Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna

[00:00:13] Intro: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Nice to see you all again and nice to invite our attendees.

I’m very happy that we’re able to do this. It’s been a kind of last minute thing. We’ve had some glitches.

It always happens at the least convenient times, it seems like. So anyway, here we are and we’re involved for some excellent discussions, conversations today.

So I want to remind people I’m going to share my screen for a minute and I hope I’m going to share it. Let’s see.

Yeah, I wanted to.

Show.

[00:01:20] Bruce Damer: Hang on.

[00:01:20] Dennis McKenna: Well, maybe I won’t share that. I will just introduce everyone here, but you can. 

You can look at the invitation on the web and you can see everyone. So in the upper left there is Dan Levy, Terence’s former editor, and I’m on the right. And Tama Starr is in the middle left, Lorenzo Hagerty.

[00:01:56] Dennis McKenna: I have to delete myself as a panelist, otherwise invite. Time to. R.U. Sirius And what about Bruce? Is he here?

[00:02:08] Graham St John: I don’t see Bruce yet.

[00:02:11] Dennis McKenna: Pill, can you text Bruce and find out where he is or email him or something?

[00:02:24] Dan Levy: Hey, everybody.

[00:02:25] Dan Levy: It’s great to see you.

[00:02:27] Dennis McKenna: Yes, good to see you. Of course.

[00:02:29] Dan Levy: I’ve been thinking a lot about Terence, as you probably have been too.

[00:02:35] Dennis McKenna: So I thought what we can do is we’re getting some participants here.

So I thought I would just.

I have some slides to show, and by way of introducing the topic, I was going to show those and then invite everyone to come in and introduce themselves and talk for a few minutes about their relationship with Terence and what has brought us to this historic occasion.

And then we’ll have a conversation, and then Graham will step in here at some point and be the moderator. So if that sounds like a good idea, we’ll. We’ll go with that.

Everyone down with that?

[00:03:29] Graham St John: Yes, I think that sounds like a fine idea, Dennis. Thank you.

[00:03:33] Dennis McKenna: Okay, just as a way of setting context.

Let me see.

I have to.

Hang on, let me find that file. First of all.

[00:03:51] Tama Starr: You’Ve got a lot of files there, Dennis.

You got a lot of files.

[00:03:56] Dan Levy: Geez, Dennis.

[00:03:58] Dennis McKenna: A lot of buzz.

[00:04:00] Tama Starr: Files.

[00:04:00] Bruce Damer: Files.

[00:04:01] Dennis McKenna: Oh, yes. Well, I do.

Okay, this is what I wanted to show here just.

Now. Just as a way of kind of setting the context here.

So this is the preface. This is the frontispiece for my book, the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which is, until Graham wrote his. This was pretty much the reference on Terence’s life and our Shared life. But Graham’s book has definitely taken it to the next step. So this is the original Screaming Abyss, the black canyon of the Gunnison, a fairly recent photograph. Terence and I used to visit this in our childhood many times. Here’s the main street of Paonia, Colorado, a bucolic western Colorado town that produced some of the strangest people I’ve ever encountered.

So that’s something. These are just a couple friends of mine that were good friends back in the day. Robert Peek and Larry Beasley. I’m still in touch with Larry Beasley. Robert passed away, unfortunately, a few years ago.

This is my mother and my dad before Terry and Denny showed up.

This is my mom in 1955.

And if you’ve read the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss or Graham’s book, you know what a pivotal figure my mother was in both Terence of my life and here we are.

Some may say the spawn was Satan, but this was at a much earlier age, obviously, but you could still see that Terence has that wild light in his eyes.

This is a little earlier, a little later in our awkward teenage years.

And this is my mom’s at my father’s and Terence’s grave in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Paonia. And then this is Terence, this iconic photo of Terence in the Amazon with his butterfly lamp.

And they’re on our way to La Chorrera in that. And then here we are at La Chorrera, having just arrived along the trail from El Encanto.

A four day nightmarish experience that somehow we did make it.

And we were looking for this. We were looking for Varola, this mysterious drug called Ukuhe, an orally active form of dmt.

And what we ended up finding, and which quickly took over our lives, was this Psilocybe cubensis, the pantropical psilocybin mushrooms, which were everywhere in the pasture at La Chorrera.

So it quickly rearranged our priorities.

Eventually we published about this.

You’re all familiar probably with this book.

And then flash forward to 1981, when I returned to Peru in 1981 as a graduate student to carry out my ethnobotanical fieldwork.

And we went effectively back to the same place. We went up the real Ampayacu, which was sort of the site of the diaspora of the Witoto people. La Chorrera is up here.

This is what is loosely described as the devil’s paradise, which it certainly was. It was no paradise. I can tell you that one of the people that accompanied us on that trip, or maybe I should say accompaniment, we accompanied him was Wade Davis. We happened to run into him in Iquitos, and he joined our expedition and we went to the Ampiaco in search again of ukuhe, this orally active varola preparation, which we had not really succeeded in finding at La Chererea. Terence joined our expedition for part of the time.

This is him standing under the kubala tree. They were called kubalas.

And then on his last day, he was furiously packing these seeds from Varola, getting ready to take them back to Hawaii.

And then Terence started this career, which you’re all familiar with and which is perhaps, probably why you’re here, had brought him and his ideas to the world.

And this is a picture of Terence, Kat, Fin and Clea, their son and daughter, at their home in Hawaii on the Big Island. This was about 1985.

And here in 1999, as you know, Terence came down with glioblastoma.

And he came down. He was diagnosed in May of 1999, and he didn’t last. He did not live for a year after that. This was taken in the summer of 1999 when I came out to join him and his girlfriend Christy, between us there, and my aunt Amelia, my father’s oldest sister, who was a nun, but who was a very remarkable person and one of a few people that could actually hold her own with Terence, both intellectually and in argument. So this is from the balcony of Terence’s house in Hawaii.

And this is Terence at the volcano in Hawaii.

So this is just a way to kind of introduce the con. The con. The introduce the concept and talk about tariffs. And I, you know, Terence, well, I grew up with Terence, so I’m the only person that was there.

He was actually there before I was because he was four years older than me and being the little brother. Hi, Bruce.

I was wondering if you were going to come on. Thank you.

Good to see you. Everybody’s here now, Terence.

Those of you who are familiar with Terence must realize how strange it must have been to be his little brother, because we had all these dynamics that go on between siblings and yet.

And Terence was the trailblazer and I was just kind of the four year younger brother kind of tagging along.

And then eventually we became much closer. Actually, we became closer after he left home because I had my own room and he wasn’t around to torture me anymore. So we became more like intellectual colleagues. That brother dynamic changed, but we were always brothers and that always persisted. And so we shared, as you know, many of these strange Adventures. But certainly Terence was the trailblazer and I think the world.

I don’t know really what to say because he was such a complex and contradictory and incredible person.

And he would be the first to admit that, the first to acknowledge that that’s what he was. And so he’s rich material for a biography. And Graham has done justice to it, I believe.

And this incredibly complex person that changed the world in some ways and was a icon of the psychedelic movement and really kept the idea alive through the notion that psychedelics were something remarkable, something amazing. He kept that conversation going during the darkest days of the war on drugs.

It continued to be current with him. And he was a spokesman, but more than a spokesman. He was a practitioner. He was a stand up.

He was a stand up philosopher, as Graham has. Has pointed out. And he brought his philosophy, which was multifaceted, to the world.

He had an ability to spin out the craziest ideas in such a way that people actually could take them seriously. That was, I thought, one of the most remarkable things.

You know, for example, just as a trivial example, this idea that mushrooms, the psilocybin mushrooms, were from the stars, that they were extraterrestrial.

Well, no, they’re not. I mean, they fit far too neatly into the phylogeny of earthly life.

But it was a fascinating romantic concept. The content that they let you access, that they bring forward, may seem alien, but the mushrooms are not alien. The earthly biosphere is perfectly capable of originating these mushrooms and this beautiful molecule which has so many different types of effects, not just in humans.

Anyway, I probably talked enough and I should let some other people say something. I’m going to hand it over to Graham at this point and let other people share their thoughts.

[00:15:05] Graham St John: Well, yes, thank you, Dennis, for that introduction.

Well, I think that.

Well, perhaps I should introduce myself before we have everyone else briefly introduce themselves and talk about their relationship with Terence.

[00:15:25] R.U. Sirius: Yeah.

[00:15:26] Graham St John: So, as Dennis mentioned, for those of you who don’t know, I’ve recently published the book called Stranger the Hallucinatory life of Terence McKenna, which is, I suppose, the first serious biography of Terence.

And there it is.

And it was an epic production over 10 years.

And I suppose that, I mean, this is a book that layers the stories of more than 80 people into the narrative.

And I suppose the one overwhelming admonition that I had from dozens of people who I spoke to over the course of this project and countless others was that it better not suck.

And given that a project like this has a thousand ways of potentially sucking, there’s A lot of pressure on a biographer of Terence. And that’s natural given that it’s been 25 years since his passing and there really hasn’t been a serious attempt, other than, of course, Dennis’s memoir, which is obviously a great resource and was a really important resource for me in producing this biography.

But I suppose that my approach has been sort of a combination of Inspector Clusoe and Captain Willard chasing Kurtz up the river. But, you know, I’m ultimately no assassin. This is a sympathetic account, but a balanced, sympathetic account that, you know, is also sympathetic to the stories of dozens of people who related their stories for the first time and how Carrots was integrated into their lives. And we have today with us several folks who approach us from such a vast range of talents and input and who Terence had relations with in various ways over the course of his life.

And I should also say that I never met Terence.

And my introduction to Terence was essentially hearing his voice whispered into my ears in various states of discombobulation on dance floors worldwide in the context of Terence being sampled in psychedelic electronica.

And so I suppose my introduction to Terence was kind of novel in that respect and sort of removed from who he was as a person, because I was exposed, as most people are these days, over the last 25 years and before he even died, to this vast archive of recorded material that he left for us.

But that’s not necessarily his life as a stand up philosopher is one thing, but his personal life is another thing. And so I’ve had the great opportunity to chat with so many people, including those who are with us today. So perhaps we can start.

I can ask people to introduce themselves. I think I’ll go sort of chronologically. I mean, in terms of the year that Terence met folks and the year that you encountered. First encountered Terence.

So we’ve heard from Dennis, so I think the next person in line would probably be Thomas Starr.

Tama, hi.

[00:19:58] R.U. Sirius: Hi there.

[00:19:59] Graham St John: Could you tell us something about yourself and how you came to meet Thomas?

[00:20:06] Tama Starr: Well, I was a psychedelic yogi on Maui in the late 60s, and I met a lot of people who were. Might. Might. My caress was involved with Terence one way or another.

So when I finally met him in 1972, it was because we were connected by so many threads of shared friendships and lovers and ideas and this and that.

In those days before we had social media, we had connectors, there were people who seemed to know everybody.

And so that’s how Terence, who was, incidentally almost my birthday mate, he was just four days younger than me.

So we have a very similar horoscope, except he had Moon in Virgo. Despite his claims that he was a triple Scorpio. That was just sort of a dramatization on his part. But we met in 1972 and we stayed friends for the rest of his life. He would.

We would pull many all nighters in New York when he was in town on his psychedelic philosophy tours. And we argued a lot. I didn’t feel that enough people stood up to him and challenged his ideas. I’m sure there were many more besides me, but he had so many followers, I thought he deserved to have more interlocutors. So we had that. That kind of friendship.

In 1987, he invited me to be in his Living in the Imagination conference at Esalen, where I met more of his circle, including Ralph Abraham and Nina Wise.

And it just became one of those friendships when circles that just had ripple effects on people’s lives.

So it was a great privilege to know him and lots of fun and I loved the man. So I’m delighted to be here today.

