(2nd Installment) Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna

[00:00:13] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. [00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Greetings, and welcome once again to the Brainforest Café. In our previous podcast, I interviewed Graham St. John, a journalist, anthropologist, and author of over 10 books, including Mystery School in Hyperspace, a cultural history of DMT, which was published in 2015. I believe his most recent work, and really his magnum opus, is a definitive biography of my brother, Terence McKenna, entitled Strange Attractor, the Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna. It reflects an incredible amount of work over several years. Graham deserves much credit for the thoroughness of his scholarship. We unpacked some of this in our initial podcast on August 18, but there's plenty more to talk about, and we delve into some of that in the second installment with Graham St. John, which will be released close to the release of the book on October 7th. So, once again, it's my great pleasure to welcome Graham back to the Brainforest Café. So good evening, Graham, it's good to see you again. We are eight hours different, so it's a little late for you, but we're here for the second installment of the Brainforest podcast, talking about your magnum opus, talking about Strange Attractor, the Hallucinatory life of Terence McKenna. And as I said earlier in our conversation, I am just so impressed with the amount of work that you have put into this and the effort you've gone to make connections with everyone and really dig deep. And that says to me a couple of things. Number one, it expresses an immense respect on your part for Terrence and his thinking and curiosity. And I think the whole world is curious because in some ways, the world at large has a certain picture of Terence McKenna, which is probably not entirely accurate. So I guess my first question would be, what was it like to undertake this task and knowing what it was going to take to. To actually document this, what was your experience in writing this book? What about it did you think went well, and what did you wish went better? I guess you could say, yeah. [00:03:24] Graham St John: Well, let me say first, thanks, Dennis, for having me back. I really appreciate being back and chatting with you about this thing that, as we were just saying, I can now hold in my hands. And the thing appears to be undergoing the formality of actually occurring as I can feel the weights and dimensions. [00:03:50] Dennis McKenna: I have a copy, too, which is only partly manifested due to my virtual background. It keeps flashing back and forth from cyberspace to realspace. But I have this book in my hands. I appreciate your sending it. I actually have two copies which I will treasure and share with the right people. [00:04:12] Graham St John: So these are advance review copies, of course. The book is not out until October 7th and I'm sure you'll have a link for the pre-sale. So it's still a few weeks of pre-sale before the thing actually appears in the public. Yeah, I mean, I mean, what was I getting myself into? I don't know. I mean, this project really didn't start as a biography. It was a follow on from my last book, which you know very well because you wrote the foreword to it and that's called Mystery School in Hyperspace Cultural DMT. And I suppose this project really began as a chapter in that book. There was a chapter that addressed your and Terence's role in the modern research of DMT. And so initially it was Terrence's relationship to DMT and how he effectively, you know, I was just fascinated with the life quest that he undertook from the moment he was exposed to DMT, which was given to him by a guy, as you know, by the name of Rick Watson in February 1966. So it was that sort of eureka moment that he spent the rest of his life trying to come to terms with. And so that was that sort of Tryptamine mysteries initiation that set him off and as you know, spent much of his life effectively initiating others into the Triptamine mysteries. And so that was that process. And so then I got. So one of the first people I spoke with was of course Rick, who as we know, has left the building about 18 months or less than 18 months ago now. And he was really, he being Clarence's best buddy, life buddy from high school onwards, you know, not only the guy who introduced him to DMT, but, you know, just such a great, great pal of his. And so he saw the merits in this project and introduced me to a lot of people. So one thing led to another and it suddenly became this ludicrous idea of a biography. [00:07:08] Dennis McKenna: Turning out not to be so ludicrous because here it is. [00:07:11] Graham St John: You've created, well, the idea of being a biographer of Terence McCain or ISO Ludicrous, you know, prospect or the idea of being an. I would never assume that I'm an expert on Terence. I suppose I've learned a few things here and there, but this project is, as I was saying last time, if it, it's not the last word on Terrence, if it's generates curiosity in others and sparks further additions to the conversation, which may be competing views and so forth, then it will have served its purpose. I guess I feel a little like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Captain Willard, you know, Chasing Kurtz up the river. But ultimately, I'm no assassin. And so this project is not, you know, it's not in any respect a character assassination. I'm sure that there will be. It's a very sympathetic account. I mean, I'm sure there will be others who will perhaps not be so sympathetic, and they may even mine this work for. Because, as we know, we've seen biographies of Leary, for example, that are quite untoward and have specific agendas and motives that are less than sympathetic. So this is not that kind of project. [00:09:11] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I mean, it certainly is not a character assassination in any sense. I mean, it does look at Terence, I think, in an honest way, warts and all. He was a human being, and all human beings are flawed, and he was an incredibly complex person, and your book brings that out. He's complex even to himself. I mean, there were aspects of his personality and his experiences that even he didn't understand. He was making it up as he goes along, as indeed we are all doing that as our lives unfold. But you mentioned his first encounter with DMT that Rick Watson kindly provided, which was clearly a pivotal turning point, a pivotal event in Terrence's life. And the second one was probably the experiment at La Chorrera, which grew out of those experiences. But Terrence, when he was living in Berkeley, and when Rick showed up at his door on that rainy February night and gave him DMT, it basically completely exploded his existing worldview. And rather than turning to despair, I think his response was quite receptive. It was like, it's not like we think it is. Reality isn't like what we think it is. It's much more astonishing than we can even imagine. So that he had to grasp onto something because his worldview had been basically completely invalidated. So what's your perspective on that leading eventually to La Chorrera, which was the other pivotal point? Always. It was sort of. He was following the Tryptamine siren song in a certain way. [00:11:31] Graham St John: Yes. The word quest comes to my mind because his life really was quest, and he was such an adventurer who perhaps never. So, as we know, we went overseas in late 1967 for the first time and began his travels and came back and headed off again. And there's a sense in which he never really quite returned from his travels. I mean, those were pretty significant years. And obviously you were a part of that towards the end of that overseas jaunts that he had when you guys ended up in La Chorrera, where you went in search of the organic source of the philosopher's stone and ended up finding mushroom instead in wonderfully perfect circumstances. [00:12:55] Dennis McKenna: Exactly. [00:12:57] Graham St John: Couldn't be replicated. [00:12:59] Dennis McKenna: Cannot be replicated, and exactly right. At a certain point when we set out for La Chorrera, we had a goal to find this exotic hallucinogen ukuhe, this orally active DMT preparation. But that goal was, and we thought that was a pretty far out, far fetched thing that we were doing, but it turned out that was a pretty mundane understanding of what was going on. And when we did get to La Chorrera and when we engaged with the mushrooms, it