Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 003 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

This talk was given in December 1982

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.”

“It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth.”

“The demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.”

“There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things [psychedelics] on your feet. And that means that you have an I/thou relationship, and you say … 'you're long on talk, but what can you show me?”

“These things [psychedelic medicines] invoke the Logos, which means they work directly on the language centers. So that the important aspect of the experience is the dialogue.”

“I think if someone tells you they've every drug you know they're confessing they're a dilettante. It's much better to lean hard on a few.”

“I think one of the interesting things about judging a drug is to see how eager people are to do it the second time. If they're eager to do it the second time it's probably not worth bothering about, because what is necessary to have validity in these experiences is the terror. The terror is a stamp of validity on the experience, because it means this is real.”

“Friends, right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is trans human, hyper dimensional, and extremely alien.”

“The most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul.”

“As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded.”

“As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of active intelligence that is on a galactic scale.”

“In other words, shamanic experience, drug experience, this is ruled out of bounds. And it is because it is the source of novelty. The cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being is happening there. I mean, think about it for a moment. If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us?”

“So I am saying we are at the beginning of human thought. This is the birth crisis of intelligence. And intelligence is something which is moving through the higher primates now at greater and greater speed.”

“The fact is that the densest organizational material in the universe is the human cortex. And the richest experience in the universe is the experience you're having right now.”

“The testimony that I want to give today is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you don't have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that except form a relationship with these plant drugs.”

“There is some surety that you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant, but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully.”

“DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once you know about it, it's very hard for anyone to understand you when you're talking about it.”

“The future is bound to be psychedelic because the future belongs to the mind.”

“The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily technique, not ritual.”

“The only intellectual, or noetic, or spiritual path worth following seems to me to be the one that builds on your own experience.”

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