The occasion of our meeting was that he appeared at my apartment to tell the story of La Chorrera, where he had just returned from after his great adventure with Dennis. Maybe it was his second trip because this was November of 1972. And I see by the list of attendees that one of the people who is listening in on this webcast today was at that event in 1972 and doubtless remembers that whole story because who could forget it? And when Graham came across that tape, he said, this may be the earliest recording of Terence.

So I was very pleased to contribute that little tiny piece of.

What do you call it, McKenna Yana, to this scholarship.

I later became a businesswoman. I ran the company that built neon signs in Times Square and lowered the ball on New Year’s Eve for 25 years.

Doubtless my background helped me be a better business person, among other things, of course.

And now I’m retired and I live on Maui and I am a full time writer.

I’ve published books and essays and op EDS and stories, and I am doing a novel in which Terence appears as himself.

So that’s my story.

Back to you, Graham.

[00:23:51] Graham St John: All right, thank you, Tama.

We will circle back to you because I’m sure others are intrigued about that novel. So we’ll come back to you.

So I think next in the chronology would be probably Dan Levy. Hello, Dan.

[00:24:12] Dan Levy: Hi, Graham, how are you?

[00:24:14] Dennis McKenna: Hello.

[00:24:14] Dan Levy: From the East Village in New York.

I’m a native Californian, I grew up in Los Angeles. I’ve lived in the Bay Area a couple of times. I still feel like I’m in California, but I’ve lived in New York City for 37 years, and I met Tama here.

I think it’s interesting that I’m the second oldest relationship with Terence, after Dennis, of course, but there’s a long number of years between when Thoma met Terence and I did. I first heard about Terence before I met him in a corporate meeting room with the president of Banana Republic and the creative director of Banana Republic, Mel and Patricia Ziegler. And I was working for them, and they were quite visionary for corporate executives. And they would entertain visitors. People would somehow they would hear about somebody, would let them know about somebody they really, really ought to meet, and they would come to the meeting. And one of them was a guy named Frederick Lehrman, who ran Nomad University. And Nomad University was a global concept that when there was enough interest for a group of people to call Nomad University to order, Nomad University would show up for them and something would happen. And he thought that Mel and Patricia should know about this. But they also mentioned a guy named Terence McKenna, who would, of course, be on the faculty of Nomad University, wherever it might be convened.

[00:26:07] Graham St John: And.

[00:26:09] Dan Levy: Okay, that was the last I heard. From that day, I was traveling back and forth a lot, from San Francisco, where the company was, to New York.

And at one point, I was in New York when Terence McKenna was hired by Banana Republic to be a Tama Starrt a global meeting of store managers of Banana Republic. So Mel and Patricia had decided that without really knowing what Terence was going to talk about, that they should convene people who worked in retail shops, in malls, in big cities all over the country, some in other countries. Terence spoke to them. And I only heard about this, but I didn’t hear it, but I heard that there was something about mushrooms. I was very psychedelic myself, and I filed that away.

And then a couple of years ago, a couple of years later, I was a book editor, and a friend of mine sent me a cover story from the LA Weekly, an interview that Terence did in 1988 that in about 10 pages was like.

It distilled what it turns out Terence had spent four decades already spinning out to his friends, in writing, in meetings, while getting high, while in a room full of people who were invited to somebody’s apartment in New York.

And in these 10 pages, I really basically got Terence’s Rap, including all the stuff that I totally agreed with and resonated with, like taking mushrooms in the dark and taking a heroic dose. I think that’s where I first saw that term being coined, was in that. Not coined, but that’s where I first saw it.

And that’s the way I like to trip, you know, I never really liked what, you know, idle chitchat. And it was too, too heavy anyway. What I really like to do was get really loaded in a dark room. And so when I saw what this guy was talking about, I filed it away again.

Then I became a book editor and I sought him out. And fortunately, Terence had recently been interviewed for Omni magazine by Howard Rheingold, who was a very close friend of mine from the well. I’m an early member of the well. And Howard drove me up to Terence’s house, where I met with Terence and Kat and Howard in the little loft upstairs where you would smoke a bowl and talk and where he had some of his books and nice rugs in this tiny little area that probably couldn’t have sat more than four people.

And that’s where my relationship with Terence began.

So we’ll talk more about all the stuff that happened afterwards, but I want to just say that I’m completely blown away and grateful to Graham for having made this book happen.

It’s so illuminating because I did not meet Terence until he was in his 40s.

And when I see the depth of the research and the letters and the willingness of people to talk about Terence and give you their stuff and their time, and Graham is. And I have talked about this a little bit since we met more recently, is that there’s all kinds of stuff. I was too suspicious of the process and the project to really shield. Some of my own protectiveness about some of the stuff that now that I read it in print, I realize Terence is really a fucking freak in all kinds of weds.

[00:30:04] Dennis McKenna: And.

[00:30:06] Dan Levy: You know, by the time I got him, he would have been getting his freak on for, you know, 40 some odd years.

And we had some really great times together in the last 11 years of his life. But I just.

In fact, about an hour ago, I saw an Instagram Post by Clea McKenna which has some video footage of Terence’s correspondence.

File cabinets after files after files read welds filled with handwritten letters to and from Terence.

And we have no idea what’s in there. And I’m very excited that this is all going to come out. Fascinating guy.

I’ll hand it back to you.

[00:30:49] Graham St John: Well, this is true.

My work is certainly not the last word on Terence McKenna. And as you mentioned, Clea having, you know, taking responsibility for Family Archives, is now overseeing an archival project that is, you know, quite fascinating in its scope and prospects. And I should point out that anyone who’s interested in donating to her project should go to Terence. I think it’s Terencemckenna.com and you can read all about that.

Now.

[00:31:29] Graham St John: You’ve also, when you’re talking about getting a freak on, I’ve realized that chronologically I’m out of step because. And this may have something to do with the fact that I spoke to. Are you. Kind of late in the process, but in fact, R.U. Sirius Comes in before Dan. And so I apologize about that. Are you.

And how are you?

[00:31:52] R.U. Sirius: I’m doing good, thank you.

Good to see everybody.

So I came out to Northern California in 1982 at 30 years old, with the intention of starting the neopsychedelic wave.

Moved out from Rochester, New York.

I guess I felt that two tendencies, New wave, punk, that sort of thing, and psychedelia, hadn’t fully met each other.

And also I was under the influence of the futurism of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

And Leary said the future was being created in California.

And if you were living east of the Rockies.

I don’t think he used the word Paleolithic slug, but that’s how I think of it. He said you were a Paleolithic slug and you better get out into the.

Into the future.

So.

So I did.

And one of the first things that happened when I got to California, when I got to the Bay Area, is I turned on the radio and there was this guy with a nasally voice talking about these interesting things, sounding very contemporary, sounding very postmodern, and talking about psilocybin and dmt, which I hadn’t had, but which sounded very alien, which met up with my interests in space at the time, because we were all going to live forever in space colonies or something like that, people might remember.

So there was terrorists saying all this interesting stuff.

And what John Lilly called Earth coincidence control must have been working overtime, because I was sitting in the living room of a relatively bland, Mill Valley sort of New Age household when there he was walking out into the garden with some of my housemates, who I refer to as Psychedelic Krishnas.

And there was that nasally voice and the guy with the curly hair.

And they went into their room. And it took me a while to work up my nerve, but I went and knocked on the door and came in and we smoked some of this way too strong pop that Terence had.

So I was in a state of delirium and. And so he handed me a baggie of mushrooms.

I believe it was six grams.

Take this on an empty stomach, go into your room and smoke this joint. Two hours later, burn out the lights and you’ll get there.

So that was my introduction to him.

And not that long thereafter, he helped me start a magazine called High Frontiers, which he contributed to, which became Reality Hackers, which he contributed to, which became Monda 2000, which he also contributed to, which he was sort of fired from as a columnist, but also came along as an interview subject with later on.

So, yeah, that was my introduction to him. I think some people say we contributed a lot to his career.

And he once made fun of me in High Frontiers for wanting to be like Andy Warhol. But we did contribute to his career. So there you go.

[00:36:12] Dan Levy: Great.

[00:36:12] Dennis McKenna: Thanks. Ayu.

Yeah.

[00:36:14] Graham St John: So this was back in. Was 82 or 83, that meeting that you had with him the first time you met him?

[00:36:20] R.U. Sirius: Yeah, 82. Yeah.

[00:36:22] Graham St John: Yeah. So I think next in our chronology is probably going to be Bruce.

[00:36:32] Dennis McKenna: Hi, Bruce.

[00:36:36] Bruce Damer: Hello, everyone.

[00:36:38] Dan Levy: Hi, Bruce.

[00:36:39] Dennis McKenna: I’m.

[00:36:40] Bruce Damer: I’m Bruce Damer. I’m a kind of like Terence, a dilettante of all kinds of science and technology and consciousness exploration. And in my current role, I’m an. What’s called an astrobiologist.

And I work on the question of how life began on the Earth about 4 billion years ago, doing chemical experiments next to bubbling hot springs.

And this leads me way back into the late 90s, when in 1997, a friend of ours was running a laboratory with big projection screens around a central kind of a booth at a company. And they were projecting a virtual world called Traveler. And Traveler had big heads that would lip sync voices.

And when we went into this. This sort of Siberium, there was Terence’s voice coming out of an avatar. Now, it was a recording, but it was the most ethereal, kind of strange thing.

And my friend said, you gotta meet this guy.

And he introduced us around sometime in 1997, and I had been hosting conferences on virtual worlds. I’d actually gotten together the whole community that was thinking of cyberspace not just as web pages with links, but as a space, a place where you had a human face, you had worlds built by users. And Terence, turned out it was. He was fascinated by this.

In fact, it was an invisible landscape built by code, by language. So this was fitting Right into his sort of philosophy or his approach to. To the construction of reality.

So we started having these dialogues. Sometimes he would be talking about me on the Art Bell show and we would talk about the work we were doing at Digital Space, which was my company at the time.

We finally got together in 1998. So this is really close to his end. He came here to Ancient Oaks Farm and I plopped him down in front of a big 24 inch monitor and put him into these virtual worlds.

And he came along.

His friends were joining were Finn, his son Finn, and Ralph Abraham, who I’d known for years in Santa Cruz.

And then we made a commitment that I would go to Hawaii and stay with him for a week at the house and we would try it from there.

So he called it the virtual alchemical pow wow.

And in February, so part of the deal was I would introduce him to cyberspace and see whether his fans and he could actually appear as an avatar in cyberspace for his fans so he didn’t have to get on all these jumbo jets and as he told me, fly to room, fly on jumbo jets from Hawaii to speak to rooms with. Full of. With 40 people.

Because the audiences were so sort of rarefied and specific in a lot of cases.

And he was getting tired actually of that.

So we tried to do this experiment on his satellite, on his dish, his high intensity military grade, which he, Sharon thought was very fun dish from the top of the house all the way to Kailua Kona, where he was getting like a 40 megabit connection to his hilltop, you know, this pyramid, this kind of hexagonal house, three story house.

And it was a fascinating week and it worked.

And what he had done prior as part of our deal was he would, he would gateway me into, into hyperspace.

So, like, R.U. Sirius I was provided through channels, a big bag of mushrooms.

Yeah. With the instruction to, you know, go out into the forest, into nature, which I did. And I took a heroic dose on, pretty much on my own with a friend about a quarter mile away in a hot spring. But I was just on my own in the Sierra Nevada and had that experience. And I was 36, 37 years old. So I, I had, I had studiously avoided these things because I had one of these strange, fragile eggshell minds, I think, sort of from an autism perspective. But it completely opened a whole new reality for me. And to this day, and one thing I’ll leave, leave you with is Terence. And I had just like with Dan and Tama, these late night conversations about everything from novelty and how the universe complexifies how it started.

A real geeky science, the future of humanity in space.

Tons of stuff that I was working on because I was starting to work for NASA at the time, doing mission simulation and design for them.

And it was fascinating because we raised several points one night. You know, how do things complexify for real from the chemical physics basis? How does information arise?

How do new things come into being?

