Terence McKenna - KPFK Interview - Poets And Prophesiers - 9 May 1996McKenna Interviewed by Pam Burton for KPFK Pacifica Radio
Poets And Prophesiers - 9 May 1996
Image - Eros (From McKenna's Website)
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/hypersextext3.html
Interview with Terence McKenna that Elizabeth Gips conducted at Terence's home sometime in 1985.
Thanks as always to Lorenzo and The Psychedelic Salon Podcast
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=615
Quotes:
"I'm not sure pig intestines is the second ingredient..."
"Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully."
"In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones."
"I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present."
"The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future."
"I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously."
Terence Fractal by Donald K. Beubs
http://mckennaforum.com/
Terence McKenna - The Definitive UFO Tapehttp://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
The Definitive UFO Tape, December 1982
The first question to Terence refers to the "two" books he had written at that point and he answers by saying that he kept most of his UFO ideas out of The Invisible Landscape. Then he refers to what he calls "the second work, titled, Psilocybin & the UFOs."
"In psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens generally we actually have a state of mind that is very similar to the state of mind reported to accompany the UFO contact, and that these things could somehow be co-mapped, one onto the other"
"Involvement with these tryptamines as they accumulated in your system, you seem to acquire the ability to inhabit more than one world at once, as though superimposed over reality there was a super-reality, a hyper dimensional world where information was accessible in magical ways."
"History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness."
"The extraterrestrial is the human over soul in its general and particulate expression on the planet. . . . The over soul is some kind of field that is generated by human beings, but that is not under the control of any institution, any government, and religion. It is actually the most intelligent thing on the planet, and it regulates human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum of history."
"The myths that are building are like the Messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ."
"What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.""
"What it comes down to is trying to have faith that man is good, because what's happening is that whatever man is, man is taking control of the definition of being human."
"Man is going to become a mirror of his deepest aspirations, and the question then becomes, "What are man's deepest aspirations?'"
"Death is both a historical and individual phenomenon about which we as monkeys have great anxiety. But what the psychedelic experience seems to be pointing out is that actually the reductionist view of death has missed the point, and that there is something more. It isn't simple extinction. That the universe does not build up such complex forms as ourselves without conserving them in some astonishing and surprising way that is perhaps related some way to the intuitions that we have from the psychedelic experience."
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=358
Albert Hofmann Tribute, Hosted By Terence McKenna [FULL]http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
An event that was held at The Scottish Rite Temple in Los Angeles on October 2, 1988 to honor Dr. Albert Hofmann on the 50th anniversary of his discovery of LSD. The MC that night was none other than Terence McKenna, and besides a few words from Terence, we also hear from Stanley Krippner and Andrew Weil, who not only have many kind words for Dr. Hofmann but also add some interesting insights about their own work with LSD, such as when Terence said: "We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous." ... And from Dr. Weil: "And here it seems to me is the fundamental absurdity of the way our science has developed: The most obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence. How can you construct a world view, how can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science tries to do."
Dr. Lilly begins with a description of his first LSD experience in an isolation chamber (300mg IM) in the Virgin Islands in 1964, saying about it, "I was scared stiff, absolutely terrified." He is followed by Dr. Oscar Janiger who gives a few brief remarks before Terence McKenna introduces Dr. Albert Hofmann by famously saying, "Psychology without psychedelics is pissing into the wind." The Dr. Hofmann takes the stage for a talk that you will most likely listen to more than once. One of my favorite quotes of his is, "Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I obtained as a fundamental understanding from all my LSD experiences that what one commonly takes as the reality by no means it defines anything fixed but represents a thing that's ambiguous, that there is not only one but there are many realities, each compromising a different consciousness also of the ego."
http://www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts/
Terence McKenna - How Evolution Occurs - 1984http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Newly unearthed Terence lecture.
For Information on this talk and MP3 download link visit...
Become a member of the alchemical archives community, the free library of digital arcana.
Art: Alex Grey - Net Of Being
Speaking The Unspeakable: Maui, 1994 (Terence McKenna)http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.co.uk/
Lecture given by Terence McKenna in early 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Originally aired as "In Praise Of Psychedelics" on The Psychedelic Salon Podcast.
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=580
Thanks to Kevin Esbensen
http://www.youtube.com/user/kaiagavin
Art by: Spayce
http://spayce.deviantart.com/art/Terence-McKenna-283286897
Quotes by: Terence McKenna
"Speaking about the unspeakable means stretching the envelop of what can be said. When new things can be said new plans can be laid, new directions can be found out of a crisis."
