Podcast 250 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 3

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled. And that's why it's so important to find out what our real wishes are." "A delusion of grandeur is when you're a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be.” “The way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have.” “We feel the dizyness of the things not said.” “The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter. They can deliver their message all by themselves.” “Imagination is the real frontier. This is why the poets and the artists are so important." "The interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go 'through' space to other worlds, that will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space means going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves." "Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It's a vast, unfilled void into anything whatsoever can be projected." "The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species five hundred years from now." "The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know, and, of course, it has facets that they never imagined." "It is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself, and if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents (this is what they were originally called, consciousness-expanding drugs) if you that that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean, obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible, at all costs, in all times and places, because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available." "The thing that really interest me, or draws me back, to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there is something you can learn that would somehow have an impact on society at large." "Time is not simply the dimention of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words."  "The culmination of man's god-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it's not that we are 'doing' it, you see. It's that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding." "The richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful." "And this is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years, to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being, and have everything fused into a super numinous concrescence that is time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Information Theory Shamanism in the Age of Reason by James Kent MAPS’ 2010 Los Angeles Conference