DJB: This was how long ago?Terence: This was in '67 when I was a sophomore in college. The interest inaltered states of consciousness came simply from, I don't know whether I wasa precocious kid or what, but I was very early into the New York literaryscene, and even though I lived in a small town in Colorado, I subscribed tothe Village Voice, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD, mescaline,and all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in. Then Iread The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and it just rolled fromthere. That was what really put me over. I respected Huxley as a novelist,and I was slowly reading everything he'd ever written, and when I got to TheDoors of Perception I said to myself, "There's something going on here forsure."DJB: To what do you attribute your increasing popularity, and what role doyou see yourself playing in the social sphere?Terence: Well, without being cynical, the main thing I attribute to myincreasing popularity is better public relations. As far as what role I'llplay, I don't know, I mean I assume that anyone who has anythingconstructive to say about our relationship to chemical substances, naturaland synthetic, is going to have a social role to play, because this drugissue is just going to loom larger and larger on the social agenda until weget some resolution of it, and by resolution I don't mean suppression orjustsaying no. I anticipate a new open-mindedness born of desperation on thepart of the Establishment. Drugs are part of the human experience, and wehave got to create a more sophisticated way of dealing with them thanexhortations to abstinence, because that has failed.RMN: You have said that the term "New Age" trivializes the significance ofthe next phase in human evolution and have referred instead to the emergenceof an archaic revival. How do you differentiate between these twoexpressions?Terence: The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology, eighties style,with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing,and this sort of thing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more globalphenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the lateNeolithic. It reaches far back in the twentieth century to Freud, tosurrealism, to abstract expressionism, even to a phenomenon like NationalSocialism which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organizedactivity, on race/ancestor consciousness these are themes that have beenworked out throughout the entire twentieth century, and the archaic revivalis an expression of that.RMN: In the book you wrote with your brother Dennis, The InvisibleLandscape, and in recent lectures and workshops, you've spoken of a newmodel of time and your efforts to model the evolution of novelty based onthe ancient oriental system of divination, the I-Ching. Can you brieflyexplain how you developed this model, and how an individual can utilize thissystem to modulate their own perspective on the nature of time?Terence: Ah, no. I think I'd rather send you a reprint of a recent paper inRevision than to try and cover that. It's not easily explained. If I were togive an extremely brief resume of it, I would say that the new view of timeis that time is holographic, fractal, and moves toward a definitiveconclusion, rather than the historical model of time which is open-ended,
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