I’ve been waiting for the apocalypse for some time now. One of my favorite
games as a child was to pretend that it was the end of the world and the goal of play was
to not be seen. Cars were government vehicles, driven by Nazis, fascists and big-brother
types who cruised the streets in search of the few rare individuals who had managed to
stay free. People on foot were zombie ghouls, of course, looking to nibble on some tasty
brains or innards. I was pretty good at not being seen, moving amongst the shadows,
being able to outrun cars on my bike by the sheer virtue that I knew my neighborhood
well, along with all of its shortcuts and hidden places. Thirty years later and I still feel
like the end is near, though the thrill of a child’s game has given way to anxiety and fear.
It does though seem like the end of the world has turned into professional sport
these days. We all know it’s the end, the main questions are when and how? The latest
sign of impending doom is the Dow Jones which, for a while at least, seemed to be
plummeting at the speed of angels falling from heaven. Along with this descent into
economic darkness, the country is bleeding jobs at the highest rate in sixty years, making
it clear that this is no mere flesh wound we are dealing with. The number of homeless is
staggering. On any given day in Los Angeles County, there are over 88,000 men, women
and children with no place to live. That is four times the population of the small town
where I was born and raised and played my apocalyptic games. This number is only
going to increase. Americans are loosing their homes at an unprecedented rate and tent
cities are appearing across the land, making many exiles in their own country.
While the majority of the cable news programs and newspaper editorials continue
to speculate and prophesize over the cause and cure of the economic collapse, a few
turned their attention to another story to emerge the first week of April; one which spoke
of the nation’s soul. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, America
is also undergoing a subtle religious transformation – it is becoming less Christian. The
number of Americans who identify themselves as Christian dropped from 86 to 76
percent in 2008. It is not the case that this decrease was the result of conversion to other
religions or religious movements, the largest increase in the study was persons who
claimed no religious affiliation at all, a group which grew by 37 percent in ten year’s
time. America, it would seem, is loosing its religion. 1

I can’t help but to consider connections between religion and the state of the
nation. I am not going to argue that people are becoming less religious because of the
economy, or that in their desperation, more people will turn to God. Nor do I plan to
lament the decrease in Christians since, truth be told, I am glad to see many of them go.
Instead, I want to argue that we are in a unique point in history to re-examine the
foundations of both our economy and religion. Indeed, it would seem that we need to
consider both simultaneously.

America has been, and continues to be a nation of Christians. We are also a nation
of capitalists. It has been 100 years since sociologist Max Weber demonstrated how
capitalism emerged out of the protestant ethic. Though he believed that the religious
underpinnings had long since vanished, it is not difficult to see how even today
capitalism is informed by an often unconscious moral attitude. For example, linguist
George Lakoff has pointed out that embedded within conservative political language is
the attitude that those who are self-sufficient are moral persons; those who need help
from the state are not. It was this kind of moral turpitude which allowed Ronald Reagan

to unabashedly claim that homelessness was a lifestyle choice, and as such the state need
not extend a helping hand.

This is America at the start of the 21 st century. Churches have taken up residence
in shopping malls and the homeless push shopping carts along city streets. These are the
images projecting from the American dream, and all dream images are apocalyptic, as the
word literally means “to uncover,” “to bring out of darkness.” They are revealing
unconscious truths; there is no longer any distinguishing Christ from commodity, in our
greed we have decimated the environment and our consumption is costing us a place to
call home. It does seem that the end is truly nigh. If there is to be any salvation at all, it is
going to require radical shifts in consciousness. We are being called to create a new
world. We cannot rely on failed ideologies, it is time to take risks and explore
possibilities long thought impossible in an attempt to give birth to an economy based on
equality, justness and sustainability and that allows for the honoring of the creative
human spirit and its connection to the divine. Perhaps we should look to voices from the
past that have been silenced and shut away, condemned to the edges of history, to see if
what was rejected could be the foundation stone for a new society.

A candidate who fits this description is Meister Eckhart a fourteenth century
Dominican priest and mystic. He was condemned by the Catholic Church, in part because
he preached to the poor using their German language rather than the official Latin of
liturgy. The message he delivered was not one of damnation and separation from god, but
one of blessing, union and justice. According to Matthew Fox, a former Dominican like
Eckhart who is now an Episcopal priest, there are four primary themes found in the
sermons of Eckhart which create a four-fold spiritual path. These are 1) creation (the via
positiva), 2) Letting go and letting be (the via negativa), 3) breakthrough and giving birth
to God (the via creativa), and 4) re-creation in compassion and justice (the via
transformativa). Embracing Eckhart’s mystical vision just may be the key that can free us
from our economic and religious malaise and provide the support for a new American
economy and spirituality.

