TrueLife - Terence McKenna : Altered States, Consciousness & Radical Ideas

Starting point is 00:00:01 Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

Starting point is 00:00:49 The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Well, well, well, look who made it back. It's the most handsome, the most lovely men and women in the world. and you spend a little time with someone who's equally appealing. You know, like attracts like, water seeks its own level.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Nothing but us good-looking folks over here. Devastatingly handsome. Incredibly intelligent. Come on. We're the best of the best. What do you want us to do? Do you guys have a good weekend? Did you have a good day yesterday?

Starting point is 00:01:49 Whatever you're listening to this, I don't know. Did you have a good Tuesday? A good Wednesday? I had a pretty good weekend. I had a pretty good day yesterday. I wanted to introduce everybody today to what I am going to call my philosopher spotlight. We're going to work on a little Terrence McKinnett. Have you guys ever heard of him?

Starting point is 00:02:09 I'm sorry. Have you ladies and gentlemen ever heard of him? For those of you who have not had the great fortune of getting to listen to this phenomenal speaker, perhaps the best way to introduce you and the format. I am going to use is to read a little bit from some interviews he's done. I will read you his response to a few questions and then we'll dive into one of his articles so that you can begin to understand why I think he is a great teacher, a great speaker, and someone that more people should be listening to.

Starting point is 00:02:47 So without any further ado, in your scheme of things, Terence McKenna, is there any place for institutionalized religion for orthodox religious beliefs? Terence McKenna. Yes, what I have found is that all of these systems that are offered as spiritual paths work splendidly in the presence of psychedelics. If you think mantras are effective, try a mantra on 20 milligrams of psilocybin

Starting point is 00:03:16 and see what happens. All sincere religious motivation is illuminated by psychedelic. To put it perhaps in a trivial way, The religious quest is an automobile, but psychedelics are the petrol that runs it. You go nowhere without the fuel, no matter how finely crafted the upholstery, how flawlessly machined the engine. Narrator, where do you personally think the human potential movement is heading now? And where do you position yourself in the spectrum?

Starting point is 00:03:53 Terence McKenna. I believe that the best idea will win. We are all under an obligation to ourselves and to the world to do our best, to place the best ideas on the table. Then all we have to do is stand back and watch. I have this Darwinian belief that the correct idea will emerge triumphant. To my way of thinking, psychedelics provide the only category that is authentic enough to be legislated out of existence. They are not going to make quartz crystals or wheat grass juice illegal. These things pose no problem, but I think that we are going to have to come to terms with the psychedelic possibility.

Starting point is 00:04:38 We would have a long time ago in America except for the fact that on this particular issue, the government acts as the enforcing arm of Christian fundamentalism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are enshrushed. shrined in the Constitution of the United States. An inalienable right. If the pursuit of happiness does not cover the psychedelic quest for enlightenment, then I do not know what it can mean. I think we are headed for a darker period before the light. I see the whole hard drug phenomenon as an enormous con game.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Governments have always been the major purveyor of addictive drugs. Right back to the sugar trade in England, the Opium Wars in China, the CIA's involvement in the heroin trade in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, and the current cocaine distribution coming out of South America. We're going to have to abandon this Christian wish to legislate other people's behavior for their own good. Let's take two drugs for a moment and contrast them. Cocaine is an ultra-cheek, cost $100 per gram,

Starting point is 00:05:50 is utterly worthless as far as I can see, and doesn't get you. you as wired as a double espresso. Then there's airplane glue. It costs $1.20 a tube, and you can totally waste yourself with it and probably kill yourself no faster than you can with cocaine. So why aren't people in Christian Dior gowns, driving Rolls-Royces honking up airplane glue?

Starting point is 00:06:14 Because it's tattie, grotesque, declass A. And this is what we have to put across about these hard drugs. The only way you can do that is to reduce the price of cocaine to $1.25 per gram. Then it will be seen as a horrible, banal, destructive thing. Only when governments intervene by restricting access to do things, suddenly do they gain this astronomical worth. So it is a game that the government is playing. Narrator.

