Podcast 164 – McKenna: “Some thoughts about ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] >"Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it’s quite spectacular." "It’s [ayahuasca] essentially ‘brain soup’. There’s nothing in it which doesn’t occur naturally in human neuro-metabolism." "It’s [ayahuasca] the only hallucinogen I know, where if it’s made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn’t done it." "What it [the ayahuasca experience] is is a self-generated, self-controlled immersion in a non-causal, parallel construct of some sort." "This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don’t want to clench, you don’t want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation … most of the time." "In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told." "Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option