quickly became clear that's not what we were there for. We were there for the encounter with this apparently hyper intelligent entity that was somehow springing from or channeling through the mushrooms. And it had a lot to teach us and it set about doing that. And that was a further evolution of this developing worldview that was based on the tryptophan experience. And, you know, everything that came out of that, the understanding of the time wave and sort of this eschatological vision that Terence had, all of that kind of manifested in La Chorrera, I've said in other places, and I think it's true, from La Chorrera on, the rest of our lives were lived in the shadow of La Chorrera, you know, not necessarily in a way that we could wish. I mean, I underwent a serious, prolonged altered state, which was either a psychotic break or a shamanic initiation or an alien abduction, or had elements of both as a ordinary person and as someone who craves, I guess, a certain amount of scientific respectability. I don't really want to be remembered for my psychotic episode at the age of 20. But it happened and it impacted both of us. And it impacted both of us in different ways. Terence became sort of the avatar of this whole idea about the end of time and what that would look like. And I think a lot of that came. It had to have sprung from our Catholic upbringing, because in Catholicism there's a preoccupation with the end of time, what happens after. And I think that was an obsession with Terence. And this imagined future really originated in that, because he rejected and I rejected, and many young people at that age reject the conventional scenario of Judgment Day and the Christian perspective. But the notion of the end of time and what that looks like really became a preoccupation with both of us, especially after La Chorerra and particularly because we carried out this event at La Chorrera. I hesitate to call it an experiment because it wasn't really an experiment. There was not Really a hypothesis. There were no controls. It was more like a ritual. We should call it the Ritual at La Chorrera or the Ceremony of La Chorrera. Maybe the ritual is a better term, but experiment carries more punch to it and implies, correctly or not, that there's a scientific rationale for this, which of course there wasn't. I mean, we were not scientists and we were in some ways pretending to be scientists. [00:17:22] Graham St John: Yeah, I mean, the whole episode, to me it's just remarkably liminal circumstance. I mean, full of improvisation more than scientific protocol and more magical and poetic than the scientific experiment. I suppose by the time he wrote True Hallucinations, I think. Well, obviously the process of writing True hallucinations is a long process. Like two decades before that book eventually came to press. And you originally published with him the invisible landscape in 1975. And I recall you mentioning somewhere that the protocols that filled the pages of that book was rich material for the student of pathology. [00:18:23] Dennis McKenna: As you can say about it. That's right, right. [00:18:26] Graham St John: It's just such a remarkable book, that remarkable fact that ever came to press in the first place. But it's a phenomenal work. But True Hallucinations, his biography or his memoir up until the early 80s, I guess, or the late 70s was two decades in the works. But there's still fascinating parts of that story that are still emerging. So for example, in the last week, the oldest, his oldest rap, which was recorded in November 1972, which was like 18 months after the experiment on March 4, was recorded in a private apartment in San Francisco by Thomas Starr. And she's approved the release of that recording. That's, that's now being released and perhaps we can throw a link into the description below or something for that because that is a remarkable three hour recording that I'm not sure if you've had a chance to. I mean, it's three hours, so it's three hours of your life. But that's three hours of the oldest Terence rap on record. And it is just pristine, vintage Terence. It's a lot of that content you already know is well rehearsed by that stage. But much of that is protean narrative for True Hallucination. So he's very much sort of audience testing. [00:20:28] Dennis McKenna: It's invaluable that you were able to recover this. I confess I have not looked at it. I haven't had three hours to carve out out, but I intend to definitely listen to it. [00:20:42] Graham St John: Well, you're mentioned in it, so I'm sure you'll be interested to. There's probably nothing new in it that you haven't heard before, but it really is. There's just some really choice comments in there. [00:20:57] Dennis McKenna: And not just about, but because it's so early, I mean. [00:21:02] Graham St John: Yeah, right. And not just about the experiment, but you see the kernel of his ideas about the transcendental object at the end of time. And all that stuff is in there, Right, Yeah. [00:21:17] Dennis McKenna: Many, many, many, many good things. So one of the things that has to do with this sort of the events at La Chorrera led Terence to postulate that what had happened to us could not fit into any kind of scientific paradigm and that, in fact, science should be rejected because of its utter inability to make sense of this. Well, it could make sense of it, but not in the way that he had hoped, you know, and he argued that what had happened at La Chorrera was a uniquely irreplicable event. It could not be replicated. And of course, in science, replication is a fundamental component of science. You do one experiment that proves nothing, you have to do dozens to validate it. And he was adamant that the. And this premise is built into the time wave, too, is the idea that time has a texture and that every event is unique. You can try to replicate an experiment, but you're not replicating it at the same time and place that it was originally done. So his experience, personal and sort of philosophical that comes out of La Chorrera was that we have to reject science, that science cannot replicate this experiment. And I pushed back against that a bit and continue to for some years. My premise was basically, we weren't scientists and we didn't really understand what we were doing. We may have thought that we were following scientific protocols, but clearly it was not. There were no controls or anything like that. So what we did there was not science. And Terrence argued that it could not be replicated. So it's kind of interesting when we went back to South America ten years later in 1981, Terence joined our expedition down the Puta Bayo. And I was there to do ethnobotany. I was looking again. I was in search of this orally active tryptamine preparation, but from a very much more mundane perspective. I just wanted to find the samples and observe the preparation and just basically do science about this thing. Why Terrence joined us at that juncture, I'm not exactly sure, except that he had an agenda which was to take another crack at what we tried to do at La Chorrera. So on the one hand, he said it could never be replicated on the Other hand, he went to South America with me a second time and really pushed for the replication of this thing. And I was pushing back against it. And most of the other people in our party were sort of. They didn't know what to think. So it was kind of a paradoxical reaction to it. He said it couldn't be replicated, and yet he tried to replicate it. What does that tell you? [00:24:57] Graham St John: Well, I don't know. I suppose it tells us that for him La Chorrera was kind of like the sacred, you know, it was a sacred site for him and that he long desired to return there. And as you know, they did go back with Kume that Same year in 971. So effectively retraced his steps, or not quite retracing the steps entirely, went there a different route, but went down the river again and twice in one year, which was remarkable. But throughout the 70s, he, as is very evident in the letters that were written by him that to Rick Watson, that was shared with me that he strongly desired to return there. Right throughout 70s until the point where political circumstances, local political circumstances suggested that traveling to Peru was a better option. But so I do, as you know, I do explore for the benefits of those letters his efforts to get Rick to join him on this long awaited return to the site of the UFO landing strip. And so I suspect that his efforts to get you back there was part of that long standing desire. [00:26:44] Dennis