Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The people who take that position that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis don’t realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet.”
“Civilization is a ten thousand year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes ten to fifteen thousand years, a moment of biological and geological time.”
“We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don’t look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.”
“Humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own.”
“So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it, and the planet feels it.”
“Our imagination is really the sail of the soul, and the question is, where will that sail take us if we will but let it?”
“That’s why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology, because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tenancies does not give a true picture of the future. That the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty.”
“We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious but we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive, it’s not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing. It is more like an entelechy, it guides, it opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices.”
“One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality. People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them they will work, and this is not true at all, especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you’re attempting to conjure.”
“I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been.”
“So it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship between certain plants and certain monkeys, and that you don’t have humanness unless you have the plants and the monkeys together. This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture.”
“And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing, it’s providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor.”
“The word psychedelic has been attached to the drugs and confined, but many things are psychedelic. Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids, and supports consciousness is psychedelic if we take the word down to its Greek roots.”
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Just leaving a comment as this page came up when I was trying to work out who the guy is that Terence keeps referencing that sounds like ‘merciliad’ – here is the actual spelling!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Thanks for pointing that out . . . I should have done that myself :-).]
I appreciate your comment about sound quality, but what you suggest doesn’t actually work. Over the past five years we have tried a wide range of products to remove these sound blemishes, and in a few instances professional sound technicians have stepped in and helped on the really bad recordings. But for the most part, these old recordings are not easily cleaned up. However, if you would like to take a crack at it (and have some success) I would be happy to replace the file if you can effect a major improvement in it.
Hi, this recording is really interesting but it is a shame the audio has not been fixed up a little.
There is a constant background hiss which the brain will filter out after a while but you can easily remove it with some software.
I’m no audio engineer by any means but in Soundtrack Pro on a Mac you can select the noise you want to remove as long as it is a constant. So just select the hissing sound and choose to remove it.
Then it will be much more of a pleasure for everyone to listen to 😉
Anyway keep up the good work!
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=296#more-296
* gnosticism: eschaton, alienation, birth pains, space migration
* evolution: humanness, genetic engineering
* The mushroom speaks: I see humanity as a coral reef
* finnegans wake: imagination unconscious made conscious. Merciliad ( who’s this ) history of flight.
* flying saucer haunts human history
* apocalyptic mythology vs. linear extrapolation
* evolution of language: estabilishment vs. psychedelics
* Coherent dialog with the transhuman “thing which is leading”: no one is in charge
** Jung collective unconscious ( great! )
** Who is the thing which is leading
* Moron disagrees
* Peruvian plants: Hawaiiyuaca. Amazonian expedition
* Psychedelic research : Reluctance to have human subjects in the picture vs. LD-50
* Annoying yogi talks about stillness
* Trance. Set and Setting. Invocation. Sensory deprivation ( but forget tanks ).
* Fungi Pharmacopoeia : Stratopharia cubensis in Southern China – Taoism ( great! )
* Eleusinian Mysteries
* John M. Allegro
* Dennis McKenna : further than Wasson. Monkeys like DMT. Humans = fungi + monkeys. ( great! )
** Inhuman culture. Colombia, grafitte: “Without this, you’re not yourself”.
** The Ghost in the Machine: Arthur Koestler. No hope for the human species without chemical intervention.
** Language preceded meaning. Glossolalia.
* Moron disagrees
* Three dimensions: awake, dreaming, tripping. LSD : Integration of the experience.
* Culture legs far behind language. The evolution of language is the evolution of reality.
* Government and drugs. MKULTRA, aerosol DMT bombs in vietnamese towns.
** The mushroom speaks: only the good ( in a Platonic sense ) will find psychedelics.
* Chip. Computer processors. Information revolution. This was not part of the plan.
** Drugs are software. Cybernetics are hardware.
** Internet : Mysterious mama matrix of information : unconscious made conscious. Many things are psychedelic.
* Commentator disagrees and talks about Bruce ( the NASA guy ), ehphex ( Liberation ), Botanical Dimensions.
** This talk is Creative Commons ( id est, you won’t get into jail for putting McKenna in every Goa song you make. Do it! That’s what all the cool kids are doing. )