Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima(?)
PROGRAM NOTES:
“There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education.” –Timothy Leary
“I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.” –Allen Ginsberg
[NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.]
“To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.” –Terence McKenna
“It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone.”
“Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence.”
“I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!”
“The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.”
“The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature.”
“The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked.”
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I agree with J! No licences, please, just education! Like we need sex-ed but not licences to have sex. As McKenna says, the psychedelic experience is a part of our birthright as human beings!
So I keep hearing this, what I feel, is an Elitist perspective of the use of chemicals. That only a chosen few, the intelligent (which is ambiguous to say the least), artists, doctors, scientists, and other suggestions along these lines. Like needing to get a license, what bullshit, I’m sorry. We do need better education on these topics. He sights sex education, which is ironic, it sounds like it was a lot better then when I went to school in the 90’s. But getting a license, I’m sorry we don’t need more regulations and interference, we need more honest dialogue, and a reverent respect for the power of the human mind and the power of substances to reveal us to ourselves. People jump out windows and have breaks on psychedelics because we live in a society of repression, which in turn breeds physic dissonance. Depending on what was repressed and how determined the individuals ego is to protect the individual from that repression, will determine how fractured the altered states can become. Couple that with a pour set, even in the best setting, a break can occur. I seems that knowledge of the potential for something like this, greatly aids one who wishes to journey inward by allowing them to get an appropriate sitter, or guide, fasting to set your intent, which is really effective because every time you go ah, I’m hungry, I’m hungry because I’m fasting, and I’m fasting because I want to open my self to an honest and loving experience free from fear, willing to learn, and brave enough to forgive yourself as well as others. In any case, this thing humans have been doing, since the begging near as I can tell, it works quite nicely. Dancing, drumming, interacting with our chemistry in many ways, to come to a higher understanding of our selves and this network of infinitely creative force called life of which we are a part. So I don’t see why I should have to get a license to do that. And why should only a few be privy to this source of knowledge. Very intelligent, educated, seemingly “well adjusted” individuals can have horrific reactions to altered states. Sometimes the first time, other times the 100th time. What we need is education on how to heal ourselves and how to help others address honestly and with compassion what ever dissonance we find. It seems very Elitist indeed, to think that only “the intelligent,” the “state licensed” individual has the tools and means necessary to learn from and make use of these substances. If we have learned anything over the last 100 years, the state is one of the least educated sections of our society when it comes to chemicals, there effects, and what that really means for society. When I was 20 I had a parole officer, he tried to tell me heroin wasn’t an opiate, and the methadone was for meth addicts. So lets get off our high horse, and take a little more personal and loving approach to this “mulch-faceted jewel.”
this post was filed under the Burroughs tag (among others) which is how i just got here. (& this is one post that one way or another oddly enough keeps returning to my forefront.)
re: WSB:
ubu.com has a new addition, narrated by Laurie Anderson, on Burroughs that i love:
this page http://www.ubu.com/sound/burroughs.html holds a link to this mp3 file: http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/burroughs_william/bbc_anderson/Burroughs-William_BBC_Narrated-Laurie-Anderson.mp3
Comments from original blog page: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=916
planetcitizen
I believe the women who makes the comment during Leary’s talk is the great Diane Di Prima.