And we talked a little bit about the philosopher’s stone. Now, this idea from alchemy that there was an object that could transform things, transmute them, and notably lead or base metals into gold or more valuable metals, but also in terms of Paracelsus and other thinkers at the time, animate dead matter, inanimate matter, into living world, the. The spirit of life.

And Terence passed, as you all know, here in. On April 3, 2000.

And we had one more event honoring this man, at least from the community standpoint, in September 1999 in Kailua Kona.

It was called Alchemical Arts. Was sort of, in some ways, a bit of a takeoff on the alchemical virtual powwow.

Perhaps there was a name that Ken Simington or Rob Montgomery came up with, I don’t know.

But that’s when most of us got to say goodbye, because we, you know, the prognosis wasn’t good for glioblastoma multiforme at the time, and Terence was bravely soldiering on, but that was sort of the. The end. And I realized, you know, he passed. Held a vigil here on the.

The night before Terence’s passing. On April 3rd in 2000, we held a vigil of the community here in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

And then about five years later, I woke up, you know, straight up in bed one night, I felt Terence’s presence.

And what blurted out in me was, hey, Terence, you left too soon. We’ve gotta ring you back.

And I contacted Lorenzo, who’s right below me, several windows down here.

I said, we gotta do something.

You know, Lorenzo, I think, had found an FTP folder of just a few digitized cassettes, you know, from some random person. And he was starting a podcast at the time, one of the very first podcasts.

And we started a campaign like, we’ve got to put Humpty Dumpty back together.

His voice needs to be heard. And his departure was so sudden. And the archives were kind of all over the place. And then the archives or the physical archives were destroyed by a fire in Pacific Grove.

I think a year after that.

And I said, gosh darn it, those machine elves are not going to have the last word. They’re not going to erase all the incriminating evidence.

We’re going to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again. So this campaign began of cassette tapes started arriving.

Ralph Abraham provided the trilogs, which were Motherlode. And they started to fuel the psychedelic Salon podcast. And many, many other people started contributing. And Lorenzo could cover this a little bit better than I can.

And we, we sought to bring Terence in a coherent fashion to the next generation by gifting all that material under Creative Commons license so people could use it and bring his voice back in a complete form.

I’ll just end this long diatribe by saying that the discussions we had in the late 90s led me to pursue a career in novelty, in the formation of novelty.

And in 2008 I started a PhD on the mathematical statistical way that the universe stacks up complexity and forms bonds between atoms. Did a two year simulation run to generate the formulas and then that led into my work with Dave Deamer at UC Santa Cruz on the hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life using wet dry cycling in hot spring settings at which were informed by an Ayahuasca vision.

No surprise. So I brought my science to psychedelic space to test it and develop new ideas, which led to breakthroughs both in the science in the lab, but also in chemistries in all over the world, from Kamchatka in Russia to Rotorua and Yellowstone national park, where we got protocells to form in little slide trays containing RNA polymers. So it was a huge breakthrough.

And I sort of trace back these conversations, like the questions Terence asked about the philosopher’s stone, the transmuting medium, or how does the universe complexify and bring things, novel things, into being, to that night of that conversation. And I dearly wish he was around today that I could, you know, report the lot of it to him, plus the shape and how psychedelics have played a role in this unraveling of this mystery of how novelty emerges.

So I think I’ll leave it at that.

[00:47:20] Graham St John: Thank you.

[00:47:20] Dennis McKenna: Bruce.

[00:47:22] Graham St John: Yes, I should say that you have done a significant job in assisting preserving Terence’s legacy. And you’ve provided a nice segue here to Lorenzo, who’s been doing that very thing.

Hello, Lorenzo.

[00:47:44] Lorenzo Hagerty: Hey, it’s so nice to see you in person, more or less, Graham, after all the emails exchanges while you’re working on your book.

And I have to say something interesting here, although I’m the oldest person here, I was 55 years old when I first heard of Terence McKenna. And so old dogs can learn new tricks thanks to the magic of Terence McKenna. And I learned about him through Mondo 2000 that Are youe Serious?

[00:48:14] Dennis McKenna: Just talked about.

[00:48:14] Lorenzo Hagerty: He was the editor in chief of it and Xandor wrote a great interview with him and that turned me on. And so I got a copy of Terence’s schedule, found out he’s going to Omega Institute, went up there to see him for the first time. And in our very first conversation, I was asking these questions and he says, you need to go to Palenque. And he handed me this card from Ken Symington. And I noticed it had two weeks there and I said, well, which week is best? And he kind of twinkled and he says, well, it kind of falls apart that second week. So I knew I should probably go to the second week, but I went to the first and.

But at the Omega, I got. I made the recordings of that. It was the Novelty series and. Or no into the Valley of Novelty series.

And I think it’s the only recording of it. And I, I got the two hour recording of him and Ralph Abraham that did a two hour thing on the World Wide Web, which this is in 1999 or 98. So, you know, it was pretty. It was pretty novel at the time.

And so I had those, those recordings and that’s what I started. And so I was running out of things and I. So I got a hold of Bruce. Now, how did I know Bruce? Terence introduced me to Bruce at the All Chemical Arts Conference, the one that Bruce just talked about. Terence says, hey, there’s a guy you got to meet here. And. And so Bruce and I have been long, long standing friends since then. So Terence has played a big role in my life. And I won’t go into any. I’ve had several other interaction actions with them, but I want to. I want to use this time just real quickly to. To mention that I. I have now collected over 300 recordings of Terence. And they’re all backed up on archive.org, soundcloud, Spotify and iTunes. So they’re. They’re adding almost all of the recordings you hear of his or probably 90% of the recordings on YouTube are copies from the salon. And there’s. I have never even used Google Ads services, I must say. It’s been totally free the whole time. And I don’t collect information.

Graham.

Not Graham.

[00:50:26] R.U. Sirius: Yeah.

[00:50:27] Lorenzo Hagerty: Anyhow, the.

[00:50:28] R.U. Sirius: The.

[00:50:28] Lorenzo Hagerty: My site is not sticky. I don’t use advertising. I don’t track people. I don’t take emails because the people need to hear, Terence.

And in. In that light, we were talking last night about going forward.

We can get together and reminisce and tell stories and. And I know a lot of people that are here tonight with us are.

[00:50:47] R.U. Sirius: Are.

[00:50:48] Lorenzo Hagerty: You know, they had their stories too, and maybe want to tell some of them. But the important people are people Graham’s age, the younger people who will carry this. This. It’s not just a man that we’re carrying forward. It’s a whole mindset, a whole, you know, Malou. Of what we are.

And. And one of the ways to reach the young people, as we know from Graham’s example, is sound bites from DJs. And so along that line, my friend Steve and I have created an LLM of Karen’s from the. The Psychedelic Salon. And last night, Dennis suggested. You suggested that I listen to the podcast you and Graham had, the second one. And so I did listen to that. And I understand your concerns about these things. And you have a bad. You don’t have the right conception of what we’re doing.

We’re only using text. We’re not using any images or lip syncs or things like that. And this is designed for two groups of people, primarily scholars like Graham, that want to go and find things, or strange people like me, that I wanted to find that. That tale he told about the stone mushrooms with the guitar mushrooms under their arms. And I just could never find it again. Now, I found it with this new LLM, but what it. What it is is for scholars to search, but more importantly for DJs who. Who want a particular sound bite of, you know, a particular phrasing, and they want to find exactly where it is in these 300 podcasts of Terence.

[00:52:23] Graham St John: And.

[00:52:23] Lorenzo Hagerty: And that’s really the purpose of the thing. It’s not to reproduce Terence or anything like that. It’s like a Google search engine on steroids just for Terence’s talks. Now, I put the whole salon in so that you can see some of the interactions between, you know, conversations, but it’s not like what you would see on YouTube and all these other things. It’s much more sedate, and it’s designed specifically to get young people to use it to interact with things. So I just want to make that clear.

But Terence, obviously, you know, R.U. Sirius And Bruce were. Were major factors in my life, and it’s all because of Terence. You know, my. My life has had my last half of my life from my mid-50s on to now has been essentially, you know, channeled by the work that Terence did.

[00:53:14] R.U. Sirius: You know, he.

[00:53:14] Lorenzo Hagerty: He. He really made a nice swath through the psychedelic community, where if you stay in the McKenna channel, you’re going to hear all of it, all the stories.

[00:53:25] R.U. Sirius: And.

[00:53:26] Lorenzo Hagerty: And in fact, I have one just this morning.

I do do two weekly live salons. And one of the people that’s a regular there is Rio Hahn. I don’t know if you remember him, Dennis, but he was the captain of the Heraclitus in the Amazon. And he told me that to get on the Heraclitus at that time, there was an application process, and he still has the application where Terence, for occupation. Terence says he was a ornithologist, bird watcher. I can’t pronounce that too well, but that’s what he put down as his application because he wanted to make sure he got on the boat. So I thought that was kind of funny. And also, Graham, he wanted to thank you for putting his picture in your book.

It’s in plate 11. It’s Terence sitting on the grass talking to the guy, and that’s him with his back to the camera. But he wanted you to know that.

So Terence is part of so many people’s lives without them even knowing it. And it’s a small world once you tap into it. And, Dennis, I really want to thank you for putting this together, but more than that, for writing your book. That was just marvelous. That was just beyond belief.

The Brotherhood and the Screaming Abyss. I’ve read it twice, actually.

[00:54:51] Dennis McKenna: Thank you, Lorenzo.

I appreciate it. And I want to say also how much I appreciate all of you remarkable people taking time to come and be present for this event, which I think I want to honor Graham’s work.

It reflects so much scholarship, nearly 10 years of very hard work toiling in the cyber dungeons.

And this is an amazing book. If you’ve read it, I assume all of you have read it. If you haven’t, go get it. Read it.

Well, I don’t have to tell you, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for this book. I did want to mention a couple of anecdotes I’d like to tell.

One of them is about Dan.

And I didn’t know Dan that well when he and Terence were working on the publishing, but he really surfaced in my life as an important figure.

He is the person that placed the phone call in May of 1999 that told me that Terence had been diagnosed with Cancer, or that there had been some event that he’d had a seizure and so on. I got that phone call, not from Kat, not from any of Terence’s relatives, but it was Dan that let me know about that.

So thank you for that.

[00:56:27] Dan Levy: I didn’t know that.

[00:56:30] Dennis McKenna: Well, the next day, forgot.

[00:56:32] Dan Levy: Thank you for telling me that. I’m amazed.

[00:56:35] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

As soon as I heard it, I was on the plane and you were already in Hawaii. So we had some very interesting and obviously very disturbing and concerning times. But by the time I got there, Terence had received some steroid treatment. So he was actually cognitively completely together and quite happy and joyful, even though he’d just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The other thing I’d like to thank you for, Dan, is when I was thinking of writing my book, I was in New York for some reason, and we got together and I said, I think we had a conversation of, can you find me an agent or something? Or you were an agent. And you said, well, there’s this new thing happening. At the time it was new. It’s called Kickstarter.

And you suggested, why don’t you try a Kickstarter project? So I did. I put it up there.

And that was a wonderful idea because it gave me enough support to both take the time to write the book and travel and visit some of the old places and then actually to self publish the book.

So that was an excellent suggestion and I really am grateful to you and I’m grateful for many of the things you’ve done showing up at some of our events.

And one. And so thank you for that. I also wanted to mention maybe I shouldn’t tell this story, but I have to tell you, I have to tell you, Tama, about Terence’s story. I didn’t really know how you fit into all this. I knew that you were an old friend of Terence’s, but the story that he told about you, and this was probably the mid-80s, your family and you were involved in the company that creates the New Year’s Eve ball that falls down on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. That was your company, as I understand it, your father’s company, and the story that Terence tells about you.

And again, we have to remember that Terence is an inveterate bullshitter. So I don’t know how much of it is true, but the way he depicted you as you were like a barefoot hippie living in Hawaii, living in very rustic circumstances, taking LSD a lot and doing those sorts of things.

