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.]

“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 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 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 speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil
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PROGRAM NOTES:

The Albert Hofmann Papers
at Erowid.org

The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online)

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

“What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet.”

» Continue reading “Podcast 237 – “A Tribute to Albert Hofmann” Part 1″

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
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“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 speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna
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In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence’s house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain.

» Continue reading “Podcast 231-Damer-McKenna: “Bruce, Terence, and Virtual Worlds””

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna
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“Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future.” -Ralph Abraham

“In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for “the snap”, that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. … What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history.” -Ralph Abraham
» Continue reading “Podcast 230-Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 3″

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

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

“Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery.”

“Good thinking, whether you’ve ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined.”

“What is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 229-Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 2″