Starting point is 00:06:46 Your idea is of the psychedelic pioneer as a type of alchemist, who can make the soul tangible, as it were. Could you tell us more about this? Terence McKenna. Alchemy was the belief that spirit somehow resided at the heart of matter. The alchemists were the heirs to the great Hellenistic religious systems and are generally tagged as Gnostic. The central idea of Gnosticism is that the material of which soul and true being is composed

Starting point is 00:07:19 is trapped through a series of cosmic misfortunes in a low, level universe that is alien to it. And the alchemist literalized these ideas to suggest that the spirit could somehow be distilled or coaxed from the dense matrix of matter. Well, this is so, this is also what the psychedelics reinforce. And it is interesting to see how alchemists at different times have contributed to the advancement of pharmacology. For instance, distilled alcohol was discovered by alchemists seeking the elixir of life. and Paracelsus popularized opium. This is not to fault the alchemical quest, but to show that alchemy,

Starting point is 00:08:01 the belief that there is spirit and matter, was a survival of an older, shamanic strata, of belief that involved gaining the alliance of a plant. I think the notion that one can make spiritual progress by oneself is preposterous. It is virtually impossible to have the spiritual experiences that confirm a certain moral order and value system unless you resort to psychedelics or alternatively fasting or getting lost in the wilderness. I do not think people realize quite how efficacious the psychedelics are. These things work. I wish people could be more Catholic in their tastes. If you are an advocate

Starting point is 00:08:45 of the virtues of yoga or natural diet or mantras, you really owe it to yourself to explore those concerns using psychedelics at the same time. I explored the possibilities I have just mentioned before settling on the golden road to the soul. Narrator, so why is there such tremendous prejudice, both in the East and the West, against psychedelics? Terence McKenna. I think people are in love with the journey. People love seeking answers. If you were to suggest to people that the time of seeking is over and that the chore is now to face the answer that's more of the challenge anyone can sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years while congratulating themselves that they are following baba into enlightenment it takes courage to take psychedelics real courage your stomach clenches

Starting point is 00:09:40 your palms grow damp because you realize this is real this is going to work not in 12 years not in 20 years but in an hour what i see in the whole spiritual enterprise is a great number of people supporting themselves in one way or another on the basis of their lack of success. Where they ever to succeed, these enterprises would all be put out of business, but no one's in a hurry for that. What do you think, my friend, is pretty interesting, right? Now I think I'm going to jump to an article he wrote in 1988. Let's dive into that one now. Wow, that water's cold. Shrinkage.

Starting point is 00:10:24 Plan, plant, planet. Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crisis. Hence, our solutions may be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the 21st century. Yeah. Just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental social model of the latest. 20th century and the steam engine was the guiding image of the 19th century this means reaching back in time to models that were successful 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when this is done it becomes possible to see plants as

Starting point is 00:11:06 food shelter clothing and sources of education and religion i'm going to stop there for a minute has has do any of you have a garden If you don't have a garden, you've got to start one. Even if you're just a little plant in your window sill, it's so amazing to see the plant grow. And yes, you should definitely talk to them. Whether it's your voice, it's more than likely the CO2 that comes out of your mouth

Starting point is 00:11:36 because that's what the plant breathes in, right? However, you can learn a lot just by having a garden. I think there's a quote that says, so as the garden, so is the garden as is the gardener. And there's a lot of truth in there. You can learn, for example, I had an avocado tree. And you could tell by the leaves whether it gets too much water or not enough water. Makes me think, am I getting enough water?

Starting point is 00:12:04 What's the optimal water for me? Also, you can see the different ways that it grows. Is it bending to the left because the lights over there? is it getting aphids because of this certain type of sap or is there a plant next to it that's causing it to grow a certain way once you figure out all those things about the garden or the particular tree in which you're growing

Starting point is 00:12:33 I believe you can take lessons that you've applied to growing and apply those lessons to your life let's face it we're growing to All right. Back. This process begins by declaring legitimate, what we have denied for so long. 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.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary other, the mind behind nature. through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the last best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural and flexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of lenses to see our way in the world. When the medieval world shifted its worldview, secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of classical Greek and Roman approaches to law. philosophy, aesthetics, city planning, and agriculture, our dilemma will cast us further back into time in a search for models and answers. The solution to much of modern malaise, including chemical dependencies and repressed psychosis and neurosis is direct exposure to the authentic dimension of risk represented by the experience of psychedelic plants. The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an anti-drug position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior.

