realized, your little brother is not such a bad guy, and he’s actually kind of interesting.

So we discovered some mutual interests and then one of which was science fiction, which we shared from early days, and then when he got into psychedelics, went to Berkeley and took LSD for the first time, discovered DMT, started hanging out with a lot of weird people who, some of whom I’m still in touch with, you know, in this psychedelic realm. And we were, we were coming at psychedelics not from a particularly an indigenous standpoint or even a ritual or spiritual standpoint. We were coming at it as science fiction geeks, you know, and our experiences with DMT made us think that it was actually a portal to another dimension.

That was our model, and maybe it is in some ways, but that was our model, and we wanted to use these drugs to go there.

That is very much part of the La Chorrera dynamic.

We did all that and we did La Chorrera and so on. And the interesting thing is, after the experiment, like I said before, I wanted to kind of get back into normal reality and get my feet on the ground. That’s why I went back and started studying harder sciences, because one of the things that came up, I studied anthropology and comparative religions and all that before, but I wanted to study botany and chemistry and physics, these sort of things. And part of it, the dynamic there was that after these experiments, Terence asserted that science could never explain this and we need to reject science. And my response was, well, we don’t know that science can’t explain it because we’re not scientists.

And we were deluding ourselves that we were scientists, but we really weren’t scientists. And I thought, if you want to reject science, that’s fine, but learn what science is and how to do it first. So that became kind of my stance, Terence. I mean, we went to La Chorrera, we had this experience, and I went into a psychotic state for two weeks or so. Eventually I came back and it was simultaneous, it was what the psychologists call a folie à deux, the folly of two. Terence was in an altered state, which was quite the opposite of mine.

He was hyper focused on this world and hyper focused on looking after me, and I was busy cruising the cosmos.

But I eventually came down and in some sense he never did. In a certain way he persisted in this understanding, these ideas about the time wave, which the core of those ideas came out of the experience at La Chorrera.

And he created this whole mathematical construction based on the I Ching, and we wrote the Invisible Landscapes together, which presented that.

And in some ways, so he didn’t really leave the delusion behind.

He managed to persist in the delusion and convince a whole lot of people that he was right.

After the experiment, that was the thing, he said. We were basically right. We were just wrong about when this hyperdimensional object would appear.

Other than that, we did it all right.

So it became a lot about predicting when this thing was going to show up, when would the stone condense?

And the time for the condensation of that stone eventually got pushed back to December 21st 2012.

That’s when it’s going to happen. That’s when the singularity will manifest based on the time wave. Well, of course it didn’t happen, but that was sort of because of that. We’re all still here to talk about it.

[00:55:30] John O´Connor: But the experiment kind of led you towards science, but it led Terence. Although he had some scientific training, it led him in the opposite direction, basically.

[00:55:42] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

He had more or less rejected science, and so he became more of a philosopher, a public commentator, and a raconteur, and all the things that his career was about.

And then later on, when we discovered. When I discovered, actually, I mean, I have to take credit for it, because it does belong to me. I discovered how to grow the mushrooms in 1975, and it wasn’t rocket science. I basically discovered this paper published in Mycologia by a researcher from the USDA, how to grow.

It was about how to grow Agaricus bisporus mushrooms in mason jars on sterilized grain, and mostly for small amounts, for genetic research and so on. Well, I tried it with the spores that we had brought from La Chorrera, and behold, it worked. And it worked very well. And so that was another inflection point. We had this symbiotic teacher, which we found in La Chorrera back in our lives again, and that persisted for many years and really continues in some ways.

And then much of what Terence talked about became about talking about the mushroom. He was totally convinced, that, based on what had happened at La Chorrera, he was convinced that it was either the mushrooms or some kind of extra dimensional or hyperdimensional intelligence that was communicating through the mushrooms and downloading information. Well, of course, mushrooms do download information.

Can’t really postulate that it’s a hyperdimensional thing.

