Talk:Terence McKenna

Initial page creation as if a WIkipedia article

Why would this page be deleted? What's wrong with the information on it? -Christopher

It was listed for deletion because the original text provided did not fit into the purposes of Wikiquote as a collection of quotations; I have added quotes and links, and moved the original comment to here:

Terence McKenna was a multi-disciplinary commentator on the exploration of Humanity and our particular place in the Universe. An advocate for the use of Shamanic technologies and the wisdom that the psychedelic plants share with those that interact with them, he brought fresh and novel insight to many aspects of reality- with humour and good nature. The author of such books as The Archaic Revival, Food Of The Gods and with his brother Dennis Psilocybin- Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, he displayed his particular model of nature, subjects that are as far ranging as the electromagnetic spectrum: from quantum mechanics to aliens- that to this day is entertaining and so very interesting. When one reads or listens to Terence McKenna, one may perhaps appreciate his logic and ultra-sharp wit, and wonder how a sufficiently alarming dose of a psychedelic could actually heal us to the point where the big bang seems insignificant!

The above text was written by C. E. Dunscombe

Some of this information might be appropriate for the Wikipedia article on Terence McKenna, but much of it is probably in too much of a particular POV for the article itself. ~ Kalki 22:28, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Shpongle samples

Does anybody know which recordings the samples Shpongle uses are taken from?
Specifically, see http://youtube.com/watch?v=KfFPPdMHers
Thanks!
--82.81.250.211 14:07, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Searching for a good Italian restaurant

"To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant." From "Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness" by Terence McKenna, a talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at Esalen, December 1983. Published 1992 in The Archaic Revival. (Source: http://www.erowid.org/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.pdf Several of McKenna's talks have variants of this quote.) --96.233.85.132 14:15, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Restorations of material

I have just reverted a massive amount of deletion of material from this page and restored it to the last edit by Ningauble (talk · contributions) I believe most if not all of any material that might have been added were retained in this reversion and certainly a great deal of significant material deleted was restored. ~ ♞☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 11:10, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Novelty is density. Do not restore. 8gguj8 (talk) 11:15, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

¿ ⨀ ?

I responded to this recent activity on the user's talk page with a vandalism notice and the following remarks before noticing comments made in the edit summary had been made here as well, and will simply repeat some of my previous response here: .

You removed much material once again with the comment "Novelty is density (usable information is condensed information)" I will state that information removal is NOT a contribution to information density, it is simply the acts of the irrationally dense. I am well aware of such processes occurring in the deliberately and obliviously vandalistic acts of others, and do not welcome it nor condone it.

I suspect that you are merely being a disruptive troll, but on the off-chance that you are in any way sincere, I will present a challenge: When you are able to explain ALL this symbol means and can mean to anyone and everyone without use of any words, then I will concede that your abilities to communicate without the use of words are superior to my own or those of any normally intelligent human being. Until then stop attempting to disrupt, constrain and control how others choose to attempt to communicate to those of various levels of intellectual and moral perceptivity — such tendencies are all too common as it stands. ~ ♞☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 11:42, 22 September 2012 (UTC) + tweak

Unsourced

These should be provided with sources before being moved back into the article.

• Rod Dickinson: In fact, the whole phenomenon is more like a large collective work of art, involving circle-makers, investigators, the media, and just about anybody who comes into contact with the circles. It's a kind of mind virus: once you get involved, you can't get out.

  Terence McKenna: Absolutely. All these phenomena—UFOs, crop circles, even the cattle mutilation in the states—are all artifice in one form or another. All this stuff, these are fluctuations in the syntactical machinery of reality. The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

  • Rod Dickinson and Terence McKenna: "Weird Shit Happens" (1995). First published in Performance Research Journal.
  • The highlighted phrase, "The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art", is quite famous. Andrew R. Gallimore cites it multiple times in his book Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game.
  • An excerpt of the conversation can be found on www.circlemakers.org/mckenna.html. However, note that Wikiquote's spam filter forbids linking to the circlemakers.org website.

