Psychedelic Salon 201-206
Terence McKenna - Appreciating Imagination at Esalen (6 parts)

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

PART 1:

The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present.

Terence McKenna at EsalenâIf the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane itâs paranoia.â

âArt is like the footprint of where the imagination has been.â

âBelow the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception, not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be.â

âWho would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore when there were saber toothed cats walking around that weighted 1100 pounds?â

âImitation is an act of the imagination.â

âWhat is a city but a complete denial of nature? ⦠Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho.â

âWhat this [virtual reality] should tell us, in the domain of light the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will.â

âShamanism didnât use matter to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind, in the presence of unusual neurochemicals, to produce unusual phenomenon and unusual sensoria of experience.â

âA true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination.â

âWe now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this.â

âClearly we [humans] view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion.â

âThe only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow ⦠and our best people are working on that very problem.

PART 2:

“What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves.”
Terence McKenna
“If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being. But given a more advanced nervous system and a more advanced cultural tool kit the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love.”

“The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a position like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion, the illusion created by the local language.”

“The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.”

“Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.”

“The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil.”

“Nature seems to be in the business of building systems that transcend themselves.”

“We are all just swarms of personalities. The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea.”

“Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over.”

“We’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner.”

“What shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals.”

“The keeper of the values [of his culture] is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit. … The shaman at the top realizes that, my god we stare out onto an abyss. We do not know.”

“Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness.”

“Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises.”

“Sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideology.”

“Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion, not a feeling to be drawn from that observation, the conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt present of the immediate moment must be what life is for.”

“I would say the bouquet of life is this moment.”

“I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever you miss the point.”

“We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children.”

“Life is what you get when a hyper dimensional object protrudes into ordinary space.”

“We clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter.”

“In my highest states I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this [human existence] is the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than this. This is the bottom line, and so the good news is it’s only up from here.”

“The last dance you dance alone, and nobody will be watching.”

“I don’t think you should live in anticipation of the drama of your death-bead scene, better to repair to the moment.”

“The real message of the psychedelic experience and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique we’ve been carrying out here is to take the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience, this is all you know. It’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibilities, fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope, who knows? But in the moment of being we have the completion of being. It is always complete, every moment.”

PART 3:

“Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.”
When all that holds you is the horizon, that is called freedom.
“If you aren’t ‘cool’ then you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means, by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed. But it can’t really be faked. But the whole engine of marketing is designed to make you think that it can be faked. I don’t know if I’m cool or not, but I am incredibly resistant to any effort to make me think I’m uncool.”

“You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears.”

“It’s very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked. … This nobody ever criticizing anybody else brings the intellectual enterprise and the refinement of human knowledge to a screeching halt. The way in which the intellectual enterprise moves forward is by being critiqued, analyzed, subjected to tests.”

“Scientists really respect each other for proving that they are wrong. If you have a theory that you’ve defended for fifteen years, and then you publish a paper saying, ‘I’ve been over it again. I’ve looked at the data again, and you know what fellow colleagues, I botched it. I was wrong.’ They promote you for this. They say, ‘This is the essence of intellectual honesty.’ … Religion doesn’t work like this. In the religious domain you never admit you’re wrong. You further elaborate the story to save whatever preposterous notion has been exposed. … And so what you get is error based on error based on delusion based on illusion based on lie based on half-truth based on supposition based on somebody thought it would be nice IF.”

“Somewhere after the Sixties, when the government decided that universal public education only created mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights, education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry. And instead we took an authoritarian model. The purpose of education [today in the United States] is to produce unquestioning consumers with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is.”

“If you turn cannabis into a Schedule I drug, a felony, suddenly all of these people who never felt inspired to dissent, never felt the heavy hand of the government, are automatically members of a criminal class. And what this does is thus radicalize the people so persecuted, and in a feedback loop of paranoia drive the government then into a frenzy of trying to understand and control this minority group. The idea that states of mind are matters for legal manipulation, it’s amazing that that discussion is even taking place in a democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson.”

“In the whole Marxist episode nobody was ever required to piss in a cup in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China to establish their loyalty to the government or the corporations, and yet that went down here with barely a murmur.”

“Once you find psychedelics there’s nothing between you and a complete check-out from your cultural heritage. The only cost to you is the complete abandonment of everything you’ve ever known and loved.”

“You can choose to be free, but it’s the last choice you’ll ever make.” –Kafka

[McKenna's Five Percent Rule] “As long as any school of dissent remains below five percent of the population no money is budgeted to destroy it.”

“I think that no one is in charge, and this is a very good thing because it allows the internal dynamic of the situation to express itself. Everybody who wants to control the situation is fighting a loosing battle.”

“I don’t feel this need for intellectual closure. I don’t see why things should make sense.”

[McKenna's Law] “As you advance in social hierarchy the percentage of smart people does not increase. … Every human situation is bedeviled by morons. No matter how high you rise you’re surrounded by fools, and you’re lucky if you’re not one of them. That’s the basic thing to guard against.”

“It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.”

“The mushroom said to me once, for one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another.”

“Culture is institutionalized paranoia.”

“I think what’s happened is that the top of the culture, it’s profoundly intellectually bankrupt. There is no plan except to keep peddling stuff, basically until the forests are gone and the oceans polluted. It’s not malevolent. It’s simply that they are clueless.”