This is a conversation that persists a lot of talk these days in psychedelic circles about the DMT entities. These supposedly non-human intelligences that you encounter, are they real or not? Well, they are real because you experience them. But are they from another dimension or from the unconscious? I don’t think we could really answer that. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more curmudgeonly and reductionist. And I tend to say these are products of the imagination.

That doesn’t mean that it does not invalidate them. The experiences are real. They do not come from another dimension.

[00:58:39] John O´Connor: Dennis, as far as you know, were you the first one? I’ve heard this stated before, and I feel like it’s unfact checkable. But are you the first one to figure out how to grow psilocybin mushrooms in the United States? And that 1975, was that you or was it done before?

[00:58:58] Dennis McKenna: We know I was not the first one. There were a lot of people working on this at the time. And actually the whole methodology had been developed. When Hoffman was working on growing the mushrooms, they managed to grow them in the laboratory, and there were other people, some of whom were our friends, were trying to figure out how to grow them at the time. What Terence and I did was we found this very simple method that just about anybody could do. And we wrote the book. We wrote this psilocybin magic mushroom growers guide under pseudonyms that had a societal impact.

That was something that was accessible to everybody. We published, it was no more than the little pamphlet, really, but we published it, and a lot of people got their hands on it. And then essentially we put the tools into the hands of many people to grow these things. And I think that’s had a larger impact on society because it made this non toxic, absolutely profound psychedelic available to anybody with a little patience and a spare basement if they wanted to try it. And many thousands of people did. And I think in some ways it set the stage for the receptivity to mushrooms that we’re seeing now with the so-called psychedelic revolution. Because mushrooms were widely available from the mid seventies if you knew where to go or if you knew how to grow it.

[01:00:55] John O´Connor: And before that, they were kind of a novelty item, right?

I mean, you could get LSD, but it was hard, or mescaline, but harder to come by were magic mushrooms. You guys had never tried them before La Chorrera, I believe, right? Or before Florencia.

[01:01:09] Dennis McKenna: Right. We tried them on the way into La Chorrera once at Florencia. I didn’t try them then. There was only one or two specimens that we stumbled across, and Terence ate those.

And then at Puerto Leguízamo, again, we found them, and then we did. Then we took them, and that was my first experience with the mushrooms. And these were probably fairly low doses, and they were great. I mean, they were a lot of fun, and they were very profound in a certain sense. I mean, they stimulate ideas. I don’t know if you’ve had psilocybin mushrooms, but if you have, you know how they can be.

They can be extremely profound and spiritual, mystical experiences and all that. At lower doses, though, they’re just like cognitive stimulators. They just stimulate ideas and speaking.

They sort of activate this poetic insight ability in people. Like they say about Maria Sabina, I don’t know if you’ve read the essay called The Mushrooms of Language?

[01:02:37] John O´Connor: I thought you were going to say Gordon Wassom article, but no, I haven’t. The mushrooms of Language.

[01:02:42] Dennis McKenna: Mushrooms of Language was an essay in an anthology, I think, edited by Peter first, Hallucinogens and Culture, which was appearing about that time.

[01:02:57] John O´Connor: Dennis, this is going back a ways, but can I ask you to talk a little bit about your Catholicism? That was a fairly big deal for mom and dad, but early point of rebellion for you and Terence, as far as I could tell, was that, you know, like a kind of a big deal in your household, you know, and another kind of point of tension between you and your parents?

[01:03:25] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, we were. We were both, Terence and I, I think, pretty vigorously rejected Catholicism at the time when many people do, you know, adolescence, puberty, you know, I mean, I was like a good dogon for a long time. I really believed, and I was an altar boy, am I, you know, all of those things.

But eventually I just. It just didn’t ring true for me at all. And I came to the realization that, you know, it’s a fairy story, and I rejected it. And that wa a point of tension to some degree in our family, but by that time, there were already so many other terrible things we were guilty of that was. That was kind of lost in the shuffle, you know?