McKenna: Right, it's interesting, you're right. I mean, his return to La Chorrera later in 1971 was, I think, clearly an exemplar example. It was a nostalgic return to paradise in a certain sense, imagined that way. And yet when Teresin Kumay showed up again at La Chorrera, the bloom was off the rose. I mean, there were no mushrooms. And it was a very much harder travel experience to get there. And it was disappointing. It must have been very disappointing to Terence that, you know, although it did afford them the time to start working on the writing of what turned out to be the invisible landscape ultimately. [00:27:37] Graham St John: Well, it was disappointing also because of course, you know, the world did not come to an end on his 25th birthday in 1971. [00:27:49] Dennis McKenna: So that, that was a. Yeah, that was a big disappointment. Right, but then. Yes, that's right. [00:27:56] Graham St John: Great compression did not transpire. [00:27:59] Dennis McKenna: Why do you think that Rick, I mean, Rick was Terrence's best buddy. They'd been into all sorts of things, but Rick was very reluctant to travel with him or seemed to find reasons not to join him on some of these journeys. What do you think was the behind that? [00:28:18] Graham St John: Well, I don't know. I think Rick did want to join him. It just didn't pan. I mean he was undertaking his own. I mean he'd moved to the UK by then and was, you know, becoming an antiquarian book dealer. So he had his own life going on, life had changed. But I think that he, I mean they spoke in these letters about even doing a book on ayahuasca and Rick was a fellow book nerd. So they spoke about many projects that never came to fruition. But I don't think that Rick ruled out the possibility of it just never happened. And then of course Terence met Kat and they in the mid-70s went to Peru. So life went on, things changed, life went on. But still La Chorrera throughout, even despite the fact that he never returned there, it still represents this sort of sacred temenos in Terence's imagination and is frequently. I mean, I think that it comes up again when he's at the ethnobotany conferences in Palenque. And so it remains as a strong, rich source of fantasy in his imagination, which I think is fascinating. [00:30:11] Dennis McKenna: Yes, it has become a mythopoetic trope in a certain sense, even reflected in his website when the World Wide web began to come on and you could develop these websites through hyperlinks and you know, his website, which was still on levity.com, i believe, the Alchemical garden at the end of time, you know, and that's a reflection of his yearning for this paradisical post historical state that we thought was going to ensue after La Chorrera. [00:30:49] Graham St John: Yeah, I mean, you bring up his ambivalent or ambiguous relationship with science. We're talking about a guy who sorts a basic revision of the mathematical description of time used in physics, who as he said, wasn't in Salong division. You know, we're talking about a guy who failed Algebra 2, who reckoned that he was forging a theory rivaling the special theory of relativity. But what's really fascinates me is that he really was the stand up philosopher. I mean he was very, very aware of his own faults and failings and made those fallibilities very obvious and made himself very vulnerable in the way that comics do. So his form of philosophy, if you like, was very rugged but very. I mean he was the stand up eschatologist and no one, you know, he filled no one's shoes and no one could fill his shoes. [00:32:23] Dennis McKenna: And this, yes, he had the good sense in some sense to distance Himself in a certain way from what he was saying publicly and what he really was. I think. I think he had a pretty good grasp on who he was. As I said in the notes, he knew he was cognitively functional. He had a perspective on this that made sense, which made sense to him. And he was aware of his flaws and accepted them. And as a result, I think he. There must have been many temptations to sort of accept this mantle of the guru or even the messiah. People wanted to look up to him, people wanted to follow him. In that sense, had his personality been slightly different, had it been perhaps more Trumpian in a certain way, I mean, he might have seized that opportunity and ridden that to a certain position of fame and fortune. He didn't really do that. I mean, he put this stuff out. He was the standup philosopher and the standup. He put it out because it was neat ideas. But to him, I think he understood that it was entertainment. And particularly later in life when he perhaps began to doubt some of the premises of it, but even earlier he presented it as. As entertainment or as just a body of interesting ideas and it wasn't about him. He wanted people to understand and appreciate the ideas. They didn't want it. He didn't really want it to be focused on him as some sort of messianic cult leader. But the temptation must have been there. [00:34:31] Graham St John: Yeah. So I mentioned a lot in the book about his role as what I call an anti guru guru, which is one of the perfect paradoxes. And perhaps if I can read a passage from the book. After all, this is biography and the project is to be presented as text. So here's an interesting paragraph. Reminds of that loathe to be associated with any cultic, mendacious or predatory religion. There is little doubt that McKenna will have laughed off this growing corpus of comparisons and rampant random visual restorations. And yet an authority he did become with a statue not unrelated, as it transpires to his own sojourns in India, which he routinely credited as a source of enlightenment. But the wisdom hadn't arrived through self realization achieved at the feet of a yogi. Wisdom was ostensibly acquired from precisely the opposite by observing the charade of the spiritual marketplace where ashrams were considered the public face of large scale, of the large scale hustle named religion. Tales are repeatedly told of visiting the local sadhus of great reputation in India, of meeting spiritual figures who failed to convince him of their importance. Although they might have supplied him with strong charis. He said, you're not empowered by placing your Spiritual development in the hands of a guru. You're spiritually empowered by taking responsibility for your own spiritual development. Yes. And I end this part with we now have the foundations of a mosaic to which we can supply ever finer tessellations on the character of an individualist holy man. And this whole section came about through a discussion with Rupert Sheldrake, who was comparing Terence with sadhu, or holy men, kind of a figure wholly independent from religious hierarchies and scientific professions in academia, a figure who draws. [00:36:57] Dennis McKenna: A following. [00:36:59] Graham St John: And so I write, our portrait will then be incomplete without an acknowledgment of the psychedelic substance of McKenna's visionary sensibility, which implies experience that is both transformative at the same time as transgressive, a practice potentially liberatory and boundary dissolving while simultaneously illicit and hedged with risk and danger. As we enter the presence of a figure uniquely enigmatic, our mosaic depicts one who was, and remains quite reflectively, an anti guru guru, the authority who rejected authority. The prestigious outlaw, celebrity, anarchist, freak scientist, notorious recluse, dark showman, the anti hero of the heroic dose, a figure who embraced paradox as a virtue. The psychonaut. Psychonaut. Such an anomaly attracts a certain type of following, those who do not follow, the workshoppers who never do workshops. Ironic, cynical, the McKenna milieu. And so that attempts to encapsulate not just Terence as the anti guru guru, but the kind of people who've been drawn into Terence's orbit and, you know, not only through his life, as, you know, as a figure who eventually had residencies at Esalen, but in. In his afterlife, where he's become a phenomenon, but a very enigmatic phenomenon, because we're talking about someone who today is something of a Persona non grata in the world of psychedelic science, at the same time as being regarded as something of a cult figure or a hero in a phenomenon. So this essence of enigmatism that characterizes Terence, I think, is very unique, and it's one of the reasons why I find him to be a continuing source of fascination. [00:39:24] Dennis McKenna: Yes, yes. As you say, he was Persona non grata somewhat in the psychedelic, the respectable psychedelic