Podcast 181 – “What Science Forgot” Q&A Session
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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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 doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope, or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean, processes always occur in the same way. And this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature. These things are as it were simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff."
"Thinking means something. It’s not just something we do. It means something. It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong."
QUESTION: What is the nature of magic, or what is magic or the wonder it invokes?
"Magic is not a trivial issue at all."
"If you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is are very close to the same thing."
"The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality, through acts of language. And language is very, very mysterious. I mean, it is true magic."
"All so-called primitive people know that the world is made up of language. That you sing it into existence. That what you say it is is what it is. That is it maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension."
"Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. This is what quantum physics teaches."
"Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy. Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty that it’s, at this point, to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors."
QUESTION: Why don’t some people get high when they take psychedelics?
"The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting."
"But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past."
"We are caged by our cultural programing, and this is the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives."
"If we could train ourselves to simply remember our dreams, psychedelics would become obsolete."
"Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it is worth."
"Language is partially the key here. We cannot move into a reality we cannot describe. If we can’t describe a world, we can’t be there."
"As long as we let the establishment set the language agenda we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian, world of consumerism and schloko values that the establishment has prepared for us."
"The way I think of these psychedelics are a different way, is that they are catalysts for the imagination."