[01:04:31] John O´Connor: Yeah. Was Terence the kind of guiding hand that led you to psychedelics, or would you have gotten there on your own, do you think?

[01:04:37] Dennis McKenna: Given the culture of the time, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten there on my own, yeah. I mean, it was pervasive, but not in the same way.

A lot of people kind of encountered psychedelics because it was a popular thing and everybody was doing it and so on. But for us, it was more serious because of our delusional beliefs about it, basically because of our beliefs that what it was, we approached it somewhat differently.

It was not casual or recreational for us, but it was curiosity is what drove us to it. Curiosity drives a lot of people to investigate a lot of things they probably shouldn’t. But then if nobody did it, we would know a lot less than we know. So, just like that.

[01:05:40] John O´Connor: I asked because I’m curious. I wanted to ask how exactly you guys imbibe the counterculture of the sixties and seventies? Was it from the predominantly the sex, drugs, and rock and roll side of things, or was it from the SDS, weatherman, black panthers were going to have a revolution kind of thing, or was it kind of somewhere in the middle, or how would you place it, your drug use on that?

[01:06:07] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I mean, we were, you know, aware of the politics and all that, and we were demonstrated against the war and all of those things. We were definitely lefty. We were somewhat into the counterculture.

Terence, possibly more than I was, because he went to, you know, he left for California and I think 1962, and then he went to Berkeley, and it was all happening. I went to visit him in Berkeley in 1967, which was the summer of love.

All the hippies were coming to San Francisco.

So we were into it in that sense. We were part of this cultural shift. But for myself and I think for Terence to a certain extent, I think we also kept a certain distance from it.

We fancied ourselves intellectuals, and maybe we were intellectuals in a certain sense. The counterculture was not particularly intellectual. I mean, there were intellectuals, but there wasn’t.

I mean, there was Timothy Leary as a cultural icon and kind of the propagator of the wisdom or the promoter of psychedelics.

It took a while for us to really find other people that were not quite so flamboyant, but maybe more serious people like Schultes, for example, and Albert Hoffman and some of those people. So there was that element that a lot of countercultural hippies, deeply immersed countercultural hippies didn’t really know about or think about or care about. So there was this element of, I guess in some ways we thought of ourselves as not quite part of the tribe.

And even to this day, I would have to say I don’t think of myself as a tribalist. I’m not so immersed. For example, I should be ashamed to admit this, but for example, I’ve never been to Burning Man.

I have no intention of going to Burning Man.

[01:08:41] John O´Connor: Yeah, that makes two of us.

[01:08:44] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, but then it’s like, that’s almost a badge of shame. Of course, burning was now morphed into basically a corporate kind of event. It doesn’t have, you know, it had its roots in the counterculture, but now it’s been co-opted by the tech bros and all that. I have no interest in any of that.

[01:09:08] John O´Connor: You know, Dennis, did you guys like, was quote unquote revolution? Was it on your mind when you went to La Chorrera, however you want to take that word? Was that something that kind of was in the works or the political revolution? Cultural revolution, yeah, however you wanted.

[01:09:27] Dennis McKenna: I think a big motivator when we went to La Chorrera was that we given up on all that, kind of give it up on political revolution as an answer to the problems that we were facing or even the cultural revolution. That was why we thought, again, if this thing with DMT, if what we thought was true of DMT, that will change everything and it will make all of this irrelevant because it’s going to change the very nature of ontology.

And so that was a big motivator. We thought, this is more important. If this is really a way to connect with some other dimension, then that’s far more important than all this political movement and the cultural movements. And of course, well actually we don’t know really what it is. But I mean, I don’t think of psychedelics in that way. I do think that psychedelics have, you know, obviously, as we’ve seen in the last decade or so, they have great therapeutic potential.

I think that they are kind of, they are symbiotic partners with our species, mushrooms and all of these things. Indigenous people always have regarded them that way.

