Friday, March 6, 2009

Terence McKenna: What is to be done? (First 3 steps)

"So what is to be done? I think the answer to this is not only nothing, but considerably less than nothing. *audience laughter* And what I mean by that is, that the real solutions to our problems lie in a series of negatives. Do not believe. Ideology has poisoned this planet. Ideology is bankrupt. It's a skin game. It's a shell game. It's only for marks. And marks! It is beneath your dignity as a body, to get mixed up in ideology. I mean after all, where is it written large that talking monkeys should understand the nature of being anyway?
So belief is an incredible copout on intellectual truth seeking, because belief precludes believing in its opposite. And so this is a self-limitation, you've become your own cog (/cop?), and the ideologies of the 20th century are so shoddy and hobbled together OR toxic to human values, they're not worth believing in anyway. So deconditioning ourselves from belief... some people call it cynicism, I call it good sense! I'm not a cynical person, but I know shit from shinola and I don't expect people who don't, to get a lot of respect from the rest of us...

OK, don't believe. The next thing which comes out of that and is an even stronger prohibition, don't follow. Following is a tasteless position to find yourself in. Pets follow, vice-presidents follow and bad acts follow. So why follow? All of these gurus, geishas, roshis and rishis are simply flim flam artists. They've had thousands of years to get these cons together and run them on you. Believe me I know I'm a recovering catholic. You have to fight your way free of belief, and then do not follow. Do not follow, it's an obsolete tasteless thing, and there's no human dignity in it whatsoever.

Then a harder one, a more radical one, the one that might get me shot. Do not in some profoundly metaphysical sense, consume. Do not consume. For obvious reasons, and then not so obvious reasons. The obvious reasons are that the fetish for objects made of matter is wrecking the planet. If everybody on Earth had what the people on the front row here have, there wouldn't be enough metal, glas, plastic and petroleum in the planet to provide that kind of lifestyle for the billions of people who now aspire it. None of this stuff brings happiness anyway. I recently had the experience of having my 75 Ford Grenada blow up on me in the middle of the night, and so I had to buy a new car. So I went down a year and up a brand and I got a 74 BMW and it cost me 2 grand. And I guarantee you once you have the little thing on the steering wheel, the quaternity sign, you don't need the 90.000 model. What we should all do, is buy antiques, don't consume anything which hasn't already been made.

There's a lot of shit that's been made going all over the place, I seen it in Manhattan going for a bundle. What we need to do you see, is re-tool our values, so that what is new is odious, tasteless, déclassé, embarassing, and not be found in the better homes. *audience laughter* The older things are, the better they are. Here's a 50 year old chair, fine. Here's a 500 year old chair, how much better! We need to cease to consume. And I'm somewhat facetious in suggesting that we all become aficionados of chippendale furniture and that sort of thing, that isn't the plan either. But the endless fetishism for consumer objects is wrecking the planet.

Excerpt from this podcast at C-realm. Will post more of this tomorrow! Speaking of "following', I wish Blogger would really change the name of that "followers" widget.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

That's some good McKenna material there - thanks for the post. I'm always looking for fresh stuff. Will pass along on my blog.

DDubsReads.com

Unknown said...

GREAT post.

Thank you for this!

-love and light

skrambo said...

Nice...Reflects my feelings at the moment.