True Hallucinations → A Talk by Terrence McKenna (1993)

True Hallucinations → A Talk by Terrence McKenna (1993)

"Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist,
lecturer, and author. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, culture, technology, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the 90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of Rave culture".

Book ☞ "True Hallucinations and the Archaic Revival"
Soon after graduating, McKenna and Dennis published a book inspired by their Amazon experiences, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching. The brothers' experiences in the Amazon would later be the main focus of McKenna's book True Hallucinations, published in 1993. McKenna also began lecturing locally around Berkeley and started appearing on some underground radio stations."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

(All quotations are by Terence McKenna )

“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

“Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.”

“You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.”

"You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

"This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.."

"In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade."

"Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic."

"One of the core elements of this psychedelic thing is freedom, on the broadest scale."

"Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there."

"I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own."

"Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy."

"The archaic revival is an invitation to historical humanity to view itself as a kind of a prodigal son."

"What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity."