Guest speaker: Terence McKenna



PROGRAM NOTES:



[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about [the psychedelic experience]. It’s like not finding out about sex or something. It’s just too weird. It’s a part of our birthright. It’s not a cultural artifact. . . . This is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.”

“We have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.”

“There was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.”

“Human culture has become, charitably, a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous, exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.”

“It’s a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barriers to the solution to our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own minds.”

“There is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.”

“Then I discovered psychedelic plants, and it was like the descent of an angel into the desert of reason.”

“I’m convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact.”

“Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious and the substitution of something else.”

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