Starting point is 00:14:24 These are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makeup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric and more grounded point of view within the individual. It is foolish to suggest that there is no risk, but it is equally uninformed to suggest that the risk is not worth taking. What is needed is experiential validation of a new guiding image. An overarching metaphor able to serve as the basis for a new model of society and the individual. The plant human relationship has always been the foundation of our individual and group existence in the world. world. What I call the archaic revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The archaic revival spells

Starting point is 00:15:26 the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization. Something that cannot be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective awareness. Rather, it will follow naturally upon the gradual, recognition that the overarching theme that directs the archaic revival is the idea, ideal, of a vegetation goddess, the earth herself as the much Bollyhood Gaia, a fact well documented by 19th century anthropologist, most notably Frazier, but recently given a new respectability by Rianne Isler, Marija Gumbutas, James Millart, and others. The closer a human group is to the nausisusis of the vegetable mind, the Gaian collectivity of organic life, the closer their connection to the archetype of the goddess,

Starting point is 00:16:20 and hence to the partnership style of social organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought was refreshed by the noses of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic era, before the mystery religions were finally suppressed

Starting point is 00:16:36 by enthusiastic Christian barbarians. My conclusion is that Taking the next evolutionary step toward the archaic revival, the rebirth of the goddess, and the ending of profane history will require an agenda that includes the notion of our re-involvement with the emergence of the vegetable mind. That same mind that coaxed us into self-reflecting language now offers us the boundless landscapes of the imagination. Without such a relationship to psychedelic exoferamones regulating our symbiotic relationships, with the plant kingdom, we stand outside of an understanding of planetary purpose. And an understanding of planetary purpose may be the major contribution that we can make to the

Starting point is 00:17:23 evolutionary process. Returning to the bosom of the planetary partnership means trading the point of view of the history-created ego for a more maternal and intuitional style. The widely felt intuition of the presence of the other as a female companion. into the human navigation of history can, I believe, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind, which provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-articulation, the light of the great goddess. What does it mean to accept the solutions? So to add a little commentary there, I don't think I would use the word,

Starting point is 00:18:12 vegetable mind. That makes me think of someone who's brain dead when I think of a vegetable mind. Now, it's probably not fair to the plant. Plants are not brain dead. Plants are not dumb. So it's probably my silly cognitive apparatus that is forging that particular image. I do think that plants try to communicate with us. I think that the earth tries to communicate with us. It's just our inability to see the big picture. It's our inability to truly understand what nature is providing for us that causes us to treat the planet the way we do. It's also important to remember that how fortunate some of us are. If you live in a first world country where one of your problems is being locked down into your home, having enough food to eat,

Starting point is 00:19:14 eat yet just being bored or not being able to get a nice meal at a good restaurant. It's important to note that we live in this sort of first world bubble where we really don't have that many problems or you could argue that we have first world problems. We have the luxury of wanting to learn from nature and wanting to save the planet. However, if you lived in a third world nation where you are just looking to scrape by, where you don't have any food, who cares if the animal is endangered? I'm hungry. Who cares if that animal's in danger?

Starting point is 00:20:03 My kid needs food. Who cares if that animal is endangered? That animal attacked my entire village. I think a lot of times we get into the situations where we see things from our point of view and we don't see them from other points of view. We lose that empathy. We don't have the right to tell people in other parts of the world how to live their lives unless they become a threat to us.

Starting point is 00:20:40 All right, back to Terence here. These are some of the points he makes about the archaic revival. And just to be clear, his notion of the archaic revival is a way for all of us to look back into history. He makes the claim that when societies, get in trouble, they look back to a time when things were glorious. They look back to a time where they can pick up some fundamental ideas, where they can begin to build upon a foundation that previously worked. These are some of the foundational ideas he has for an archaic revival. An inward search for values. Inwardness is the character.

Starting point is 00:21:32 characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate, and swarm while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterized by the solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants, then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of the vegetable imagination. Perhaps this is what the reconnection to the vegetable goddess through psychedelic plants, the archaic revival, actually points toward. That the life of the spirit is the life that gains access to the visionary realms resident in magical plant teachers. This is the truth that shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the 12th century.

Starting point is 00:22:27 visionary Hildegard von Bingen. A new paradigm, capable of offering hope of a path out of the cultural quicksand, must provide a real-world agenda addressed to the escalating problems that the planet faces. There are several domains in which the rise of awareness of Verididas might help stave off Armageddon. Detoxification of the natural environment. The process of detoxification is naturally carried out by the combined action of the atmosphere, the biological matrix, and the oceans. This planet-wide process was able to take care of even urban industrial waste until modern industrial technology became a truly global phenomenon. Planting species of Dautura, the plants once a part of the religious rights of the Indians of Southern California, and other plants that leach heavy metals from the earth and sequels.

