Guest speaker: Terence McKenna


PROGRAM NOTES:


[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"I still don't believe that people who deal with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is."

"The evolution of the human species is the evolution of the human mind. These consciousness-expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution of the human mind. And so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape. It is they which generate religions, and physics, and messianic careers, and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment and disgrace."

"The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed."

"It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind."

"It is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug. It is not a thing which mixes well with the politics of any institution."

"I think [taking psychedelic drugs] is very dangerous. I do not tell people that it's safe because I don't have the faith that it's safe. I know what the pharmacological literature says, and it says that it's safe. That at the doses where these effects occur there can't possibly be a problem, but this seems to me to be the naivete of materialists, and we shouldn't be in a hurry to believe them even though it might make us more comfortable to do so. In other words, it's saying the drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience."

"I think it's fine to take drugs for pleasure, but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure. And the high doses of psilocybin that are necessary to elicit entry into these places it requires, as it says in Hamlet, 'You must screw your courage to the sticking place.'"

"I think that the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain. We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys."

"There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyper dimensional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunities for us to be happy hunters and gathers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured."

"The entirety of human history has been the story of the monkey becoming the flying saucer. . . . And we, for some strange reason, happen to be living through the final moments of that process right now, and it is a turbulent, chaotic, multidimensional metamorphosis."

"Evil is anything which trivializes a mystery."

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