Although he never reached the same level of household recognition as Timothy Leary or Ram Dass, Terence McKenna was without question one of the primary guiding spirits of psychedelic culture and was arguably the most eloquent. While Leary seized the national stage to preach the transformational potential of psychedelics with an evangelistic fervor that to many was more destructive than constructive, McKenna worked mostly from stage left, being more interested in studying shamanic societies and articulating a vision of purpose for the psychedelic culture than converting as many souls as possible. Where Leary was ringmaster urging all to tune in, turn on, and drop out, McKenna was philosopher-poet who would eventually captivate a global audience with tales of alien others existing in a bejeweled hyperspace and transcendental objects at the end of time.
While many of the early pioneers of psychedelic culture focused their interests towards the eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism in an attempt to better understand the subtleties of consciousness expansion; Leary published a guide for the psychedelic journey based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and his Harvard associate Richard Alpert would create a new identity as Hindu guru Ram Dass, McKenna’s attention turned south to study indigenous shamanic cultures that had an established history of using psychoactive plants. However, like Leary, Alpert, and so many others, McKenna’s initial investigations were also bound to Buddhist thought. He lived in Nepal in the early 70s, where he worked as an art historian and attempted to “integrate the psychedelic experience into a Buddhist model.”[1] It was during this time that he discovered the Tibetan shamanism of the Bon tradition which was the beginning of his shamanic studies. While much of the writing regarding psychedelics and Buddhism seems to focus on using the dharma as a hermeneutical key to understand the psychedelic experience or to map the two-way street where psychedelics led to Buddhism or where Buddhism led to psychedelics, McKenna seems to be largely excluded from the dialogue. This is somewhat understandable as he was no Buddhist and seemingly abandoned his early interest in the philosophy leaving it as little more than a historical footnote in his life’s work. He did reflect on Buddhism and psychedelic society in general, but as an essential voice of psychedelic culture shouldn’t his work be taken into greater consideration? Aren’t there other questions we can ask? Even if McKenna didn’t necessarily interpret the psychedelic experience in Buddhist terms, does that entail that there are no points of contrast between McKenna’s psychedelic philosophy and that of Buddhism? Isn’t it fair to ask whether McKenna’s message was consistent with the dharma?
When approaching McKenna’s work what one often first notices is an intellectual indebtedness to the likes of Alfred North Whitehead, Marshall McLuhan, and Teilhard de Chardin rather than Buddha and Bodhidharma. He lectured and wrote on a vast range of topics, including but certainly not limited to shamanism, the nature of language, the I-Ching and novelty theory, esoteric philosophy, and the DMT experience. Given such a broad range of topics, it is beyond the scope of this essay to address a comprehensive examination of the influence Buddhism had on McKenna’s thought. Instead, the focus is on his message of the archaic revival.
“Like a chemical habit, we are hooked on ego. And the psychedelic dissolves that chemical or psychological dependency and replaces it with the facts of the matter: how the individual fits into the life and organization of this planet, the vast amounts of time all these things have been in existence and have worked themselves to their present status.”
McKenna, like the rest of the counter-culture, was responding to what Theodore Roszak in his now classic The Making of a Counter Culture termed as the technocracy, which is synonymous with the corporate state. The technocracy is a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that claims logic, reason, and progress as its foundation rather than the truth that its power is derived from oppression, violence, and an unquenchable thirst for profit. Any hope that the machine would ultimately serve humankind has proven to be naive. Only profit has an intrinsic value for the technocracy, all else; humans, animals, and land only have instrumental value. In the corporate state, the human exists only to serve the machine. The technocracy is akin to a theocracy governed by a priesthood of technical experts who appeal, not to God, but to the unquestionable laws of science and scientific progress for guidance. The technocracy is totalitarian. It maintains control by “exploiting our deep-seated commitment to the scientific worldview” and by making us want ever better living through the products it creates. The technocracy “charms conformity” from its citizens by providing a false sense of complacency found in the gathering of material goods.[2]