• We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told "no", we're unimportant, we're peripheral. "Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that." And then you're a player. You don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

• Nature loves courage. You make the commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a featherbed.

• Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to supress, distort and ignore. That is that Nature is some kind of minded entity. That Nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.

• If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.

• For monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking-monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.

• I can't preach Scientism cause I don't believe it. I can't preach Buddhism cause I can't understand it. The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs but plants. It's a perversion of language to try to derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way and so far as I can tell this is the only way that they come to us that is rapid enough for it to have an impact upon us as a global population.

• In the Amazon and other places where visionary plants are understood and used, you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different from ordinary reality. Their vividness cannot be stressed enough. They are more real than real, and that's something that you sense intuitively. They establish an ontological priority. They are more real than real, and once you get that under your belt and let it rattle around in your mind, then the compass of your life begins to spin and you realize that you are not looking in on the Other; the Other is looking in on you. This is a tremendous challenge to the intellectual structures that have carried us so far during the last thousand years. We can do tricks with atoms, there's no question about that, but these tricks immolate us. The higher-order structure of molecules, let alone organelles and that kind of thing, is intellectual incognita to us. We have no notion of how these things work or what is going on. Yet it is from those levels that the constituent modalities of reality are being laid down.

• It's only in western civilization that you get this steady focus on this monotheistic ideal, and working out the implications of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern. The pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity. No one you would invite to your garden party.

• The 20th Century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.

• To a large degree I think the sixties were probably misplayed. But on the other hand it seems to be the last decade when anything happened. The lid has been utterly on ever since. It's an illusion all this change. There is no change. We're living in some sort of weird eschatological hiatus while the people who rig the game try to send out for new batteries or something. I don't know what's going on. There's energy for change building. I think that when it ultimately comes it will be fairly spectacular. It's astonishing actually the way in which change has been halted. Everyone is running around saying "change change change" but on the other hand there is a curious sense in which things have become eerily dreamlike and still, while we just teeter on the edge of the end of history; and the same personalities, the same design elements, everything has looked the same in the galleries for twenty years. There is an eerie suspension.

• We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

• Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

• Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

• People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.

• Some kind of dialog is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and...nothing can stop it.

• People say, "Don't you think you ought to be able to do it 'on the natch?'"(without the use of plants) And I love this question because the answer is: No, you can't do it 'on the natch.' That's the entire message of the last 10,000 years of human history. The self is insufficient. The ego will not suffice... you must humble yourself to the point where you admit that you can't do it without the help from someone whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow flop.

• The whole folderol and whoop-de-woo about the 1960s was that the crypto-fascist bullshit agenda was damn near overthrown by a bunch of 19 and 20 year olds on campuses scattered around the high tech world. The male dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.

• Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.

• More and more, the imagination is where we spend our time. Theres a lot of talk these days about virtual reality— an immersive state-of-the-art technology in which you put on goggles and special clothing and enter special environments and then you are in artificial worlds created by computers. And this is thought to be very "woo woo" and far out, but in fact, if you're paying attention, we've been living inside virtual realities for about ten thousand years. I mean: what is a city but a complete denial of nature? We say no, no, not trees, mudholes, waterfalls, and all that. Straight lines, laid out roads, class hierarchies reflected in local geography meaning the rich people live here surrounded by the not-so-rich people, all served by the poor people who are so glad they're not the outcast people. So you know urbanization is essentially the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho. And the growth of cities, and the growth of the immediacy, I guess you would say, of the urban experience has been a constant of human evolution since urbanization began. Now the only difference that the new technologies offer is that we're gonna do this with light, not mortar, brick, steel, aluminum, and titanium, which are incredibly intractable materials. I mean, it's amazing to me. We started with the toughest stuff, and of course it costs enormous amounts of blood and treasure to work with such intractable materials. It's always been amazing to me that the largest buildings that human beings ever build are in a sense the first buildings humans ever built because the pyramids of Egypt are enormous even by modern scale, and yet they were among the earliest buildings ever built. In virtual reality, the difference between a hundred story building and a ten story building is one zero. What this should tell us is that in the domain of light, the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time— where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will.

