Terence McKenna on Drugs:

Terence McKenna on Drugs:

[More from Terence Mckenna. We’ve said he was credulous, he says we’re hearing him wrong.]

Terence McKenna — Tree of Knowledge:

“…I feel like I should say this. Its more for my ease rather than yours. I’ve reached the conclusions I now espouse through skepticism, reason, rationalism and tough argument. So it may sound bitsy, flakey and soft-headed, but that just because you’re hearing it wrong. The guiding input was experience, and in a way what we’re gathered here to talk about tonight is an experience. Which is not only rare, transformative, challenging, but, also, for reasons which we’re probably get around to, illegal.

So it’s a very peculiar situation. Very few experiences are illegal, and our models of the world are built up based on our experience. So if you make an experience illegal, you’re essentially saying it is off-limits for model building. You can’t include that in your model because it isn’t really there in some sense. And this is the situation in western society vis-à-vis the psychedelic experience. To my mind the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being human as sexuality, personal independence, child rearing. These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation vis-à-vis the phenomenon of being, and a society which would deny that is a society whose secret, or maybe not so secret, agenda is the infantilization of its citizens.

I mean if we’re not capable of dealing with these things, then, who is? And are the people who made the rules; did they carefully, conscientiously and at depth explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit for human consumption? Or was it done more hastily, more mindlessly and with more fear? I would submit to you that it’s the later.”

–snip–

“Well, my notion to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing, and I think one can show in fairly short order, that these things are not alien to the human experience, or ancillary, or the province of uneducated little brown people down in the rain forest, or anything like that. I submit to you that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings is central to understanding who we are and how we got this way. And if we can explore this issue and convince ourselves that there’s some merit in this point of view, then it will simply, it will do more than rewrite the annals of a staid science like anthropology. It will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we’re in the process of grinding into pollution.”



Pasted from <http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×9321820>

@ ~ 4:40 in
Terence K. McKenna (1992) Search For The Original Tree Of Knowledge.
Recorded live in Boulder, Colorado May 29-31, 1992.

Pasted from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09354zHyLRg>

“There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind, and if you don’t go to the backside of your mind, you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

@ ~ 59:00 in
Terence K. McKenna (1992) Search For The Original Tree Of Knowledge.
Recorded live in Boulder, Colorado May 29-31, 1992.

Pasted from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09354zHyLRg>

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