Author's Note: This is an unpublished interview I conducted with Terence McKenna by phone in August 1996. The interview was originally planned for Australia's REVelation magazine, and remains in my mind as one of the most informative that I've ever done, thanks to McKenna's intellect and humor. Special thanks to editor Peter Collins for his enthusiasm and support.

As the Elder Statesman of the 1960s Ethno-botanical/Psychedelic revolution, Terence McKenna has updated his memetic vaudeville act for the late 1990s. No longer content with discourse about psychedelics, McKenna has adopted the nascent science of cultural memetics, formulated by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and evolutionary theorist Daniel C. Dennett, as part of his repertoire.

This adoption is both a response to the dizzying Escape Velocity of culture in the millennium's penultimate years, and a tool for precise analysis of the cultural forms themselves. In the past decade the sources of inspiration for McKenna's Timewave and Archaic Revival memes have been revealed, whilst the memes themselves have sporadically mutated into stranger forms.

21st Century Renaissance Man

For instance, anyone familiar with the Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, will see his Noosphere as a natural precursor to McKenna's Timewave theory, that draws upon the spiralling trajectory of Western Civilization to suggest a final metamorphosis or Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Hijacking both de Chardin and McKenna's theories, the controversial physicist Frank Tipler's book The Physics of Immortality (New York: Anchor Books, 1995) conveys an even grander eschatological scheme to support the Biblical Resurrection. Extropian and Transhumanist thought have likewise conceived a Singularity Point that extends the Timewave towards the evolution of a cybernetic, isolate, self-aware consciousness.

Citing both de Chardin and media theorist Marshall McLuhan as notable influences, McKenna has combined his vast knowledge of science and cultural forms with a sharp wit to survive the gruelling US New Age talk circuit. Fuelled by early travels to Indonesia and the Amazon Basin, he has unwittingly spawned a mini-industry of books, lecture tapes, and ongoing multimedia projects. McKenna's books The Invisible Landscape (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993), True Hallucinations (San Francisco: Harper San Franciso, 1993), Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1992), and The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) use a multi-disciplinary focus to develop a General Unified Theory of the physiological development of early human consciousness.

Dismissing claims of being a guru, he is critical of the corporate mass media that reinforces conformist mind-sets and consumer spending habits. Sounding like Neil Postman on speed, McKenna states that "all mass media is tabloid media, meaning dumbed down to sell to the widest audience possible. No intelligent discussion can take place in an environment with this structure. What the Internet does is provide any-to-any communication which replaces the old top down, one-to-many model we are used to. The effect of this switch is a tremendous empowering of diversity and of viewpoints previously held to be marginal because they did not have mass appeal."

A Modest Proposal on the Drug War

The future evolution of the Internet is promising, but he denies a level playing field for memes in the traditional forms of mass media. One exchange that conveyed just how jaded McKenna is with some media institutions is when I asked him about the 'modest proposal' for drug decriminalization and policy reform contained in Food of the Gods.

His blistering reply? "Drugs, prison building and the criminalization of the non-white underclass is a vicious racket that will never be put out of business by proving that this or that drug is harmless or useful. Keeping drugs illegal and highly profitable is near the top of the agenda of international criminal syndicates, mendacious governments, maverick intelligence agencies, the mass media and their stooges.

"My suggestions stand as written, I have simply become much more cynical concerning the degree of involvement of so called legitimate governments and institutions in the drug rackets."

Counterculture Veteran Affairs

Cynicism was also fuelled by a media-driven rumor panic that led to McKenna and his producers Axiom Management duelling with the Department of Veteran Affairs, when bureaucrats panicked about a speech he was to give at the Wadsworth Theatre, leased by the VA to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in early May 1996. Despite gaining a temporary injunction, McKenna and Axiom Management were facing a potentially long fight in the Supreme Court if they disputed the situation further. "We were hoping to have a benefit to raise money for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but then the ACLU went into court and obtained not just a temporary injunction which was what allowed me to speak, but they obtained a permanent injunction against the UCLA restricting freedom of speech, and so in a sense, all battles were won," explained McKenna. "This doesn't surprise me; it was an incredibly stupid occurrence from a legalistic point of view, an incredibly stupid position that UCLA got themselves into. After all, the university isn't an apologist for the Veterans Administration. UCLA should have represented its own interests, which were the same as mine: free speech and freedom of discourse. It was really a case of an administrator over-reacting , and seeing a supposed public danger in my message, just forgetting that the public mission of a university is to uphold these things."

Casting Nets Into the Sea of Mind

These duels with the denizens of Friendly Fascism haven't prevented McKenna from continuing his research, and fans are anxiously awaiting his upcoming book Casting Nets Into the Sea of Mind, a collaborative effort with hermatologist Phillippe de Vosjoli. McKenna promises that the book will update his Food of the Gods thesis and explore paleontology of consciousness theories previously formulated by Julian Jaynes. "Vosjoli and I met about three years ago at the Ethno-botanical Teaching Intensive that I do every January at Pelenke in Chiapis, where there are some very large Mayan ruins. Vosjoli is very well known in the exotic animal field, and is editor of a respected magazine. He has been instrumental in bringing exotic animals to people's attention, and he has an amazing empathy and insight into animal behaviour and psychology. Since much of what I'm interested in is the early evolution of human consciousness out of presumably animal styles of relating to the world, we had a lot to say to each-other. I found him to be a very interesting guy - his father was head of the French Intelligence Service [SDECE] under [Charles] de Gaulle, so he had a pretty exotic childhood. He lives in San Diego and is a very broad, interesting thinker.