Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“There are several unexplained anomalies. Why is it that fully 80% of the world’s known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin, even though the flora of the Old World jungles of Indonesia is equally rich?”

“The curing scenario of the ayahuascero is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans world wide.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 240 – “Philosophical Gadfly” Part 1″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna ... recorded in 1996, however, it is current enough to have been given just last night ... maybe it was .]

“And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them, generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present. And in the present moment we, like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins.”

“In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We’ve re-understood that the world is one thing, and it’s a living thing. It’s a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept [of alchemy].”
» Continue reading “Podcast 239 – “Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century””

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.>

"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″

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: Terence McKenna
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[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] >“Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it’s quite spectacular.”

“It’s [ayahuasca] essentially ‘brain soup’. There’s nothing in it which doesn’t occur naturally in human neuro-metabolism.”

“It’s [ayahuasca] the only hallucinogen I know, where if it’s made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn’t done it.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 164 – McKenna: “Some thoughts about ayahuasca””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

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

“One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively.”

“The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 136 – “A Few Conclusions About Life””

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Matt Pallamary
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NEW! … Two of Matt Pallamary’s books are now available on Kindle:
Spirit Matters … Kindle Edition
Land Without Evil … Kindle Edition

PROGRAM NOTES:

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

“Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.”

“The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 132 – McKenna: “Shamanism” and Pallamary: “Spirit Matters””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

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

“Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured.”

“The precondition for creativity is, I think, is disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos.”

“The prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 123 – “Opening the Doors of Creativity””