Podcast 030 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 4)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [All quotations are by Terence McKenna] 3:05 "Basically, for me, the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked—on someone who thought nothing would work." 4:06 "What I like to talk about [at these gatherings]—and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about—is the content of the psychedelic experience, which is very difficult to ‘English’, or to bring into any other language." 4:39 "…that was sort of my core specialty, if you will: the ethno-pharmacology of consciousness and the phenomenology of the states there derived. But, after 25 or 30 years of doing this, it bleeds into all kinds of larger categories, like, ‘What is art?’, ‘What is human history?’, ‘What is the religious impulse?’, ‘What is the erotic impulse?’, ‘What is mathematics?’… ‘What is the future?’…" 5:50 Terence gives a brief personal history (childhood-1998). 9:20 "…psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination …there’s nothing ‘woo-woo’ about it. It has to do with perturbing states of brain chemistry and standing back and observing the effects wrought thereby." 12:49 "…I think a lot of people who have never taken psychedelics have the idea that it’s thermodynamic noise, that it’s just the brain isn’t working right, it’s firing randomly, and then some portion of it is trying desperately to lay gestalts of meaning onto this random firing, and so you get this kind of surreal careening from one supposed illusionary perception to another. Anybody that’s taken psychedelics knows this is not a very apt or cogent description…" 14:01 "I do not say that this is the only path out of the mundane coil of blind casuistry and entropic degradation. I don’t say it’s the only path out—it’s the only path I found. And I checked some of the other major players… Perhaps yoga can deliver this, perhaps Mahayanist metaphysics can deliver these things. Perhaps I was impatient, or lumpen, or simply not intelligent enough. But the good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic—even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient." 15:30 "…[the historical process] is inevitably ramping up into more and more hypersonic states of self-expression… and this is what’s causing this ‘end of history’ phenomenon, this eschatological intimation that now haunts the cultural dialogue. There is something deep and profound moving in the mass psyche… now exacerbated and focused by new communications technologies that are essentially prostheses, extensions of the human mind and body…" 18:10 "…at least since I read McLuhan and assimilated his notion of tools as things which have a feedback into how we see the world, it seemed to me that the psychedelic state was then like a predictive model for what human history wanted to do. Human history wants to break through all boundaries, to somehow have a realized collective relationship with deity, or with that which orders nature…" 18:56 "[The depth/meaning of the psychedlic experience] is all in the ‘implications’. It has to do with how much intelligence you bring to it in the beginning. If there’s no mind behind the retinal screen, then it’s just mental pyrotechnics. It’s how much we can make of the phenomenon that makes it so rich." 19:30 "[Aldous Huxley] was asked at one point: ‘What is the psychedelic experience?’ and he said, ‘It’s a gratuitous grace… It is neither necessary for salvation, nor sufficient for salvation.’ But it certainly makes it easier… One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available." 20:20 "It’s a kind of paradox that… the hubristic enterprise of white man anthropology carried back all these medicine kits and mojo-bags and sacred plants and so forth and grew them in university botanical garde...