Thursday, May 30, 2013

Psychedelic Salon 351 Terence McKenna - What is Truth?


It starts with a bang!

What is truth?
"What one is sure of, very little. I would think. Well, I'm getting ready to say nothin'! I guess that's what it is, everything is provisional. As to what I believe in, is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience, the primary datum, I'm very aware that everything else is a construct moving out from that. And so the primary datum is the first level of being, but to say I believe in it..."

"If you're not thinking than you are no more than the onrush of your metabolism and not greatly different from your cat or your dog."

"And so I live by questions, I don't see how you can live any other way."

"I actually try to create a complete explanation, but I always call them models. Because you have to throw them away, you have to keep adding to the model and then throwing it away."

And the quotes listed at Psychedelic Salon:

“Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”

“The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”

“If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”

“So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That’s why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.”

“I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.”

“I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”

“Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”

“The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.”
 
“The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don’t see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It’s beautiful.”

“Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.”

“In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we’re walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn’t self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.”

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