Starting point is 00:23:26 quest of them in their cellular tissues are examples of natural processes that could help clean up our environment. Recognizing the many ways in which the biological matrix of the earth functions to avert toxification, recognizing that nature is working to sustain life might go a long way toward building a political consensus to actively participate in saving that same life. Connectedness and symbiosis. Like plants, we need to maximize. the qualities of connectedness and symbiosis. Plant-based approaches to modeling the world include awareness of the fractal and branching nature

Starting point is 00:24:06 of community action. A tree-like network of symbiotic relationships can now replace the model of evolution that we inherited from the 19th century. The earlier model, that of the tooth and claws struggle for existence with the survivor taking the hindmost, is a model based on naive,

Starting point is 00:24:27 observation of animal behavior. Yet it was cheerfully extended into the realm of plants to explain the evolutionary interactions thought to cause speciation in the botanical world. Later, more sophisticated observers found not the war in nature that Darwinist reported, but rather a situation in which it was not competitive ability, but ability to maximize cooperation with other species that most directly contributed to an organism's being able to function and endure as a member of a biome. Plants interact with each other through the tangled mat of roots that connect them all to the source of their nutrition and to each other. The matted floor of a

Starting point is 00:25:20 tropical rainforest is an environment of great chemical diversity. The topology of the topology of Approach is that of brain tissue in its complexity. Within the network of interconnected roots, complex chemical signals are constantly being transmitted and received. Co-adaptive evolution and symbiotic relationships regulate this entire system with the ubiquitous that argues for the evolutionary primacy of these cooperative strategies. For example, mycorosal fungi live in symbiosis on the. outside of plant roots and gently balance and buffer the mineral-laden water that is moving through them to the roots of their host. I'm going to pause here for a moment. I'm going to link to a video that I made in the show notes. If you get a chance, check it out. It's really interesting.

Starting point is 00:26:15 It will at least, I thought it was interesting. And of course, I'm going to think it's interesting. I did it. However, I hope you find it's interesting. Let me tell you quickly what it's about. It's about the fractal nature of our planet. Let's define fractal, so everybody's on the same page. A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures such as eroded coast lines or snowflakes, in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or

Starting point is 00:26:51 chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation. The most important part of that definition is a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole, in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales. So if you think of Terence McKenna's explanation of a rainforest floor being covered with roots, small ones, big ones, covered in fungus and fluid. Can you picture that? Have you ever been on a nice long hike where you're way out in the woods and there's

Starting point is 00:27:38 this giant tree canopy above you and you look down and there's leaves and dirt and roots? And it seems as though each root is a little pathway leading to an obscure world of bushes and shrubs. Doesn't that kind of seem like some of the pictures you've seen of brain images? You know, when you look at John Hopkins or if you look at any sort of scientific magazine or neurological magazine where they show you inside the brain and there's all these tiny little blood vessels moving through this gray matter and it's the brain has all these folds in the white matter.

Starting point is 00:28:23 It just looks like this network. In fact, it is a neural network, much like there is a network of root structures in any sort of forest. That was somewhat the premise of the video I made. However, the video I made went on to talk about the similarities of fungus in each of these structures. I made the claim that

Starting point is 00:28:51 The fungus or the active ingredient in the fungus helps to promote nutrient consumption amongst the neural network. It provides a pathway or provides substance to that pathway to help facilitate growth and consumption, healing. I think that there's a lot of evidence that points to that. A lot of the work being done at John Hopkins on modern. medicinal psilocybin mushrooms shows that people are able to create new neural networks utilizing the active ingredient in mushrooms, which is psilocybin. Additionally, there is a lot of research on the benefits of microbial, microbial, that I say that right? Microbial fungal networks in the forest.

Starting point is 00:29:55 So I thought to myself, is that an idea of a fractal? Is that something that, if indeed it is fractal, could we study? Could we study the root structures of forests to better understand our neural networks? And as I was doing that video, I began thinking, what about supply chains? In my house, I have this giant map on the wall. And this giant map has all the shipping lanes and all the supply chains. And if you use your imagination a little bit, you could kind of understand how that almost looks like a set of neural networks. Could we study supply chains to better understand how our neural network grows?

