Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don’t actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence”

“These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.”

“Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.”

“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.”

“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”

“For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”

“And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.”

“We need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being.”

“Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.”

“Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.” [Note: this comment was made a dozen years before the iPhone was released.]

“As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.”

“The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.”

“History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it’s over . . . in a sense.”

“What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.”

“To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.”

“If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it’s an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.”

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MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013 Conference

Books Mentioned in this podcast

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

By Katie Hafner