spheres of research, if there is such a thing. I think that's a reflection of psychedelic movements, or at least certain parts of that community, a certain longing for legitimacy. And it doesn't want to be associated with a wild freak like terrorist who is actually saying what a lot of people were afraid to say. I mean, I think on some level, people who work on psychedelics are fascinated on psychedelics because they realize that they're dealing with a phenomenon that's possibly impossible to really understand and may be transformative existentially for our species, that they deal with that by enclosing it in the protocols of science and essentially trying to strangle it with mundanity. And maybe that's what has to happen if psychedelics are ever to be accepted into the biomedical community. And I'm not sure that acceptance in that community is necessarily the goal, but I think a lot of people working in the field think that it is because their livelihoods depend on it and their self respect and their reputations. But psychedelics are inherently disruptive. It's something that we do not understand because we're dealing ultimately with the mind. We're dealing with our own consciousness, which is something we don't understand. So Terrence was disruptive in that sense. He rejected. I mean, his feeling was that for him, the mushroom was the logos, it was the muse, it was the source of this information. And it's kind of like any insights that didn't come from this tryptomenic dimension was automatically suspect or rejected. It had to come from that source. So he rejected science. He also rejected most religions. I mean, effectively all religions, except perhaps maybe certain forms of Buddhism, but saying basically they're all charlatans. It's all a bunch of poppy cop. And he's basically right in a certain way. I mean, if Terrence's worldview is based on a delusion that comes from some imagined muse that dwells in his head, that's downloading misinformation, how is that different than the insights of various prophets in religious history? They heard voices too. They had revelations too. And we look at that. Well, if we look at the impact of things like Christianity or Islam on cultural evolution, the prophets and the articulators of the message had the vision. But many, many people bought into the vision to their detriment. I think he wasn't really peddling this as a doctrine that people had to accept and, and then follow him. You know, I'm the guru, I'm the messiah. You have to accept this doctrine. He was definitely presenting it in terms of, here's a set of interesting ideas. I invite you to evaluate it and make your own decision. That's very different. Cult leaders don't do that. Right. You know, that's true. [00:43:27] Graham St John: And I mean, yeah, so he, you know, wanted to share the means of perception. But of course, if you compare him with the likes of Leary, who attempted to do, I guess, the same thing, but en masse, Terrence was following more the mindset of Huxley, who was one of his great mentors. And apparently he'd read most of Huxley's work as a teenager, who. [00:44:05] Dennis McKenna: You know, Huxley was an almost curious intellectual. He didn't have an agenda. He was like Terence. He was trying to understand this thing. Leary was very much. And I think Leary got sucked into the role of. Of cultural prophets and all that. I don't think it's a role that he chose, but given the times that. [00:44:33] Graham St John: He. [00:44:36] Dennis McKenna: Didn'T have a choice, the culture chose Leary, that he was going to be the point person for this point of view, which was heretical to most of the rest of culture. And Leary. Well, we know what happened. He did have that role for a long time, and I don't diminish what he did. But I think in some ways, Leary set back psychedelic research for some decades, and that's okay. That's just inevitable. But there were two very, very different figures. [00:45:18] Graham St John: It's interesting that. So Leary referred to Terrence as the Timothy leary of the 90s. So that was the mantle that he himself gave Terrence, which was quite a sort of mantle to hold onto. [00:45:35] Dennis McKenna: But I don't think Terence really accepted that he wasn't anybody's heir apparent. He was his own person, and his own. His perspective was pretty uniquely Terence's. [00:45:51] Graham St John: Yeah, his perspective is far more anarchical than Leary's. There's no question about that. And the embrace of shamanism or the Shamanaki presented something wholly different. I wanted to ask you, when was the last time you went to a Terence rap? Because I think that there was a point where you decided that this wasn't the kind of experience you wanted to digest. I was wondering if you remember the last one you answered. [00:46:37] Dennis McKenna: The last what? [00:46:39] Graham St John: The last time Terrence spoke in a. You know, gave one of his raps publicly. [00:46:47] Dennis McKenna: I can't really remember. [00:46:49] Graham St John: Maybe it's this one because there is a picture in the book that, as unfortunately, can't see you very well. [00:46:59] Dennis McKenna: Right. No, I know the picture. [00:47:02] Graham St John: There's a balding head there, and I think it's you. At least you're named. And this is an ojai event in May 91. [00:47:11] Dennis McKenna: That's right. [00:47:12] Graham St John: Speaking. [00:47:13] Dennis McKenna: That's right. [00:47:14] Graham St John: Maybe that was the last one. [00:47:18] Dennis McKenna: It could have been close to the last one. There were events at Esalen, I think later than that. But. Yes. Well, you know, certain aspects of Terence's rap, I had always been skeptical, or I had been skeptical, particularly of the Time Wave and some of that. But then, you know, sort of the eschatological vision as well. And it's okay to be skeptical. I mean, if you're a scientist, that's your job, you know, is. To be skeptical, is to look at a phenomenon and say, what were the gaps? Where's the data that, you know, what data explains this and what data doesn't? But he. Terrence didn't. He didn't really like it when I came to his events because I was the only one that might stand up and say, wait a minute, what you said doesn't make any sense. And that contradicts what you said 20 minutes ago, which doesn't make any sense. And so where's the consistency? Where's the intellectual consistency? And then he would just say, well, you know, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, you know, and then he would just move ahead. And I think that was. [00:48:45] Graham St John: So you broke the. You spoiled the magic. [00:48:50] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Spoiled the magic. And this also touches on a question. These ideas that Terence was propagating were, on the surface, so autre. So cockamamie in a certain sense. But many people resonated with them, and many people accepted it. And you get the similar phenomenon in religion, religious movements, the premises, the metaphysics, all of that, of religion, the whole creation myth and Christianity and the ends of time myth and the resurrection of Christ. If you just step back from this and you say, wait a minute, none of this makes any fucking sense. This is a fairy story. And, I mean, people who are deeply religious might be offended, but I'm sorry, that's what it is. The moral precepts of religion and all that, they have validity. And to the degree that religion instantiates those precepts, which it often doesn't. But that's a whole other conversation. I think religion's probably responsible for most of the wars and genocidal events of history, but it springs from a pure impulse towards salvation. [00:50:20] Graham St John: I was very privileged to have input from, as you know, a whole bunch of people that were very candid about their views and their conversations with Terence, going back to even before La Chorrera, but especially after La Chorrera, when he returned with his visions, after he'd been changed. And, you know, you have. There's a letter that was, for example, written by Sarah Hartley to Michael Malcolm, you know, warning him of St. Terry arriving in the Bay Area. And then, you know, he had debates with the likes of George Chicory. And we're talking about really intelligent people who were not standing for Father Terence as Rupert Would later jibe Terence and make fun of him. But, you know, I come back to the fact that he was so very conscious of how, you know, half cocked and cockamamie his ideas were and was never concealed. That. And so just live. He was just live