Podcast 352 – “The Amazing Thing About Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it's discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there's somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.” “You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn't depend on a state of grace. It doesn't depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn't even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don't have to go to India for ten years. You don't have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.” “If you think that you've got it all figured out, and you haven't ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you're absolutely out to lunch. You don't know what's going on. It's like the opinions of eleven year old boys about sexuality.” “You can actually go from birth to the grave and never experience [a psychedelic trip] if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently idiotic culture.” “I think that there is some truth to the notion that the reason we are alive is to learn the path out of the labyrinth, and that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.” “We share this planet with some other kind of entity, and culture is a way of sealing us off from this fact.” “Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to entertain larger perspectives than the completely piss-ant perspective that they're being given by the popular media.” “We must not consume. We must produce, as a community. The psychedelic community must produce art, not consume it. If they get it flowing the other way and we begin to consume it then we are depotentiated.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto The Essential Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard