Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The only path in to the supernormal that I’ve found are the psychedelics. Everywhere else I found chicanery and fraud.”
“It’s fun to be a free person. It’s fun to not depend upon an institution, an ideology, an other person, a place, a time. And it’s very hard to sell this form of fun. People are afraid. People have been dis-empowered, I think, through the process of juvenilization.”
“Millions and millions of people live larval, low-awareness lives warehoused in the burbs, plugged in to Costco and the tele. And as long as the magazine subscriptions stay subscribed and the credit cards continue to be serviced the illusion that there is life happening here is allowed to continue.”
“I think that every single one of us should be learning how to expand our communications skills.”
“It’s not about rejecting the media or the marketplace. It’s about changing your relationship to it. Do not consume. Produce! . . . Inject your own art.”
“I don’t believe alien spaceships are visiting Earth to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, or to do anything much else of interest, but I do think there is an alien presence. It’s non-material. You contact it in the psychedelic experience. . . . Its nature is informational.”
“What the alien needs to manifest among us is a suitable landing zone.”
“In a sense, the Internet is a net to catch an alien.”
“In other words, the imagination is like a field of data that is at the Bell level of connectivity in the quantum mechanical universe.”
“Physically, we are alone, physically. But in the imagination we’re surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our religions, our culture.”
“We have exhausted the exterior world, and yet the interior world beats like an enormous ocean. And what is ordinary, historical consciousness but a tiny island protruding above that ocean.”
“There was a period in my life where I formed my taste by saying I liked what I didn’t like.”
“I think the worst setting for taking drugs is complex social environments, especially public social environments.”
“I believe in large doses . . . rarely.”
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Pronouncements that all spiritual disciplines and all non-chemically induced trance states are phony are as hyperbolic as pronouncements that all chemically induced experiences offer no personal transformation or spiritual insights. McKenna, living comfortably from his seminars and books with his intellectually compliant devotees seems little different from other gurus.
Is it possible that people who move from psychedelics to other practices do so because they see the potential for self deception such as the idea that in 2012 some great cosmic transformation will happen or that we will merge with machines and live in virtual universes. One minute McKenna poses as the ultimate skeptic and the next he projects sci fi fantasies backed up with a private interpretation of the I Ching.
One thing I would like as a listener are attempts, Like D Pinchbeck’s to record the content and long term personal effects of psychedelic experience. Fewer experts, fewer science projects, more psychedelic journalism and art that tries to get at what these medicines do. The first wave brought many psychological hypotheses, many spiritual hypotheses, and some really fun anthropological hypotheses like Mckenna’s creative and witty musings about mushrooms in the history of human development. Is it time for some fresh hypotheses?
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: I think that there is a lot of merit in this comment. While we shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bath water”, I agree that we could do with some fresh hypotheses . . . like those offered by Bernardo Kastrup, perhaps.]
Thank you Lorenzo again. About the difference btw ayahuasca and yagé, the dmt source they say comes from two different plant – chacruna for ayahuasca and chacrupanga for yagè – while the caapi is the same.
I still think 5 grams of well grown Psilocybin is absolute overkill. Maybe natural picked mushroom might be ok but I’ve had 3.5 grams of homegrown Golden Teachers that felt like a quarter of picked mushrooms.
Considering Terence had his brutal freakout in the 80s I think it was dangerous advice for him to contiue preaching 5 gram and up doses.
Anyway, thanks Lorenzo for sharing.
Won’t play?
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Hmmm. It must be on your end, because it’s playing for me right now.]
In this podcast I mentioned the fact that we needed new music to serve the same purpose as did the protest songs of the Sixties. Well, today I found one, and it is powerful.
Sole & DJ Pain 1 “Hostage Crisis” feat. Chris Hannah of Propagandhi
“We’ve been enlisted to wipe each other out”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myEeDSaPRnk&feature=youtu.be
Great stuff Lorenzo, you are awesome. 🙂 thanks for the great information on the psychedelic salon.