"Shamanism in its most primitive forms has a lot of emphasis on changing into animals, usually in fact large hunting cats, and displacement of consciousness out of human social and cultural modes into a kind of animal consciousness. Maybe this switching back of consciousness early on laid the basis for self reflection. As we became more like these carnivores in early human society, the payback was greater success in hunting. However the top carnivores seem unable to imagine, conceive or plan their hunting in the absence of the actual prey and the context of the kill.

"What psychedelics may have had to do with this is an extension of this hunting displacement into a realm of abstraction - the ability to contemplate the hunt in the absence of the hunt itself. What we're suggesting is that there is a close intimacy between hunters, top carnivores, and the states of mind necessary to each for the evolution of successful hunting, and subsequently survival of offspring. Our thesis is not politically correct with such an emphasis on carnivores; they're not very good Buddhists, these animals!

"Things like the jaguar cult are worldwide and very common, of course these practices are much suppressed in contemporary society. We attempt to build up social values that mitigate that killing instinct In the early Paleolithic there may have been a bridge out of animal organization rooted in a non reflecting self presence of the moment, leading into abstraction. Such practices are part of the reflex to return to archaic lifestyles, and that's not what the whole book is about, but because these ideas were new, it was exciting to think about."

Rethinking the Archaic Revival

Countering suggestions that the Archaic Revival meme is just a McLuhanesque repackaging of New Age ideology, McKenna explained, "I've written a lot about the Archaic Revival as an impulse to counter the ruthless, existential toxicity of modern life, so I presented it very positively. But I've also subsequently come to see the Archaic Revival as an expression of anxiety about the future. It's a double edged sword, and I'm sure that in every culture there are revival movements. In one sense its about revivifying and capturing the values of the past. In another sense its a denial of the inevitability of the future, and as technology advances, and becomes all encompassing, the archaic impulse steps in to counterbalance things, in a subtle way that isn't either/or, polarized situations. Psychedelics give some people a lot of energy to revivify archaic forms of ritual, sexual behaviour, etc. Many other people are equally impelled to embrace the future, high technology, experimental styles of living."

For those who do embrace such lifestyles, manage to break on through to the Other Side, perceive some very fundamental truths about the nature and structure of reality and existence, and feel compelled to communicate some of these truths, he has some strong advice. "The trick to managing special mental states (schizophrenia, shamanism, etc.) is to know when to keep your mouth shut. Shamans do not babble. It's also important to have a firm grasp of intellectual history in order to judge just how odd or deep a given insight is given that people have been mulling these matters for millennia. As for community, that can be trickier. The World Wide Web is one place where once can find a peer support group so too are the various conferences and teaching get together that form themselves around elders in the field, so when Albert Hofmann or Schultes or someone like that is in town, it tends to bring the psychedelic community out in the open. Pay attention to the crowd at such events, not the great one on the stage."

Philip K. Dick Meets The Overmind

McKenna also feels close to the SF writer and cyber-shaman Philip K. Dick, drawing analogies between his encounter with an 'insect-like intelligence' during an anthropological safari to the Amazon Basin in 1971, and Dick's startling encounter with a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) three years later. Both were according to McKenna, "encounters with the Overmind, which is the humanly knowable portion of the intelligent Other. Jacques Vallee called the category of experience that Dick and I had 'the Cosmic Giggle,' which is a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly. Should you be caught up in it, it will turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously 'really there' and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation; the umbilicus of our ontology, the place where we see that the world came from something very different from what it now appears to be."

Drawing upon the Gnostic mysticism that influenced Dick and fellow SF writer Arthur C. Clarke, he explained further that "these archetypes offer a strong hint that we do not know jack shit about the nature of reality or our own minds. This humbling insight is step one along any path of knowledge. All knowledge begins with an admission of ignorance.

"They literally exist in the same way that all other experience literally exists. These experiences are not in a special category, they are as real as anything else we are accustomed to thinks of as "real", the difference is that they are rare and not sanctioned or affirmed by social and cultural values in which we may find ourselves embedded.

"Philip K. Dick was the man of the Cybernetic Age, certainly he had a keen appreciation of the problem of epistemological balkanization. Reality seems to be breaking down into cults: the cult of Science, the cult of Extra-Terrestrial Intervention, the cult of Christianity, the cult of Imperialism. Once you are inside the cult it provides all the definitions you need, provided you don't go outside the definitions provided by the cult. Some institutions like science claim a kind of freedom from this infection, which is really just an artefact of our thinking at this point.