Archive for Terence McKenna

Podcast 351 – “What Is Truth?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”

“The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”

“If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”

“So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That’s why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.”

“I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.”

“I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”

“Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”
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May 14, 2013 · Filed under Ayahuasca, Books, Culture, Evolution, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 349 – “A Higher Dimensional Sectioning of Reality”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Just because you have a nut theory it doesn’t mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there’s a limited pool there that we’re all after.”

“Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what’s happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.”

“Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.”

“I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.”
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April 30, 2013 · Filed under Crop Circles, Culture, Extraterrestial, John Allen, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 347 – “This counts, somehow it matters”

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.”
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April 9, 2013 · Filed under 2012, Culture, Eschaton, Evolution, Future, Language, Psychedelics, Religion, Shamanism, Terence McKenna

Podcast 345 – “Transhuman Encounters”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.”

“By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.”

“The question is being asked, ‘Are we alone?’ ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we’re not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?”

“People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.”

“Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state, it’s that we haven’t demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.”
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March 20, 2013 · Filed under Books, Consciousness, Culture, DMT, Evolution, Extraterrestial, Imagination, LSD, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 344 – “A Global Cultural Crisis”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.”

“Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it’s going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.”

“Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.” (quote from 1983)

“Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.”

“I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.”

“If I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism.”

“So it’s [shamanism] a kind of a profession. It’s almost like clergy. It’s to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.”

“The history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of.”

Books mentioned in this podcast

A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present
By Howard Zinn

Burr: A Novel
By Gore Vidal

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated
By Gore Vidal

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March 13, 2013 · Filed under Ayahuasca, Books, Consciousness, Culture, Language, Psychedelics, Shamanism, Terence McKenna

Podcast 339 – “A Necessary Chaos”

Have you had a “bad trip”
on psilocybin mushrooms?
If so, please take this anonymous
Johns Hopkins survey,
and please tell others about it.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.”

“Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.”

“I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that’s because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that’s a thrill, you’ll probably love psychedelics.”

“The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.”

“We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.”

“Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.”

“The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.”

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January 29, 2013 · Filed under Chaos, Consciousness, Culture, Evolution, Future, Language, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 337 – “The World Could Be Anything”

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
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December 29, 2012 · Filed under Alchemy, Ayahuasca, Consciousness, Culture, Eschaton, Future, Psychedelics, Shamanism, Terence McKenna

Podcast 335 – “Is There Any Reason to Hope?”

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!”
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December 14, 2012 · Filed under 2012, Cannabis, Culture, DMT, Eschaton, Fraser Clark, Psychedelics, Salvia divinorum, Terence McKenna, Timewave

Podcast 333 – Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”

Guest speaker: Ken Adams
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“I’m almost sixty years old, and I can guaranty you that I’m fucking tired of having to whisper about psychedelics.” – Ken Adams

Watch a video of this talk

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today we feature the fifth Palenque Norte Lecture of 2012, which was given at the Burning Man Festival. This talk features the filmmaker Ken Adams, who was a neighbor, friend, and collaborator of Terence McKenna in their search for new ways of explaining the psychedelic experience. Ken is the producer/director of a new, and experimental, film titled “The Terence McKenna Experience” which features never before seen and heard raps by Terence.

TerraLucida-The Terence McKenna Experience-test sequence from Ken Adams on Vimeo.

Ken Adams “Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

Rolling Jubilee
A bailout of the people by the people

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November 26, 2012 · Filed under Art, Burning Man, Consciousness, Creativity, Culture, Ken Adams, LSD, Palenque Norte, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 325 – “Cauldron Chemistry”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I’ve been telling people recently is that until there’s animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.”

“In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it’s good to stick to the natural ones.”

“I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they’re about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.”

“The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.”

“I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.”

Links mentioned in Jon Hanna’s comments:

The bio synthesis of dimethyltryptamine in vivo.

Comments by Sasha about DMT & Tryptophan

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September 1, 2012 · Filed under Alchemy, Hermeticism, Jon Hanna, LSD, Psychedelics, Shamanism, Terence McKenna

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