Ask Terence McKenna

...tory over and over again. Well, uh the- what history then is, or what culture is, is, um, the- the phenomenon that attends the rise and spread of t...

...carnate in a human body at the end of the 20th century in a squirrely culture like this, trying to make sense of your--your heritage, your opportun...

...ing, because it cannot be bought and sold, is deemed worthless by the culture. We actually live in a de-humanising culture and, as you know, the co...

...t it was something that had retreated to the status of a myth in most cultures. Then in late 1970 I went to the Amazon and very quickly, through us...

... want to study psychoactive drugs and plant and their impact on human culture - and thats really what interests me - is how drugs effect culture - ...

...onal and this is something which is hidden within in the context of a culture. cultures don’t run around announcing how they haven’t got their acts...

...f this mushroom cult happened right at the time we were inventing agriculture, and agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relati...

... double. The world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be. culture – and by culture, I mean any culture, anywhere, any time – um, gives ...

...es that are taking place in the third world and disrupting rainforest culture and causing this shamanic and folk pharmacopeia to be lost. So I appr...

...cess in the Jungian model -- not of a single person, but of an entire culture or a species. We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and wh...

...ink about these issues before all that, because he’s dealing with the culture in a very different way than I am. I listen to his laments and compla...

...ionists were doing, the replacement of phonetic alphabet linear print culture by electronic media that has happened over the last 25 years, these t...

...oductions presents' ... 'Inner Work Videotape' ... 'Hallucinogens and culture with Terence McKenna'] Jeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome. Our topic...

...is fascination with the archaic which is an effort on the part of the culture to stabilize itself because we really have- having seen the limitatio...

...e organic world is not thought to be extrapolatable into the world of culture and thought. There are imagined to be clear breaks in these categorie...

...erms of its feedback into social here-and-now stuff, is the idea that culture is not your friend. That culture is an impediment to understanding wh...

...g is that reality is simply a state of mind. Reality is a place where cultures pitch their can and then defend it against all others. In the same w...

...nt' I mean the whole 20th century, is, uh, a similar thing, a similar culture crisis, but on a much grander and more global and more threatening sc...

...oundary-dissolving states of ecstasy in which all the factoids of the culture are thrown up for grabs, the deck is reshuffled, synchronicity rules,...

...e conclusion that ideology, beliefs, and then in the broader context, culture, is not our friend, culture is not your friend, ideology is not your ...

... Why should people like ourselves who live in high-density electronic culture, why should we care about this? What does it say about our future? Wh...

...ocalyptic excitement at the end of a century, and always throughout a culture at the edge of its technologies. And, to my mind the most interesting...

... things then become the medium upon which the primary database of the culture is being carried forward. Well, the rest of the story you know and th...

...e from. Then it appears that in a series of coalescing involutions of culture and neuro-organization, driven by the spatial coincidence of human be...

...ected by the inside/outside, matter/spirit dichotomy of the dominator culture. But, the notion that man – notice the gender thrust here – the notio...

... that both in a way are taboo and when you, uh, deal with preliterate cultures you discover that the shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is, uh, c...

...s. And in thinking about this and the relationship to dream and human culture I have realized that cultures are like operating systems. We are like...

...o Queen Mab becomes Mae West, you know, uh, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend, Irish internecine polit...

...t of view. You inherited it from, uh, a geolo- a geographical area, a culture, a set of parents. It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anch...

... at this was not the, uh, attitude of representatives of the superior culture studying the quaint folk ways of preliterate peoples. It seems very c...

...erent levels, needs now to be looked at in the light of the fact that culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the do...

...d of time, about 5 or 6 years, an extraordinary influence on American culture. You couldn’t pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing Mc...

... me, so I may not be able to maintain the ordinary veneer of genteel, cultured affability. I may have to simply cut to the chase here. You know, we...

... broad topic, it's, here we are at the end of history all the world's cultures are melting together, more powerful technologies than we've ever ima...

...what we’re talking about goes on in the non-sanctioned corners of the culture. Pulp literature, uh, cults, uh, un-sanctioned gatherings of friends,...

...st of us don't understand or don't really know is the fact that Greek cultures and Elucinean * mysteries incorporated the use of something very aki...

...ey don’t have, aah, mo, monopoly on it. It’s ancient it occurs in all cultures, It’s shamanic, and what it is it is a kind of neurological seizure ...

...e 1990s, uh, as a, uh, sphere or a cylinder of that sort and think of cultures as gasses at various pressures. And, let’s assign low pressures to t...

...dic; it's more a fractal wave-length. Gylany, the partnership form of culture is characterized by peace, happiness, and by sex, drugs and rock-'n-r...

...w for a couple of years trying to figure out what was going with with culture, but when I finally got to the scene, and all this acid, and all this...

...presented as a breaking through, a penetration to another level, that culture is an imprisoning bubble of interlocking assumptions, that are like, ...

... behind the making of this kind of a film. It’s not a film about rave culture. It’s not a film about Albert Hoffmann. It’s not a film about body pi...

...ars to have become the cutting edge of the guiding image of this mega culture. So it becomes important then for people who identify themselves with...

...ally the most intelligent thing on the planet, and it regulates human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum o...

...verse phase, during which we were self-absorbed. One dimension of the culture crisis is a collective erotic drive for a connection with the Other. ...

...or, uh, a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restau...

...nal image wants to move. Part of acquiring the full initiation of the culture at this point is learning how to do these things. What it means is th...

...Mhm. What do you think about the question of the presence of advanced cultures and man in the remote past of humankind? History of Atlantis.. TM: I...