And then when you got word that your father had died.

You, like, put on a business suit, got on a plane, went to New York and took over this business. I don’t know if that’s true, but I thought it was amazing, which is.

[00:59:46] Dan Levy: What the best you could say about almost anything Terence would say.

[00:59:50] Dennis McKenna: She was wearing sandals, barefoot. Everything else is crude.

Yeah. So that was what I knew about Tama Starr until you recently wrote me. And I’m glad to get to know you. And I understand now that I sort of understand some of the connections. I understand that you and Diana were good friends, and that’s how Terence met Diana, or vice versa.

[01:00:20] Tama Starr: I think that Terence and Diana got together in Kathmandu.

[01:00:26] Dennis McKenna: In Kathmandu, yes.

[01:00:29] Tama Starr: And then they traveled. I had known her on Maui from the Maui Zendo where she was living. When the zendo busted up, she went to Asia and encountered Terence and the guy she was with. And the gal that he was with was sort of left by the side of the road. And then they were off to Asia to follow in the footsteps of A N. Wallace.

And she was a terrific letter writer.

So I had lots of documentation of their life.

Collecting butterflies along the Wallace line and folding them up in these little cartoons and English lesson books and whatever scrap of paper they had to hand. Graham tells that story nicely, too.

And then there they are in the sweating jungle, nothing to do but eat LSD and make love.

So what an ideal that was until it wasn’t anymore.

And they split up and met again in Taiwan and then again in Vancouver because Deanna didn’t have a word for goodbye.

[01:01:35] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Well, thanks for sharing that background. Yeah. And I understand Deanna has passed on. She sadly died in an automobile accident or something like that.

I met her a couple of times. She was a lovely person.

And so it’s very sad.

[01:02:00] Graham St John: Can I just add there, this was something that sort of links to. What I was going to ask, Tama, is that you mentioned you’re working on a novel, and I understand that that is based on. Based on Diana or Diana, and that that, you know, involves to some degree.

[01:02:26] Bruce Damer: Her.

[01:02:28] Graham St John: Relatively brief, I imagine, in the context of her entire life, encounters with Tarrants.

How far along are you with. With this novel? And can you tell us a little bit more about it? And when would we expect to see that?

[01:02:47] Tama Starr: I’m getting near the end. I can see the light in the end of the tunnel. And this has been a project since her mysterious death, which was in 1992.

But I finally had the vision allowing me to put it all Together, she was a very charismatic and intriguing person and explosive in a lot of ways.

And then it was her mysterious death that got Rick and me. Rick Watson, who gave you so much material about Terence and who unfortunately passed away last year, he wrote all those pieces about Diana and about the sainted poet Richard Horne, and about Terry and about John Parker.

In the course of Our Conversations In 1993, after Diyana’s death, Diana’s strange and mysterious departure from this planet really sent me back to the early psychedelic days and the visions of that time.

And so the book takes place in a present of 1992, like a detective story, trying to figure out what did happen to her. How did this woman die? Or who was she anyway?

And why were all these people in love with her? And why could two men never stay friends when she was around?

And she went after the women, too, and the dogs and the cats. I mean, everybody was in love with Diana. Well, not everybody.

There were some people listening in on the podcast who weren’t, but so then the past.

She was, again, one of those web people. She was connected to so many people, including Rick Watson’s best buddy in India, who was my college sweetheart, the sainted poet Richard Horn, whom she left Rick for, thereby breaking his heart. I mean, this is sort of very, very grand. Opera. Soap opera. I don’t know what psychedelic soap opera. I hope it’s a little better than that.

But anyhow, Yes, I am on. I’m going to say it. The last draft. Do I dare say that? Does anyone want to advise me not to say such a shit?

[01:05:13] Dan Levy: As your attorney, I advise you not to say that.

[01:05:19] Dennis McKenna: Great.

[01:05:20] Graham St John: Well, I, for one, am looking forward to that. I think that would. That sounds fabulous based on not only what you’ve just said, but various conversations over the years. And I thank you for all the information you’ve provided me, which has enabled me to essentially condense their interaction into one paragraph, one long paragraph. So my.

My attention to their relationship was very.

Just a small road stop in the context of his life. And I suspect that many people will gravitate to Diana as a consequence and want to know more about her.

Yeah, I think that sounds like a fabulous project and look forward to that.

[01:06:17] Tama Starr: Thank you, my viewer.

[01:06:18] Bruce Damer: Thanks.

[01:06:20] Dennis McKenna: So.

[01:06:22] Graham St John: I don’t know. I mean, I suspect we have about an hour and a half left, Dennis, and I imagine at some point you want to introduce questions from the audience. But before we do that, I just want to, I guess, sort of open it up to our participants to perhaps talk about aspects of the book that introduced you to situations in Terence’s life or aspects of his personality or events that happened that were surprising to you and that were eye opening. And if anyone would care to indulge us in anything that strikes you.

[01:07:24] Dennis McKenna: Putting me on the spot.

[01:07:27] Graham St John: Well, we could start with you, Dennis, if you like.

[01:07:31] Dennis McKenna: Well, about the book, you know, there. There were.

I mean, I was Terence’s brother, of course, and we were close during most of his life. But your book is remarkable to my mind, because in the latter part of Terence’s life, in the 90s, basically, we were.

It’s not that we weren’t close, but he was off doing his thing. He was spending a lot of time in Europe.

I learned things about Terence that I never knew from your book, which is a testament to your scholarship.

And he had a double or even a triple life.

He was so involved in various things, like the whole association with rave culture. He became this icon of rave culture, and they looked up to him, which is kind of puzzling in some ways, because he was not a raver. He wasn’t a dancer.

He didn’t believe in taking mushrooms to music or anything like that. I mean, he was, you know, very rigid in some ways about his views about how one should take mushrooms. But the rave community adopted him. And I wonder why that was. I mean, other than just Terence had the ability to.

It didn’t really matter what he said.

A lot of what he said didn’t even make sense.

It didn’t really have to make sense. I mean, I would go to. He never really liked me to come to his workshops and his events because I was the only person that would ever get up and comment.

Everybody else will. I mean, in the intimate events, everybody was so loaded on cannabis that they couldn’t say a word. But even in the public events, people would never stand up and say anything. They would just sort of take it all in, because what he was producing was not necessarily intended to be believed.

It was a riff. It was like poetry.

It was that.

And if I was at his events, occasionally I would stand up and say, well, you. I. What you just said didn’t make any sense. And it contradicts what you just said 20 minutes ago, which didn’t make any sense.

You know, what an annoying little brother thing to do.

[01:10:25] Dan Levy: Maybe you should have talked to him about it later.

[01:10:29] Dennis McKenna: And he would just sail on, you know, So I guess it’s a talent. He was not.

I think he was not talking to be believed. I used to tell him, you could read the phone book in front of people and people would hang on to every word because it was his voice, it was the way that he delivered it.

[01:10:53] Dan Levy: No, I disagree with you. I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but the thing.

[01:10:57] Dennis McKenna: You disagree.

[01:10:58] Dan Levy: Yeah, I do, because. Which is not to say that Terence wasn’t full of shit about stuff and wrong about stuff. Of course we knew it, we know it, and he would cop to it constantly. But the thing that people related to was not the sound of his voice and that he could have said anything. It’s that he was.

[01:11:17] Dennis McKenna: It’s like he was a deep sea.

[01:11:19] Dan Levy: Diver who had more air in his tank. And he could go deeper into the psychedelic experience and bring back language that we resonated with because we knew it already. We just never been able to put it into words.

[01:11:32] Dennis McKenna: Yes, that’s true.

[01:11:33] Dan Levy: And Terence, if nothing else, was the person who made effable, the ineffable and taught other people how to do it. I feel like I have learned so much about how to rap about anything or talk about anything by seeing the way he knew how to make language visible by telling the story in a coherently narrative way so that he built a more and more vivid picture in the listener’s mind of what he wanted to say. And this is what his brilliance was. And that’s why people liked to go hear him speak. And it wasn’t because he could just say any old thing with a tone of voice. It’s that he was talking about stuff.

We already knew it. We had gotten it on the radio waves in one way or another. Already was able to and, and it didn’t. I mean, I’d say for myself, I’m not. I’m a relatively skeptical person. But at no time was I in his presence when he was talking, when I wasn’t thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re full of shit too, you know, I mean it. It was just part of his delightful, full bodied Persona.

He was a self contradict, just like he was a self transforming machine elf. He was a self contradicting, you know, self regarding clown. And that’s what we all related to.

[01:13:08] Dennis McKenna: That was part of his charm, you know, that he was.

Bruce, you had your hand up or you wanted to say something, by the way, but he can put their hand up like this if they want to.

I have my hand up. I want to say, you all know this. You’re all Zoom veterans.

Bruce, you got to know Terence later in life. You knew him from about 1997. Is that when you really started hanging out. And so tell us something about that, because you guys really resonated. And I imagine that must have been interesting because you sort of introduced him to this field of virtual reality and the cybersphere and all that which he was fascinated by. His theories about the externalization of the spirit and this whole preoccupation with the transcendental object at the end of time, whatever that was. But it was often conceived as some kind of a cybernetic invention. It was an artifact, essentially. It was kind of about transforming the spirit into what, a machine or the transcendental object at the end of time, whatever it would be. It would be like the ultimate artifact.

Did you guys talk about that? Did you?

[01:14:44] Bruce Damer: Well, what was most fascinating was, you know, that this was the time of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that transcendental object could have been the restaurant at the edge of the Universe as easily. But what I noticed with Terence, and this is actually to his credit, was here he found himself sitting in the presence of. He came to see me in order to learn about stuff, and I wanted to learn about his stuff.

But he sat quietly. I mean, our first two meetings, it was mainly him asking a couple of questions, and then just. I would riff. I would do the Terence thing, actually.

And he was taking notes, and he was revising his understanding because he didn’t have any experience. He didn’t have any experience in technology at all. He’d never written a line of code and didn’t really understand, say, the protocols of the Internet and things like this. So I spent time explaining to him how basically TCPIP worked and how you have these little thin channels and stuff. And what you’re seeing on the screen is a painted simulacrum of a virtual world. This. The world doesn’t exist anywhere.

And I would contrast this with the world of the chemical world, of the reality of molecules bouncing around simultaneously and how they had properties that were so different that ideas of, say, a singularity or a eschaton were kind of ludicrous if mapped onto cyberspace, because cyberspace was not a medium that could do biological things. And we still see this today.

That compute goes through these pipelines and things like this.

And at the end of one of these long sessions, we were talking about 2012. And so he asked me about, what do you think will happen? This is, of course, 1999. It’s years into the future. I say, Terence, she asked me about year 2000. It was only one year in the future. I said, Terence, nothing is going to happen at Y2K. It’s just all overblown and people making a lot of consulting dollars.

Nothing’s going to happen.

But then we went on to the 2012 idea and in my collection of the archives here of Terence’s, some of Terence’s material, there’s a post it note where Terence excitedly writes, December 21, 2012. Yes, yes.

You know, on his. On the copy of this software written by Peter Myers.

But these were notions and they were sort of fantasy notions really.

And I said, Terence, you know, that kind of thing, what you’re talking about biology and consciousness being uploadable and things like this, those are ideas from science fiction, they’re from Berner Vinge and all these things. And we both read Omni magazine and they actually weren’t realizable.

And not only weren’t they realizable, nobody was working on that direction because it wasn’t profitable.

We see this today with what has emerged in AI, which is useful tools. It’s not the general concept of consciousness in cyberspace. It’s so far from that.

I remember at about 2 o’ clock in the morning, after several two Hawaiian bombers, which he claimed was like some of the worst cannabis on the planet that was grown on the Big island. And he begged anyone who came into the house for, you know, some, you know, Trinity Gold or something better than the pot they were getting in Hawaii. But at about 2:00 clock in the morning he said, well, about 2012 and singularities, I just hope they don’t take it all too literally.