"Psychedelics are catalysts for the human imagination. That very simply is what they are."
"We seem to be the creature that can download the ideas, the Platonic perfect forms of a higher dimension, into the world of matter. And so where we are there is an interfacing between the world of ordinary nature and some kind of transcendent force."
"Science has steered us deeply into the notion that nature is soulless and spiritless. And the practice of this idea has led us to the brink of catastrophe, global and species and ecological catastrophe."
"Anyone who loves adventure, and who loves life, and who loves the experience of being, has an obligation, I think, to explore this [the psychedelic realm]. It's as much a part of your identity as your sexuality, your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to choose to play with less than a full deck. Don't do that. Play with a full deck!"
"People didn't care for the Holocaust, that was a moral outrage, but the policies of the Roman Catholic Church push more people into early death, disease, and poverty than the Holocaust ever did. And yet, they're perfectly free to run their bingo games and appear among us. Why? They should have to answer for this outrage."
"Millions of people right now are being warehoused by television. Television is the heroin of the electrified middle class."
"It's ridiculous to criticize a drug you haven't taken. It's sheer, boneheaded, know-nothingism."
Tryptamine Hallucinogens & Consciousness:
Presented: Esalen Institute, Big Sur CA.
December 1982
"The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant."
"It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth."
"The demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind."
"There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things [psychedelics] on your feet. And that means that you have an I/thou relationship, and you say ... 'you're long on talk, but what can you show me?"
"The testimony that I want to give today is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you don't have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that except form a relationship with these plant drugs."
"There is some surety that you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant, but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully."
"DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once you know about it, it's very hard for anyone to understand you when you're talking about it."
"The future is bound to be psychedelic because the future belongs to the mind."
"The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily technique, not ritual."
"The only intellectual, or noetic, or spiritual path worth following seems to me to be the one that builds on your own experience."
Audio: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/
Art: The Steve (http://weheartit.com/TheSteve)
Terence McKenna - New & Old Maps Of Hyperspace - November 1982http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
The earliest Terence lecture to come to light so far (November 1982) we hear him describe what took place during what he calls 'The Experiment at La Chorrera' as "Very loose science of very tight magic"
Thanks to Lorenzo for posting this at the Psychedelic Salon today...
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=370
The above link has a link to the podcast and Dennis' Kickstarter page where it's not too late to help realise 'The Brotherhood Of The Screaming Abyss' project.
Note: Lorenzo has named this lecture 'Exploring The Abyss' For the purpose of this archive i have kept the original tape name 'New & Old Maps Of Hyperspace.
"My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical."
"Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they're metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you."
"What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce."
"Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright."
In this recording of a small 1984 gathering in Northern California, Terence McKenna holds forth on ayahuasca, his research in the Amazon, and the amanita muscaria mushroom. As is often the case, this workshop was shaped mainly by questions from the participants, which brought about this interesting quotation: "You must be aware that I have other wrinkles, the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things, but all of these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us." And his 1984 take on death is also notable: "I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination."
"We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time."
"Humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own."
"So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it, and the planet feels it."
"Our imagination is really the sail of the soul, and the question is, where will that sail take us if we will but let it?"
"That's why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology, because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tenancies does not give a true picture of the future. That the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty."
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=294
Quality is not so great on this one but it's survived, been digitized and free to listen to on internets. Thank you Lorenzo.
The Angel Within The Monkey (Terence McKenna) [FULL]http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Video: Recently unearthed interview that Lorenzo played on The Psychedelic Salon Podcast.
(1983, 14 May) Hallucinogens: Monkeys Discover Hyperspace
aka Return to the Logos. Psychedelic Conference II, 1983
Presented: University of California, Santa Barbara.