• A conclusion of that same era was that language is alive. I experienced this very concretely on acid. English as an animal, a kind of amoebae, extending its pseudopodia of description into every nook and cranny of reality, a kind of syntactical Los Angeles, ever growing, expanding and including more and more empty or natural territory into its grid of meaning. Wasn’t it Burroughs who observed that “Language is a virus from outer space?” What does it want with us, and how can we tell if it won’t tell us? And then how can we trust its message since even the act of deconstructing it involves a total commitment to it as both means and end? ETs and countless other almost realities or wannabe realities seem to be the minor flora and fauna of a purely linguistic domain. And then there is the ambiguity of memory…It is more and more amazing to me that we can sustain the hallucination of any meaning at all.

Quotes about McKenna

• There was one oft-repeated McKenna-ism that resonated particularly strongly with me, uttered during a seemingly casual conversation about crop circles that was subsequently published online:

  "The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art."

  For some reason that wasn't entirely clear (it still isn't), when I first read this simple sentence, something about it shook me and left me shaking. Like one of the Grand Pronouncements from the Upanishads, it seemed to import some deep and profound truth about our reality—if only I could get at it and make sense of it.

  • Andrew R. Gallimore: Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game. Strange Worlds Press, 2019.
  • Gallimore cites the 1995 conversation "Weird Shit Happens" between Rod Dickinson and Terence McKenna, which was first published in Performance Research Journal.

New editors...

I am glad there recently seems to be at least one new editor here interested in adding material to this page, but more attention should be paid to some of the conventions generally promoted on the project, and new quotes should be added to the "body text" of the article, as well as to captions of any images added, and citations need not be added to the captions... that takes away from space for other images and captions. YouTube recordings of his talks and lectures ARE acceptable, but where possible dates of the talks should be presented as well. I will probably do some cleanup on this page within a week or so — I am too busy with too many other things right now. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 06:46, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Removal of quotes

Ksshd, you said to take it to the Talk page - and that is correct - but you should not just remove a large amount of quotes before discussing it. Please provide your reasoning for making such a drastic change to the page and refrain from making that change until it can be discussed. Thanks. ~ UDScott (talk) 15:53, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Only condensed and systemized information is useful:

To be useful, internal energy has to be concentrated. The more dilute or disorganized the internal energy, the less useful it is ...

—Newman, Jay. Physics of the Life Sciences Springer, 2008, p. 336

In order to make this collection of Terence McKenna's quotations useful, I have condensed and systemized it. ~ Ksshd (talk) 16:59, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Again, please do not remove quotes until discussion has occurred and consensus is reached. Simply stating your case is not enough (discussion involves more than just one person). If you continue to remove quotes absent such consensus, you will be blocked. Please allow others to comment. ~ UDScott (talk) 17:10, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

You have failed to present a counterargument. Indeed, why bother if you can simply block me? Kalki is a self-professed anarchist (see his user page) and as such is unsuitable to be an administrator of this library (to be usable, a library must be systemized, not anarchic). This discussion is a waste of time. ~ Ksshd (talk) 18:18, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

How could I (or anyone else) present any counterargument when you posted your argument and then immediately removed the quotes again? You did not allow time for a discussion to occur. ~ UDScott (talk) 18:28, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

"Something is trying to be told" quote on Art Bell c2c?

TM sums up conspiracy theory culture/memes with "something is trying to be told" ... will find exact Art Bell show to reference. Text mdnp (talk) 01:09, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

• Terence McKenna on conspiracy theory ("misinformation") - OK Wikiquote seems to need a Art Bell/Coast to Coast AM page? What about a qoute regarding CIA/Mcluhan type recursiveness to "buzz words" as "controlled narrative" zeitgeist meme routines? (Manufacturing Consent) Text mdnp (talk) 01:03, 4 November 2022 (UTC)