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For other people, this process is an enormous liberation. It is an influx of material previously hidden in the unconscious, laden with symbolic meaning, and is not to be sustained in this acidic, dissolving, roiling liquid state. That’s part of the process, but it is eventually to be recombined, coagulatio, the recombi...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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That’s one level. We can do self-directed psychotherapy on ourselves with psychedelic substances out of plants and we can use alchemical symbolism to guide this process, and that’s all very interesting but so what? What’s so great about it? Well - One of the most famous of all alchemical axioms is, “as above, so below”...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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What does all this mean for us beyond the commitment to our own sort of ordering the wunderkammer of our own private imagination? What it means is important because if you look around you, you will see the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of a...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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In the 1960s, we thought that all that had to happen was - everybody would take LSD and the obvious right things to do would be done. We expected no opposition to this because it’s rightness was so obvious. We didn’t realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into the waiting jaws of its oppressors. Bu...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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So here it is again. What is different this time that we might have some greater hope of actually coming through to the beginning of the third millennium without having to hang our heads when we tell the story to our grandchildren? I will submit to you this evening that the difference between then – 1965 through 1970 –...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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No gay kind in Montana, no Chinese scholar in Botswana, and no person anywhere with a specialized interest or predilection now need feel alone. There is no aloneness. You can find your people. One of the things Tim Leary said in the 1960s that I always remembered but I never heard anybody talk about or ever really hear...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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Find the others! We all need to create affinity groups which are subsets of the much larger community that we’re part of. Then using this technology, which was designed to keep track of us, to pick our pockets and to sell us junk we don’t want, use this technology to produce art. We must produce massive amounts of subv...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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My brother years ago invented this term. He called it extra-environmental. He said, this is what we want to be. We don’t want to be Americans, or Germans, or English – we want to be extra-environmentalists. Always feel wherever you go that you are a stranger, the outsider, and the one looking in. This is the viewpoint ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual should pour this forth. This is what you are: you are some kind of a mystery suspended betwee...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate, just like genes replicate. See if your meme can infect and move into the organism of society, and believing as I do that society operates on a kind of biological economy, I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. However, unless the memes are released...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence, with ourselves, is that we consume images. We don’t produce them. We need to produce and not consume media. Media is a huge issue. You can’t escape it, so what are you going to do about it? The only solution is to drive it, to take charge, or otherwise you will be pois...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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I don’t know if I’ve hit this technological thing hard enough. I hope that you all avail yourselves of the power of the Internet. In years past, in speaking to audiences in America, it was maddening to me to find that the environmentalists, the feminists, the gays, the psychedelic people, the space people, and the colo...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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Finally, I’ll close on this. The alchemical return. All culture is some kind of myth. All cultural stories then have a kind of psychic dynamic to them, which is not suspected by the civilization as it lives these myths. It has to been seen from outside. There is a consistent myth in Western civilization. In the early ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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All of these qualities of care giving and, notice for example, that all the processes of biology occur below the boiling point of water. If only we could build societies that did that. We work in the range of hundreds of degrees, thousands of degrees; fusing metals and creating toxicity. So I think the psychedelic plan...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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So I’m involved, as I’ve said, in a process of bringing this story to many people who haven’t heard it. It’s a great story, it’s a great myth that the underground community should make it’s own. I used it evening just as the scaffold for this talk but I tried to hit the things that are important to me; which are: psych...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login John Balance Interviews Terence McKenna Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Reviews Date Location Words 1996 Unknown 39 End of Results No youtube link available, try the following: No transcript available f...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login I Ching, Habit & Novelty Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Youtube Reviews Date Location Words October 1997 Unknown 9440 End of Results Radio Host: Ok. 471-6291 is the pledge number...oh, you wanna hear h...
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Radio Host: Again, our last minute pledge number is 471-6291. We can, uh, put your name on our list very easily. Just make that call: 471-6291. Thanks to these people who did call in: Peter Bain, in loving respect for his sister Kate Brooks in Dripping Springs, Bran Nelson responding to the challenge for artists who ma...
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And, as I welcome Terence McKenna, let me first say that I have been asked to mention that there is a film called Strange Attractor, which features Terence McKenna, and it will be shown at the Adobe Theatre on October the 18th at midnight and the 19th at 2 O' Clock [indecipherable]. Alright, I'm gonna take The Umbrella...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Light of the Third Millenium Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Youtube Reviews Date Location Words 1997 Light of the Third MIllenium 6841 End of Results Save the following quote? Completed this talk? Re...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login New Views of the Time Wave Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Audio Reviews Date Location Words 11 August 1997 Unknown End of Results No youtube link available, try the following: Audio Link Transcription ...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Relationships, career, drugs & our times Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Audio Reviews Date Location Words 8 August 1997 Unknown End of Results No youtube link available, try the following: Audio Link T...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Terence McKenna on Art Bell Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Reviews Date Location Words 22 May 1997 Unknown 39 End of Results No youtube link available, try the following: No transcript available for th...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Surfing the Fractal Wave at the End of History Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Audio Reviews Date Location Words 23 April 1997 The Lighthouse, New York New York 9038 End of Results No youtube link avail...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Brisbane Talk Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Audio Reviews Date Location Words 26 February 1997 Unknown End of Results No youtube link available, try the following: Transcription Other links No transc...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Live at The Zoo with DJ Zippy Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Audio Reviews Date Location Words 26 February 1997 The Zoo, Brisbane, Australia 4663 End of Results No youtube link available, try the follo...