streaming throughout his life before the Internet, his mindset. And he just appeared to be on fire right to the end. [00:52:21] Dennis McKenna: Right and right. I think when he did return from La Chorrera the first time and go to California and revealed the vision, the insights to his friends and they were like, what? I mean, they all love terrorists, obviously, but they were very skeptical. And I think that was a healthy thing that helped keep him honest because they were not afraid to stand up and say, again, this kind of thing, what you're saying makes no sense. It contradicts what you said before. They were not shy about pointing out. But at a certain point, I mean, perhaps he heard that message. I can't see that it changed the way that he delivered it, particularly because at a certain point he was delivering a message that there was a much bigger audience, much less critical. Not really looking at the nuts and bolts of what he was talking about, but appreciating this. This riff effectively. I mean, in the notes somewhere they say something about Terence became this singer. You made the point that his output was primarily audio and audio output, and he was like the Homeric Hymns or the Mycenaean singers. He was the singer of a mythopoetic scenario for the post psychedelic, post cybernetic generation. And people longed for that. They appreciated that. They longed for meaning in general, which were very short on meaning. So that appealed to very many people who. They didn't accept conventional religion. They may have had psychedelic experiences which were impactful. So then along comes a guy like Terrence who really articulate these impulses and yearnings that they couldn't really articulate for themselves. [00:54:38] Graham St John: Yeah. So you're right, this weird circumstance transpired in the early 90s where effectively he became the frontman for Rave culture, a spokesperson for a whole new audience. And this has been a particular interest of mine for many years, and I attempt to engage with that in the book. The fact that a guy who really was never seen dancing became the sort of role model for a dance movement. And there's all sorts of chance meetings and encounters there. I mean, he eventually had a number 18 hit in the UK singles chart with the Shaiman track called Re Evolution, which was essentially him talking for about eight minutes, that when he was recorded, he thought he was just doing an interview. He was responding to an interview. So what you get on that track that was, you know, number 18 and regularly played by BBC but by on UK radio as a hit on. I believe the. The Shaman's album Boss Drum was just an unrehearsed interview that. That he did. And I've noted that when Colin Angus and his buddy caught up with Terence about a year later, because that recording was made in the UK before it was released, he caught up with Terrence and played him the demo. And Terrence listened to the demo and then said, gentlemen, I hope we shall not be accused of demagoguery. And of course, because of course he was concerned about becoming a cult figure, which was this thing that he wanted to fought against so long as he lived. [00:57:05] Dennis McKenna: He was very much an advocate of think for yourself, figure it out for yourself. But tell me, this second sort of career with being involved in rave culture and so on happened at a period of his life when we were less. I mean, I was still of touch with him, of course, but I was not so much aware of everything that was going on. I don't think of the rave demographic as particularly intellectual. If anything, they're anti intellectual. And yet they heard Terence's message, whether accurately or not, and it resonated with them, it excited them. Why do you think it was so attractive? It seems like an unlikely demographic that Terrence's message would find a home in. I guess is the. [00:58:02] Graham St John: Well, I guess when we talk about rave, it, I mean, it's one of those four letter words that has a lot of meanings. But in terms of Terence's demographic was more of the psychedelic sector of that community. So we're talking about the early psychedelic trance, post Goa trance crossover with Deadheads or Electronic Deadheads. The project that Colin Angus was leading was very much inspired by the Grateful Dead. Now, so if you're suggesting that Deadheads are not intelligent, then I would have to. That's a whole other argument that you'd have to. [00:59:06] Dennis McKenna: Not Deadhead. I can't really speak against that. [00:59:09] Graham St John: It's more of the, I suppose, intelligent psychedelic edge of the electronic dance music. It's a Spongel which essentially became an act that was an analogy for Terence. I mean, Raja Ram and Simon Posford, who founded Spongel, were effectively on the end of DMT. That came from Terrence. So that whole performance and that whole phenomenon in Spongle was a phenomenon, was inspired by Terrence. So he had a very direct role in this movement. [01:00:03] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. So perhaps the people that he was directly in touch with and inspiring and maybe turning on in a certain sense. But then they were spokesmen or were recognized in this. In this rave culture and you were. This is really the part of your life. I mean, that was early 90s and that's when you first got interested in Terrence. You were quite immersed in that culture. Is that where you first stumbled across Terrence and got. [01:00:38] Graham St John: Yeah. I mean, he is, I guess, effectively the most sampled person in the history of electronic music. And I imagine that his voice was whispering to me over many hours. And the breakdowns of tracks in Altered States and Dance Floors in Australia and elsewhere, there's just countless examples of Terence being sampled in psychedelic electronic air. And so by the time. And there was also quite a treat for DJs to perform backing Terrance. And so by the time he arrived in Australia, which was in 97 for a two week trip, he effectively, the red carpet was rolled out for him and he was treated like some kind of psychedelic saint. And it was quite something for DJs who play backing performances in various venues for him in Australia. And I've recently written a fun piece that puts the reader into the back seats of Terrence's 97 Australian tour, which a lot of people don't know that much about. I didn't actually get to meet him, so I never met Terrence. That was my one opportunity and I blew it. He eventually spoke close to where I grew up at a psychedelic trance festival called Trance Elements 2, which never made it to. But I did go to Trance Elements one. So yeah, didn't connect. But I do feel like he's strangely whispered into my sensorium all those years. [01:02:56] Dennis McKenna: Yes, I think so. But you never actually met him. [01:03:01] Graham St John: We never met. That would have been my one opportunity and it didn't happen. [01:03:09] Dennis McKenna: That's very interesting. Well, it doesn't seem to have cramped your style at all. Perhaps it was a good thing because you were contaminated by an actual encounter. So you could. But that's surprising because you at that age, you must have been very much involved with the psi trance movement, electronic movement and all that. [01:03:36] Graham St John: Well, I suspect had he lived a bit longer, our past might have crossed. He certainly did inspire many events. [01:03:50] Dennis McKenna: Or. [01:03:50] Graham St John: Many people that became associated with events or the production of festivals that then became part of my research as an anthropologist and as an anthropologist of, widely speaking, transformational events. And these are the kinds of events that Terence may or may not have found himself speaking in because of course, he had his perception of the ritual for the heroic dose was that you don't listen to music at all. You are silent, darkness and no dancing crowds, no dance floors. [01:04:41] Dennis McKenna: Right. [01:04:42] Graham St John: And at Home Alone was his idea. So it was completely the opposite to some of the developments that we've seen. And although festivals are quite complex landscapes these days, so they're not singular at all. So I don't know. As you know, Terence, he just desired towards the end of his life to be. To present from home. And his whole idea was set up to. Had he lived even just a few years longer, he would have been podcasting. And I'm sure had he lived two decades around now, his potential podcast would be rivaling Joe Rogan or anyone else. Would make him look like a minor garden