Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“After you fiddle with psilocybin for a while the question of whether or not there is an alien intelligence becomes moot.”
“We are embedding ourselves in a matrix of silicone and glass.”
“ We are beginning to embed ourselves into a cultural membrane of some sort.”
“What is happening is a globalizing of intelligence.”
“The reductionists who want to say these drugs just perturb the brain I don’t think have taken enough of these things.”
“Our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.”
“I think psilocybin three or four times a year definitely means that you are a psychedelic person. For sure it means that your every waking moment is informed and transformed by your relationship to this stuff. It doesn’t take very much because it’s a way of thinking.”
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)
Lorenzo,
What a nice way to end a breathtaking talk from Terrence. To end it with music from the heart. Never heard that song before, the harmony in it went straight to my heart. Thank you for this nice moment/podcast in these dark days. Keep doing what you seem to to best (and bring us as much Terence as possible). Greetz from Holland, where mushrooms are not legal anymore by the way…
Jerry
Hello there. Really enjoying your podcasts. I had to chime in here that Terence actually alludes to his horrible trip and going straight! It’s veiled but in hindsight clearly there. It starts around 45 minutes: ‘…sooner or later it will ambush you in some tremendously unpleasant way and then you will get straight.’ And at 47 minutes he describes how the fun stuff goes away and it ‘shows you as you really are’ and he says ‘that’s enough of that.’
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Thanks for pointing that out, Chris. I’m going to go back and relisten myself now.]
Thanks Lorenzo beautiful words we are all butterflies beating are wings and who knows what beat will cause the hurricane but it will. I feel after listening to your show for over three years now, you have found your mark in life each talk gets better and better as my kids get older I look forward to sharing the salon with them. Thanks for keeping the beat.
Hi all,
I just discovered a massive flow of i-linguistic phenomena. I’m talking about dream-yoga. I’ve been an apprentice of a highly respected Tibetan dream Yoga teacher and it has showed me a way to access direct information.
With the proper techniques and the blessings of my teacher, I’ve realized, that the way of yogi direct perception has no imminent precursor.
I’ve seen things in a state of full clarity – that of a waking state – which certainly have been dreams. I broke down my factions of reality sustaining supports and I’m ready to see it all.
I’ve seen things which were impossible, but which -in course of this diffusion into the outer reality- became reality. I’ve never seen anything Terence McKenna related, but I’m still following my intuition of what he would want or like me to do.
If you want to know more about any specifics, or the acquired data of inemotional directions (of travelling) I’ve seen, even those of related to AI, which is so hard to …….. vocabularize just ask yourself: “Is this dream inert or lucid”?
Fantastic Lorenzo your little journey into recent history of Extasy!
How one single person can inadvertently be responsible for a life-changing movement. Thanks for bringing this to our attention and Pura Vida from Switzerland!
fox
Lorenzo, this was a fantastic talk. As always, thanks a lot! As a classicist, I think my favourite part of the talk was when Terence drew a parallel between the rise of classicism in the Renaissance and the Archaic revival in the 20th century:
“The Archaic Revival is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century. The 19th century was the white gentleman’s century: commerce flourished, cities were built, the poor knew their place, and brown people knew their place. The 20th century has been all about the confronting of the bankruptcy of all that. From surrealism, Freud and Jung, Dada, right through to jazz, rock’n’roll, rave music and abstract expressionism – these are all archaic impulses. The 19th century was all about realism, materialism and defined social structures. The 20th century deconstructs the visual image, deconstructs the idea of simple location. We have body piercings, we have trance-dancing, fire-walking, all of which are impulses to return to the primitive. What it means is that in the aura of the realization that history has failed, we’re going back to an earlier model. This is what societies do when they get in trouble. When medieval Christianity essentially got a flat tire by having seventy popes in 25 years, none of whom died of a natural death, that clued people to the idea that there was something wrong with Christian idealism, and the Renaissance capitalists invented classicism.
Classicism, meaning rebuilding a society according to the ideals of Greece and Rome, was a science fiction option at that point. Greece and Rome had been buried in the ground for a thousand years, and yet they dug it up: the dug up the buildings, the manuscripts, and said “this is how people should live!” They founded classicism by becoming patrons of the arts and beginning vast architectural undertakings. And it worked! It set a model for society: Roman law and Greek Aesthetics clear into the 19th century. Now we require such a radically new paradigm that we have to reach outside the domain of history entirely. The archaic then, which is a model of nomadism, of very little material culture, of hedonism, a lot of focus on sexuality and sensuality, body adornment and this sort of thing, and an information based culture ruled by magic: in the case of the archaic it was based on natural magic, in our case it will be based on the magic of technology.”
Very aptly put, I must say.
That was great! Thanks for sharing!