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Terence McKenna last interview
Namada
Veteran
Time is speeding up..
2
Comments
I just discovered him recently, here is one introduction for thoes who are interested.
An American philosopher, ethnobotanist, and psychonaut, McKenna’s entrancing lectures covered everything from shamanism, language, imagination, the Internet, and consciousness to religion, dreams, the origins and evolution of life, culture, alchemy, alienation, chemistry, sex, art, and literature.
Terence McKenna was an astonishingly polymathic mind, and at the center of his dazzling web of interests was the psychedelic experience, specifically the effects of psilocybin and DMT.
Perhaps the most stunning thing about McKenna was his masterful facility with language and vocabulary; I daresay he was one of the most poetic and eloquent orators ever to walk this Earth.
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”
Just reading his wiki page about his death:
"McKenna was worried that his tumor may have been caused by his psychedelic drug use, or his 35 years of daily cannabis smoking; however, his doctors assured him there was no causal relation"
Interesting...
Yes, things like cannabis and psycedelic drug should be used in moderation, however alcohol is much more dangerous than magic mushrooms according to studies. I have never used it, but my friend did, and he said it was like being awaken again, just like Alice in Wonderland, jumping down the rabbit hole, sseing things in a total different way.
"Psychedelic drug experiences are a truly interesting way of realizing the true nature of cyclical, singular, and sacred reality" thats what they are saying..
Pheraps a short cut to seeing things as they are?
Yes perhaps. I took LSD a number of times in my younger days but didn’t have what I would call any kind of awakening. It was kinda fun though.
@Namada - I assume when you say alcohol is more dangerous than magic mushies you mean alcohol in excess? One or two drinks is fine I would think.
An interesting man, I hadn’t come across him before. I’ve never taken LSD myself but it seems to be a helpful avenue of change for perception. Reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception.
I find him a bit of a mix of psychedelic thinking and science... he seems quite grounded and subject to reason, but the things he talks about are quite unreasonable sometimes. I admire the breadth of his thought though.
His Wikipedia page
Sure they didn't. Cause everything on wikipedia is always true
(not having a dig at you Bunks)
In researching him I came across this talk by Michael Pollan at Google, fascinating stuff
It seems to me that a lot of people who live dull lives could be helped by a few doses of LSD, there seems to be a lot of very rigid, straight-line thinking in many places. There’s this fascinating question asked in this talk, “why do you think engineers connect so strongly to the psychedelic experience?”
Other great information coming from this talk was about how they did experiments to find out how addictive psychedelics were, and the answer was, almost not at all, and how as a drug they were very safe, with no known lethal dose. Of course there is still some psychological risk.
@Bunks Magic Mushrooms are the thing to use if you are going out tonight, as also @Kerome mentioned its a very safe drug.
"With both legal and illegal drugs all taken into consideration, it appears that magic mushrooms were indeed the safest drug to take, with just 0.2 percent of users saying that they needed emergency help afterwards".
"Two of the most comprehensive scientific studies on drug use ever conducted both concluded that alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug, thanks to the high level of harm it causes to the user and to others around them. Conversely, mushrooms were ranked far further down the list for the opposite reasons".
Scale under show the most used and popular drugs.
@Kerome “why do you think engineers connect so strongly to the psychedelic experience?”
Iam study engineering at the moment, so I can realte to it, right now Iam trying to figure out and learn Burnellis principle..need some psychedelic to learn this..psycedelic helps (they say) to go beyond boundaries and mental obstacles
Thanks @Namada but my days of taking any kind of mind altering chemicals (bar caffeine) are over. 😄👍🙏🏻
I remember those kinds of problems from my university days. There were pumping stations involved...
But i’m not convinced psychedelics and engineering problems are a great mix, you may get inspired but also lose accuracy.
I would be seriously worried if someone under the influence of psychedelic drugs was in the process of carrying out safety procedures on any aircraft I was about to board..."oooh, lookat da preeeetty wires... all dem colours.... wow...."
nope nope nope nope nope....!
But I do think that engineers tend to be trained in thinking in straight lines, and maybe that is why they find the experience of psychedelics such a release. It has a history with quite a few tech companies in Silicon Valley... there was one who had incorporated taking psychedelics into their management programme, which I find pretty funny.
Psst.... does anybody want to score some Dharma ...It's top quality stuff...It's mind blowing ...
In any case @namada thanks for bringing him up, even just listening to his voice seems to be consciousness expanding... it’s cleared up a few things for me.
My pleasure @Kerome ! He did open some "doors" for me aswell, I agree, he speak like a poet sometimes.
Interesting converstation with Ram Dass, sitting together in a cafe in Tsjekoslovakia, check it out if you have time.
