Podcast 189 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.> “Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god. … [This] is probably a memory of a relationship to […]

Podcast 188 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.” “Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.” “This is what I talked about last night about the archaic revival […]

Podcast 187 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Most software, I think, is written by freaks.” “What it [investigating psychedelics] really requires is a love of the peculiar, of the weird, the bizarre, the étrange, the freaky and unimaginable.” “Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in […]

Podcast 185 – “Shamanism and the Archaic Revival”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] “People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.” “The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.” “And I don’t mean […]

Podcast 181 – “What Science Forgot” Q&A Session

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is the Question and Answer session following the talk heard in the previous podcast. In it, Terence answers questions from the audience, such as, “Can you talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness in layman’s terms?” [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “It […]

Podcast 180 – “What Science Forgot”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? I mean it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? … I think so.” “I live […]

Podcast 177 – “Surfing Finnegans Wake” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties.” “In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’.” “Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings […]

Podcast 176 – “Surfing Finnegans Wake” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century.” “The reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things, clearly. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ […]

Podcast 174 – “Pushing the Envelope”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] “The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.” “Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may […]

Podcast 170 – “How the Web Looked Back in 1994″

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s me in Hawaii sometime in 1994. “I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it!” […]