I think the indigenous traditions, the indigenous knowledge traditions of using these things is the reflection of thousands of years of cultural history. They probably have it more or less right, but I’m not indigenous. You’re not indigenous. We can’t just aid these practices, but we can appreciate them and we can borrow from them and we can acknowledge that ancestral wisdom. I think that is the right way to approach these substances. I’m all for science. I think that science should investigate these things. I don’t agree with people that think it all has to be. If you. They have to be used in a clinical context. I mean, if you’re using them for specific medical purposes, you use them in a clinical context. But these substances can benefit the well, you know, you do not have to be have a mental disorder or a mental problem to benefit from them because they’re learning tools and they’re ways to explore consciousness and that’s what they’re used for. And then there are people who, the whole people that think that the DMT entities are out there or the psychedelic, the machine elves and so on. I think my brother coined the term machine elf. With respect to DMT, I have to tell you, I’ve never seen a machine elf.

I’ve seen lots of things, but not.

[01:12:56] John O´Connor: That’s hilarious. Yeah, there’s an awful lot of that right now.

In the psychedelic renaissance, I think we were both at the psychedelic science conference last June.

There was a lot of, I mean, I thought, you know, I wanted to talk to you about your thoughts on that. You sort of just answered my question. But there was a lot of, you know, good. Good stuff there. I thought, like good science and some sane people, but, you know, very sane, kind of smart, accomplished people, but also a lot of, in my experience, a lot of kind of wild and unsubstantiated claims being made about these drugs and their potential uses.

But what do you think? What do you think Terence would have made of all that? If you were alive today and doddering around the psychedelic science conference in Denver last summer? What do you think his impression would have been?

[01:13:54] Dennis McKenna: Well, I think his impression would have been similar to mine. Pleased in some ways and appalled in other ways.

I think we’d both be happy that psychedelics are getting recognized for the important medicines that they are, for the important substances that they are, and that’s good. That’s long overdue. I mean, it’s good. They should never be prohibited. That was completely wrong headed.

But I think we’d be. I mean, I know I have reservations about the corporatization of psychedelics and the, you know, the venture capitalists have jumped on all this and want to make billions of dollars and they want to develop new compounds that they can patent which are actually not better than the natural compounds, their sole virtue being that they are patentable. And now there are certain segments of the research, corporate research community that are trying to develop non psychedelic psychedelics, which is just, to my mind, completely wrong headed with a complete misunderstanding of what psychedelics do. I do not think you can separate the experience from the therapeutic effect. You can’t make a compound that has no perceivable psychological effect and yet will reset your receptor systems and suddenly cure your trauma or your intractable depression or so on. You have to have the experience in order to do that, that’s an intrinsic part of the therapeutic effect. And for that, you have to have the right set and setting. Leary was right about that. Set and Setting is more as important as the medicine. You know, I mean, to take a psychedelic, you’ve got really four variables. You’ve got the medicine, whatever it might be. You’ve got the dose, you’ve got the, you know, you have the setting and the set. The setting and the set. Well, the setting has to be compatible with having the experience.

The set is in some ways the most important element because the set is what you bring to it. The set is you.

It’s not just your expectations or your intention. It’s everything, your whole life experience that you bring to this occasion of this intensely personal encounter with a part of yourself that’s not normally accessible.

And so set, setting, dose, and medicine, all of these things are variables that are important, and I think they’re all essential for any kind of therapeutic or spiritually satisfying experience.

[01:17:08] John O´Connor: Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of people there at that conference who were dismayed by the rush to cash in on these plants. And there was some, you know, that almost half of that whole top part of the conference all was taken up by different companies looking to, some of them fairly benign, but maybe others arguably not so. But yeah, it’d be interesting to see where things go in the next few years.