party. [01:05:48] Dennis McKenna: Right? Yeah, it seems like. I mean, he wanted to propagate his views to a wide audience, and yet he was a serious introvert. He didn't really want that direct contact so much with his fan base and anything that could. I mean, even in his personal appearances at different venues, I mean, it would be Terrence, and then there would be the audience. It wasn't. You know, that was the structure of it. Podcasts would have been the perfect thing for Terrence. I mean, he would have taken to that like a duck to water, possibly with good consequences, possibly not. But I agree, he probably. I mean, in terms of being able to wrap things down, he could put Joe Rogan to shame. Well, Joe Rogan is kind of a channel. He provides a listening platform for people. He doesn't so much bring his own views. I mean, it's hard to suss him out. But Terrence could have used podcasts. He could have created an enormous audience. And the temptation, again, to sort of accept this. This. Damn it. This messianic role or cult leader role would have been very strong. But had the podcast technologies existed at that time. So Terence's vision from La Chorrera was that we were performing an experiment. We called it an experiment that we thought would be transformative of us personally, that we were actually undertaking a bioengineering project to transform our mind and body using sound and DNA of mushrooms. And it was a whole protocol, which, if you looked at it in an objective way, probably didn't make a lot of sense. But it was more like a ritual than an actual experimental protocol. But the idea was that it would result in a personal transformation, that we would become some kind of superhuman entities. In some ways, it was like becoming a very good yoga or a shaman. But what seems to be happening is. Is not so much individual transformations in the current sphere. It's that our entire collective consciousness is merging with cybernetics, through AI and through social media and all this. And it's not that individuals are suddenly becoming avatars or becoming these figures effectively. We're all participating sort of in this rush toward what Terence termed, and it's as good a term as any, the transcendental object at the end of time. But what is that? And we have speculated, and we've had a couple conversations, I've speculated that maybe now we can see the outlines of that, in that the emergence of AI, which is a technology that unlike any other technology that we've ever invented, is premised on the idea that it's going to change us. It's actually built on our. A union of our own nervous system, our own spirit, and different kinds of informational technologies, particularly AI. But I think that social media also has something to do with it. And so we're merging into a collective consciousness. And Terence talked about this in terms of the externalization of the soul. It was something that you did as an individual. And his understanding of this was quite optimistic, really, and positive. What actually seems to be emerging as we move closer and closer toward some singularity which probably is going to involve AI in some sense, but it seems like a fairly dystopian and dark vision that seems to be emerging, and not one that I would welcome, and I'm not sure, but then I'm speaking also from the standpoint of an old man who's probably inherently resistant to change. But I wonder if Terrence would welcome it. I don't think it's exactly what he had in mind, what we're seeing happening. For one thing, his vision was very positive. What's happening on the global scale as we transform into something more than human in some ways or less than human in other ways. It's quite dystopian, and in some ways it's quite terrifying, at least to me. What's your perspective on all that? [01:11:32] Graham St John: Yeah, I mean, it's obviously hard to think about what Terrence would be thinking given that he hasn't been around for 25 years. And obviously the last comments he was making on this were pretty much in the wake of the Internet. So this was the pre.com bubble era, when everything was, you know, very utopian and very strident. And although, you know, most people who had discussions with him, you know, realized that they weren't just talking to someone who was a flat out cyber millenarian, you know, he was a critical thinker. But what really interests me is that, and I've said this in another article that I've written on, which is called Zoern Ghost in the Machine, Zoern Ghost being his avatar, the name for his avatar, and that he represents a net era exemplar of a figure who is a permanent state of departure whilst always arriving. Which again comes back to this. It's a perfect paradox and it just represents. And this is, I suppose, is moving away from what he was saying, but it represents this status of a figure who had departed just at the time he was arriving. So a guy had left the building, but in the wake of the Internet, was suddenly all over the place and present. And largely because of his very unique archive of rats and spoken word content that is unreplicated in terms of its scale and depth and content. Because, of course, he wasn't making the same rap twice. He was very ingeniously enhancing his rap and, you know, very much speaking to the moment. And so to me, he became spectral and remains the spectral phenomenon that the virtualization which is present in the psychedelic sense, in the digital sense, in the cybernetic sense. And this is probably not answering your question, but it does intrigue me. [01:14:48] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. I just wonder what he would make of it and what he would make of the sort of current. On one hand, it's like we're being as a culture and even as a planetary culture, we're being pulled forward or pushed into the future, perhaps. Pulled into the future. Terence always visualized that as a detractor from the future that was inevitably dragging us into the future. But then it's not entirely defined by the technological changes. It's also geopolitical and climactic and all these other things, things that are sort of part of the crisis of our times and the rise of authoritarianism and the apparent obsolescence or growing obsolescence of democracy. I mean, Terrence, of course, had political views on all this. What do you think he would have made about what would his perspective have been on our current sort of global existential situation? [01:16:00] Graham St John: I think we hear peels of laughter. [01:16:04] Dennis McKenna: Peels of laughter. [01:16:05] Graham St John: Yeah. And you know, of the. Of the we're in I told you so country and. But I must say, just talking about AI and I know last time we mentioned that there is an app in progress that may be reaching a public at some point in the near future, which is a phone app, which is essentially going to be a terrance. I think it's going to be called Eschaton and it's going to be like this oracle at your fingertips. And it's based on. It's basically A large language model that's built on all of Terence's wraps. And so you don't need to ask me, or me, you what Terrence would think you can ask him in this app. So I've had a brief look at this app, and I think it's pretty extraordinary, and it's just unprecedented because we just don't have that level of rich, detailed content from one person, so there's no parallels. So it's really quite a fascinating job. [01:17:29] Dennis McKenna: Right. Because there is such a vast archive of videos and raps and so forth. But do you think that it. This AI, or any AI will ever. I mean, I've been reluctant to look into any of them because I. I. [01:17:50] Graham St John: Imagine it would be thoroughly ghoulish for you to do it. [01:17:55] Dennis McKenna: It would be. And on one level, I'm afraid that it will be such a perfect simulation that my prejudices will just dissolve. And on the other hand, if it is that, that's rather scary in some ways, but also fascinating. I mean, if it's possible to interface with an AI that's a sophisticated simulcrum, I guess the word is of Terence. I just can't get away from the idea that he was too complex for that, that you can reduce it to an AI. [01:18:33] Graham St John: Well, I mean, obviously it's not Terence. I mean, the question is, can Terence be replicated? And, you know, or maybe the other way of putting that. Will the meta Terrance or the AI Terrence pass the Turing Test? Or we probably need to invent new language to describe the Terence Turing Test. Will it be the Terence Test? [01:19:03] Dennis McKenna: Right. [01:19:04] Graham