According to Fox, Eckhart is a panentheist, that is, that God is in all things and
that all things reside in God. God can be found in creation and therefore, the world is
inherently good. Being is holy. The human soul is a spark of the divine and as such, we
are born into goodness. This is the antithesis of the view that we are all born into sin. It is
an optimistic imagining of the human condition that stands in direct opposition to the
pessimistic stance injected into modern political and philosophical discourse by Thomas
Hobbes.

In his political treatise, Leviathan, Hobbes famously described the human life as
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The world is a hostile place with everyone
always, at all times, acting out of selfish motivation. As such, it becomes a moral
imperative to act to protect your interests and ensure that no one takes advantage of you –
because everyone is out to do so. This is the underlying world view beneath Reagan’s
comments on the homeless as well as those who argue against universal health care or
welfare because the assumption is, others will take advantage.
Obviously, Eckhart would not agree with Hobbes’ assessment of the human
condition. For Eckhart, the soul was noble so the human was noble. Furthermore, the
world, being a product of God’s creation and at the same time containing God, is
therefore divine. Because nature is full of God, Eckhart would encourage us to love

nature as the believer loves God. I wonder what would follow from a shift in
consciousness where people began experiencing nature as containing God, rather than
treating it as nothing more than lifeless substance to be exploited for personal gain?
Could it not set the stage for an earth-honoring economy and politic? Much is being said
about transforming the American economy into a Green Economy, that is, one which is
based on sustainability and sound environmental practices. It seems to me that Eckhart’s
path of creation will lead us towards this goal.

Scholars and commentators have written much about Eckhart’s second path, the
via negativa. It has often been compared to Buddhist, and in particular Zen Buddhist
thinking, especially since Eckhart employs terms like “nothingness” and encourages his
listeners to “let go” and “empty themselves.” All creatures are “nothing” because they do
not and cannot exist without God, which is the ground of all being. In order to fully
experience the divine, we must go beyond God and empty ourselves of all our previous
understanding in order to allow Being to flood our souls. As Eckhart preached “I pray
God to rid me of God.” America too needs to rid ourselves of God, to let go of our self
identity as a Christian nation, abandon fatuous fundamentalisms and false piety in order
to truly experience ourselves as citizens of a promised land. Likewise, we need to
dismantle outdated social structures which serve only the wealthy and elite in order to
construct a system truly based on equality and justice.

Weber lamented that capitalism had lost its religious foundation, creating a world
of alienation where modern workers were not religious ascetics but angels transformed
into automata after being conscripted into corporate service.
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism
was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly
morality, it did its part in building tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine
production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into
this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with
irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal
is burnt. 2

Americans define themselves by their work. Most of us typically spend more
waking time with co-workers than family. When we are not identifying ourselves with
what we do, it is because we are busy identifying with what we own. We are consumers
trained by a lifetime of advertising and public relations to never be satiated. We are like
the hungry ghosts of the Preta Loka, one of the Hindu and Buddhist hells, where souls
condemned to eternal hunger reside. We must release our identifications of vocation and
consumer; we must abandon the drive to accumulate of excessive wealth in order to
discover the treasure of our souls. Yet, fear and greed often divert our attention from
devotion. As Eckhart noted, some people are “more afraid of losing a piece of money, or
even a danarius, than God. We condemn Judas because he sold Christ for thirty silver
pieces, and yet many persons sell God, truth, justice for a single quarter or eve a penny.” 3
Even if we can find the courage to embark on the mystic’s path, the world does
not allow much time for spiritual endeavors. Personally, I have spent the past 15 years
studying the world’s religions and religious teachers, yet have devoted little time to my

own spirituality. My days are filled with work and deadlines and distractions leaving
hardly ten minutes for silent meditation. Yet I carry with me, every day, the need for
stillness. I suspect I am not alone if feeling like this. As well, I also feel the desire to
create, to write, to paint, make music, yet that too remains unrequited.
Karl Marx argued that when workers are forced to create items for another’s
profit and not in order to fulfill their own creative needs, they will become alienated,
strangers to themselves. Again, when we do not know ourselves, we cannot know God.
Any model for a new economy will have to be one which allows for the free expression
of our innate urge to create.

