Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The ‘banks’ of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.”

“All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don’t run around announcing how they haven’t got their act together.”

“What the psychedelic thing is about, or at least for me, is it’s a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.”

“We are, literally, a schizophrenic species. We are at war with our own nature. Civilization, whatever that means, is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it’s constantly refusing to come to terms with the context in which it finds itself, which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy, and so we go outside of those things and create a generalized abstraction and reason backward.”

“The reason psychedelics, I think, are so frightening to the guardians of social order is because they represent a direct addressing of experience.”

“What the psychedelics show, that is a secret that some people don’t want told, is that we can redesign our behavior. We can change very, very quickly.”

“The whole history of humanness is a history of unexpected adaptive response to unusual circumstances.”

“Whatever the imagination is, psychedelics catalyze it, psychedelics enhance it.”

“If we could feel the consequences of what we are doing we would stop doing it. . . . We’re like someone half-awake inside a burning building.”

“Everywhere where reason has shown its light the greater darkness has been revealed.”

“The truth, for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn’t you should seek a deeper truth.”

“History is the necessary distortion of an animal species to lead it to the brink of an ontological transformation.”

“The magic, if that’s the word, or the grandiosity, the power of ecstatic exultation that resides in the psychedelic is because it is literally a change of dimensional perspective.”

“The real test of your psychedelic authenticity is your ability to write a novel.”

“The quintessence of understanding is the ability to occupy other people’s points of view.”

“Not reckless dose but committed dose. Not to see if it works. It works, other people have established that. You don’t need to do research to confirm that it’s psychoactive.”

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