McKenna Under the Teaching Tree Part 2

Summary

This episode of the Psychedelic Salon, hosted by Lorenzo, combines personal updates, archival commentary, and a long featured excerpt from a 1985 Terrence McKenna talk. Lorenzo opens by apologizing for missing a prior podcast and recounts a recent visit to Los Angeles to see Gary Fisher, whose earlier work with Doctor Grob and Lorenzo involved treating autistic and schizophrenic children with LSD and psilocybin. He also shares a brief anecdote about Timothy Leary’s first LSD experience, as told by Fisher: Leary reportedly received 400 micrograms of Sandoz LSD and had a difficult time. Lorenzo then thanks listeners who donated money and those who purchased his novel, The Genesis Generation, before introducing the McKenna segment. The main body of the episode is a wide-ranging discussion of psychedelics, especially DMT, ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, and related plant medicines. McKenna explains the pharmacology of ayahuasca in practical terms: DMT is normally destroyed in the gut by monoamine oxidase, but Amazonian shamans combine a DMT-containing plant, often Psychotria viridis, with Banisteriopsis caapi, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors. The resulting brew allows oral DMT to enter the bloodstream and produce a prolonged psychedelic experience lasting several hours. He contrasts this with smoked DMT, which he describes as brief, intense, and capable of producing the “elf” or “machine elf” realm when taken in sufficiently strong doses. He emphasizes that route of administration matters greatly: smoking DMT is more intense than injecting it, and intravenous research methods often miss the flash-like quality that smoking produces. McKenna also discusses hallucinogenic snuffs used in South American cultures, describing them as physically unpleasant and culturally specific rather than universally desirable. He uses these examples to argue that psychedelic substances are not interchangeable and that different cultures develop different relationships to them. He notes that some traditions rely on breath control, drumming, song, or ordeal rather than plant hallucinogens, but he argues that the most powerful shamanic traditions are usually entheogen-based. He suggests that shamanic ability may be partly genetic, partly cultural, and partly dependent on access to the right plants and training. He also stresses that many people who claim to be shamans are not genuine practitioners, and that real shamanic competence is rare. A major theme is McKenna’s view that psychedelics dissolve boundaries and therefore threaten established institutions. He argues that governments fear psychedelics not merely because of economics or drug policy, but because these substances encourage people to question the basic assumptions of society. He links the rise of psychedelic culture in the 1960s to the expansion of public education and the resulting generation of curious young adults who were exposed to both higher education and psychedelics. He contrasts the treatment of cannabis and caffeine, noting that caffeine is socially normalized because it supports work discipline, while cannabis is heavily criminalized because it encourages leisure, conversation, and resistance to industrial routines. He also criticizes the broader war on drugs, pointing out the social damage caused by mass arrests for nonviolent drug offenses. McKenna then moves into his more speculative philosophy of history, UFOs, and eschatology. He proposes that history is not driven by the past alone, but by an attractor in the future that pulls human civilization toward increasing complexity and self-organization. He calls this process concrescence, borrowing from Alfred North Whitehead, and suggests that mystics, visionaries, and prophets are people who resonate with this future attractor. In this framework, UFOs are not extraterrestrial spacecraft but compensatory images or reflections cast backward from the end of time. He connects this idea to Jung’s writing on flying saucers and argues that modern technological culture, including virtual reality and human-machine symbiosis, reflects humanity’s movement toward this transcendental endpoint. The talk also includes McKenna’s skepticism toward New Age claims and sensational stories about alien abduction and fetal removal. He invokes Occam’s razor and warns against multiplying hypotheses without necessity. Lorenzo closes the episode by reflecting on the historical significance of McKenna’s ideas, noting that much of the information about DMT was hard to find in 1985, long before the internet made such material widely accessible. He also reads listener emails that point to archives of McKenna recordings and promote an art show in Oceanside, California. The episode ends with standard licensing and promotional information for the Psychedelic Salon and Lorenzo’s audiobook, reinforcing the podcast’s role as an archive and educational resource for psychedelic thought.