Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The Holy Now
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time–or even knew selflessness or courage or literature–but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
There is no less holiness at this time–as you are reading this–than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter, or the day Peter walked on water, or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.
Purity’s time is always now. Purity is no social phenomenon, a cultural thing whose time we have missed, whose generations are dead, so we can only buy Shaker furniture. “Each and every day the Divine Voice issues from Sinai,” says the Talmud. Of eternal fulfillment, Tillich said, “If it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all.”
-Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
TERENCE MCKENNA VS. THE BLACK HOLE
Note: The following are some excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November last year, in preparation for a profile that will appear in the May issue of Wired. For obvious reasons, I have chosen selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a craniotomy, and he therefore spoke a bit more frankly about his condition than during November, when I spent a week with him and his wonderful girlfriend Christie Silness during his sort-of recovery in Hawaii.
The comments have been edited and are not chronological; I have included my questions only when necessary. Perhaps someday the full text of our talks will be made available. In Hawaii, we had an especially entertaining routine: during the day, I would ask him the professional interviewer questions, and in the evening, after he had napped, we would get thoroughly baked and ramble through the wilds of esoterica and bibliomania. The evening chats were recorded on DAT; they need serious editing, but there’s some mind-bending loops in there.
I first met Terence in the early 90s, and I feel blessed to have been able to spend some time getting to know him a little better during the last six months of his life. I found him kind, generous, and unpretentious, although he clearly had a potent dark side. He was even more brilliant and well-read than I had expected, with fistfuls of references at his command. But most remarkable for me was how he seemed to face his situation: with an admirable blend of humor, compassion, stoicism, and a willingness to stay open and awake in the midst of the big awful questions without trying to console yourself with answers. And that, for my money, is the ultimate lesson of the psychedelic path — not the Gaian mind, or the onrushing apocalypse, or those ridiculous elves, but a radical openness to ambiguity and the unknown.
At one point I asked him what advice he had for someone about to down 100 ml of potent ayahuasca alone in a rainforest. His words were spare, the utter opposite of the guru some made him out to be: “Pay attention. And keep breathing.” Words to live by, until you stop.
- Erik Davis