From my friend Lorenzo & Erik Davis / Wired Magazine
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Podcast 262 – “Terence McKenna’s Last Interview” Download Mp3
Podcast 263 – “Terence McKenna’s Last Interview” Download Mp3
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“But I did [as a child] spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul, and the nature of sin, and all of these imponderables. And, of course, what you end up doing is you end up reading scholars of mysticism.”
“To me it’s the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience, it’s when you get the logos coming out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.”
“[Speaking about how to pursue a psychedelic culture.] Well, I’d say the wrongly-packaged version would be something like ‘Castenadaism’, a formulaic cult. Do these things, take these drugs, follow these instructions and moral obligation will flee from your kin. Nobody can be that foolish. If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff, grow the plants, try to understand it, try to revivify the rituals and figuring out what it’s all about, well, that’s an authentic push towards spirituality, a very authentic push towards spirituality, and probably fruitful.”
“It seems to me that ‘the shamanic drug of the month’ is not a very appealing idea.”
“The basic concept [of alchemy] is that somehow intuition and nature are reflective of each other. Until that hypothesis fails we should probably hang on to it, because look how far we’ve gotten. I mean it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.”
“[I'm hoping] that some lack of resource or vision doesn’t reveal that we can’t give enough people a bearable life. So we [would then] have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil, and struggle for resources. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Now let’s see if information can liberate. That’s why I don’t want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate. And it will be settled in the next ten or fifteen years. Either they’ll get a handle on it, whoever ‘they’ are, whatever a ‘handle means. Or it will slip from their control, and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge, and that nothing can stop it, that some kind of Renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.”
“The trick to making the shamanic virtual world compelling is to fairly and truly convey it. You can’t cut corners. You can’t fake it. . . . So that this stuff really does blow people’s minds, so that people see, well, human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul. It doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re wearing too tight a pair of shoes.”
“We have no idea how strange the world we can create in the near term will be.”
“Given the circumstances as we find them, what rational momentum is there to think that life is unique and arose on this planet only?”
“I think that’s the question that remains unanswered, you know, that’s the grail of the thing. What is the nature of the Other, is basically what you’re asking. Is it a construct, a projection or a discovery? It’s not clear to me what it is.”
“ You can’t believe everything you hear. The are of many kind, ‘some are made of ions, some of mind, the ones of DMT, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.’”
“I think [ketamine] is an inter-uterine memory drug. I think there are things about it that cause you to recapture some kind of inter-uterine state.”
“The psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing. It isn’t just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed or something like that.”
“Mathematics is really what it’s all about when you finally get it sliced thin, I think.”
“All doubt means is that ‘I’m shopping, thank you.’”
[Before I had cancer] I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind were naturally available to people, and non-lethal. In other words that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures and experience very bizarre states of body/mind dislocation and have it not kill you. So now I see that the spectrum of human experience is a lot broader than I previously imagined.”
“The mind can adjust to a great deal more than that which simply kills it.”
“Given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death. It’s bound to be mighty strange, life was mighty strange, and I’m curious. … It’s an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life left, because it composes your mind for you, wonderfully.”
“What psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises. I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle. The fact that that can happen to your mind. So it means that all kinds of things are possible.”