So I realized that here was a man that was willing to have. Some of the stories were fantastical and they were getting people, you know, to come to seminars and things like this.

But when challenged, he was quite willing to say. And often what I loved about Terence is that he would joke about himself, you know, and Graham can relate to this. He would, you know, talk about any, you know, the last person on this planet you need to believe is me. And so he would hearken to his trickster, performer, philosophical gadfly role with a w, a twinkle in his eye or a wink.

So not taking it all too seriously and not taking it all literally in the 2012 thing.

[01:19:37] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, exactly. That was much of his charm. That’s why he never wanted to take on the mantle of a guru or a messiah.

He had enough perspective to be self deprecating.

And like you said, he said, the last person you should believe is me because he had the good sense to understand these concepts.

That he was talking about.

The answer is, nobody has the answers. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. And he could admit that. I mean, that’s why Terence could never.

He did not want to be a guru. He was the anti guru in some ways. And that was certainly part of his charm. That was a big part of his charm that he said people should think for themselves.

You don’t find religious figures, you don’t sign messianic figures or cult leaders telling people to think for themselves.

So he was different in that sense. Others will say, think what I tell you to think. Here’s the set of rules or beliefs. This is what you should believe.

Terence was not that way. And I think that’s one of his main saving graces in some ways, that he was not doctrinaire about what he believed. He realized, as any good scientist would realize, in some sense, his attitude was scientific. You as a scientist realize that scientists construct hypotheses about the way things are, but they’re always provisional.

You never prove a hypothesis. You just can’t disprove it until more data comes along, and then maybe that overturns your paradigm. So in that sense, he was true to the spirit of science, even though he rejected science as a thing.

And I’m not sure why.

After La Torera, he reached a point where basically his reaction was, science will never explain what happened to us, will never explain the experiment at Lechura and what’s down. So science is useless.

And my reaction was just the opposite. It was that, well, even though it’s called the experiment at La Chorrera, it was not an experiment. And Eric Davis has said we went to the Amazon and we committed an act of science fiction, which I think is closer to the truth.

But my reaction to La Chorrera, maybe that was a way of getting back on my feet after I had this dissociation that lasted many days. But I came away saying, well, wait a minute, we’re not scientists.

Maybe we ought to learn science before we reject it.

And so then I moved in that direction. I didn’t exactly study the hardest science. I didn’t study quantum physics or anything like that. I’m sure I couldn’t understand it, but I studied pharmacology and chemistry and that kind of thing.

And, you know, I was not ready to throw science, to reject science based on what happened at La Chorrera. And Terence was.

And maybe in some ways that he did that partly because, well, it absolved him of the responsibility of having to learn science. You know, he could criticize it I don’t have to do it because I don’t believe in it was kind of his approach.

Yes. Sorry.

[01:23:38] Graham St John: Yeah, I think those are great points. I mean, I suspect one of the things I found fascinating about Terence is that he almost loved the idea of people being hecklers, and he really.

He really brought it on, and that really inspired him, that criticism from his audience.

And in those Q and A sessions that often went longer than the lectures themselves, where he really did indulge in personal details. And for any biographer who looks back through, Sits back through his vast archive of material that Lorenzo has. I mean, much of the stuff we see on YouTube, I think Lorenzo is responsible for. But any biographer podcasting, that is, and any biographer who listens to all this stuff and doesn’t listen to the Q and A sessions at the end of Terence’s wraps will be missing so much of his life, because it’s in those really personal forays that he really sort of unpacked a lot of his life for the benefit of us all. And I suspect there’s a lot of masterful bullshit in there. And I know there is.

I mean, after all, we’re talking about a character who.

For whom it’s quite difficult for any biographer or historian to determine where the truth ends and the hallucination begins.

And I figure that just in terms of writing a biographer of such a gnomic figure like this, we’re talking about someone who was really pursuing multiple Personas throughout its life. And we can talk about someone who was at the same time a freak, an exile, an outlaw, an anarchist.

[01:26:03] Bruce Damer: An.

[01:26:03] Graham St John: Alchemist, a surrealist, a prophet, bard, all these things and more all at once, which has proven so challenging for any biographer to really try to nail him.

And I’m not suggesting that I have done so, because I don’t think. I mean, I certainly haven’t written a textbook on Terence McKenna.

So, I mean, I understand that there’s probably as many authorities as there are people to whom Terence has spoken directly. And so all I can do, really, is to provide readers with an opportunity to enhance and augment their existing frames on Terence, because we’re talking about someone who’s essentially become a phenomena.

And I see your hand up you.

[01:27:12] Tama Starr: Oh, okay.

[01:27:15] R.U. Sirius: You asked.

[01:27:16] Tama Starr: It’s a very good point about how about his self deprecation, and he was just setting an example. He was not telling people what to believe.

But you asked a moment ago for something surprising, and it was not surprising, but something I found jarring was to see him and Timothy Leary in the same picture or on the same stage because the two were so different.

I mean, I guess they were both talking about psychedelics and that is enough. But from a moral or ethical point of view, I mean, it’s really kind to say that Leary was ethically ambiguous, compromised, heuristic, challenged, irresponsible, those sorts of things.

And here Terence really had integrity that was as different as two people can be.

So I always found it jarring to see when I was reading Graham’s book how often they made appearances together.

[01:28:39] Dennis McKenna: Are you?

[01:28:41] R.U. Sirius: Yeah. It wasn’t my intention to talk about my friend Timothy Leary, but I will just say that the link between Terence and Tim was being psychedelic people who are very progressive about technology being excited about virtual reality.

Terence spoke about space migration, as did Leary, as covered in Graham’s book. There was a transhumanistic aspect to what Terence spoke about, which that term features often in Terence’s. In Graham’s book.

And in some sense, Leary really started transhumanism.

[01:29:35] Dennis McKenna: Which.

[01:29:38] R.U. Sirius: Is certainly ethically problematic in ways that might relate to what somebody was saying before about the idea that the notion of uploading ourselves into digital space and leaving behind biology is absurd.

Which I think Bruce was talking about that and about the practical uses of AI. But if you’re in Silicon Valley among the tech bros and among a lot of very extremely crazy ruling class people, they actually believe that. And they are sucking up the energy of planet Earth and they are boosting the oil industry so that there will be enough energy to create extreme forms of artificial intelligence, presumably because they’ve given up on the plausibility of continuing life on Earth and they don’t think they can get into space. So they’re going to get themselves suck into digital space from which we can possibly drag them into the cosmic garbage can.

But actually what I had wanted to say is I wanted to talk about Graham’s incredible use of language.

And that was a match for Terence’s use of words language.

And I don’t think Terence ever really got his beautiful spoken language into the text of a book at that caliber. And this book kind of makes up for it. And I just, I flagged this one really quick thing that he wrote that I think shows not just his use of language, but. But is willing to take risks and be irreverent towards Terence himself, in which he writes, if this Wasn’t Terence wasn’t McKenna’s Everest of the weird, he had at least achieved the foothills of the Kook. I thought that was an incredibly funny and wonderfully languaged piece of the book.

[01:32:18] Dennis McKenna: Thank you. Are you.

[01:32:19] R.U. Sirius: Yeah.

[01:32:20] Graham St John: Yes, of course.

I’m. No, I have no proficiency in the spoken word arts, and so. But I thank you on that. And I also want to ask you, I’m kind of intrigued about what the nail that that hammer in your background meets, because, I mean.

[01:32:52] R.U. Sirius: This was painted by an artist, and I’m not remembering its name right now, but he’s even featured in the Museum of Modern Art, and he did light shows for Glenn McKay. He did light shows for the Jefferson Airplane, and he passed away in Mexico. I guess I can say this out loud now. We got this by buying.

He was charging too much for his ketamine, so he threw in the hammer.

[01:33:26] Lorenzo Hagerty: Tear it up.

[01:33:27] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

[01:33:28] Graham St John: And while we have you here, you mentioned that there was a time, and I know you were also working on a book, and perhaps you can tell us a little bit about that book and when we might see it. But before you do that, you mentioned that there was this sort of sudden, I guess, departure of Terence in your life and that he was, I guess, a regular, had some frequency in your publications over the years in three or four of your of your works.

[01:34:08] Dennis McKenna: But.

[01:34:08] Graham St John: There was a sudden disappearance in the early 90s. Can you maybe say something more about what transpired there?

[01:34:20] R.U. Sirius: Yeah. Well, I mean, I did see him once in a while before he moved to Hawaii or whatever. I saw him backstage when he was to perform with the Shannon, actually, so that was memorable.

But he was a columnist for My Frontiers and Reality and Reality hackers. Then Monda 2000, we were doing our virtual reality issue, and he wrote a column about phone sex as a virtual reality.

And we had the entire issue designed.

And he called up the publisher, Alison Queen Moo, and he begged that she removed the column from the magazine because his agent had said that it would be bad for his career if that would run in the magazine. So we were at a stage in our publication, still pretty early, where we were offended even by the idea of having an agent or having a career.

That changed in about a year, but Queen Moo was pretty upset. But we removed the column and somehow managed to get, I think, an advertisement put into that space.

But Terence was gone as a columnist, although he returned when he was interviewed by the character known as Xander Krasybski for a later issue.

Great interview, by the way.

[01:36:10] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah.

[01:36:12] Graham St John: And you’ll be relating that story in.

[01:36:15] Lorenzo Hagerty: Your book On Moonlit, the Freaks in.

[01:36:19] R.U. Sirius: The Machine, Mondo 2000, and late 20th century Tech culture Co Written with Sherrod Chess due maybe in about a year, I’m guessing.

[01:36:33] Dan Levy: Yeah, I want to read that.

[01:36:36] R.U. Sirius: And it’s published by a book company called Strange Attractor Press.

[01:36:42] Dennis McKenna: Great press, oddly enough.

Yep. Bruce, you got your hand up.

[01:36:49] Bruce Damer: Yeah. I want to perhaps swing this in a more personal direction around the disclosure of Terence’s life. Things that I had sort of second and third hand understanding of, but was not there.

This was understanding long after the fact was the relationship with Kat, with his wife Kat, you know, the mother of their children.

And I had never met Kat, actually only met Kat about 15 years ago and have a good relationship, but sort of remarkable in the book and to your credit, Ram, to have Kat fully participating.

It couldn’t really have been a biography without members of the family contributing. Kat being, I think, one of the major contributors. So, you know, bravo for bringing everyone to the table. And some of Kat’s disclosures about this so called bad trip that Terence experienced toward the end of their marriage that may have been a precipitating event that ended the marriage. Those were revelations that we only had second and third hand understanding of him. Cat actually shed a light on what actually went down. And that for me, that was a, you know, a remarkable sort of biographical depiction is probably done as clearly and as carefully as you could possibly do it. And just all, all kudos to you, Graham, for bringing that story to light in the sense putting a lot of rumors and, you know, incomplete understandings to bed now that we have the full telling from, from Kat and from the family.

[01:38:44] Graham St John: Thank you. Thank you, Bruce. Yeah. Yes, you’re right.

This, this project could never have happened, really, without Cat’s contribution. And we shall thank her for her very candid retelling of that story.

And she is also one of many figures who’ve, I mean, we’ve only briefly mentioned Rick Watson and the book is dedicated to his memory. And he was really primarily instrumental in getting this whole ball rolling. And unfortunately it’s not around.

Hasn’t been around for the last 18 months. So it’s pretty sad, his departure. And it’s been almost for a long time, almost noted on a daily basis because he was someone who was there at my fingertips on email, who would respond very rapidly and was very eager to participate and saw the value in this project being one of Tanaris’s closest friends and someone who he at one time corresponded with quite heavily in their younger days and correspondence that may or may not have been destroyed, certainly the correspondence that, you know, the letters that Terence wrote to Rick something in the order of 25 letters there that he shared with me. And they were quite instrumental in sort of navigating the story.

Rick’s letters to Terry, well, who knows, they may be in these boxes that clean McKenna is excavating from her archives.

We don’t know for sure.

