Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Occam’s Razor is fine in the formation of physical theory, but it doesn’t take us far in understanding human motivation.”

“What the psychedelics seem to me to argue for is that reality is not reality. There may be no reality, but certainly this is not it. This is some kind of highly provisional, culturally sanctioned, hallucination that we are all participating in.”

“Reality, whatever it is, is temporary and yields to non-existence.”

“Thought can’t go where the roads of language have not been built.”

“Culture is a kind of environment that we have learned how to interpose between ourselves and whatever is really out there.”

“I just don’t think that a monkey species had the wherewithal to evade the mechanisms of control and constraint that guide and direct everything on the planet. There is a purpose to history.”

“What is to be done? You can’t begin to answer that question until you have some notion of what reality is.”

“But all it takes [when two people are sitting together in silence] is somebody breaking that silence and stating the contents of their mind for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us.”

“I think great relationships are built in silence, because then nobody ever finds out what’s really going on.”

“Reality is a naive concept and should probably be abandoned as quickly as possible.”

“What we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally-sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination of some sort.”

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