How A Fortuitous Meeting Can Pinball Your Life

Meeting Terence McKenna bounced me into 25 years of amazing gameplay

Then cyber-hippie Bruce and visionary artist Robert Venosa flanking Terence McKenna at the AllChemical Arts conference, Hawaii, September 1999 (photo by Galen Brandt).

At 62 I do a lot more looking back these days, and I have noticed that encountering a particular person or attending a special gathering can be singular events which pinball your whole life. This happened for me 25 years ago with two fortuitous meetings in 1999: joining Terence McKenna at his home in February to create an experience called the AllChemical Virtual Powwow; and six months later being invited by him to a unique meeting called AllChemical Arts. For those of you unfamiliar with the name Terence McKenna, he was a raconteur of DMT hyperspace who in the 80s and 90s kept  the psychedelic pilot light burning (actually, he reignited the whole darned pile). As I’ll recount here, these two encounters with Terence kicked my life into a crazy set of journeys to the ends of the Earth, to the farthest out realms of the psyche, and back to life’s origins in deep time, and outwards to its possible future in the cosmos.

AllChemical Arts was a secretive psychedelic conference convened by Terence and held in a 1960s era hotel in Kailua Kona, Hawaii that was slated for demolition as soon as we left. This explained the ham & cheese sandwiches for every meal.  We were also the last group to share a space with Terence, as he had been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer four months earlier. Despite valiant efforts to save him, he was to undergo a final boundary dissolution a few months later. 

The brainchild of Terence and organized by close colleagues Ken Symington and Rob Montgomery, AllChemical Arts Invited a handful of cultural creatives (including some early cyberspace mavens like my then 37-year-old self) to address the question: how did psychedelics factor into your life and creative output? Now that I look back at it, this gathering embodied the core questions we are probing today at the Center for MINDS and which I recently reported on in my last SubStack: a Meeting of MINDS. A quarter century ago we were deep in the era of prohibition so there was a real fear felt by the group assembling in Kona. We looked at each other wondering if one of us might be a mole planted there to file dossiers for the DEA. Renowned writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and others were encouraged to privately share their stories without the presumption of the punitive hammer of psychedelic stigma (or worse) crashing down. No recordings were permitted.

Terence with his son Finn (sitting) and yours truly enamored by the virtual unfoldings up in the library at his house in Hawaii (February, 1999).

I presented a live demo of early avatar metaverses, cruising through inhabited cybercities, visionary art galleries and a tryptamine-inflected tripscape known as “Pollen.” This was the virtual world which back in February of ‘99 hosted the AllChemical Virtual Powwow, an experimental online meeting held for Terence and his fans. Long before Zoom, Terence thought these avatar worlds could liberate him from “traveling on a jumbo jet to speak to a room full of thirty people.” You can see Terence, his son Finn, and his partner Christy all engaged in the experiment we held at his house in South Kona in this video shot by Jim Essex. After 8 hours online, we logged off, decamped to the library, took a few puffs and compared notes well into the night. Terence declared that the whole experience was ‘not unlike DMT’. In return for jacking Terence into avatar cyberspace, the previous month he had provided an anonymous source who delivered a potent bag of Cubensis mushrooms that launched my first mission into hyperspace (and what a doozy that was!). So, while he was attending his last Entheobotany Seminar in Palenque, Mexico, I was deep in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada in California being shot through the ignition of the cosmos. More on that another time but you can hear a veiled recounting of the experience in my Levity Zone podcast The Conscious Universe.

Perhaps AllChemical Arts was partly informed by the earlier AllChemical Virtual Powwow but I suspect that all-things-Terence circled back to the all-chemical. Hanging over the Arts event like a dagger was Terence’s dire medical condition. It was highly unlikely that he would survive for more than a few months. During the final hour of the meeting when many realized that this might be their last moments with Terence, all chairs were spontaneously cleared away in the main room. The renowned New Age composer Constance Demby then brought in her sculptural instruments known as the “Space Bass” and “Whale Sail” and participants were invited to sit down or lie down on the carpet. Terence sat down on his haunches in the middle of the group and after an improvised and deeply heartfelt concert by Demby we all had that last precious half hour to send Terence our wishes for wellbeing, remember times with him, or perhaps just take a nap. 

