Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The absolute victory of habit is death itself.”
“Life is apparently a phenomenon in this universe considerably more tenacious than stars.”
“When the democratic crunch hits, democratic values will go down the drain long before they turn off the lights and stop delivering the food.”
“The Net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity.”
“Freakery is the wave of the future.”
“If you’ve never read Moby Dick you certainly should. It’s a crash course in psychedelic metaphysics.”
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It’s a shame that Terence’s reading of Melville is marred by static. Anyone interested in the deeper philosophical significance of Moby Dick should read ‘Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment’ by Jed McKenna (no relation).
Just look up the definition of history on wikipedia… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History and then add the verb ends and you will know what Terence is saying. It is just an invention of the greeks, a noun. Before it was prehistory, conflict runs through it, Herodotus was its father, it is subject to end etc… There is no substitute for literacy in understanding words.
I did not understand this history ending thing either, in order to please my parents I got all A’s in high school taking multivariable calculus and AP English but I had never even read the Odyssey nor understood Euclid (literally). I am now undergoing the process of becoming literate and Terence is starting to make sense.
I believe many of us are captivated by advanced things such as fractals or in this case graduate level philosophy. But these things are built upon prerequisite material, we cant just skip grades k-12. Instead of gaping in awe at what Terence says we ought to put in the work to actually understand it and replicate it with faithfulness to the original.
Or perhaps we should just enjoy the felt presence of immediate experience… lol
I just listened to the last three Terence talks, i think what he means about the end of history is simply we will out grow our need for history the same way we no longer need paper to read and write. On the other hand i think we are all taking shots in the dark. Thanks Lorenzo
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: In a later workshop that I podcast a while back, Terence said that by the end of history he meant “human-only” history, and that the next phase would be human/machine history . . . if I remember correctly. :-)]