Podcast 224 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think, when it's all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C." "The African 'Cradle of Civilization', I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't believe that is going to have to do some fast talking." "They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were." "DMT is this very short-acting hallucinogen that you smoke, but it's a neurotransmitter. It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals. In terms of nature, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens. In terms of impact, it's the strongest of all hallucinogens. It's a completely reality-obliterating experience, and it comes on so quickly that you don't grok it like a drug." "The other thing about DMT that's weird is, it does not affect your mind. In other words, you don't feel gaga with ecstacy. You don't feel relaxed. You feel exactly the way you felt before you did it. It's that the world has just been swapped out, and that's strange. I sort of like that, that it doesn't lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes, instead it just does something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced by a three-, four-, five-dimensional, highly colored moving environment filled with screaming elf-deamons." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option