Psychedelic Salon 215-217
Terence McKenna
Under the Teaching Tree (3 parts)

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

âThe surface of things is not where attention should rest.â

Terence McKenna at home in Hawaii, Spring 1999âIâve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, âI canât believe it!â ⦠This is no drug. Itâs magic. It masquerades as a drug. Itâs a doorway into another world.â

âWeâre a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.â

âI came to feel, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it [DMT] is secret. It is not a secret. It is THE secret. There is a secret, and this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is. Itâs that the way the world is, is a way that you canât think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.â

âYou see, a secret is not something untold. Itâs something which canât be told.â

âWithout this [the smoked DMT experience] in the picture, half the world is missing.â

âWhat we have discovered in DMT is, literally, a chemical doorway to the bardo.â

âOne thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure, is to convince you that whatâs real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. Thatâs whatâs real.â

âThe biological object is made of time itself as much as itâs made of space and matter.â

âIâve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul.â

âThe Twentieth Century is analogous to the birth canal of human history.â

âWhatâs interesting about DMT is that it occurs naturally in the human brain. We all make it all the time. And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all. This is a human metabolite that youâre getting a tremendous of, but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, bio synthetic pathways, that can deal with it.â

PART 2:

âI was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and thatâs what you want. Weâre not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here.â

âA language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate.â

âItâs more an ability locked in your physiological structure that weâre not using. They [the machine elves] want us to speak in colored lights.â

âI think that the subtext of the governmentsâ fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run. And I think this is true of any society. It isnât an American phenomenon. Itâs that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hassidic Rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises. And you get millions of people questioning the first premises, and then the powers that be become very nervous.â

âCannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state.â

âThis is a heresy for sure, Iâm not that fond of LSD. I think itâs a very sloppy drug.â

âItâs the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala.â

âWe have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present. The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future.â

âHistory is not a random walk. Itâs not a series of undirected, random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved.â

âThe rules of evidence are not in suspension for the New Age.â

PART 3:

âThe UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean itâs like a magnet for screwballs.â [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . go figure :-) .]

âIâve seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe.â

âMy technique, which I recommend to you, is donât believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing weâve got.â

âProbe the edges.â

âPsychedelics work. If you think that Iâm bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and then weâll talk. Thatâs the sine qua non. Itâll work, on demand. Iâm not saying, âAnd wait forty years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. Itâll work. Itâll blow your mind to shreds. Itâs real.â

âWhat Iâve decided is that the [DMT] experience is an archetype. Itâs the archetype of the circus.â

âI think where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time. Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen.â

âThe dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else.â

âFairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language. And the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication, faries, and language suggests that here we might have a restrictive gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns.â

âAs long as we pursue the destruction of the Earth, and the elaboration of materialist ideology, and the suppression of psychedelic states, and the suppression of the feminine we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology.â

âThe apocalypse is no longer a rumor. It has arrived in many parts of the world.â

âDo what you think is right. Think about what you think is right, and once youâve thought about it then do it!â

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