But I did want to just ask really quickly, even maybe painful to discuss, but about Terence’s death, I mean, you write quite beautifully about it in the book, but I’ve sort of heard that there are these kind of rumors passed around about Terence his last days and at the very end, the last two days before he died that he had this kind of healing moment that he had not, I think, touched. This is what I’ve heard. So please forgive me if I’m totally off base here, but that he´d more or less forswore psychedelics for the better part of a decade. He had this bad trip and then kind of forsook them, and then. But before he died, he had this kind of. What I’ve been told was this quote unquote, healing moment.

Is that your recollection of things? Do you have anything to kind of, any clarification there?

[01:18:33] Dennis McKenna: Well, he had forsworn psychedelics for almost a decade when he was in the latter stages of his life. We, my friend Eduardo Luna and myself, but Eduardo, work closely, close friends of Terence’s. We tried to urge Terence to do psychedelic therapy. To take at least a moderate amount of psilocybin, we had access to some pure psilocybin.

I was afraid to give it to him in the state. Ayahuasca. I didn’t want to. I was afraid it might be too stressful on his body.

He took low doses, but he was not really with the program at that point, and so I didn’t press it. He was not able to have a profound psychedelic experience close to his death, or if he did, it wasn’t with me, and I don’t think it was. You know, he was. 

He was just reluctant to do it.

[01:19:41] John O´Connor: Yeah. And did he suspect that his drug use had anything to do with his. I’ve read that also he suspected his drug use had something to do with his tumor.

[01:19:52] John O´Connor: Is that right?

[01:19:54] Dennis McKenna: His drug use had to do with tumor?

[01:19:57] John O´Connor: He suspected it was related.

[01:20:03] Dennis McKenna: I don’t think so.

He never articulated that to me. Or it may have come up, but even his oncologist, when it came up, said, it has nothing to do with your psychedelic use. It’s something that happens to people. You happen to be one of those people, you know, that fate came along and tapped you on the shoulder and said, it’s your time. You know, I think that’s exactly right. I don’t think it had to do with his use of psychedelics at all.

[01:20:40] John O´Connor: Yeah.

[01:20:44] John O´Connor: My wife is a doctor, and she said pretty much the same thing. That’s not how that works. But I was just curious to know whether Terence kind of how much he believed that or not at all, it sounds like.

[01:20:57] Dennis McKenna: I don’t think so. I don’t think he believed that.

[01:21:00] John O´Connor: Last question, Dennis, and maybe a weird one, but was the word. This is new book by Mike J. Now called Psychonauts. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but he really parses that length, the whole history of psychedelic drug use. And that word in particular. Was that a word, psychonaut? That was on your guys’ lips when you went to La Chorrera?

[01:21:19] Dennis McKenna: No, no. That’s a neologism. I think that’s a pretty recent term. Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s. I guess it’s a good term. I mean. Yeah. The idea that the world of the unconscious, it is a universe, and these are chemical starships, and we can travel in. Into that universe. That’s one way of looking at it. Psychonauts. I don’t know.

It’s kind of a, it’s kind of a charge term, you know. It’s kind of a macho assertion of a certain bravery that really. I think these experiences should be approached with humility, you know? And I think we need to realize this. Ayahuasca very often reminds me, remember how little you know. People say, what have you learned from all these years of taking psychedelics?

I’ve learned how little I know.

[01:22:23] John O´Connor: Yeah.

[01:22:24] Dennis McKenna: You know.

[01:22:26] John O´Connor: Thank you so much Dennis for speaking with me. I really appreciate it. It’s been terrific.

[01:22:30] Dennis McKenna: It’s been a wonderful conversation, John. I hope we can revisit it. Let me know when your book is coming out of and back on. I’m so appreciative. This did not go where I thought it was going to go. It looks much better place. 

[01:22:46] John O´Connor: Oh, good. Great. I’m glad to hear it. Well, thank you, Dennis.

[01:22:48] Dennis McKenna: Enjoy your afternoon. We’ll talk soon.

[01:22:51] John O´Connor: All right. Thanks, Dennis. Take Care.

[01:22:53] Dennis McKenna: Bye bye.

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