Starting point is 00:30:46 If we are programmed a certain way, wouldn't it be programmed a certain way? makes sense that we set up our world that same way? You know what I mean by that? If each of us being so similar sees the world so similar, how could we not establish a system of supply chains that's similar to the way we think? Obviously, we're going to set up supply chains to be effective and efficient, but effective and efficient to whom? Effective and efficient to us, the humans. So I would think there would be some similarities in the way that our brain is structured versus the way we set up our own supply chains. It's a fascinating video. I really like it. You guys should check it out. I'll put it in the show notes down there. Thank you for taking time

Starting point is 00:31:43 to let me drop that there. Let's get back to some Terrence McKenna here, though. Whole system fine-tuning. If the phenomena associated with biological harmony and resonance could be understood, then such large-scale systems as global banking or global food production and distribution could be more properly managed. The Gaian biologists Lovelock, Margilles, and others have argued persuasively that the entire planet has been self-organized

Starting point is 00:32:16 by microbial and planktonic life into a metastable regime, favorable to biology and maintained there for over two billion years. Plant-based Gaia has kept a balance throughout time and space, and this, in spite of the repeated bombardment of the Earth by astroidal material sufficient to severely disrupt the planetary equilibrium. We can only admire, and we should seek to imitate such a tau-like sense of the planet's multidimensional homeostatic. balance. But how? I suggest we look at plants. Look more deeply, more closely, and with a more open mind than we have ever done before. Recycling. Like plants, we need to recycle. On a cosmic scale, we are no more mobile than plants. Until this point in history, we have modeled our more successful

Starting point is 00:33:14 economic system on animal predation. Animals can potentially move on to another resource when they exhaust the one at hand. Since they can move to new food sources, they potentially have unlimited resources. Plants are fixed. They cannot easily move to richer nutrients or leave an area if they foul or depleted. They must recycle well. The fostering of a plant-based ethic that emulates the way in which the botanical world uses and replaces resources is a sine qua non for planetary survival. just for those of you that don't know sin queen non is like it's called the eternal now it's a good way to think of it all capitalistic models presuppose unlimited exploitable resources and labor pools yet neither should now be assumed i do not know the methods but i suggest that we start turning to the plant world to discover the

Starting point is 00:34:16 right questions to ask photovoltaic power appreciation of photovoltaic power is part of the shift toward an appreciation of the elegance of the solid state that plants possess. Plants practice photosynthic solutions to the problems of power acquisition. Compared to the water or animal turned wheels, which are the er metaphors for power production in the human world, the solid state quantum molecular miracle that involves dropping a photon of sunlight into a molecular device that will kick out an electron capable of energetically participating in the life of a cell seems like extravagant science fiction yet this is in fact the principle upon which photosynthesis operates while the first solid state devices arrived on the human cultural frontier in

Starting point is 00:35:12 the late 40s solid state engineering had been the preferred design approach of plants for some 2,000 million years. High efficiency, photovoltaics could today meet the daily needs of most people for electricity. It is the running of basic industries on solar energy that has proved difficult. Perhaps this is nature's way of telling us that we aspire to too much manufacturing. A global atmosphere-based energy economy. The approach of vegetational life to energy production, is called photosynthesis. This process could be modeled by the creation of a global

Starting point is 00:35:56 economy based on using solar energy to obtain hydrogen from seawater. Solar electricity could supply most electricity needs, but the smelting of aluminum and steel and other energy-intensive industrial processes make demands that

Starting point is 00:36:11 photovoltaic electricity is unlikely to be able to meet. However, there is a solution. Plants split atmospheric carbon dioxide to release energy and oxygen as byproducts. A similar but different process could use solar electricity to split water to obtain hydrogen. This hydrogen could be collected and concentrated for later distribution. Plants have been very successful at finding elegant solutions based on material present at hand. A hydrogen economy would emulate this same

Starting point is 00:36:48 reliance on inexhaustible and recyclable materials. The notion is a simple one, really. It has long been realized by planners that hydrogen is the ideal resource to fuel a global economy. Hydrogen is clean. When burned, it recombines with the water it was chemically derived from. Hydrogen is plentiful. One third of all water is hydrogen. And all existing technologies, internal combustion engines, coal, oil, and nuclear.

Starting point is 00:37:18 clear-fired generators could be retrofitted to run on hydrogen. Thus, we are not talking about having to scrap the current standing crop of existing power production and distribution systems. Hydrogen could be cracked from seawater at a remote island location and then moved by the already existing technology that is used for the ocean transport of liquid natural gas from its production points to market. The objection that hydrogen is highly explosive. and that proven technologies for handling do not exist has largely been met by the LNG industry and its excellent safety record.

