Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

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PROGRAM NOTES:

This lecture was recorded in November 1982. A more complete version of this talk may be found in Podcast 317.]

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they're metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.”

“What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.”

“Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright.”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“[UFOs are], in other words, something which in order not to alarm us has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche signaling a profound historical crisis.”

“A mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack.”

“Eternity does not have a temporal existence, even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed. It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity.”

“We are not primarily biology with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. And the shadow in matter is the body.”

“The whole purpose of shamanism, and of life correctly lived, is to strengthen the soul and strengthen the relationship to the soul, so that this passage [death] can be cleanly made.”

“Technology is the real skin of our species.”

"There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliacosoms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”

“An Aquarian science, or a science that places psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation, should move toward a practical realization of the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the overself.”

“This [psilocybin] is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.”

“We can release this thing once again. The logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenadies and Hericlitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people. And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.”

“But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens, is information,