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””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I think, when it’s all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C.”

“The African ‘Cradle of Civilization’, I don’t even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn’t believe that is going to have to do some fast talking.”

“They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 224-McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean it’s like a magnet for screwballs.” [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . go figure  .]

“I’ve seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe.”

“My technique, which I recommend to you, is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing we’ve got.”

“Probe the edges.”

“Psychedelics work. If you think that I’m bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and then we’ll talk. That’s the sine qua non. It’ll work, on demand. I’m not saying, ‘And wait forty years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It’ll work. It’ll blow your mind to shreds. It’s real.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 217 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 3″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here.”

“A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 216 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 2″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The surface of things is not where attention should rest.”

“I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world.”

“We’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 215 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 1″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you.”

“If I want a more intense drug experience I take more of one drug.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 206 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 6″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.”

“This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.”

“It’s a relationship [ingesting mushrooms] like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 191 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 5″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna].

“Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda. Ayahuasca will work with you.”

“The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.” [Also see The Art of Steven Rooke.]

“Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?”

“Obviously, it’s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.”

“The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That’s why it’s not important that yogas’ claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.”

“Once you come face-to-face with these psychedelics, the trail ends. You have found the answer. … Now the question is, ‘What the hell do you do with it?’ “
» Continue reading “Podcast 190 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 4″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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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 some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.”

“I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.”

“Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism.”

“The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.”

“I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. … I think that these plants ‘take people’ as much as people take the plants. … When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenic fields of all the people who ever took it.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 189 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 3″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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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 the psychedelic experience.”

“DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 187 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 1″