Starting point is 00:38:00 Hydrogen accidents could be extremely destructive, but they would be ordinary explosions, local, non-toxic, and without release of radioactivity. Like plant life itself, the hydrogen economy would be non-polluting and self-sustaining. burned hydrogen recombines with oxygen to again become water. An international effort to extraordinary scope would be necessary to begin to move toward a proof of concept demonstration of the feasibility of hydrogen economy. Granted, there are many possible problems with such a scheme, but no plan for the production of energy sufficient to meet the needs of the 21st century is going to be without difficulties. nanotechnology. The era of molecular mechanisms promises the most radical

Starting point is 00:38:52 of the green visions since it proposes that human-engineered quasi-biological cells and organelles take over the manufacturing of products and culture. Nanotechnology takes seriously the notion that manufacturing techniques and methods of manipulating matter

Starting point is 00:39:11 on the microphysical scale can affect the design process of the human scale world. In the nanotech world, dwellings and machines can be grown, and everything that is manufactured is closer to flesh than stone. The distinction between living and non-living, an organic and artificial, is blurred in the electronic coral reef of human machine symbiosis, contemplated by the savants of nanotechnology.

Starting point is 00:39:40 You see, it's this level of imagination, that draws me to this particular philosopher. Use of terms like the electronic coral reef of human machine symbiosis. Preservation of biological diversity. The life on this planet and the chemical diversity that it represents is likely to be the only source of biologically evolved compounds until the day that we discover another planet as teeming with life as our own. yet we are destroying the living diversity of our world at an appalling rate.

Starting point is 00:40:17 This must be stopped. Not only through the preservation of the ecosystems, but also through the preservation of information about those ecosystems that has been accumulated over thousands of years by the people who live adjacent to them, it is impossible to underestimate the importance for human health of preservation of folk knowledge concerning healing plants.

Starting point is 00:40:45 All the major healing drugs that have changed history have come from living plants and fungi. Quinine made conquests of the tropics possible. Penicillin. The birth control pills remade the social fabric of the 20th century. All three of these are plant-derived pharmaceuticals. I work in this area by managing botanical dimensions. A botanical garden in Hawaii that seeks to preserve the plants utilize, in Amazonian shamanism, one of many such systems of knowledge that are fast disappearing. The measures outlined above would tend to promote what might be called a sense of Gaian holism,

Starting point is 00:41:25 that is, a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position within that dynamic and evolving balance. It is plant-based view. This returned to the perspective on self and ego that, that places them within the larger context of planetary life and evolution is the essence of the archaic revival. Marshall McLuhan was correct to see that planetary human culture, the global village, would be tribal in character. The next great step toward a planetary wholism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic matrix of the vegetable intelligence, that is, the over-reesome.

Starting point is 00:42:12 mind of the planet. I hesitate to call this dawning awareness religious, yet that is what it surely is, and it will involve a full exploration of the dimensions revealed by plant hallucinogens, especially those structurally related to neurotransmitters already present and functioning in the human brain. Careful exploration of the plant hallucinogens will probe the most archaicic and sensitive level of the drama of the emergence of consciousness. It was in the plant human symbiotic relationships that characterize archaic society and religion that the numinous mystery was originally experienced, and this experience is no less mysterious for us today, in spite of the general assumption that we have replaced the simple awe of our

Starting point is 00:43:05 ancestor with philosophical and epistemic tools of the utmost sophistication and analytical power. Our choice as a planetary culture is a simple one. Go green. Let's evacuate the building. Let's go. Well, there you have it, my friends. A little introduction into one of my favorite philosophers. We'll be doing a little more since this week is the Spotlight on Philosophers.

Starting point is 00:43:35 with Terrence McKenna. As I leave you, I'd like to leave you with one more thought by Terrence. God rest his soul, we miss you, buddy. I think it's important to understand part of Terence's message.

Starting point is 00:43:52 At least to me, that is that the plant and universe are like a living organism. An organism in which we are a partner with. We're not set against it. It's an organism that we are, in fact, part of an unfolding reality that is larger than human understanding. We can move no faster than the evolution of our language.

Starting point is 00:44:26 Right? I forgot who it was, but there was a beautiful quote that says, The world is not only stranger than you imagine. It's stranger than you can imagine. Imagine that. I love you guys. I'll see you tomorrow. Aloha.

TrueLife - Terence McKenna : Altered States, Consciousness & Radical Ideas

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