Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don’t actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence”

“These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.”

“Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.”

“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.”

“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”

“For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 347 – “This counts, somehow it matters””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.”

“It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.”

“It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.”

“And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.”

“The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.”

“In cyberspace things are built out of light.”

“Apparently, in the Avesta classical period [early Iron Age and before] no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.”

“To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.”

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
» Continue reading “Podcast 337 – “The World Could Be Anything””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“[The wide variety of psychedelic plants] are the way in which the Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.”

“The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don’t believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.”

“Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there’s no hope, there’s no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!”
» Continue reading “Podcast 335 – “Is There Any Reason to Hope?””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic
UFOs and aliens
The end of history – the eschaton
The psychedelic experience
Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other
Death and afterlife
Dreams
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

“The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”

“Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”

“The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace””

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
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PROGRAM NOTES:

Occupy Segment alone is available at: Occupy Updates Day 31

[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

“Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it’s basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what’s to come.”

“There’s perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn’t. It’s a neurological experience. It’s a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it’s basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.”

“To summarize, I’m an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are ‘leave the planet’, ‘get smarter’, and ‘learn how to live as long as you want’.”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!

PROGRAM NOTES:

This lecture was recorded in November 1982. A more complete version of this talk may be found in Podcast 317.]

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they’re metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.”

“What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.”

“Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 267 – “Exploring the Abyss””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I still don’t believe that people who deal with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is.”

“The evolution of the human species is the evolution of the human mind. These consciousness-expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution of the human mind. And so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape. It is they which generate religions, and physics, and messianic careers, and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment and disgrace.”

“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 254 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time””

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What would you have if you could have anything?”

“I think that life proceeds through time. It’s an effort by organism to map one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a ‘something’, and the ‘now’ is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it. And so what being in time is is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And that’s why, hopefully, a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get a whole picture.”

“Yes, well I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history. … Because your history gives you the power of your convictions.”

“I think, better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetime.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 249 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 2″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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» Continue reading “Podcast 248 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 1″

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
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PROGRAM NOTES:

“I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.” -Rupert Sheldrake

When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, “No,” and then he went on to say, “Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it.”

“If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?” -Rupert Sheldrake
» Continue reading “Podcast 234 – “The World Soul””