“What I’m pleading for is an enlightened form of alienation, not simply an emotionally driven alienation, but a strategically driven alienation. See, alienation can be used not to create neurosis but to attain freedom, creative alienation, alienation that embraces itself as the source of inspiration.”

PART 4:

“An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

“Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process.”

“Feelings are primary. The primary datum of experience is feeling, and then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience. And then still lower on the rung, and I maintain lower on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience.”

“I think it’s really important to keep things as simple as possible because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly baroque. So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of Great Atlantis only further exacerbates the problem.”

“We know that behind all this constipated sociability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience. It’s important to keep it in mind in very psychedelically situations. But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality and commit crimes based on delusion about what is and isn’t reality.”

“The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of the culture. It is literally the response to toxic cultures. The more toxic the culture the more ego is revered as a natural value within that culture.”

“People are clueless, and they’re being used and abused. Seemingly intelligent people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconsciousable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous towards the Earth. … Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decomodify experience. … What is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?”

“Novelty is that quality of nature that seeks complexity. It’s countervailing force is called habit.”

“The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it these past 500 years, because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true; the intuition that every moment is unique [time is not uniform]. It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysics of being.”

“The way you investigate time is by moving inward, by investigating metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.”

“It is as though the Winter Solstice of 2012 was some kind of dwell point out of which the temporal continuum is being generated.”

PART 5:

“You don’t conquer time by building vast instrumentalities and seeking a primary particle and all that. The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.”

Terence McKenna“I live in a kind of waking hallucination. I have a little aphorism which covers this. It’s: Rome falls nine times an hour. It falls more than that and less than that, but let’s say it falls nine times an hour. Well, then your job is to notice every time it falls. In other words, what we think of as our random musings and our personal mental furniture is in fact our subconscious awareness of these systems of temporal resonance operating around us.” [Comment by Lorenzo: I have no idea what he means by this.]

“I do entertain the idea that we may each have our own Timewave, sort of following the model of astrology.”

“What will happen, as novelty asymptotically increases, in the final months, hours, minutes, seconds is boundaries will dissolve, all boundaries They’re already dissolving. We see the nation-state dissolving, but wait’ll the atomic field dissolves.”

“It’s not a gravity collapse. It’s a novelty collapse. We are collapsing into a black hole of novelty.”

“The future is not like the past except that it hasn’t happened. If you were to suddenly find yourself in the future, it’s a vector-storm of unrealized possibilities. You’ve never seen an unrealized possibility.”

“I believe that the idea that is the most fun is probably the closest to the truth, and I find this idea to be absolutely delightful.”

“The whole thing [Timewave hypothesis] smacks of the impossible. It’s even pushed me toward the idea that maybe this is not actually a reality. We’re trapped, or I’m trapped. I don’t know if you’re trapped. But we’re in some kind of piece of fiction. It’s like a Phillip K. Dick deal, you know. We’re in some kind of simulacrum, and the clue to the fact that it’s a simulacrum is this impossible idea [the Timewave]. And so the point of the idea is not to believe it, but to use it as a wedge to fight our way out of this labyrinth and back to whatever reality we were in before we fell into this situation. Something like that.”

PART 6:

“Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you.”

"The Art of Seeing" by Aldous Huxley“If I want a more intense drug experience I take more of one drug.”

“Low doses of psychedelics, or moderate doses of psychedelics, transform the quality of thought. You think faster, think deeper, think odder, think broader, but you need more for that to burst through into hallucination.”

Terence McKenna’s ‘Private’ List of Most Influential Books
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/039484484X

The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0916870480


“The world is something to look at, and that attitude in the presence of psychedelics will throw open a cornucopia of riches.”

“I don’t know what life is like without cannabis. I hear there is such a thing.”

“The thing about DMT, and we didn’t talk about it much this weekend, is it is an inhabited space. A HUGE percentage of people who take it encounter entities of some sort in there. Not entities like wombats and foxes, but entities with intelligence of some sort, with language of some sort.”

"The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" by Dr. Seuss“I think that in service to the principle of parsimony, preferring the simplest explanation, these things [beings encountered in DMT space] must be human souls.

“Now I dare to hope that maybe there is some kind of existence beyond the grave.”

“I’ve looked at the literature of near-death experience. What those people are describing is far more mundane than a DMT trip.”

“I would suggest, with great heat, that if we want to study the near-death and after-death experience, that actually you come far closer to dying, whatever that means, on DMT than you do in drownings and things like that.”

“If you’re living right, your life should get just more and more baroque, beautiful, complicated, mysterious … and then you die.”

“I prefer to think that it [2012] is not a planetary catastrophe, or a mass dying.”

“Perhaps what enlightenment is is it happens to an entire universe when it drops its matter and anti-matter out of its structure, and it becomes entirely made of light. That would certainly fulfill the Novelty Theory [sic].”

“It’s a bit baroque for my taste.” [Speaking about the concept of parallel universes. Of course, Terence never lived to read: April 14, 2003, Scientific American, Parallel Universes
Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations

http://www.krabach.info/astro/parallel_universe/parallel_universe.html

“The universe is a series of impediments to the expression of novelty.”

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