More and more the imagination is where we spend our time. Theres a lot of talk these days about virtual reality. An immersive state of the art technology in which you put on goggles and special clothing and enter special environments and then you are in artifical worlds created by computers and this is thought to be very "woo woo" and far out but in fact, if you're paying attention, we've been living inside virtual realities for about ten thousand years. I mean what is a city but a complete denial of nature. We say no-no. Not trees, mudholes, waterfalls, and all that. Straight lines, laid out roads, class heirarchies reflected in local geography meaning the rich people live here surrounded by the not so rich people all served by the poor people who are so glad they're not the outcast people. So you know urbanization is essentially the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private idaho. And the growth of cities and the growth of the immediacy, i guess you would say, of the urban experience has been a constant of human evolution since urbanization began. Now the only difference that the new technologies offer is that we're gonna do this with light, not mortar, brick, steel, aluminum, and titanium, which are incredibly intractable materials. I mean it's amazing to me. We started with the toughest stuff and of course it costs enormous amounts of blood and treasure to work with such intractable materials. It's always been amazing to me that the largest buildings that human beings ever build are in a sense the first buildings humans ever built because the pyramids of egypt are enormous even by modern scale, and yet they were among the earliest buildings ever built. In virtual reality the difference between a hundred story building and a ten story building is one zero. What this should tell us is that 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 it's 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
Build Your Own Damn Boat (Terence McKenna) [FULL]http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
In this 1994 Esalen appearance, Terence McKenna talks about "Laws and Freedom, Habits and Novelty" among other things.
"Do not lease other people's linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds. Build your own values and your own house of mirrors."
"The culture is so capable of assimilating and disarming its critics through hype and fashion. I mean, I was horrified to see that ad, 'Alan Ginsberg work kakis'. Did you see that!"
"If habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism. It's more like a creature. It learns, It gains experience. As it matures it changes its strategy. As it expands its experience it gains new domains of emergent subtlety."
"Humor is an admission of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. And in a sense, to take it to a deeper level, magic is a deeper perception than science. Because science believes that the world is truly there it is naive in its empiricism. Magic knows that the world is made of language. That the world is the construct of forceful imagination. And the people who don't know this are walking around in the world of the people who do."
The Transformations Of Language...(Terence McKenna) [FULL]http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
The Transformations Of Language Under The Influence Of The Psychedelic Experience:
Berkeley, CA (October 1983)
Played yesterday on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast as...
The Varieties Of The Psychedelic Experience.
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=385
Note: I've changed the name of this talk so as to not confuse it with Robert Masters & Jean Houston's book 'The Varieties Of The Psychedelic Experience' about 5 minutes into this Terence states the subject of this talk as 'The Transformations Of Language Under The Influence Of The Psychedelic Experience'
"It seemed probable to me that this phenomenon encountered in deep psychedelic experiences with psilocybin actually has a potential historical impact. It is a kind of human ability, which is at present submerged in the psyche, contactable only by the shamanic means of journeying into historical hyperspace. In other words, of going into that place where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough that you can have an intimation, at least, of what is to come."
"I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language. Because what you cannot think you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine you cannot steer your culture and go. So I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulates the evolution of human culture generally."
"Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure."
"This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing."
"The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of."
"Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about."
Art: Alex Grey - Visionary Origin Of Language (1991--1998)
What's So Great About Mushrooms? 1987 (Terence McKenna) [FULL]http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com/
Another Terence talk from '87 originally aired on The Psychedelic Salon Podcast...
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=408
"Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language."
"One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is because they catalyze the evolution of language."
Leo Zeff Remembered by Terence McKenna (April 17, 1988)http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.co.uk/
Leo Zeff Remembered by Terence McKenna
Audio Excerpt from Zeff's Memorial (April 17, 1988)
"I felt when I stood near Leo, that I stood near a giant. And what the experience of standing near a giant was, was the experience of the wisest, kindest, gentlest, funniest man that I have ever had the privilege to know."
-- Terence McKenna, April 17, 1988
During the process of digitizing audio tapes from the Stolaroff Collection, we discovered a recording of the memorial held on April 17, 1988 for Leo Zeff. Finding this tape seemed particularly poignant, since Myron Stolaroff wrote a book about Zeff's work based on transcripts of conversations between the two: The Secret Chief: Conversations with a Pioneer of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Movement. In the 1997 first edition of that book, Zeff's identity truly was secret; it remained hidden behind the pseudonym "Jacob" in order to protect those who may have been connected in some manner to the work that he had done. However, when the revised second printing of the book was produced in 2004, enough time had passed for Zeff's family to feel comfortable with allowing his name to be revealed, and he received the public recognition that he so richly deserves.
It was Terence McKenna who first honored Zeff by calling him "the Secret Chief". Stolaroff asked McKenna if he could use his pseudonym as the title of his book on Zeff, and McKenna was happy to see the meme spread in this way. Zeff passed away on April 13, 1988. The audio file from the Stolaroff Collection hosted here is excerpted from remembrances from his memorial; it features McKenna commenting about how impressed he was upon first meeting Zeff, and why he gave him the name "the Secret Chief".
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