And given that Rick himself was a masterful author, very humble, wrote all those short stories, unpublished short stories that he also shared with me, some of which sort of layered through the book, given his own talents as a writer, I think if that material was lost, that half of the correspondence was lost. Lost is disappointing. I do also imagine that people just back on Kat Harrison, I would hope that people would pay more attention to.

[01:41:27] Dennis McKenna: Her life.

[01:41:29] Graham St John: Independent of her ex husband.

And so I imagine when I know that she’s working on a memoir. So I’m looking forward to, to seeing that.

Now, Dennis, I don’t know how much time we’ve got left, maybe three quarters an hour.

I want any questions from the audience.

[01:41:54] Dennis McKenna: I mean, the one person that’s been quite quiet here probably can’t get a word in edgewise is Lorenzo. Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share?

[01:42:05] Lorenzo Hagerty: Well, just very briefly, I’d like to make an apology to the community for my put down of the time wag idea because I really poo pooed it. I didn’t play a lot of those parts of the podcast. And for the last two years I’ve been like 100% involved in AI, which I know is a bad thing, like saying I’m a lawyer, which I also am.

So I’ve got a lot of things going against me. But in the AI community where I interact on a daily basis, the time wave is an aha moment that he can’t believe how prescient he was. Because the year 2012 is when there was a total 180 degree change in AI research.

And the whole AI community will tell you 2012 was the hinge year, the pivotal year, the plunge into novelty that has never been seen before. Now, I admit there’s probably an AI bubble and it’ll all go away or something, but at least there was something really major happened in 2012. And my opinion now is that Terence had some kind of a gut instinct. You know, we know how he was. He had these, these ideas that came from somewhere and he didn’t, he couldn’t put words around this one.

And Bruce has the correspondence where the original end date was in November, I think. And then, then he got that, that Mayan thing. But the actual Release of the paper, that was the stamp that said, okay, we’re going to go a different direction. Came in the week in between, right in between those two dates. So I think that. That there’s more research should be done about Terence McKenna’s time wave in the year 2012. And then what happened when novelty went down below that, you know, he wasn’t here to talk about that. And, you know, my guess is he would understand it, because in my 11th podcast, it was 20 years ago, he said humans are an intermediate species making the way for machines.

So he had an inkling of what was going on in 2012, is my opinion. Now, I made all that up. And in the psychedelic community, nobody will buy in on that, because it’s like Catholics hearing about Buddhism. They’ve got this Catholic shell, they’ve got to break through. And we all decided the time wave was interesting and fun, but it wasn’t. It didn’t happen. And I get over the AI community and they say, my God, how did that guy know this is going to happen? So, you know, I think that Terence reached in directions that we’re yet to find out.

So here’s my two cents for tonight.

[01:44:46] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, that’s very interesting that you say that, Lorenzo, because in some sense, maybe if 2012 was a pivotal time for the emergence of AI, in some sense, maybe Terence was right.

Terence and I used to have conversations about how does novelty introduce itself into the continuum?

You know, and he was all in favor of the dramatic abrupt eruption, that it was a dramatic event, like the first detonation of the atomic bomb and so forth.

But I argued that novelty doesn’t burst into the continuum, it leaks into the continuum.

And AI is one of those things. And then you don’t know the seed is planted, and then you don’t know what the consequences really will be until later.

And atomic energy is the same way.

You couldn’t detonate the bomb until Einstein had the insights, until Fermi did the sustained chain reaction. All of these things had to happen first before you got the dramatic event of the atomic bomb going off.

I think AI is that way.

So AI is now emerging. I mean, it emerged. You say 2012 as a pivotal time, and now everybody’s talking about everything. It’s taking over.

And it seems to me quite dystopian.

I’m very leery about AI, but one thing that comes to mind is Terence was preoccupied with one of the tropes in Terence’s meme sphere, if you will, is this idea of the transcendental object at the end of time, whatever that is.

Maybe it’s emerging now. Maybe we know what it is and it’s AI or it’s some kind of hyper intelligent AI that is emerging.

But to my mind at least the way it’s happening is a dystopian event. It’s something to be.

[01:47:18] Lorenzo Hagerty: And I totally agree with you, Dennis, as a lawyer, I can argue both sides of this and I, I do agree that probably the next five to 10 years are going to be a little bit of goodness, a lot of badness and, and, but, but if it doesn’t crash, then the goodness will eventually overcome. There’s a, there’s so much going on that you don’t see in the news. I mean the news isn’t even the tip of the iceberg right now.

And, and I’ve been in this, I, I started on the global brain mailing list in the January, June of 22,000. So I’ve been following this and I know a lot of these players. I’ve been emailing with them for 20 years, so, or yeah, I guess that long, I don’t know. But, but it could be really bad. And the bad thing is not the technology, it’s the people, the way they’re going to use it. And because right now you can create a virus and with $2,000 buy a crisper and start creating, creating stuff like that, it’s not quite that simple, but it’s really dangerous technology that’s totally unregulated and that is horrible. It’s going to be a real mess for a long time and it could totally implode, which could be a good thing to get it out of the way. But we’ve been using AI for so long and people don’t realize it. If you’ve ever followed a recommendation on YouTube, you’ve got an AI directing you around and so the more you learn about, the more you can get free, free of it. You know, I, I, I, the AIs, I, I interact with four of them on a daily basis and they don’t know I’m interacting with the others and I play them against each other and, and so I’ve learned a whole lot about what’s going on and you know, I can argue whether it’s going to be a terrible thing and it’s a really good thing. So, but I’m using it and I’m learning a lot about it and I know a lot of the people involved in it and most of them don’t know what the hell is going on. Now I’m not talking about the ones in it for the money. I’m talking ones that are in it for the science and at the university level, the ones, the deep researchers, there are very few that I trust.

Or the ones in it for the money. The Sam Altmans of the world.

There’s some really bad shit going on with some of those people. But I think that getting back to Terence, he had an instinct of some kind that something was going to happen.

The object at the end of time I think might have been the changeover in how they started developing AI because if that hadn’t happened, we still wouldn’t be hearing about it right now. It would just still be the stuff you get in your phone and YouTube and stuff like that. So things are changing at a really elemental level in that field and it’s important to not just put it down because I don’t think Terence did. And he was really far away from it. He used to, in some of the podcasts he talked about the people going to, to work every morning doing the great work and that was the. The AI developers he was talking about. So he did have a connection with it. And it’s just a real tragedy that we don’t have him here today to really get him involved and get his opinion on it because he’s somebody that. I would really like to hear what he has to say about it. You know, everybody would.

[01:50:36] Dennis McKenna: Quite, quite so. Technology is a two edged sword and all technology can be used for benefit or for harm. You know, it’s us, it’s the choices we make in deploying this technology that makes it good or bad. So we’ve got three. Precisely, right? Yeah. With hands up we should. Graham, I suggest that we let everyone here with their hand up say their piece and then we should take a break and then let’s open it up to the participants. What do you. To the audience, what do you think?

[01:51:14] Graham St John: I think I saw Dan’s hand up. So did you have something you wanted to say, Dan?

[01:51:19] Dennis McKenna: Dan’s hand. Okay.

[01:51:21] Dan Levy: I just put my hand up a second ago. There were, I think Bruce and Ru already had there. But I wanted to say something that responding to one of the stories that Bruce told about visiting Terence. Because the thing that’s about Terence’s living situation in Hawaii is that he was really off the grid at a very inconvenient moment. For somebody who’s interested in the Internet and the efforts that he made to get himself connected to the outside world really came to a fore with this episode that Bruce was talking about. And I didn’t remember that it was Bruce who really assisted Terence in establishing this connection between an antenna on his roof in the jungle far away to a office building and an antenna on the roof in downtown Kailua that enabled him to have.

And it was truly science fiction. And the way Terence had set up.

[01:52:29] Dan Levy: His air in anticipating that he wouldn’t have to go on tour anymore. He could do all of his work on the Internet from this.

I always. When I saw it, it reminded me of, like, Captain Nemo at his organ, you know, that he was going to be able to control his expression into the world through the Internet through these antennae. And so I applaud you, Bruce, for making that happen, because it was the thing that made it possible.

Actually, it was one of the things that made it possible for Christie to summon help years later when Terence collapsed as quickly as it did. And if it weren’t for some of these connections and Terence’s constant efforts to. To sculpt his reality in the jungle into something that would allow him to be connected to the world, he probably would have died that day.

[01:53:24] Bruce Damer: And this is a great segway into my question, which was for you, Dan, that I’ve been dying to ask, but one little anecdote before I ask it.

We’re standing in the library, and Terence turns around because we have to put a webpage in where the avatars can float up to a screen where we’re going to put something where they can click and get a worldwide website. And I remember Terence, and it’s actually in a video you can watch called Terence McKenna on the natch.

And it’s a video that we shot on hiat, and it’s actually Terence at home doing the virtual world thing and talking to Christy and Finn, and it’s a beautiful thing, and showing how he was a Hunt and Pack typist, and when he would type, he would lick his lips. He was almost like a monk of old time mouthing the words, but he was Hunt and Peck. And how he wrote those books, it’s just extraordinary to me.

But he turned around and enunciated out clearly to Finn. Www.levity.com/eschaton being the website to link into this world. And here we have. We’re honored to meet Dan Levy, who created that site for Terence and for many others. And the question I have for you, Dan, is what was it like to work with Terence and to develop his books?

That’s what I’ve been dying to ask.

[01:54:58] Dan Levy: Well, that would that’s like the whole rest of the time we have. But I would say that the three books that I worked on with him were quite different in their approaches. The first was the reissue of the Invisible Landscape, the book that he wrote with Dennis. That was basically, I think, my great triumph there was that I would manage to convince my bosses to really reset that in type and make it a real thing. And yet I have one of the first editions and it’s beautiful.

The next one was sort of my personal mixtape of Terence’s short pieces called the Archaic Revival, which I really conceived of as a future dorm room classic like Autobiography of a Yogi or the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test or Gravity’s Rainbow or any one of these books.

And I have to say that it’s still in print and both of my kids have enjoyed reading through that. It’s a great bathroom book. If for no other reason that it’s short pieces.

The very first piece in it is that LA Weekly interview that set me afloat with my thoughts about Terence. I just think that’s a great introduction. And.

And then the third book of course was the book version of the long standing audiobook True Hallucinations, which was not strictly a transcription of the tapes, but different, rewritten, edited.

There were a couple of stories Terence told me along the way just about what his life was like. The travels he had made before La Truerrer that I asked him to write more like the story about the obsidian liquid in Kathmandu, I think.

Well, first of all I have to say that I signed these books when I was an editor at Citadel Press and my boss somehow discovered, before it was too late for him, that these books were on subjects that he didn’t really want to publish himself. So they got detached and got sent to.

I had the luck of having stayed attached to those books when they got re signed by Harper San Francisco and I edited them for there and then I got fired. So it was, you know, and then I got another job.

[01:57:45] Dennis McKenna: But.

[01:57:46] Dan Levy: But it was.

Wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me. But I got to work with these books and amazingly their own print and that you can’t really say that for a lot of books that were published in that era especially, they’re not always easy to find. I mean we don’t have the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles anymore that you could rely on to see it on the shelves all these years later. But I have to say that it’s YouTube and the tapes and the archive of Lorenzo’s that has Inspired my. Each of my kids have friends that know Terence’s stuff, like inside and out. And these are people in their early 20s.

So it isn’t just people Graham’s age, but people much, much younger who seem to be very interested. And it just takes a few.

So I guess, you know, joy, in spite of everything, I’m optimistic in spite of everything.

But I’d love to. Bruce, we have to talk. Some other time. I’ll tell you more about it. Thanks for having me.

[01:58:57] Graham St John: Just as you.

[01:58:58] Bruce Damer: You.

[01:58:59] Graham St John: You’re speaking with us. You did briefly mention D the episode where Terence faced what he regarded as a potential First Amendment crisis, which was sometime in the.