St John: What's the point where Terrence goes sentient? And what would that look like? I mean, would it be some kind of simulated digital cyber DMT trip undertaken in some kind of virtual meta terrace sphere? I don't know, but I think we're a long way off achieving that. [01:19:31] Dennis McKenna: I'm comforted by that. I agree. I think we're a long way off, but it will. I mean, people are working on it, and we'll see what comes from it. [01:19:46] Graham St John: But I'd be interested to. I mean, I'm sure at some point you'll have some access to this and would be interested to gauge your opinion about that. [01:20:00] Dennis McKenna: I will take a look at it. I would like to. But I think the point you made is all of these. I mean, what we lack here is Terence. We don't have Terence, so we don't have Terence is not around to take a look at this and say, well, that's a pretty good simulation. Or, no, here are the gaps, here are the problems with it. We don't have his actual wisdom to be a critical reviewer of these things. Another question that comes up for me is why the impulse to develop something like this? It's like people, they don't want to let go in a certain way, or they don't want to really acknowledge that Terence is gone and the body of his thoughts and thinking, it's out there. I guess it's a longing to. In some ways, the same longing that Christians might feel with respect to Jesus. You know, Jesus will come back someday. Well, probably not, actually, but if that's a comforting notion, then that's what they cleave to. So it's just. I don't know. I have complex feelings about this whole evolution into AI which probably could belabor, but maybe we've belabored it enough. [01:21:41] Graham St John: You'd probably have to ask someone like Lorenzo Haggerty about that, because, you know, after all, I mean, this. This app was based on the. The content that he's been podcasting for about 20 years or so. [01:21:57] Dennis McKenna: Right. [01:21:58] Graham St John: And, you know, then you might have to get into the whole. The question of, you know, why podcast it? Why. Why is this guy the. The. The main subject of. Or one of the main subjects of your podcast? [01:22:11] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think people just have to be mindful of the fact that these may be very sophisticated simulations and entertaining in that sense, and interesting, but they are not Terence, and they will never be. So one thing we haven't really discussed, we have discussed how Terrence was an intensely private person in some ways, and almost a pathological introvert who found himself in this public role and admired and known by millions. And yet in some ways, that was uncomfortable for him. And in a previous and in parts of his life, particularly before he became publicly. Well, though as publicly well known as he was, he actually had a double life and much of his economic activities during that period, the 70s and really from the 60s on, I mean. [01:23:24] Graham St John: He. [01:23:24] Dennis McKenna: Had a Berkeley dope dealer's mindset in a certain sense. He had this perspective that producing and distributing psychoactive controlled substances was a good thing. I mean, a believer in hashish and psilocybin and ultimately ayahuasca. So he had this clandestine life which had to be covert because it involved illegal activities. And that might have been known in part of his public sphere, but it was sort of a covert. And he almost. Even though there was considerable risk at persisting in this. He did. Why do you think he did? I mean, it was more of an obsession than an economic need. Or was it? I mean, what was behind that? [01:24:26] Graham St John: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that he was sort of fighting these skirmishes, stealthy skirmishes behind the lines of the war on drugs. And it just so happened that the molecules that fascinated him and intrigued him happened to be, you know, scheduled substances that were, you know, had prohibitive injunctions on them. So that sort of makes for a career as a remarkable, you know, cognitive libertarian. And I would again like to bring up a, a paragraph from the book that addresses this, please. McKenna admired Leary for his courageous independent stance within a climate of prohibition that saw not only a moratorium on research, but an institutionalized taboo that stifled education and precluded public discourse. The silence, avoidance and denial on the part of public intellectuals dependent for their livelihood on those same government instruments that enact and enforce prohibition is the absurd situation McKenna was privileged to observe as a free thinker untethered to academic institutions or professional bodies. While few if any public funded commentators rose in the defence of psychedelics, more specifically the indole hallucinogens, in the wake of the moral panic that saw their scheduling with heroin and that suppressed research on their social and medical benefits, it was McKenna who rose to the challenge, as is evidenced in his and this is evident in his Talk Back radio debate with the Vice chairman of the LA County Young Republicans. Facing off with a confident but ill informed Den Brennan, McKenna put the prejudiced conservative to the sword live on LA's KFA AM radio. As Brennan denied the rights of the individual to be educated on the risks and benefits of psychedelics, he personified a sentiment McKenna attributed to Leary that LSD is quote, hallucinogenic. A hallucinogenic drug that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it. [01:26:56] Dennis McKenna: Right. [01:26:56] Graham St John: This kind of forum was not generally favored by Terence, who preferred honest intellectual debate. So I guess part of his quest was defending the virtues of the transdimensional experience as a human birthright, which has civil rights issues with First Amendment implications. But as I say, and as you know, his approach was stealthy and behind the front lines of the War on drugs. [01:27:45] Dennis McKenna: Right, Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. The war on drugs has been characterized by some. Graham Hancock comes to mind as the war on drugs is actually a war on consciousness in a certain way. Certain ideas and Terrence used to talk about this. The reason psychedelics are dangerous is because they give you funny ideas and funny ideas are inherently dangerous. That was what society was terrified of. It wasn't about any toxicological effect or any effect like that of psychedelics. Clearly there isn't one. But it was the ideas that was why it was so brutally repressed in the 60s, because the 60s was an era of enormous intellectual ferment and all of these heretical ideas were being brought forth and discussed. And. And so the psychedelics were a cultural catalyst in that sense, that they made people have funny ideas. And the establishment was afraid of funny, equal, dangerous ideas. And then as the law enforcement became even more draconian and these things, the War on Drugs got rolling. Terence was always out there as the voice of reason. And actually, I think the fact that he persisted to talk about this in public through the 70s and 80s, gave psychedelics, particularly mushrooms, a certain cultural credibility, I guess you could say, or cultural recognition. People didn't stop talking about these drugs, the psychedelics, even though there were great efforts made to suppress them, but they couldn't be suppressed. That wasn't their nature, because it was really the experiences that they were affording to people. That was what the establishment feared more than anything else. And Terrence kept that conversation alive through the 70s and 80s, really into the 90s. And then eventually the cultural perception circled back with Rick Strassman's work on DMT. And gradually psychedelics became recognized for their therapeutic potential in the 90s and in the 2000s. And the biomedical establishment hasn't really gone beyond that, but at least there is that recognition. These substances that were vilified, prohibited, defined as Schedule 1, without any possible medical application, that was all completely wrong. And the medical. The scientific establishments now understood that, recognize that reluctantly, but there it is. So I think Terrence deserves a lot of credit for keeping this conversation going during a period that was really very repressive with the War on Drugs and so on. He was not afraid of talking about it in public, and yet they never went after him, which is another thing. I think it's remarkable. [01:31:24] Graham