Terence McKenna: A thread dedicated to the words, studies, knowledge and wisdom of one of the wisest men to have ever lived.

Please quote what you consider to be several of his most impressive examples of "the wisdom of one of the wisest men to have ever lived."

Unless you just meant he tripped a lot.

5 stars.

PINE IT!!!

"We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow onto matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.

At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.

The metaphor of a vehicle—an after-death vehicle, an astral body—is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the pysche." ~Terrence Mckenna

Last Edited by COSMIC WARRIOR on 02/14/2015 08:31 PM

..or some would say he was a drugged out blathering idiot with a large vocabulary

I'm not going to explain, for those unfamiliar with him, what it is that is so great about this man. For those of us who are inteleectually and intelligently inclined enough to understand and absorb his words and ideas, all it will take is one listen before you're hooked.

Terence McKenna is not simply some hippie talking about psychedelics. He is a highly gifted speaker, phenomenal with words and speaking with a form that demands respect.

I'm going to post some videos below, but for the sake of the thread's loading time and to keep things orderly, I'll be posting the links directly to youtube. his is also better for mobile users who don't have the ability to watch the embedded videos.

I will also eventually post links to FREE e-book or .pdf files of all his published books and writings.

First, here are some links to several of his better known interviews and speakings.

Audio Archive
[link to archive.org (secure)]

A Link to audio, quotes and some written transcriptions
[link to deoxy.org]


Terence Mckenna - DMT, Mathematical Dimensions, Syntax and Death (video)
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Mckenna discusses if reality is real (video)
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Terence Mckenna - Empower yourself to just say BULLSHIT! (video)
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Terence Mckenna - Trust Yourself (video)
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Tryptamine Hallucinogens & Consciousness
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Terence Mckenna - The world could be anything
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

This. I went down the new age road of psychedelics in seek of "enlightenment" partly due to this mans teachings. this whole idea is very misleading and leads nowhere good. Just my honest opinion

I could listen to his audio lectures for hours on end. The guy was a linguistic genius.

Food Of The Gods changed my life forever.

[link to books.google.com]

Here are some great, simple and deeply relevant quotes from McKenna.

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

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“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 it's a feather bed.”

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“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.”

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"The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”

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“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.”

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“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

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“Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”

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“If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.”

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“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”

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“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

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“Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.”

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“Monotheism strenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style that periodically places the ego and its values in perspective through contact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mystery of plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy and wholeness, what Joyce called the "mama matrix most mysterious.”

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“We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything.”

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“The questions of God – meaning in Milton’s phrase “The god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven” – I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short, our world! The world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world, the psychedelics want to connect us up to… Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.”

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“A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.”

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“If you don’t smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening balancing your checking account. If you do smoke cannabis you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek Renaissance.”

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“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.”

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“Culture is the effort to hold back the mystery, and replace it with a mythology.”

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“We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth.”

Well you must not have absorbed it properly if at all, because McKenna was largely against the "New Age" movement.

You might consider re-evaluating and listening again. This isn't hippie bullshit. This is higher knowledge teetering on the edge of total truth.

Absolutely. His words are almost like music or poetry. Very skilled in giving explanations of things that are nearly impossible to explain with language.

WORSHIP, n.
Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.

Anyone can say anything. What separates the intelligent truth-seekers from the less intelligent followers is the ability to understand his ideas.

His ideas are far more accurate, legitimate and 'real' than anything you're going to learn in school, church or experiences in the institutions of 'culture' or 'society'.

Are enlightenment and humor mutually exclusive?

This is good..


Terence Mckenna: Psychedelic advice.
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Your statement is irrelevant to what he or i said.

This is also great.. Quick & dirty.

Terence McKenna - The Message
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

No, it's not.. Please contribute or debate, but don't debate anything irrelevant to the thread.

Please speak intelligently with regards to the thread's subject, otherwise shut the fuck up.

Pretend it's a random question then.

Go.

I felt like getting a bit of real info flowing on GLP tonight. Contribute whatever you have - links, conversation, ideas.

Admittedly, his words and ideas are so profound it's hard to know where to start a conversation about it all. He covers so much with such style and grace. Almost as if he leaves nothing more to be said, you can just read/listen and then contemplate.

The more interesting question is: why are you asking?

what do you have to judge this by?

how do you know they are accurate when no one can verify it?

He just wanted to be a cult leader

Find the Spacetime Continuum CD with him 'speaking in alien voices'

What a douche

To pick your brain.

“Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.”
– Terence McKenna

Excellent thread idea OP.

I have bookmarked it for reference.

I don't have the time right now to add much but hope to participate sometime soon.

“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.”
– Terence McKenna

You could have asked 99% of the "people" on this site your question and it would have applied more to them than me. So who are you and what do you want to know?

Because I can relate, directly. I have tripped on LSD & mushrooms when younger for fun. Revisited them years later with spiritual intent. Once you know, you know. That's all.

His words are a guide towards truth. It's clearly above your level of comprehension or your willingness to learn, I suppose.

Like I said, once you know, you know. Experience is all that matters, not "rumors" or beliefs that are acquired without direct experience.