Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4,1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "The nation state is now on the ropes. It's being replaced by something else, the world's one thousand companies, the world corporate state." "The interesting thing about the world corporate state is it has no real moral agenda. It only wants to pick your pocket, which when you think of what's been peddled in the ideological market place in the 20th Century, somebody who only wants to pick your pocket is a welcome and humane addition to the rogues gallery. So I think that fairly quickly, more and more drugs will be legalized and even drug taking encouraged because there's a great deal of money to be made." "So all of these things [adverse reactions to drugs] should just be treated as neurotic responses to the problem of being, and if people want therapy or anti-depressants, or whatever they want to get over this hump should be given to them. But to criminalize this is not to do any favor to the victims. It's simply to turn it into a racket for all kinds of underworld and marginal institutions." "What all these things [psychedelic substances] have in common is that without any great danger to body and mind they produce a profound transformation of consciousness, the processing of language, the way in which we model the world and relate to the past. And do they impact on cultural conditioning? You bet your booties they do, because what they do, essentially, is return you to some primal, per-cultural state of conditioning where the animal body and the unacculturated inputs of perception are directly experienced. This is a model of the psychedelic experience." "Is culture good or bad? Well, I'm coming slowly to the conclusion that, I'm not sure it's bad, but it's certainly a damn nuisance. It's a limitation, is what it is." "The problem is these [world] cultures create less than a full expression of human potential." "To the degree that we are integrated into our culture we are not ourselves." "Could we end up spending most of our disposable income on code rather than fabricated steel, aluminum, glass, and plastic?" "So it's going to be technology, or catastrophe, or fascism. These are the choices, because, of course, because fascism, you know, can just order the liquidation of everybody under five feet, or everybody with brown eyes, or whatever. But the consequences of fascism are the complete distortion and subjugation of the human spirit. When we talk about survival of the human species we're not talking about at-any-cost or under any circumstances. If humanness does not survive with the human species then we're no more than another cannibal ape with a bigger club in the hand." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option