St John: Yeah, it is. At least we don't have any evidence that he was a target or a major target, certainly in anything, like Leary, who, you know, as, you know, ended up in about 30 different prisons throughout his life. And where Terence did not maintain a criminal record and was very. It was very vocal, but was more, you know, he had a tactical approach. He also had, you know, very different attitude towards these things than Kat Harrison. And they had the differences. And I discussed that in the book. And there are different approaches towards Selvi Divinorum, for example, which Turrets became quite vocal about during the 90s. And in fact, he spent a bit of time in Australia when He was in Australia in 97 promoting the virtues of salvia as the next big thing. But it's interesting that within five years, maybe shorter than that time, Australia was within five years of Terence promoting spruiking salvier. Australia was the first country to prohibit that Salvonora Ney. And whether federal Australian authorities were in the orders, quite possibly or not, we don't know. But he was possibly being watched, but likely not seen as a great threat. [01:33:13] Dennis McKenna: Yes, he was undoubtedly, he must have been washed. But I guess even though he had this previous brush with law enforcement when he was very young through the hash smuggling caper, but apparently they weren't tracking him that much. I mean, Timothy Leary went to prison many times and yet Timothy Leary, I mean, he wasn't running a clandestine LSD lab somewhere. And Terence effectively was. I mean, he was producing all these control either smuggling hashish in the early days or producing mushrooms, which is a much quieter kind of activity than trying to run a clandestine pharmaceutical lab. And then of course, in the third phase, he had ayahuasca when he was in Hawaii. And again, that's a very quiet thing. You could just kind of produce it. You don't need any. But he escaped that kind of scrutiny. And I think that's interesting because I think he was driven to do it. I mean, I think he really did believe that if you believe in these substances, you should not only talk about them, which he did, but you should get them out to people, which he did on a much smaller scale. [01:34:42] Graham St John: You know, as I say, my research hopefully will inspire others to dig further. I mean, I've only dug so far and you know, I did make various inquiries, FBI, other federal authorities, and came up with nothing with regard to, in that area. But that doesn't mean that there isn't information on how he may have been subject to surveillance. So one of the interesting things that I did discover was that I did get the court records for various court records for his, as a result of his, the smashing of his hash smuggling network in 1969. So there is an image of Terrence McKenna versus the United States court record from. I believe that's from the Southern District of New York or the Colorado one. But there was court records associated with both of those jurisdictions. [01:36:01] Dennis McKenna: Right, right, right. [01:36:03] Graham St John: And there may be more, you know, that people may dig up about that. But you know, despite that appearance, he effectively got two years probation. So he managed to wriggle out of that one in ways that we don't, we're not quite sure of. [01:36:23] Dennis McKenna: And, but well, again, I think when it came time to actually present himself to the authorities with his lawyer and his father and all that, and then he told a story and this is where his skills as a bullshitter really became useful because he could spin out this yarn about how he was getting the hash and so on, just enough detail to make it plausible. But I've read that and it's like it's described, but there's no. It's very light. There's no actual information there that would have been useful, but it was plausible enough that they bought it. And so again, his verbal facility saved his ass. [01:37:21] Graham St John: I can only imagine his day in court and how persuasive he would have been. I mean, there's a document that I draw on which is one of the more important documents which appears to be a document that he may have used at that time to describe his activities over the previous few years that is just inflected with his persuasive approach. But he was a good boy for the next two years and. And completed his degree. [01:38:14] Dennis McKenna: Yes, yes, yes, he could come back. [01:38:18] Graham St John: Co authored a book, in fact, two books. But I think the second book, the Mushroom Book, came after the end of the probation. [01:38:26] Dennis McKenna: Right, right, yes. I wondered also you mentioned there was this two year period we didn't really say anything about Carl Heinz and I like to say a couple of words about that. The story is that he encountered this fellow in Indonesia and he had this whole scenario and that he was some. And that he was going to involve Terrence in some sort of bio extraction process in the Amazon. And Terence was interested in that and interested in these people. Were you aware or was it discussed in the book? I think when it came up about Heinz, you were not quite sure whether this encounter ever actually took place. [01:39:33] Graham St John: Yeah, well, I mean, the book is called True Hallucinations, isn't it? And I think this was one of his examples of the cosmic giggle. I don't think I gave this much attention. Maybe somebody else will come along and write a whole book on Carl Heinz and who this fabled figure who he apparently met in Timor. Yeah, in a restaurant in Timor. [01:40:05] Dennis McKenna: Right. [01:40:08] Graham St John: But I mean, you know more about this guy than I do because. [01:40:12] Dennis McKenna: I think I can add a piece of apocrypha here, which is interesting. The question is, was Heinz, did this encounter really take place? Was this really a real person? I think so, because. And I'm not sure your book talks about this, but when Terence had returned from La Chorrera was living with me in Boulder and he and Kumay were working at the Rose Garden and all that. So there was a conference that was held at CU at that time. I forget what the conference was. It was some kind of anthropological conference, I think. And Terence went there and Carl Heinz was there, or he thought he was there. He saw this person that he was convinced must be him. And he came back and said, I'm sure that was the guy. And I'm going back tomorrow. I'm going to. To say something. I'm going to talk to him. And he did. And apparently, as Terrence tells the story, he was there. He went up, he said, Dr. Hines, do you remember me from Indonesia? The guy just gave him a blank stare and appeared not to recognize it. But Terrence said, I know it was him. So that's kind of an interesting story. [01:41:40] Graham St John: Yeah. This is one of the many things that didn't. I mean, you see how thick this book is. If I had have included all of the Carl Hines stories and all of the other stories, it would be out here and it would be several volumes. There's just. There's only so much one could fit in the book. But like I say, maybe someone will write a whole book on their research on this. [01:42:05] Dennis McKenna: Right. And no one would read it, so. Well, Grim. Possibly you have the rest of your life to write the next five volumes to this. So I think we've covered a lot here. Is there anything else that we really need to talk about this or talk about before we close out? [01:42:28] Graham St John: No, I mean, other than to say thanks for having me again. And you know, as I like to say, this project, it's not the last word on Terence. If it encourages others to join the conversation, a conversation that you effectively initiated with your book, then it will have served its purpose. And I also know that it's an interesting time for Terrence research because as you probably know, clear Terrence's daughter is starting an archive on collecting photos and documents, which I think is a really important thing to be doing and taking responsibility for. And so I think the website there is. I think it's terrencemckenna.com for catching up with all of that information. That's also the site for Terrence McKenna Bibliography and Archives. [01:43:43] Dennis McKenna: That will be a resource for scholars well into the future and your work as well. So, well, if we haven't left out anything critical, I guess we can end this recording. [01:44:00] Graham St John: No problems. Dennis, thanks for having me. 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