In this potentized field as soon as my head hit the carpet I entered what I today call an “endo trip” or as Terence would say, a psychedelic journey entirely “on the ‘natch.”

I closed my eyes and was suddenly transported to a green plain, looking much like the 3D virtual landscape of AlphaWorld which had been the setting for the AllChemical Virtual Powwow. None of the other attendees were in there, it was simply me, an observer sphere alone with Terence’s avatar self sitting there. I then heard a whirring sound overhead. The sound emanated from a point which as it grew nearer resolved into an ovoid shape. I began to notice glistening colors reflecting off of its sides. 

I recognized it as a rendition of the bejeweled Fabergé eggs reported in Terence’s tryptamine raps. Its top featured a curved windscreen shielding an unseen driver. Terence looked up as it hovered just above him, then softly landed on the green plain next to him. He unfolded himself, got up, and stepped on into it, settling into a plush rear seat. The whirring commenced again and the vehicle floated up, disappearing into the azure veil of a virtual sky.

The conference then began to disperse and before my final departure from the hotel I approached Terence, asking if I might share what I had seen. After hearing my rap, his face cracked into a grin and the last words I ever heard from Terence were: “ah, the getaway car, the getaway car!” We posed for a photo with Robert Venosa and that was that.

On April 2nd, 2000 I hosted a circle of Terence’s local fans out on the lawn here at Ancient Oaks as we had heard that he was close to passing up in San Rafael. He boarded the elf-chauffeured getaway egg early the next morning. But was that that? Hardly!

Elflike Terence chilling and chatting late into the night after the AllChemical Virtual Powwow on February 25, 1999.

These two encounters with Terence toward the end of his life spring-launched the pinball that was my young self into an extraordinary playfield. In the next 25 years I took on the core questions Terence and I mused over in the late night conversation at his house during the avatar Powwow (partial transcription here). Thus velocitized, over the next two decades my trajectory encountered extraordinary flips, bumpers, ramps, tilts, bells and lights. Come along with me on this crazy ride!

My Pinball Run

The first stop in my pinball run was the life-changing psychedelic experience itself. That first doozy of a mushroom encounter flipped me straight to the ignition of the universe and deposited me back again on a pile of boulders by a rushing river in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. I felt totally complete as a human being, and fully present as an organism in this world. I vowed to transform my newly acquired property into a healthy and colorful community wrapped around me like a fuzzy blanket. After some false starts and a lot of infrastructure, that dream has now been realized as Ancient Oaks. The energies unleashed by that night in January ‘99 kept the ball rolling and gave me an enhanced fearless sense of the possible. After all, if you navigate through the abject fear of total dissolution to merge with the universe at its birth moment (and return to relate the tale) other life obstacles seem trivial by comparison. When I related this, my first encounter to Terence, it raised an eyebrow (or two).

Bumper: Upload Terence to Cyberspace!

Terence passed away in 2000 and departed from my daily thoughts, but in early 2005 I woke from a dream featuring an intensely vivid presence of Terence. I sat bolt upright and spoke out loud: “Terence, you left too soon, I’m bringing you back!” I felt had been ‘tapped’ and became rather obsessed. Searching the then primitive Web I could find no more than a single FTP folder (remember those?) of parked MP3 audio files of his talks. His Levity.com pages were still online as they are today but there were scant other resources, and no social media to keep his memory alive. It was as though Terence had passed too soon to make the jump to cyberspace. I called my friend Lorenzo Hagerty who I had first met at AllChemical Arts and later collaborated with to start Palenque Norte, the first speaker series at Burning Man. Palenque Norte was an attempt to offer a North American rebirth for the kind of talks given at the previous Entheobotany Seminars in Mexico. Since it launched in 2003 it has been a wild success, with hundreds of talks posted in Lorenzo’s Psychedelic Salon podcast.

