Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:



[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken’s right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn’t done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?”

“I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a week. And it’s really changing how they look at the world.”

“Isn’t it interesting that the ‘fix’ turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we’re just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There’s an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego.”

“Psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area. The area of thought and cognition.”

“I’ve seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning.”

“The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics, in a generalized sense, is that they are inspiration for ideas. And when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto an ocean of ideas.”

“What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?”

“If mind were not constrained by the rules of physics we don’t know what we are. We don’t know the castles we would build in the air.”

“I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination. The imagination is a place. It’s a world. It’s a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we somehow have to marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it’s the only safe haven there is.”

“What we are cannot be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet.”

“I think, based on the Timewave and based on reading the newspaper, that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane, global agenda is religious fundamentalism.”

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