This was interesting too... in several ways his last interview was not his best talk, it’s worth exploring a little and seeing what you find in his lectures
Every action comes down to choice. I chose not to use psychedelics of any kind, save caffeine and chocolate, (we all have our "weaknesses"
). the shamans have religious justification and rituals the use of certain substances. use or non-use is a choice and should carry no judgement of shame or pride as long as the decision of use is based upon knowledge and awareness of the personal implications and hazards involved.
just my thought
Well, i’ve never taken any psychedelics, but if you look at the recent research there are quite a few use cases in the mental health space where they may be beneficial. Addictions, depression, neurosis, there seem to be a lot of positive responses looking at the TED talks.
But McKenna is an interesting case because he talks about such a range of ideas that come from psychedelics, it gives you some impression of how the mind functions on psychedelics. I’m coming to the tentative conclusion that they could be a good thing for a lot of people, and it would be a shame if they are kept on the list of illegal substances.
LOL
In Tibetan and Sherpa lore there is a story about a monk who came across a woman who told him that he must either:
a. kill her goat,
b. sleep with her, or
c. drink a mug of beer.
d. All of the above.
The monk thought to himself, "well, surely if I kill the goat then I will be causing great suffering since a living being will die. If I sleep with the woman then I will have broken another great vow of a monk and will surely be lost to the ways of the world. Lastly, if I drink the beer then perhaps no great harm will come and I will only be intoxicated for a while, and most importantly I will only be hurting myself." (In the context of the story this instance is of particular importance to him because monks in the Mahayana and Vajrayana try to bring all sentient beings to enlightenment as part of their goal.)
So the monk drank the mug of beer and then he became very drunk. In his drunkenness he proceeded to kill the woman and sleep with the goat, breaking all three vows and, at least in his eyes, doing much harm in the world. The lesson of this story is meant to be that, at least according to the cultures from which it delineates, alcohol causes one to break all of one's vows, in a sense that one could say it is the cause of all other harmful deeds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_drugs
Well that just shows what happens when you cannot hold your liquor. It’s dangerous to not learn to cope with these common substances, you might run into a situation like the above, where you end up doing horrible things.
Don’t you think the bad karma lies with the woman in this situation? If someone who doesn’t drink has their juice spiked with alcohol, I don’t think they’re to blame for not having developed a tolerance.
Well the monk is the one who chooses to believe her, he could just have said “get away with you, silly woman, and take your goat and your beer with you.”
Fair enough. I suppose I presumed there was some compulsion involved, that the monk had to do what she said. But he didn’t seem to. @lobster, do you have the full story? The Wikipedia page doesn’t elaborate...
But the whole thing of McKenna again makes me wonder about the content of the mind with respect to enlightenment. People like Osho place very little emphasis on the content of the mind, Terence McKenna fills his mind with self-transforming elf machines, but the Buddha on the other hand places a lot of emphasis on right view and right intention.
So does it matter how pure, how full of dharma, how carefully constructed of the right beliefs one’s inner landscape is? I’ve heard that for example not to believe in a spiritual world and those who profess to see that spiritual world is held as wrong view.
Indeed. A mind telling itself stories is our normal state. A mind telling itself intoxicated hallucinations is not in the direction of clarity. Spiritual world views all seem different, not an indication of clarity ...
No.
From experience, I find clarity comes from clearing impediments, not adding more stimulation, simulation and adding hallucinations.
This is completely different to visualisation (disciplined mind use).
Yes, @lobster, I think your point about adding stimulation is important. The one time I went to a Triratna meeting, the teacher invited us to spend the rest of our weekend reducing the amount of “input” that we normally seek in our lives. Instead of watching TV while eating, just eat. That kind of thing. And I find it very helpful.
I think there is a certain pattern one follows. You declutter your life, become mindful, come to rest, find the ground of being, and then you find that a certain amount of stimulation is helpful in maintaining things. It does take a while though.
Its interesting that McKenna says that while taking significant doses of psychedelics he gets this strong impression of being taken to another place, where there is this other intelligence. It is almost as if for him it was a spiritual experience, and that this mix, of drugs as a spiritual quest, was contributing to his mental well-being. I find him surprisingly intelligent and coherent after a lifetime of intensive drug use.
His argument about drugs is interesting, that psychedelics are to a certain extent the answer to drugs. There have been a number of studies showing that psychedelics can change people’s lives who are addicted, and in fact they dissolve a lot of egoic patterns by all reports.
He basically holds that human technology has been required to create anything addictive — distilled alcohol, refined sugar, chemically-treated cocaine and heroine. Can’t say that he is wrong. Whereas the natural world and natural plants do not do this.
I find his lectures very interesting — wide ranging and entertaining.