Psychedelic Salon podcast host Lorenzo Hagerty with just some of the 90 Trialogues cassette tapes ready for digitization and the “upload Terence” project (April 2010)

We powered up both Palenque Norte and the Psychedelic Salon in part to put the Humpty Dumpty of Terence back together. As off-the-wall as Terence was, we felt his voice needed to be heard by the next generations, and goshdarn it, we missed him. We realized that his talks were trapped on cassette tapes (remember those?) and we literally had to call them in and digitize them. And in they flowed, first from Ralph Abraham who provided a full box labeled “Trialogues” which Lorenzo and I digitized staying up all night during the first MAPS conference in 2010. These were epic three-way conversations with Ralph, Terence and Rupert Sheldrake and fed full meals to the Salon community.

Like the Grateful Dead community before us, fan-recorded raps arrived in padded envelopes, and other motherlode stashes were delivered until no fewer than 300 non-duplicated gorgeous Terence tellings were in hand. These became the central high octane fuel to power Lorenzo's growing podcast. I dumped a hundred cassettes worth of raw digitized audio to the Internet Archive under Creative Commons License to allow Terence’s voice to be ripped, mixed, and burned by a thousand future creators (which it dutifully was). 

‘Zone Ghost’ Excerpt in a letter from Terence to Peter Meyer, January 7, 1995.

During the AllChemical Virtual Powwow I noticed that Terence named his gray alien avatar ‘Zone Ghost’. Later I acquired a package of his letters and files associated with his Time Wave proposal and in one he declared “I could be the zone ghost of cyberspace without leaving the confines of this hill.” I realize now that we were actually ‘zoneghosting’ Terence (hey, that's a neat new verb!). By 2012 Lorenzo and I put the icing on the cupcake of our zoneghosting project by hosting three events, including a workshop at the Esalen Institute in the very yurt where he put audiences under his unique spell. On the cliffs at the edge of the west we took up Terence’s life & times and offered our own take on his ideas in our times. I also offered an ‘Ode to Terence’ as a part of a Deeper Dive into the complexities of his life.

Fare thee well, Zone Ghost!

Ramp up into Novelty

Back to that evening deep dive with Terence, the very first question we took up even before our nighttime musings was one of his favorites (and mine) - novelty. We asked: novel forms clearly arise continuously in the universe, but by what process?

Pinballing Novelty: Bruce at the EvoGrid server stack at UC San Diego, visualization of molecular bonds formed, and the resulting staircasing ‘cosmic wiggle’ chart of increasing complexity (2011).

In 2008, to earn my long-delayed PhD, I took up this novelty question beyond mere speculation. Working with a dedicated team we toiled for two years to build and run a simulation engine called the Evolution Grid (or EvoGrid). This engine cranked away searching for a general formula for complexification (i.e. novelty). Running on a stack of servers at UC San Diego we found an optimization selection method by which ricocheting virtual atoms (trillions of pinballs!) would increasingly stick together, forming more bonds faster. I dubbed this the ‘cosmic wiggle’ in reference to the staircasing pattern revealed by the charting of bonds through time but also a nod to Terence’s cosmic giggle. The cosmic wiggle was a key statistical building block to what came next.

Tilt Back 3.5 Billion Years to Life’s Origins

Dr. Bruce meets the stromatolites! Western Australia, 2015

Another juicy topic of that late night conversation with Terence were stromatolites, those truly ancient fossils of life dated as far back as 3.5 billion years. We mused how they rocked their existence and gave us clues on how life began. I shared a plan to travel to study their living descendants at Shark Bay in Australia hoping Terence would join in. Terence had suggested that I join him and “go on the road” the next year, me taking up the tech, life & space topics, and him covering psychedelic recipes, hyperspace & hermeneutics. He even went as far as to contact Esalen’s program director to book our first session together for the spring of 2000. Sadly that was not to be.

In 2009, as my doctoral work on the EvoGrid was cranking away, I met my scientific mentor, the renowned chemist David Deamer whose group I joined as an associate researcher at UC Santa Cruz. We were both interested in the ultimate novelty question: how did life arise from the background physics of the cosmos? Dave had put forward the proposal that, like Charles Darwin’s original intuition that life started in a “warm little pond”, hot springs on land were the most likely birthplace of the first cells. This flew in the face of many leading scientists who were convinced that life could only begin deep in the oceans at hydrothermal vents. Ours was a minority position at the time but it has since grown to prominence in the field of Astrobiology. The story of how it got there is a pretty wild pinball ride!

Yours sincerely in a plank canoe departing the Amazon with the scientific goods, an insight that would lead to a new scenario for the origin of life.

At the same 2010 MAPS conference when Lorenzo and I were up all night digitizing the Trialogues cassettes, I ran into Ken Symington, who was organizer of AllChemical Arts. He invited me to join his veteran crew to journey to a remote spot in the Peruvian Amazon where for the first time I would drink the jungle tea ayahuasca. I felt truly honored to be included in his group of veterans. During the 2013 trip south, I experienced a profound healing of a rupture surrounding my own birth, as I was given up for adoption straight out of my mother’s womb. This opened my path to revealing a new way to inquire scientifically about the birth of all of life. In an extraordinary state late one night, I observed a failed division of the first ‘protocell’ (the earliest ancestor of living cells). While this seeming calamity was going on, I noticed the crazy undulating action of polymers, life’s information stores. In effect, I witnessed death writing the code of life, and questions raised around this primal act primed me for the download of a fully incubated origin of life scenario eight weeks later.  

Landing a psychedelically-catalyzed scientific vision on the pages of Scientific American (2017).

Through careful figuring with Dave, that vision landed plausibly in the geochemical setting of ancient hot springs and then made its way into peer-reviewed publications. In the productive ‘miracle years’ of 2013-15 as we developed the ‘hot spring hypothesis’ we teamed up with colleagues at the University of New South Wales and traveled with them to their ancient and living stromatolite sites in Western Australia. They had just discovered hard rock evidence for hot springs carrying the signatures of thriving microbial communities 3.5 billion years ago! It was a parallel discovery in two fields which propelled our work onto the cover of Scientific American in 2017 and onward into a fully developed hypothesis in the prestigious journal Astrobiology in 2020.

After keeping judiciously quiet about the sources of this vision, I came out of the psychedelic scientist closet at Terence’s brother Dennis McKenna’s conference in the UK in 2022. The full story is being spooled out in serial form for Lucid News, and you can catch the first installment of A Psychedelic Journey to the Origin of Life. I decided to take this step in the hopes it would inspire a next generation of scientists to use these tools for breakthroughs. That decision led directly to the formation of the Center for MINDS.

Slingshotting around the Globe (and Beyond)

Testing the vision at Hells Gate, Rotorua, New Zealand 2018.

A hypothesis is only as good as its testable predictions (and pathways to falsification) so Dave and I set forth to bring the science out of our clean laboratory setting slingshotting to messy (and sometimes dangerous) bubbling volcanic hot springs around the world. These are analogs to what we believe were present on the early Earth at life’s beginning, around four billion years ago. We started by setting our trays of chemicals into hissing volcanic fumaroles at Bumpass Hell in California. We then formed protocell compartments successfully in waters from geyser pools at Yellowstone National Park. The next step was a risky journey down to a bubbling acidic hydrothermal field called Hells Gate at Rotorua in New Zealand. Lo and behold, we were able to form the complete basic units of pre-life, the ‘protocells’ I witnessed in the jungle vision. Today, our wet-dry cycling hot spring methodology has been adopted by many teams around the world, signaling a paradigm shift in science and guiding NASA where to drive its rovers on Mars to determine if the red planet once hosted microbial colonies. The scenario may help humanity understand the processes underlying perhaps the ultimate act of novelty beyond the creation of the cosmos itself. This new science would have been endlessly fascinating to Terence had I been able to take a few puffs with him in his library and jam about it.