Considering such a bleak picture of modern society, one might wonder how humanity could ever awaken from its technological bondage and challenge the technocratic clergy. Roszak and Charles A. Reich, author of The Greening of America, both placed the key to society’s deliverance in the same place – the transformation of consciousness. This then is the primary message of psychedelic culture, that it could provide the necessary shift in consciousness that could break the stranglehold of the death-dealing dominant culture. For McKenna, this took the form of an archaic revival, a rebirth into Gaian consciousness, and an awakening of the primordial religious impulse by way of plant-induced ecstasies. Like so many others, McKenna understood psychedelics as “deconditioning agents” and “catalysts of intellectual dissent.”[3] He also claimed during a lecture given some time in 1995 that “we have not awakened to the depth of the crisis that surrounds us” and 15 years later his observation remains regrettably true. During the same talk, he stated “I can’t preach scientism because I don’t believe in it. I can’t preach Buddhism because I can’t understand it. The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics.”[4]
Yet, despite his claims of not being able to clearly discern the dharma, what he claimed he could teach, the felt presence of immediate experience, seems Buddhist to the bone. Zen Buddhism in particular teaches a path of finding enlightenment in the moment, in everyday activities. As D. T. Suzuki wrote, “Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to the facts of personal experience.”[5] Buddhist meditation is an attempt to clear the mind, to free it from delusions, false assumptions, and social constructions so that one can perceive the nature of reality clearly. Likewise, focusing on the felt presence of immediate experience had a similar effect for McKenna:
The main thing that you get with these so-called primitive, preliterate people…is they are in the moment. They know how to have fun. They know how to work. They know how to live. And the reason they understand this is because they are focused within the confines of the felt presence of experience. They do not live by abstraction. And abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts. We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.[6]
As humans turn a blind eye to environmental devastation unfolding before them or deny global climate change because of ideology and not fact, there is little question that we are still prisoners of abstraction. As environmental activist Derrick Jensen wrote in his impressive two-volume work Endgame
It is no wonder we don’t defend the land where we live. We don’t live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances. We don’t even know where we live. Before we do anything, we have to get here first.[7]
Another common analogy, used most likely since before the time of the Buddha, was that we are asleep and thus unaware of the true nature of reality or our condition. For Buddhists, enlightenment is to awaken from our dogmatic slumber and the first step towards enlightenment is to quiet and examine the mind. Likewise, for McKenna, the first step is to examine the mind, but not a mind silenced by meditation, but rather, a mind expanded and awakened by psychedelics. Although, according to McKenna, the psychedelic experience was “the exact antithesis of meditation.”[8]
One of the primary premises of Buddhism is anatman, or no-Self. All things are interconnected according to Buddhist philosophy, and all things are constantly undergoing a process of change and given these two facts, it is not cogent to infer the existence of an independent, enduring, permanent Self. The ego then is a barrier to enlightenment, a falsehood in need of deconstruction. Many Buddhist meditation techniques are designed for the specific purpose of dismantling the notion of Self. And yet, ego death (assuming Self and ego are synonymous) is one of the more commonly reported effects of psychedelics. Indeed, this is one of the primary reasons peopled turned to Asian traditions in order to better understand their hallucinogenic experience of the ego being little more than hallucination. Indeed, McKenna claimed that “Buddhism and psychedelics are together probably the best hope we have for an antidote to egotism and materialism, which are fatally destroying the planet.”[9] In The Archaic Revival McKenna echoes this sentiment in language reminiscent of what the Buddha himself might have used:
Like a chemical habit, we are hooked on ego. And the psychedelic dissolves that chemical or psychological dependency and replaces it with the facts of the matter: how the individual fits into the life and organization of this planet, the vast amounts of time all these things have been in existence and have worked themselves to their present status.”[10]
Recognition of the falsehood of the Self follows from the understanding of what Buddhists refer to as sunyata or emptiness or no-thingness. Every Self is simply an intersection of an infinite stream of causations and an ever-changing flux of perceptions. A common metaphor used to illustrate this is Indra’s net, an infinite web spanning all that is, connects everything and each individual is simply a temporary multifaceted jewel reflecting all the other temporary multifaceted jewels creating a mirrored universe of infinity. One must wonder if in his spectacular descriptions of a multileveled bejeweled hyperspace McKenna might have been describing the landscape of Indra’s net.
