Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

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."

"I think the word 'psychedelic' is maybe too broad, because it includes things which are very different from each other. It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline."

"The icaros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination."

"It seems very clear that this [ayahuasca] healthcare delivery system is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of psychological disorders."

"You must be aware that I have other wrinkles, the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things, but all of these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us."

"But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings. It is simply a modality, an interior landscape, and large portions of it are not human."

"As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness, these trans-human, non-human dimensions slowly come into view. It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity, which our cultural and linguistic programming has blinded us to rather severely."

"[The mushroom] is not a drug of acceptance, you know. It want's transformation of a very radical sort. The ayahuasca seems to integrate."

"Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these other things sometimes can't be."

"What does it mean that on a psychedelic drug one person can see more art in an hour than the species has produced in 10,000 years? What does that say about how effectively we are accessing our souls?"

"If you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at."

"I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life that life occupies to death."

"I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination."

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