I believe it was late 80s or mid to late 80s where you were involved.

[01:59:24] Dennis McKenna: In.

[01:59:27] Graham St John: Correcting that situation. Can you briefly mention work?

[01:59:30] Dan Levy: Terence had a gig at ucla. Actually it was sponsored by ucla, but it was going to be on the grounds of the va, the West Los Angeles VA, which is very close to Westwood and had a very beautiful, shabby Victorian auditorium called the Wadsworth Auditorium. And somehow somebody at the VA got wind of what Terence was likely to talk about and felt it wasn’t really in the best interests for veterans and people who lived on the grounds of the VA and asked UCLA to change the venue. And ucla, the person who ran the speaking there, it seems like it just seemed more expedient to just cancel the gig.

And I.

I really didn’t come from a position of incredible outrage, but more like problem solving that I suggested that we get in touch with the LA branch of the ACLU and lickety split. I mean, it was like uncanceled within days and an embarrassment for the university. These days, universities are willing to undergo the most incredible depredations of embarrassment over something like this. But back then, I guess it was enough that they just reinstated it in a different venue, a smaller room on campus.

I don’t know why I cared so much. I was living in la, but I think it’s because I’m a UCLA alumnus.

But that’s what happened.

It wasn’t really an incredible co celeb, but it was kind of entertaining to see that you could wield the American Civil Liberties Union, to which I am a card carrying member to this day, to something just to help your client family so much.

Yeah, yeah.

[02:01:28] Dennis McKenna: So maybe we should open it up for questions. What do you think, Graham? Is this other people?

[02:01:36] Graham St John: I think that’s a good idea. We seem to have half an hour.

[02:01:39] Lorenzo Hagerty: Borga and Jira, all great.

[02:01:41] Graham St John: If there are questions, then let Them rip Bernadette.

[02:01:43] Dan Levy: Let’s hear it.

[02:01:45] Dennis McKenna: I think. Does anybody want a break?

Okay. Nobody wants a break. All right, we could take a break if. So I’m looking at this Q and A panel here. Is that how we take questions.

[02:02:09] Lorenzo Hagerty: Or.

[02:02:13] Dennis McKenna: People know how they’re going to ask their questions?

Let’s see.

That’s not it.

So I have only two questions here which are not really questions.

One is Zach Billhorn says 1,000% agree with Lorenzo. He planted the seed of imagination for this. Okay.

Phil Burns asked, can Tama speak more about hard relationships with Terry?

Okay.

Hard relationship. Okay. I clicked her ak.

Yeah.

Answer lie.

[02:03:15] Tama Starr: You know, when he turned up on my doorstep with this amazing story about La Chorrera, we had heard about each other for a long time. That’s how Graham said, how did you come to record an evening of conversation with somebody you had never met before? How do you know that’s worth recording?

But of course, our mutual reputations had preceded us before you would meet.

We didn’t have social media, we didn’t have each other’s selfies and everything. All we had were promoters. Your friends would be promoting you to all your other friends so that you heard about them.

And so that’s how.

I didn’t even meet rick Watson until 1971, but because he was friends with Martin Nin and he was friends with the sainted poet Richard Horne and of course Diana, that when we came together, it was like an incursion from the future.

You just met and said, haha, I’ve always known you.

I saw him through different romances that he had. It’s interesting, I didn’t realize Graham until I read the book.

Women often left him.

He was not the one who broke it up. The women left him.

And I remember having long conversations with Kat at Esalen in 1987 about the nature of the narcissist.

It was a novel use of the word narcissist. Now it’s a very common word and it has very specific meanings.

But 40 years ago it was not so common.

And it described somebody who was more like a black hole, an attractor, so as to attract lots of people and attract lots of affection and even more even adulation by people.

But when you got up close to it, it could look what is at the center of a black hole? Well, nothing really.

So this was the kind of thoughts that Kat.

The kind of feelings that Katt was starting to have.

Maybe the, you know, maybe the feet of clay of, you know, the great man.

It was hard for all of that adulation not to go to his head.

And he didn’t really credit women that much anyway.

I mean, Kat’s work was sort of an afterthought. He included her in the Living in the Imagination conference. But that’s cause she was there taking care of the kids.

He had grown up a lot by the time Christy came along, his last love. And she was really beautiful and wonderful.

And that was a very strange experience for her to get together with this amazing guy and then immediately he’s in his end of life situation. How long were they together? We’re only a couple of years.

[02:07:06] R.U. Sirius: Right?

[02:07:07] Tama Starr: Hardly any time.

So that was very tragic.

See, now here I am talking about all his relationships with all of these other women.

And the question was about my relationship with him.

But I think I’ve often been in the boys club and they forget they treat me like one of the boys.

When somebody would say, you think like a man, I would say, thank you. Sorry about that, girls.

So I think Terence would forget and see me more of an equal where his girlfriends, not so much. Well, Diana was different though. Now Diana had power, but her power was sometimes kind of perverse. I mean, she got them into countries where tourists were not allowed to be what, Burma.

By starting love affairs with the local Jeanne d’, Armerie, which I think Terence mentions in one of his books. This sort of disturbed him.

[02:08:15] Bruce Damer: He.

[02:08:18] Tama Starr: Didn’T care for that kind of action.

And she was of much more improvisatory morals about that stuff.

So there. I didn’t answer the man’s question at all.

[02:08:37] Graham St John: Yes, but you did. And you brought up something that we.

[02:08:42] Dan Levy: Didn’T really talk about.

[02:08:43] Graham St John: Or you did mention that earlier, that you made the first recording, or at least the oldest recording I should say, that survived of Terence and that you titled called Amazon Psychotropical Quest, which this year, which is like a three hour recording that you made in the apartment of Martin N.

Who you lived upstairs from in San Francisco in November 1972. And there was like half a dozen people in the room. And that recording is extraordinary. I mean, this is protein, Terence McKenna. And that’s been released in combination with a video sync produced by Peter Bergman this year.

And it’s called Amazon Tropical Quest. And I encourage everyone to check that out. I mean, if you’re into the Terence McKenna rap, this is, you know, it’s just the proto rap. I mean, you’ve got Terence before he became Terence McKenna and we even have, you know, the sound of joints circulating and he doesn’t miss a Beat in the. You know, he doesn’t stop talking, even in the inhalations. I think at one point, he’s even operating in bongo.

So can you take us back to that time? Because you’d never met Terence before that day, that you had a recording device.

And I mean, obviously, as you say, you’d heard wind of him through Diana. So can you take us back to that, Debbie?

[02:10:27] Tama Starr: Through Diana and through Rick Watson and through Martin.

So from all of these unimpeachable sources, they said, just wait till you meet this guy. He has the most amazing rap.

So that’s. So, of course, I pulled out the tape recorder for this.

I believe he had already visited Martin. Perhaps in between the two trips to La Torera.

[02:10:54] Lorenzo Hagerty: Right.

[02:10:54] Tama Starr: There were two trips, Dennis. He went and came back, and then he went back there.

And so Martin already knew that there was this huge adventure afoot, this psychic and outer space and inner space and transformative and transmuting of the elements, and what they were going to carbalize the eschaton, the language, which Graham did live up to, that language. I mean, in fact, my notes on the book are all of a few of the amazing phrases.

Look, that’s how many amazing phrases I found of Graham’s.

And then I finally figured out they were not all coinages. Some of them were already known to science and sci fi. So, anyway, I knew that this sci fi character was about to materialize in the apartment at Dodge Place, and so we invited the whole gang.

We differ on how many people are probably there. Probably eight. Six. Eight.

It seemed like a big crowd, but he was so practiced, and he never stumbled, he never skipped a beat, and he never searched for. For a word.

It was as if he had rehearsed it, but he obviously hadn’t.

The way he dramatized the phrases, the way he paused, it was just a magnificent, magnificent performance.

And I don’t use the word incredible to mean very, because to me it means not credible.

So it was not incredible at all. It was credible.

He made the whole thing come alive.

It seemed that it would be impossible to put it into writing. A totally different medium.

It had to be spoken and experienced.

So I see now that we really did receive a.

A raw and real teaching and a thoroughly mature dramatization of that whole adventure, including all the personalities of the people. One of whom, by the way, did you know, was the high school friend of mine, Sally Hartley.

Did you know, I knew her in high school, Dennis.

Anyway, she was along on that trip.

Sarah Hartley.

[02:13:44] Dennis McKenna: Oh, yes, of course she was On a trip. And she was an old friend of yours?

Yes, of course. She witnessed it all and participated in it all. And she was one of the skeptics, fortunately, at La Cherere. But it was good that you had them.

[02:14:04] Lorenzo Hagerty: Yeah.

[02:14:05] Dennis McKenna: Well, you mentioned the recording. People should know that the. That recording, that 1972 Dodge Place recording that you did, that is on the McKenna Academy website. If you look at the podcasts with Graham, I’ve done two already. And on the second one, I think the link to that recording is posted so people can listen to that conversation. And it is one of the most remarkable sort of digital artifacts from Terence’s career. It’s definitely.

If you could stand it. It’s about two and a half hours.

Speaking of two and a half hours, we’re coming up on the last 15 minutes.

There are lots of interesting questions turning up here.

I want to look at some of them. I don’t think we’ll have time, but one of them.

Well, one of the questions may be worth addressing is from Brian Ebert. He’s a friend of mine. I know him.

Thank you, Brian. He says, what do you think Terence would have to say about the current state of the psychedelic landscape, the way people engage with psychedelics, decriminalization and clinical trials, its impact on the global culture, mainstream acceptance, widespread psychedelic retreats, et cetera. So if I.

Would someone like to weigh in on that?

[02:15:43] Dan Levy: I think he would say, what hath God wrought?

It would be like, first of all, would the world be different if he were alive? Would this world that Brian is asking about have changed, have evolved in a different way?

I mean, this is just one of thousands of times I’ve asked myself, what would Terence say about x, starting with 9 11? I remember being in New York when 911 happened. And the first thing that came to my mind is, where is Terence? I need to call him and talk to him about. Yeah, because it was like a novel event, of course.

[02:16:26] Dennis McKenna: Absolutely.

[02:16:27] Dan Levy: Things in motion. And Terence, in my imagination was going, yeah, bring it on, bring it on. As well as he was going, the horror. The horror in a classic Terence way.

I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what people.

What do you, the rest of you think Terence would think about it all?

[02:16:45] Tama Starr: Well, I have a comment. I am grateful to anyone who has prevented psychedelics from being totally co opted by the therapy community because Therapy, therapy, therapy, therapy.

Well, I guess I’m old school, but in the old school that I came from, class of 64, in subsequent years, I did A survey of my classmates at Fieldstone School and there were a hundred of us.

How many have taken psychedelics and how many have had therapy?

And it was split.

I think there was one person who had done both.

But we were always, when we heard that there were medical trials going on about it, we would just get hysterical. We would just laugh our heads off at the concept of some twerp in a white coat with a clipboard saying und vak are we feeling now, eh? I mean, the horror, the horror.

So with Terence saying just, you know, do like I do, I want to, you know, and the non programmatic nature of that kind of psychedelia, I’m still enough of a libertarian and individualist and contrarian to say, yes, keep it away from the man. The man doesn’t understand how to use it and especially keep it away from those therapists.

[02:18:25] Dennis McKenna: But inevitably it’s going to be co opted by the medical establishment. But I completely agree. I think we should look to the way that indigenous people have used these things for thousands of years. They have a much more realistic understanding of what these medicines are. I mean, I used to joke that psychedelics are kind of like a starship that’s crashed in the jungle and it’s sort of working and you’re entrapped by the pretty lights and you can detach pieces of it and point it at people and they cure cancer and they do these things, but nobody really understands what the substance is. They don’t really understand what psychedelics are.

So they’re trying to stuff it into all these different boxes. The biomedical box, the therapeutic box. They don’t really fit.

I think that we should look at symbiosis as the model through relationships with these plants and fungi.

