Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The people who take that position that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis don’t realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet.”

“Civilization is a ten thousand year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes ten to fifteen thousand years, a moment of biological and geological time.”

“We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don’t look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 241 – “Philosophical Gadfly” Part 2″

Guest speakers: Albert Hofmann, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, and Terence McKenna
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» Continue reading “Podcast 238 – “A Tribute to Albert Hofmann” Part 2″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It’s a kind of tuneless singing.”

“Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance. And not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed. Poetry may have been at its climax. Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy, there’s no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 221-McKenna: “Evolving Times””

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:

Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk.

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?”

“Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances.”

“We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings”
» Continue reading “Podcast 211 – “Empowering Hope in Dark Times””

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.]

“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 as the notion of making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow.”

“We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual. There will not, apparently, be business as usual.”

“You either have a plan, or you are a part of somebody else’s plan.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 188 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 2″

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″