Terence Mckenna: What is to be done? (Conclusion)

Another negative and this is a slightly more difficult to follow, requires a little- it's insidious: We shouldn't watch, watching is some kind of voyeuristic sadomasochistic peculiarity that we are permitting ourselves because we think there are too many of us to do, but I don't think this is true. I think watching is an incredibly disempowering thing. Millions of people live half awake larval lives watching six and a half hours of tv a day, and as long as they stay in their homes, you know, shopping by phone and fax, everybody is happy. But they participate not at all in the society. They're the marks and they consume. They consume the media, entertainment, the clothes, styles, the brands. They are the morons who are keeping this system running. And I assume that largely the people here tonight are not, we're the people who grind out all this stuff. I mean I feel I do this, I write books, I produce ideas, they are grist for the market place. Harper and Banton don't care what I'm saying, what they care about is how the books are selling. You know, product nr 32 45 A sub F how is it doing in the market place?

Do not watch, because when you're watching you're not at the center of things, largely what I'm talking about here is reclaiming experience. Reclaiming experience. This is what's been taken from us. This is why the new music and dance culture is so important, this is why drug culture is so important, this is why the celebration of sexual minorities is so important. This is all about coming to grips with who you really are, and how you really feel, and then experiencing it.

You know, you are not owned. It is not he or she or it that you belong to and we have been told that we have to fit in, we have to make sense... this is not true. We are creating a world that celebrates diversity, that celebrates the uniqueness of every person. The complexification of our species is a process directly dependant on the complexity that we each bring to the process, the diversity that is spreading through society is a concomitant to the boundary dissolution, and I really believe that science's inability to make sense of human beings in the world as part of nature, to make sense of our love, hate, aspiration, fear. The failure to make sense of this, is the failure to come to terms with the transcendental aspect of reality. We are the best evidence there is that something extraordinarily unusual is happening on this planet and that it's not something that will go on for millions of years.

It began about 20.000 years ago. It's a self-advancing, self-expanding, self-defining process and it takes no prisoners, you know. There is no going back, there is no going back from the momentum that history has imparted to the human imagination. There is only a going forward in what is called a forward escape through art, through design, through management and integration. We have to push the art pedal to the floor. We have never designed our society, we have never managed our societies or our lives, we have never tried to make what we were serve an aesthetic agenda, and that's why we've created a mess. In the absence of an aesthetic agenda, what we've created is Animal House on a global scale.

So now it's time to pay the piper. And just in closing, the catalyst now, is a combination of technology, solid state technologies and pharmacology. The world that we are leaving behind, the world that failed us was a world of ideologies and mechanical technologies, and the ideologies one by one are going down the tubes. Marxism, Freudianism, fascism, they one by one will be discredited. They cannot sustain, and the mechanical technologies cannot be sustained. They pollute, they dehumanize, they wreck the planet. What is coming into place is a world where drugs replace ideology. That's why drugs are so terrifying to those who oppose them. That's why they say: "You want to escape. You want to take drugs to escape!" That's right! You want to escape, you want to escape fascism, communism, socialism, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism. All of this stuff, you want to escape ideology into the felt presence of the body which means drugs and sex and syncopated music.

And... and parallel to this development and happening in different sectors of society, is the hardwiring of our imagination. The building of databases that we can access instantaneously that make the human past co-present with the now, the boundary dissolution that I'm talking about is the division between past, present and future. This is what it means to end Newtonian time. It means the past, the present and the future become a co-extensive domain, where everyone then awakenes to the fact which was always there to be observed. That there is not simply one past. There is nothing called the past. I have a past. You have a past. It's not the same past.

Consequently the future's we are going to are different. We create our own realitites as a species and as an individual and so what we are passing through here in the now, in this lecture, in the 20th centure is a moment of community. A gam, as melville would say, a gam is where 2 sailing, 2 whaling ships meet at sea. That's what we have here, a gam. A moment of dialogue, and then we each go back to our own private idahos. But the thing to take back to those private idahos, is that awareness that human history secures the central importance of human beings. We are part of a universal adventure. What happens to us decrees the fate of a vast set of universal processes and circumstances. we are not ephemeral, irrelevant, to each other or to the greater whole, this is the truth of psychedelics that aboriginal societies have always known and it's the truth that we have to sacrifice in order to make the prodigal journey into matter. But the prodigal journey into matter has now been concluded. We've found the top quark. We've shut down the super collider. Now we need to go back to the problesm of the human soul and there isn't much time, but the tools that have been put into our hands are the most powerful tools there have ever been.

The Gaian connection into the vegetable mind of the planet that we are trying to mirror and hardwire on a human scale. Nature is full of interest and affection for humanity, it's up to us to discover that humanity in ourselves. Because we have gone so sour along the rational path, and connected us with the bunch of the rest of nature. This is a process that is happening, it's a birth. It can go with ease because we help it from this side, or it can be traumatic because we resist and as McLuhan said, insist on driving the automobile's history using only the rear view mirror. That's no way to proceed, we need to wake up, smell the coffee, turn on the lights, get loaded and to direct the human future toward a mirroring of aspirations such that we are pleased then to turn the enterprise over to those who follow us.

Well, that's that I think... *audience laughter*

Part 1 here. Podcast here at C-Matic.