Eckhart saw creativity as a spiritual practice. Once we have emptied ourselves,
and let go of the notions that we are separate from creation then we can be filled with
God. When we find stillness, we can experience a breakthrough, an awakening to the
mystery. We finally experience the truth that God is in us and we in God. Our will
becomes God’s will. God flows from our every action, we give birth to God and like
God, we become creators. However, we are not to remain in constant rapture. Too many
who have had an experience of the ineffable remove themselves from the world, they are
“blissed out” and in their desire to linger in transcendence, they remove themselves from
the divine and become trapped in a narcissistic quest for ecstasy. For Eckhart, it was
essential that we be in the world.

The final path of Eckhart’s mysticism, the via transformativa, requires that we
“recreate creation.” 4 We are called to give birth to the world, just as we are now. For
Eckhart, this world is one where equality reigns. All creatures participate equally in being
and as such, all are connected. Eckhart taught that there is a reason why the Lord’s prayer
petitions “Give us our daily bread” and not “give me my daily bread.”
We say “our” in order that we might remember that all people are our brothers and
co-heirs and thus we might love them and persevere to the end with them as brothers,
keeping also in mind that other verse: “All of you are brothers.” 5

Later, in the same sermon, Eckhart, citing the Church Father Chrysostom, declares
We might understand that bread is given to us so that not only we might eat but that
we recognize others in need, lest anyone say “my bread” is given to me instead of
understanding that it is ours, given to me, to others through me and to me through
others. For not only bread but all things which are necessary for sustaining this
present life are given to us with others and because of others and given to others in us.
Whoever does not give to another what belongs to the other, such a one does not eat
his own bread but east the bread of another along with his own Thus when we justly
eat the bread we have received, we certainly eat our bread; but when we eat evilly and
with sin the bread we have received, then we are not eating our own bread but the
bread of another. For everything which we have unjustly is not really ours. 6

The social structure that Eckhart would have us build is one where it is ensured
that everyone has their basic needs met; food, shelter and health before anyone could

begin compiling and collecting excess. It is a scandal that America, one of the wealthiest
nations in the history of the world, has denied so many what is essential for survival. It is
not that those in need are lacking virtue. The sin lies with us, not them. We are failing to
act with compassion. Eckhart would rightly see us for what we are, a nation of people
who pray for “my bread” not “ours.” In a sermon which clearly demonstrates Eckhart’s
contemporary relevance, he states “it is a great crime to give the wages of the poor to the
rich and from the livelihood of the poor to increase the luxuries of the powerful, taking
water from the needy earth and pouring it into the rivers.” 7

Writing from Birmingham Jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. commented
that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and so it is for Eckhart. Acting
out of compassion, we will feel a compulsion to social justice. The apocalypse is a
necessary deconstruction; we are required to remove that which is useless, outdated and
unjust before dreaming a new America. This is the nation Eckhart would have us build;
one based on equality, justice and compassion. None would go hungry or homeless. All
will receive the care they require. Alienation will be exorcised as every person will be
allowed to fully embody the creative energy flowing through their being. Realizing that
all things are connected and sacred, we will build community and honor the earth and all
its creatures and create an economy that is sustainable. If this is revealed, then the
kingdom of heaven will surely be on Earth

1 http://livinginliminality.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/aris_report_2008.pdf
2 Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (London: Routledge. 2001) 123.
3 Fox, Matthew. Passion for Creation. (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions) 459.
4 Fox, Matthew. “Meister Eckhart on the Fourfold Path of a Creation Centered Spiritual Journey.”
5 Fox, Matthew. Passion for Creation. 496
6 Ibid. 499-500.
7 Ibid. 422.

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.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=201

Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: Volume II. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006.

Maters, Robert and Houston, Jean. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 2000.       

McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival. New York: MJF Books, 1991

________. Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.

Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969.

Suzuki, D.T. Zen Buddhism. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.

---

[1] McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival. (New York: MJF Books, 1991), 7,

[2]Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), 9.

[3] McKenna, 52.

[4] 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>

[5] Suzuki, D.T. Zen Buddhism. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 7.

[6] 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>

[7] Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: Volume II. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 761.

[8] McKenna, 31.

[9] Badiner, Allan Hunt. Zig Zag Zen. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2002), 191.

[10] McKenna, 10.

[11] Badiner, 190.

[12] Maters, Robert and Houston, Jean. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. (Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 2000), 109.

[13] Suzuki, 240.

[14] Callenbach, Ernest. Ecology: A Pocket Guide. Revised edition. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 163-164.

[15] 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>

[16] McKenna, Terence. (Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam Books, 1992), xvi-xvii.

[17] Badiner, 192.