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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The way to get off on DMT is after you feel completely peculiar you have to do one more enormous hit. This is where courage comes in.”
“A meme has gotten loose on this planet that is the social equivalent of cancer in my opinion, and what it is is capitalism. Capitalism does not serve human beings. It serves itself in the same way that cancer does not serve a human being.”
“The reason people fetishize objects is because they have no accessible dimension of inner worth. They feel worthless.”
“I think the Internet probably will turn out to be very toxic for capitalism.”
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““I think the Internet probably will turn out to be very toxic for capitalism.””
If only…
Thanks Lorenzo for the mention of Dr Bruce traveling to NZ in the introduction – I got to meet him on two occasions, one with a focus on the beginning of life, the other being a very moving story telling salon of his personal experiences, with and without entheogens. I also met some other really great people at the latter event, as it was hosted by a fellow Saloner. My search for The Others is beginning to snowball!
Psycherence.. where’s the afterparty p:
Hey, it’s the guy who found the tapes again. Finally had a chance to listen, with relish, to part THREE 😉 of this lecture series, which again was a walk down memory lane.
One of my favorite parts was hearing Terence and the two guys who would later marry my wife and I, Greg and Moorlock, prognosticating the future of the Web during the Q&A (Netscape and Internet Explorer had just come on the scene the year before). It reminded me why I became lifelong friends with these fools. I think they were pretty spot on, no?
Moorlock: I see a couple of possible paths that the effect the new media is going to have on people could go: One would follow the model of what happened to Europe when the Church stopped becoming the sole interpreter of the Bible, and the Bible was printed so that anyone could read it and interpret, and many people did, and started different interpretations, and that sort of caused an explosion of different ideas and different ways of looking at the world.
The other would be… this is a little more difficult to express. There’s a terrific Buddhist magazine called “Tricycle,” and one of the things that’s terrific about it is that it’s not sectarian. It has a whole lot of viewpoints; it talks about all sorts of different flavors of Buddhism that people respect. [And this is] because there aren’t enough Buddhists in America to have really cool magazines for all these different sects. Now if that were to change tomorrow, and there was a different magazine for every sect, then each magazine would have a single viewpoint, the other viewpoints would be portrayed maybe but seen as sort of heresy and talked down about.
I can see that sort of thing happening on the web, or with web-like media, where people start pursuing ideas that they’re interested in and they care about, [and] they may end up digging themselves a niche of their own preconceptions and the prejudices they already have about information, and going to information sources that support that and prop up things that may or may not be valid.
The other option is that they could be exposed to so many different types of information — from the original sources, not filtered through the mass media — that they’ll actually become more informed about more different points of view. I can’t tell right now which way it’s going to go. Or maybe it’s going to go in both directions for different people.
Greg: You can’t keep ignorant people ignorant because there’s too much access to the other knowledge.
Moorlock: Only if you want it, though. It’s not like now: today if you turn on CNN, you get not only the information you’re interested in; you’re getting information that CNN thinks that a large audience of people is going to be interested in. So you’re inevitably going to be confronted with things that mess with your prejudices. Now the downside of this is that CNN is mapping the societal prejudices of its market share onto all of its audience, and because there are so few media sources, there are only a few selected branches of prejudice that you’re allowed to tap into. But whether the future’s going to break that up, or just mean that there are going to be tighter groups and smaller groups of predispositions that are reinforced…
Greg: That’s choice — those that wish to insulate themselves in only that information they want to see that supports their inner worldview, will insulate themselves excellently. And those that wish to just throw themselves into the unknown constantly will have a readily-available source of unknowns…
Terence: Terence: Yeah, I think we’re already seeing this… clearly some people are going to take the internet raw and love it and other people are just going to want the conference on cat grooming.
(Yours truly doesn’t stick his neck out much among this daunting company of intellectuals except for a question regarding a parrot I bought for a dollar in Thailand which the hunter who’d caught it immediately traded for cigarettes. However, it was interesting to hear my younger self being very much interested in the friction between capitalism and wilderness. It’s something I would later ask “The Gods” about not two days after the conference, during my first — and very much synchronistic — flash on DMT. Moorlock would soonafter accompanying me to Egypt in the aftermath of that trip and become a character in my (recently re-released!) memoir The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah. Which, um, makes the perfect summer read for the astral and/or temporal traveller in YOUR life!
Lastly, Greg died of cancer a few years ago and I have again passed these podcasts along to a very grateful community: the 299 strong public Facebook group, Celebrate Greg Junell. Please do check it out. Again many, many thanks to Lorenzo for his persistent work in thrusting Terence once again into the public sphere. Count me as a supporter.
Thank you Lorenzo!!
I’ve been explore these podcasts for years. Tonight I finally got through all 28 pages of your podcasts. I’ve probably listened to about 80 or 90% of them.
Much love for your contribution to the psychedelic community. You’ve helped me immeasurably through my teenage years and into my adult life. I’m now 27, and look forward to your next post.
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Thanks for the kind words.]