Ring the Bell for AI

Another bounce of my life’s pinball traces to that night when Terence inquired: “you don't sound like you are of the school that thinks we’re close to some sort of AI that when it goes over the threshold that in a matter of hours it will just inflate into some kind of thing that we can’t even relate to… and you would get a cascade of self-perfecting machine intelligences.”  My response to him then was that cyberspace was very different to a glass full of chemicals and that the internet is formed of wires which permit limited interactions through the constricting pipes of CPUs and is an arid desert ecosystem for life-like processes. In a pond or an ocean everything happens all at once in a massively parallel way we simply can’t mimic with computers. I went on to suggest that the error rate will be a key factor too, and that life requires a lot of random ‘stochastic’ action which software is not set up to deliver. So, if digital-space is so different from bio-space will something like a biological virtual organism capable of adaptation and learning ever be possible? I am skeptical as I feel we will have to reinvent computing hardware from the ground up to have a chance at a true ‘artificial life’ let alone an ‘artificial general intelligence.’ Terence was worried about some sort of super-intelligence taking over in the year 2012 and I did my best to dissuade him. In the end he said “well, I hope they don’t take it all too literally” (his prognostications on the oncoming eschaton). On the assigned date for the end of our world in late 2012 I found myself laughing it all off in a coffee shop under Grand Central Station in the company of a psychedelic comedian. 

I did offer Terence the following bone: that we are more viably likely to come up with a nanotech lichen or silicon slime mold than conscious intelligences. I mused that those simpler self-reproducing techno-microbes might be pre-adapted to settle asteroids or Oort cloud objects in space but would evolve so that the language they communicate in would become opaque to us. We would then have grown our own aliens for ‘first contact.’ I still hold to this today in the era of LLMs, which are not even remotely similar to a slime mold. There is no danger of AI eating the Earth.

Light the Solar System Up with Life

The ultimate pinball: SHEPHERD spacecraft design by Damer, Jenniskens and Nott (2014), capturing asteroids to harvest fuel and minerals and transmuting them into mini-Earths to open the solar system for human habitation, and life along with it.

That begged the next question Terence and I circled around that night: how can life emerge from the womb of the Earth to colonize the solar system? This had been a passion of mine since my teen years and I expounded to Terence how it might go down. Months after AllChemical Arts I won my first contract with NASA and my small team at DigitalSpace delivered on 25 simulation and design projects for the space industry up until 2014. Then, the next breakthrough came, or rather, the breakout: the SHEPHERD spacecraft concept in which an asteroid encapsulated in a balloon could be safely handled with an introduced gas. Co-developed with Peter Jenniskens and Julian Nott, we worked out ways that SHEPHERD could stabilize and move asteroids around, harvest water from them for fuel and crew use, and 3D print minerals from metals they contain to produce parts for ships and space colonies. In a nod to the terraforming discussion with Terence, SHEPHERD could also turn icy asteroids into small biospheres, aquariums in space to feed millions of us as we sustainably settle the solar system. This is quite possibly the way life will find its way out of the womb of the Earth and some pretty stellar teams are now working on it.

Game Not Over… Tell Your Own Story

The moment back in late ‘98 that Terence walked through my front door imparted a spin to my life that has been quite extraordinary. One last turn of the wrist was that I recall him turning to me and saying: “keep telling the story, but make it your own story.” So today, in this essay and elsewhere I plan to share my crazy-glorious trajectory of the past quarter century, a testament to the power of a single fortuitous meeting. 

And the pinball rolls on.