... white person. I grew up in Colorado where everything was white-bread culture, and my father may have had opinions about the IRA and all that but w...

...lating novelty and it’s what makes human society possible, electronic culture possible, a city like New York. These are obviously manifestations of...

... other words, a kind of cultural brainwashing is necessary for modern cultures to work at all. And the consequences of the acceptance of this situa...

...ean, we’re turning the whole planet into a white bread, mall-shopping culture and the values of every other way of doing things is being subsumed t...

...my eventually lead them to a terrible discovery. The discovery of agriculture. Because they learned that rather than maintain this vast library of ...

...content is a survey of the psychedelic plants of planet Earth and the cultures that have used them, and then discussion of their chemistry, uh, geo...

...y evolved, uh, in 50 or 60 thousand years, possibly much longer. Once culture was established, the, the, uh, soma of, of, uh, the human species was...

...s don't understand, or don't-don't really know is the fact that Greek culture and the Eleusinian min-mysteries, um, incorporated the use of somethi...

...nce and our position. But what we are is uh, again contextually, is a culture of science, uh, and I’m speaking now of our community. It’s the Alber...

.... Rap 1, The Archaic Revival. History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable c...

...lly we recreate the entire world of our imaginations. I mean, this is culture is, is a kind of coaxing into reality of the structures of the human ...

... lose control. I’ve talked a lot about Africa, about the emergence of culture and my belief that language and complex neural processing were cataly...

...60 or 70 million years ago at the close of the dinosaurs, then we get culture, 25, 30, 50 thousand years ago. And very shortly after that, mathemat...

... pre-condition for biology a later arriving phase of novelty and then culture builds on biology and so forth, like that. Yeah. Q: But when you said...

...st disempowering things that has been done to us by the male-dominant culture is to, uh, brush out our footprints into the past. We don’t have a cl...

...the imagination seriously. We have never taken the self-management of culture seriously. We’ve always sort of thought things should just go along, ...

...he year 2000, what are some of the novel features of our contemporary culture that are likely to become dominant in a future society? With me is Te...

...cial institutions that derive, essentially, from the invention of agriculture, which is where I think the shit hit the fan. I mean I’m fairly radic...

...onogamous thing. So then we come now to the flashy possibilities. The culture, the sub-culture in pornography, fashion and the advanced sectors of ...

...n unconfirmed rumor brought through the medium of language. And every culture accentuates different parts of reality. So within a sense every cultu...

...t was very, very early and achieved a sudden and extreme flowering of culture like nothing that would -- nothing would rival it for several thousan...

...devoted to preserving and studying psychoactive plants used by native cultures throughout the world, and he is also the developer of a computer sof...

...try right now. Do you perceive yourself an advocate to bring into our culture new elements like an easy way to reach altered states of consciousnes...

...the hallucinogenic state from, uh, growing up basically in the counterculture in Berkeley. But what I found in South America after sifting through ...

..., and all nature is the vehicle of the information God, and so is all culture and all individuality. Okay. Dividing 4,306 years by 64 you see the n...

...at we hold a unique opportunity which is sort of the flip side of the culture crisis. Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our a...

...ed entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology and the theoretical origins of human consciousness itself...

...ilization of homer or catalhyuyuk or alta mira is is simply a form of culture chauvenism. okay but psilocybin had other effects besides this suppre...

...chings, points of view, are now swirling around the deathbed of human culture. You know, we remember the shattered affairs, the failed crusades, th...

...east I personally have come to the realization that this is how those cultures have chosen to deal with the faustian impulse in human beings. It’s ...

...uh, called, uh, 'Crypto-Rap Meta-Electrical Speculations on Temporary culture' so, [audience laughs]. And it ran to like two-hundred-twenty pages, ...

...artnership society for so long and why did it give way to a dominator culture, the answer lies, I think, in changing patterns of plant utilization ...

...l one level deeper in the psyche as inheritors of the Judeo-Christian culture. That is the idea that the world will end, that there will be a final...

...nd analyzed their experiences using all kinds of knowledge of all the cultures on the planet. It’s very difficult for any two of us, for example yo...

...utting them on or not. His theories about the origins of contemporary culture in the psychedelic trips of the distant past seem startling to those ...

... of life so that we can really take back our minds from the dominator culture, the linear paternalistic industrial capitalist culture and live the ...

... they are to FDR or anybody else like that. Still, I-I think that the culture crisis is going to become so intense and the world is going to become...

...which is a unique study of the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution and TheArchaic Revival, in which this interview appears...

...evices which created the phenomenon of self-reflecting language-using culture-creating animals on this planet. Orthodox evolutionary theory takes t...

...from 49:50... "Now, as a culture we must come to grips with the fact that the world is not simple, in the same way that a nine year-old must come t...

..., government, the military and the churches are the forces which make culture, and just realizing culture is what we're doing at this very moment, ...

...lus of biological organisms surrounded by metabiological forms called culture, and that in fact there isn’t a way to regenerate a Frankenstein that...

...ks has been that these substances have had a far greater influence on culture and still have, and will have, than most people would like to accept ...

...t of ironical, sophisticated insight into the mechanisms of one’s own culture and the cultural games that are being played. This rap would have bee...

...meeting people and discussing this issue to see how much of the youth culture has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue. Because it really mean...

...mplexity. The drift of this then is the emergence of language, tools, culture and higher ideals, like courage and love and self-sacrifice. These id...

...e and female, shapes our relationship to technology and ultimately to culture and nature. We looked at the forms of relationship between women and ...

...atory systems with the notion that I was looking at, uh, artifacts of culture, uh, productions of the human mind that were to a large degree arbitr...