Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“There is no closure. There are models, and there are questions. But all models are provisional, and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What's being claimed here [in the psychedelic experience] is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers. And it's different for everybody.”

“There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics. If you look at the people who've been involved with it they've said completely different and contradictory things.”

“We look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of 'bare' furniture. We fear it and don't want to look at it. And to my mind, most of the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guarantied lack of success. That's what they offer, because the last thing anyone wants is real change, because real change is uncontrolled change.”

“Somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state. The two, I feel very strongly, are linked. Of course we can't get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.”

“The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience.”

“Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.”

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