Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

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

"The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place."

"Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may never know what hit us."

"If I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the Net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull."

"All time is is how much change you can pack into a second."

"You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise."

"It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you."

"Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected."

"It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is."

"This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?"

"To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination."

"Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating."

"I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago."

"It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense."

"Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity, and beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences."

"The momentum now is inevitable. Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable."

"What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all."

"When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let’s be frank about it, it is enslavement."

"The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure."

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Transcript of this Talk

Video of Bruce Damer’s EvoGrid

This is the book Terence spoke about in this podcast.