Psychedelic Salon 248-251

The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring) - 4 parts

PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
âThe Dawning paradigm of post modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we donât know what is happening at all, that all of the models we have worked out over the past five hundred years or so have now become recursive, and they can no longer be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed.â

âThere is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science.â

âHaving seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small row boat in a dark ocean, and we are being swept we know not where.â


âArt is the ultimate expression of this transformation of unorganized matter into ideas which human beings carry on.â

âThe Growing Transparency, thatâs a good idea for what the end of history is. Itâs that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate, and everything is seen to be of the same stuff.â

âLife is a hyper dimensional object. All hyper dimensional objects are organisms, whether they be societies or animals.â

âThere seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps al la Bellâs Theorem or something like that. And thatâs what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologramatic space of information, where by sitting still in your room and sending your mind you can cross the universe in an instant.â

âIâve always thought that Christianity, without making any judgment about Christ himself, that Christianity is hands-down the single most reactionary force in human history.â

âI think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is what technology is.â

PART 2:

âWhat would you have if you could have anything?â

âI think that life proceeds through time. Itâs an effort by organism to map one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a âsomethingâ, and the ânowâ is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it. And so what being in time is is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And thatâs why, hopefully, a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get a whole picture.â

âYes, well I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history. ⦠Because your history gives you the power of your convictions.â

âI think, better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetime.â

âThis is the anguish of the ancestors. This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed. The pogroms, and the invasions, and the atrocities conducted across history can only be, somehow, redeemed if we, who are the living wavefront of this genetic experience do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do.â

âThe âotherâ is just a way of thinking about all of these things that we name spirit, god, demon, void. Itâs that there just necessarily is a place off our map. Whenever you have a map it implies the part that is not on the map, and the other, the truly other, lies outside the domain of language. Itâs like the unspeakable. All you can do it point at it.â

âThatâs the challenge. You see, thatâs the weird thing about the psychedelics. It is a path, but in a sense itâs the end of the path. And then what do you do? Now itâs up to you.â

âThe way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right.â

PART 3:

âI think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled. And thatâs why itâs so important to find out what our real wishes are.â

âA delusion of grandeur is when youâre a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be.â
âThe way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have.â

âWe feel the dizyness of the things not said.â

âThe great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter. They can deliver their message all by themselves.â

âImagination is the real frontier. This is why the poets and the artists are so important.â

âThe interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go âthroughâ space to other worlds, that will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space means going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves.â

âOuter space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. Itâs a vast, unfilled void into anything whatsoever can be projected.â

âThe hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species five hundred years from now.â

âThe alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know, and, of course, it has facets that they never imagined.â

âIt is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself, and if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents (this is what they were originally called, consciousness-expanding drugs) if you that that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean, obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible, at all costs, in all times and places, because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available.â

âThe thing that really interest me, or draws me back, to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there is something you can learn that would somehow have an impact on society at large.â

âTime is not simply the dimention of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words.â
âThe culmination of manâs god-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And itâs not that we are âdoingâ it, you see. Itâs that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding.â

âThe richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful.â

âAnd this is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years, to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being, and have everything fused into a super numinous concrescence that is time.

PART4:

“This connection between the cow, and the mother goddess, and the mushroom is some kind of a key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity in early man in that part of the Middle East.”

“This notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness.”

“But it isn’t a missing link, I think, it’s a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency toward symbol formation and self-reflection.”

“A history of the human race could be written analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol, and psychedelics.”

“That these foods and drugs and spices, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They are regulating human history and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation, all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants.”

“Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation, and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs, and the teachers are merely the pipeline for ideas, and the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction.”

“I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself.”

“The imagination may be, in fact, a three dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen.”

“The triumph of Socialism will be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context, that there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of information.”

“You see, what’s going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics.”

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