Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.”

“It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.”

“What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.”

“I finally realized that this ‘place’ that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody’s idea of a playpen.”

“We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it’s too early for us to be anything else. There’s no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That’s why it’s so important to try and share [our stories].”

“The world isn’t this unbelievably strange thing which is ‘out there’. The world is this stranger-than-we-can-suppose thing which begins from the core of us out. That means nothing can be taken for granted. It can be taken apart. It can be put together many, many ways.”

“[DMT] is pure, one hundred per-cent magic. MAGIC. It’s not a drug. It’s an event. It’s not something you do. It’s something that happens to you.”

McKenna also describes a DMT experience as, “A collision with another modality.”

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Books Mentioned in this podcast

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

Riane Eisler

The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (Cornell paperbacks)

The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series)

Richard Evans Schultes

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers

Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch