This brings McKenna's General Unified Theory of Consciousness full circle. Since a peak experience via DMT in 1967, he has felt that they are an invaluable tool for exploring the brain's wetware, and combating toxic memes. "What we have going in my particular neighbourhood that is absent elsewhere is the psychedelic experience. We're not asking people to go back to the teachings of a past figure, testimony, or a powerful argument, but instead to have a personal experience that they undergo in real time. As long as that's kept centered, one can't drift into pontification or auditory propaganda. Drugs can be used to control people, but only if people are given small doses with large doses of message. If people are given small doses of drugs without any message, by journeying into the wilderness or exploring the confines of your own mind, then what is encountered is a primary experience. Its like sex - people have many different opinions about it, but that's not what it is. If we stay focused on the self presence of the immediate experience, of the ordinary and psychedelic variety, this is innoculation against the ideological viruses that are being curiously propagated through local organisms.

"We can use the psychedelics for inspiration, and then download those visions into a more user-friendly, less terrifying environment, so that the opinions of those people who have never taken psychedelics, it has in the pharmaceutical form in fact participated in the psychedelic meme and state of mind. The whole crux of these technologies over the past several hundred years has been first photography, then color photography, then pictures with sound, ever more consistent pictures. Apparently there is this incredible impulse to create artificial simulacra sensations, and now the people who are doing this are so powerful that it isn't unreasonable to imagine creating virtual realities that are indistinguishable from ordinary realities, except that the design criteria would be under the control of the human imagination. That's really where we're headed - this thing that we carry around called the 'mind' or the 'imagination' is a prophecy of a future state of Being."

Somewhere Out There?

As our three-hour conversation draws to a close, he is somewhat cryptic about what kind of society will exist after the 2012/Singularity Point.

"There is an old joke that God made the world round so that you couldn't see too far down the road. I cannot see beyond the human/machine global fusion of 2012. Asking what lies beyond that is like asking someone in the 13th century to accurately envision the societies and technologies of the late 20th century. It simply cannot be done, we are lacking essential facts that will arrive each in their own good time as we move toward the Singularity. Ask me this question in 2010."