Regardless of whether the visions were the same, there is a common result that both McKenna’s vision of psychedelic culture and Buddhism share and that is compassion. As McKenna stated “Compassion is the central moral teaching of Buddhism and, hopefully, the central moral intuition of the psychedelic experience.”[11] For Buddhists, when one realizes, to borrow a phrase from Thoreau “the infinite extent of their relations” they are better able to begin cultivating compassion for all things. Likewise, psychedelic travelers often experience a deeper sense of compassion. Masters and Houston in their now classic work The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience report that approximately 90 percent of their test subjects experienced a state of mind they described as empathic. Although the term empathy is broad and covers several type of experiences, one in particular which Masters and Houston suggest “should be regarded as one of the most important experiences available to psychedelic subjects” is the kind where “the distinction between I and You, or I and It, become blurred and the subject-object relation between persons seems to yield to a sense of mutual intermingling with openness to and knowledge of the other.”[12]
In Buddhism, compassion extends not just to living beings but to all of nature. Whereas the West has had a long tradition of seeing humankind as separate and distinct from nature, in Buddhist thought at least we are an integral part of nature. D.T. Suzuki wrote that humans are dependent on nature because we are the products of nature, we are nature. “I am in Nature and Nature is in me.”[13]
The intuition that we are all interconnected and cannot be held separate from nature is the same intuition held by deep ecologists. In a postscript to his pocket guide to ecology, Ernest Callenbach writes that
But in the last fifty years or so, something extremely strange has happened to these formerly straightforward seeming ways of understanding and controlling the world. With the more sophisticated analysis possible through modern science, we’ve learned that the world is in reality more a fuzzy network of interconnected energies than a set of separate objects with neat mechanical relationships. There is no such thing as a thing – that is, a separate, disconnected, independent thing. Not only in biology but also in physics, the world is now described as made up of complicated overlapping and interacting patterns. The apparently solid objects and beings we see around us are in fact mostly empty space, in which systems of energetic patterns manifest themselves. There is no fixity or permanence… All is constant change, cycles without end, the birth and rebirth of stars, rocks, trees, humans, and microbes…[14]
This notion that we are part of nature is one of the primary premises of the archaic revival. McKenna rightly pointed out that it is the separation of humanity and nature that is the source of our current environmental crisis. Those of us in modern, “civilized” society have forgotten our connection with nature and the deep relationship human consciousness has with plants, yet this is something the shamans of South and Central America have not forgotten. For McKenna we are faced with a choice, “a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways; horror beyond your wildest imagination or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community and caring beyond your wildest imagination.”[15] It is the way of the shaman that can lead us from the brink of extinction back to the earthly garden that is our birthright. Indeed, for McKenna, this is the only solution; “Only a recovery of the relationship that we evolved with nature through the use of psychoactive plants before the fall into history can offer us hope of a humane and open-ended future.”[16]
The answer for McKenna was not exclusionary. That is, no single approach would solve our problems. Psychedelics by themselves would not pull us from the brink, nor would Buddhist philosophy alone save us. Rather, he argued, Buddhism, ecological thinking, psychedelic thinking, and feminism are the four parts of a solution. These things are somewhat fragmented from each other, but they are the obvious pieces of the puzzle. An honoring of the feminine, an honoring of the planet, a stress on dematerialism and compassion, and the tools to revivify and make coherent those three.[17]
Finally, like the Buddha, McKenna said that we have an obligation to awaken, “in other words, an obligation to make sense, be non-trivial, not squander resources in foolishness.” But yet, at the same time, in good Zen fashion, he claimed we also have a responsibility to dream. The future is something to be shaped by human imagination, and for McKenna, there was no better key for opening the gates of human imagination than psychoactive substances. In the end, the archaic revival is a paradoxical command to simultaneously awaken and dream. Indeed, the fate of the planet and the world may rest on upon unlocking the bard’s koan.
There are other avenues of investigation regarding McKenna and Buddhism and other questions to be asked. One area of interest would be comparing some of his work not with Buddhism in general, but specifically Zen Buddhism. McKenna identified the works of D.T Suzuki as being influential and often he seems to delight in tossing psychedelic koans into our path. Is McKenna’s thoughts on the creative aspect of language consistent with the understanding of language by Zen masters? Another question could be asked what are the similarities and differences between the map of hyperspace McKenna described and that described by Mahayana Buddhism? Or, to put it another way, do the self-transforming machine elves have a Buddha nature? Of course, it is not difficult to imagine that if McKenna were still alive his response to this question would be to first chuckle at the question, and then suggest we journey into hyperspace and ask the elves ourselves.
Works Cited
Badiner, Allan Hunt. Zig Zag Zen. San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2002
Callenbach, Ernest. Ecology: A Pocket Guide. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Hagerty, Lorenzo. “A Crisis of Consciousness” 7 December 2007. Podcast. “The Psychedelic Salon” Matrix Masters. 7 April 2009.
< http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=147>
Hagerty, Lorenzo. “Psychedelic Dreams” 6 January 2009. Podcast. “The Psychedelic Salon” Matrix Masters. 24 January 2009.
