Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered visa vie the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definition, and the drugs have done that to a great extent.”

“The notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion.”

“The fact that we rely on an intellectual method [science] two thousand years old almost precludes our understanding of anything interesting.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 242 – “Philosophical Gadfly” Part 3″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

“Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 204 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 4″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]

“People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.”

“The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.”

“And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.”

“… of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern. The pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity, no one you would invite to your garden party.”

“Technique [in taking entheogens] to me is a kind of a … I’m reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 185 – “Shamanism and the Archaic Revival””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.]

“What  Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral.”

“So if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis.”

“If you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 184 – “The Boundaries of the Human Mind””

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.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 181 – “What Science Forgot” Q&A Session”

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: The two quotations below are by Sasha Shulgin.]

“Internally, no one’s an elder. Internally everyone’s kinda around 35 or so.”

“The people at the industry said, ‘Gee, if you have that kind of imagination that you can look at a structure and guess at another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do.’ And I did.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 173 – Shulgin: “How I Go About Inventing New Drugs””

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

[NOTE: The following quotes are from a conversation held in September 1991.]

Terence McKenna: “But in fact it seems that the ouroboros has taken its tail in its mouth and these two concerns psychedelics and computers] are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge.”

Terence McKenna: “The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic.”

Terence McKenna: “Yes, I mean television certainly has an influence on the mass mind, but on the creative, cutting-edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture, but if you watch television it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 126 – Trialogue: “Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution””

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna
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Rupert Sheldrake: “Especially in Brittan, this declining confidence in science, and this declining funding of science has let to a reduction of scientific morale. Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students. . . . It looks as if the great golden days, the golden age of the sixties and seventies of endless expansion, is over, perhaps forever.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 121 – “Grass Roots Science””

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

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

04:32 Terence McKenna: “But the fact of the matter is, there is no reason to believe that time is invariant, and experience argues the contrary.”

12:39 Rupert Sheldrake: “Maybe, you see, that the bonds between pigeons and their home are comparable to the bonds between people and other people, and indeed they may be related to that which holds society together. When we say “the bonds between people”, we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. It may be that there is an actual connection between them. . . . This kind of social bond, this kind of linkage, may be utterly fundamental.”

17:28 Ralph Abraham: “Especially for people like Americans, who watch television for seven hours a day, there is somehow not enough time away from language.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 108 – Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 2)”

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

10:09 Sasha Shulgin: “First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of balance in all aspects of the human theater.”

11:00 Sasha Shulgin: “One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary, a vocabulary that might allow each human being to more consciously — and more clearly — communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche. This may be called a vocabulary of awareness.” » Continue reading “Podcast 100 – “Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference – 1983″ (Part 1)”