Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it’s a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we’re basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our social systems, our religious ontologies, our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing, all of this is 19th Century at best. And so, really whether we live or perish as a species probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise from any source available.”
“If consciousness is not part of our future then what kind of future can it be?”
“Culture is an intelligence test.”
“I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology.”
“I think primates are most interesting when cornered.”
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http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-02-11
I think this is the Dilbert comic strip Terence references in the talk. I love the pacing of this talk… it feels different than most of the lectures I’ve listened to, and I look forward to the ‘epochal’ announcement about the time-wave theory 🙂
[COMMENT by Lornezo: Thanks for that link. I was a big Dilbert fan when I was still working in the belly of the beast. In reference to that cartoon, my working title for my book that became “The Spirit of the Internet” was “Building God” . . . but I decided that wouldn’t have a very wide appeal. 🙂 . . . And I’m looking forward to that announcement as well. It should come in two weeks.]