And psychedelics are nothing if not intensely personal. That’s where it happens. That’s where the magic is between an individual nervous system interacting with this molecule, whatever the molecule might be.

That’s not something that you could really fit into a therapeutic paradigm the way it’s understood. You have to. I mean, setting is important. You have to create the appropriate circumstances and then let it happen.

But the magic happens between the interaction between the person, that nervous system, and the plant or fungus that carries the molecule. So I think.

But of course there’s also the profit motive in the terms of the pharmaceuticalization of all that.

I mean, it’s better than having them illegal, I suppose.

But I think what should be encouraged is people just should learn how to use these substances.

In a safe circumstances, appropriately, not necessarily under some clinical protocol. I mean, there’s times when that might make sense, but in general you don’t have to be sick to benefit from psychedelic experience.

Bob Jesse used to talk about they can be used for the benefit of the well.

And yes, they can be used to address depression, ptsd, all of these things that, that people suffer from. But that’s not their limit. That’s just a very limited understanding of what they can do. So that’s my 2 cents worth.

So many good questions here.

Someone asked.

John Hoopes asked, I’d like to hear more about the lineage from William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the Yagé letters to the experiment at La Chorrera.

His question is good because it’s mercifully short. Some of these people have written paragraphs, which is fine. But John, I would say the lineage, if there’s a connection, it’s come up a couple of times. Why did we go to La Chorrera?

Because Schultes reported the collections of Varola that the Ukuhe came from as coming from El Encanto, which was some distance from La Chorrera. But I think at the time we were aware that Bill Burroughs went to La Cherere in 1950, the year I was born, to look for Yagé.

And then he wrote about that in the Yagé letters and the exchange of letters with Ginsburg. But that’s just remarkable to me how ahead of his time Bill Burroughs was to go to La Chorrera of all places of 1950, to find Yagé.

And he also deserves some credit. You know, he and Schultes were colleagues, they were both from Harvard. And it was Bill Burroughs that told Schultes, dick, I think you need to look at some of these other plants that are going into Ayahuasca.

Because at the time the thinking was, well, it’s all about ayahuasca. But of course it’s the admixture plants that contain the dmt.

And this was not known to Schultes.

I think Bill’s suggestion made Schultes decide to look at some of these admixture plants, which he did. And from that the whole pharmacology of Ayahuasca was understood and elucidated.

Let’s see what else here.

Oh, here, here’s. Here’s one maybe for Lorenzo, I don’t know.

This gentleman says, hi everyone. One thing I wanted to say as a 34 year old man who found Terence at 16, when I was looking at a strange world and begin having funny ideas of my own, a voice of reason in a maddening storm of Beauty and chaos. I wanted to thank you and Terence for bringing mushrooms to the access of the people through cultivation and courage.

I have so many words. One day, maybe it will get a chance to share. As I walk a neo shamanic path, I feel Terence’s voice in the ether. Always my question for Lorenzo. I was wondering if such an large language model becomes available.

That was being discussed earlier.

Where might we able to find that?

Where might we be able to find that?

As I navigate and self reflect through the quest that is my life.

So that’s for Lorenzo.

[02:25:14] Lorenzo Hagerty: I’m going to send a link to your support staff here, Dennis, that I just got it this afternoon. He just updated it and he sent one of those things. You got to put your phone on and that’ll send you the link.

What do you call them up?

[02:25:30] Dennis McKenna: Okay.

[02:25:31] Lorenzo Hagerty: I don’t QR code. Anyhow, it’s a QR code and I’m going to send it to your staff and they can put it up with this talk. So you’ll be able, when you go to the McKenna Salon or Academy and you go to this, this podcast, this talk, hopefully you’ll be able to post that in the program notes and then they can just hold their phone up and it’ll take them right to that.

[02:25:56] Dennis McKenna: Okay, thank you.

Let’s see what else.

So we’re coming up on what’s supposed to be the end of this session.

You’re all troopers, you’ve all hung in.

Let’s see, Trying to find.

There are many good questions.

One here is.

Hello, everyone. I was curious to how Terence recalled the whole experiment at LA.

Did he reference Dennis notebooks in the 11 days he went without sleep?

Do we know what actually Terence was trying to crack open at a second experiment?

I guess I can answer that in a sense. Terence, no.

During that 11 day period, he definitely did not reference my notebooks. I don’t even know if he had access to them.

It was the pure logos. I mean, he was in a state while I was sort of cruising the cosmos and lost in what might be called a schizophrenic episode or a shamanic initiation episode. It’s never been clear, but Terence was getting the download from the logos. I mean, he was in a state of hyper vigilance.

He didn’t sleep for 11 days and he was getting a download of a lot of information that led to the construction of the time wave. He was obsessed with cycles and he was scratching diagrams in the dirt about so many days since our mother’s death. And Then counting forward from the experiment at Launcher Era, it was all some kind of complicated thing, and it led. Eventually he formalized it, obviously not at La Torera, but later he formalized it into what became the Time Wave. What was curious to me. The questioner asked, do we know what exactly Terence was trying to crack open in a second experiment?

This is an interesting thing, because when he came away from La Torera, he said, we have to reject science. And the very nature of the Time wave is that nothing can be regulated because time itself has a texture. So this idea, which science is very invested in, that you could replicate experiments, you can’t really, because every moment is unique and has its own sort of novelty gestalt.

And that’s kind of paradoxical because when he went with me into back to Peru in 1981, when I was there to do my field work, and by that time I was like, we’re not going to try to replicate the experiment. I’m not sure I’m here to collect some plants, damn it. And I have an academic agenda to fulfill. But Terence tagged along and he really wanted to try to replicate the experiment.

And at the time I said, you said it could never be replicated, so why are you here?

So he thought it could be replicated, but I wasn’t buying it. And that second trip of ours to South America, this time to Peru, was in some ways contentious for us and in some ways marked, I think, a certain departure in our points of view. I mean, after the experiment at La Torera, I had sort of retreated into science, or I don’t know if the term has retreated.

I just needed a base of reality to.

And then 10 years later, I went back to do what ostensibly we were going to do the first time, which was find these exotic, orally active drugs derived from Varola.

And we did. I went and found them and I published them, and that was part of my thesis.

But Terence was there, and he was really be the disruptor. I mean, Wade Davis was there. It’s a long story.

Talked about it in the invisible landscape. But he was really pushing people to take large amounts of mushrooms. And of course they were there, so mushrooms were available. And I was like, I’m not really interested in that. I’m here to investigate these ukuhe derivatives. But there were other people that were. And he was taking them. So it was.

It was a kind of a peculiar time. And in some ways, I think it.

Well, we never. You know, I think it represented a sort of a demarcation of our diverging trajectories.

And Terence went in the direction of being the philosopher, the raconteer, the metaphysician. And I went toward being more scientifically oriented.

And sort of by personal choice, I decided to, you know, I wanted to be in the background. I didn’t want to be this public figure that Terence eventually became.

So I was happy to toil in my lab when I was a student and.

And not really be a public figure. Not as much.

So anyway, let’s see.

We have two raised hands here, Graham’s and Bruce’s. And Graham has gone to the bathroom, which was a good idea. Oh, here he comes.

Oh, Bruce, you’re up.

[02:32:33] Bruce Damer: In closing, as I. Since we’re winding down, I know people have their show and tell Items, the Mondo 2000 issues, and of course, the book, what I brought today. You can see it.

It’s my T shirt.

[02:32:49] Dennis McKenna: Ah, yes, yes.

[02:32:53] Bruce Damer: So just to bring some of the spirit of Terence into the room, we call this the Octoshroom.

The Anto Shroom.

[02:33:04] Dennis McKenna: Right, Right.

[02:33:05] Bruce Damer: Mushroom cap.

There are two very wide eyes here with the stem of the mushroom, and there’s the body of the octopus, and right under it says Terence McKenna here.

So an Octo Shroom T shirt. Very rare, delectable.

And I think what it.

What it points out is the.

The levity, if you will, and the humor and the completely off kilterness of Terence’s thought in that the. The mushroom, of course, is the entity, but then it merges down into this thing which a lot of, as you know, octopi have visible language on their skins with the pigments that they have. They can communicate with the texture changes. They can also hide themselves.

And this is found on Terence’s personal letterhead in some of the few surviving printed letters that we have. And it appeared around, I don’t know, 1985 or 86 on letters from Occidental and then from Captain Cook, you know, the Captain Cook address in Hawaii. There’s the Octo Shroom there. Pounded out on Apple.

No, not even laser writers, like, low resolution.

[02:34:26] Dennis McKenna: Dot matrix printer.

[02:34:27] Dan Levy: Dot matrix printer.

[02:34:29] Bruce Damer: What was that?

[02:34:30] Dan Levy: It was a dot matrix printer.

[02:34:33] Bruce Damer: A dot matrix printer, Right. So we reveal the Octoshroom.

Terence, we see you, and you’re a winner. Still, his personal moniker is this. Is this his personal symbol that he chose that no one ever knew about, that only came through archival reveals. And so it, you know, everybody should download the Dr. Shroom and do whatever they want with it.

Bring it to life with AI have it speaking Terence or whatever, but let’s make the octo shroom.

[02:35:09] Dennis McKenna: Oh, you’re proposing that AI entity should look like this image on your T shirt?

[02:35:16] Bruce Damer: I think so.

[02:35:17] R.U. Sirius: Why not?

[02:35:18] Bruce Damer: Why not?

[02:35:20] Graham St John: I was just looking for the picture because I’ve reproduced an image of that design in the book and that design is by Eric, whose surname I’ve forgotten, but it’s in the book and I’m pleased to see that that’s taking form of a T shirt. And I’m slightly jealous.

I don’t know what you think, Dennis. Maybe it’s time to wind it up because we are over time. And even though it’s only 3:30 in the afternoon here, I’m sure it’s getting quite late in the northern hemisphere.

I just want to say thanks to you, Dennis, for hosting this webinar and thanks to everyone. I’m just so pleased that my book has provided the opportunity for us all to chin wag over Terence. And I hope that there are. Well, I know there will be further opportunities for me to dialogue with you all because the work of a biographer is never done.

[02:36:27] Dennis McKenna: Yes, well, this was the first interactive event. It may not be the last.

I agree. We are a little. We’re about 15 minutes over what we said. You’ve been all very patient and our audience as well, per our listeners.

Thanks to them for showing up.

And this will all be recorded. It’ll be on the website and people can look at it. And I really think this has been a wonderful event. It’s everything I hoped it would be.

So. And Graham, thank you again for the work that you’ve done.

Go buy his book. What else can I say? You know, this is an incredible work and everybody should read it and know about it and we need to get it out. And I look forward to being in touch with all of you and we’ll let it go there any that we absolutely must share before we close out.

All right.

All right.

[02:37:37] Graham St John: Well, let’s buy from this part of.

[02:37:39] Dennis McKenna: The world, all that. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. All right.

[02:37:43] Dan Levy: This is great. Thank you so much, everybody.

[02:37:46] Dennis McKenna: Thank you.

[02:37:47] R.U. Sirius: Bye bye.

[02:37:48] Tama Starr: Oh, lovely.

[02:37:50] Dennis McKenna: Let me.

[02:37:50] Bruce Damer: Sorry, everybody. I should have meet and hang with y’. All.

[02:37:54] Tama Starr: Yes, a pleasure.

[02:37:56] Dennis McKenna: It’s been a real pleasure.

Yeah. Enjoy the holidays and we’ll be in touch. We’ll follow up with email and you’ll be able to link into this, share it and so forth. So. I’m just so happy and moved that you could do this. I know you’re all very busy, so.

Yeah. So.

Well, say good night or Good morning, wherever it is. Good afternoon.

[02:38:25] Graham St John: Good afternoon.

[02:38:25] Bruce Damer: For me. Good afternoon.

[02:38:28] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Good afternoon.

[02:38:34]: Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world.

Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world. Support the Makena Academy by donating today.

Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna.Academy.

[00:00:13] Intro: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.