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TM: [Terence laughs] It looks to me like the tribes have turned out in all their splendid variety. So I'm here this evening to talk to you in three brief rants with Zippy's wonderful art before, in-between and after. We have commercial opportunities for you back at the pinball machine. Uh, we've, uh, hopefully provided...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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suppose, is to humbly offer one version only of why this is happening and why it's happening now and what it might mean for the future. This is the old style of doing things. This is how religion was practiced for the first three million years before it fell into the hands of politicians and real estate speculators. Re...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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a state of mind. Reality is a place where cultures pitch their can and then defend it against all others. In the same way that we've had to learn that our sexuality doesn't come in two flavors, we have to also face that there's more to consciousness than awake and asleep. And in fact in every ecosystem, in every cultur...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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of our own environment and our own courage and our own dissatisfaction with the world as we find it and remake it. Remake it through technology, through trance culture, through underground culture, through media, computer graphics, the Internet. Uh, these are all tools of transformation completely beyond the understand...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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of that whole lifestyle is now evident. Why now? I believe it's because psychedelics dissolve cultural assumptions. They are social and political dynamite. They are, uh, the equivalent of standing naked in a world of, uh, illusion, delusion, pretension, assumption and misunderstanding. All societies are frightened, all...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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riches after which we are told we should seek. The houses, the boats, the furs, the cars, the jewels, the degrees, the social esteem. All of this is false currency compared to the authenticity of your own experience and the art that you experience coming out of your own psyche and that you can then give back to the com...
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[audience claps] [music]
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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TM: Part two. Part two is what I've learned or think I've learned from psychedelics. And I offer myself as an example, because it's as important to tell your trip as to have it. Because until you tell it it's not food for the community. So, uh, my far too many years of taking psychedelics have taught me some things. An...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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shaman, is someone who understands how the world really works. How does the world really work? What is it and what are we in it? The where is it from? Where is it going? Science tells you that nature is red in tooth and claw, all competition strife and random mutation, but in fact there is a hidden appetite in nature t...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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a universe of inorganic life, inorganic organization comes the carbon based world of organic life. At the very center of the complexification process of organic life intelligence appears some hundred thousand or million years ago. The process of intelligence existing and iterating itself through time, elaborating langu...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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we find and further complexify it, further complicate it through the process of making art, forming relationships, realizing our plans, building our dreams. We are the creature that carries a sensory organ unknown to occur anywhere else in nature. We are the creatures who possess the hyperdimensional organ of perceptio...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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a group mind, as a mass society we are the victims of advertising agencies and politicians. The nature of our relationship to our collective existence is constantly changing and not yet defined. This is the important thing about the human adventure. We are not locked in genetic[sp?] repetition of behaviors over millenn...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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a drug, a form of music, a sexual act, a posture in relationship to art, something that cracks apart the rigid rule defined reality of the group and shows you that beyond culture, which is a fairytale told for fools, is the uncharted, unmapped, unintegrated, unspeakable. Wittgenstein actually called it the unspeakable....
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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for ultimate knowledge, rather it should be thought of as an exercise in self-exploration because it is inevitably true. The larger you build the bonfire, the greater the darkness that is revealed. Or to put it another way, the greater your sphere of understanding, the larger the area of your ignorance. It is inevitabl...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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[audience cheers and claps] [music] Woman in audience: Hey, Terence! Thanks for coming! [inaudible] TM: I'm pretty happy. Woman in audience: [inaudible] TM: It's bloody hot. Woman in audience: [inaudible] [Terence laughs] Woman in audience: [inaudible] TM: They're pretty. [woman in audience singing] [Terence...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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[audience inaudible] TM: At the present moment this plant is legal worldwide. You can transport it, grow it, advocate it, extract it, advertise it, do therapy with it, uh, and anything else you can think to do with it. This is an incredible gift to our community out of the complex circumstances of the times. I don't t...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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TM: Uh, this is news. And tonight we have passed out information on various places where this plant can be obtained. Now this is all very exciting, but behind this fact lies the approaching truth that there are probably many such compounds and many such plants and that in fact the human inventory of psychedelic possibi...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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the Peyote only began to be used in the 1880s and the ghost dance religion has a way of trying to hold Indian culture together against the whitey[sp?] advances. Uh, similarly this Salvia Divinorum thing was known from a tiny group of Mexican Indians and only from there. And yet, as I say, this plant can be a house plan...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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It occurs in the brain of every single one of us here tonight. In fact, this is an unresolved issue. Can you make a substance illegal that is a human metabolite?
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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[audience laughs]
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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TM: It's getting in there a little close, I think. Uh, maybe we might want to rethink that. Uh, it means you're holding every moment of every day and every night since you emerged buck naked from your mother's womb and you will go to the grave holding. Well what is DMT doing in human metabolism? We know not. But as the...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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were taking psilocybin mushrooms and practicing an orgiastic sexual style and a nomadic social style. In other words, moving lightly over the land, possessing nothing, finding our emotional release and our meaning in, uh, complex social and sexual relationships with each other, carrying for the cattle and using the, uh...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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And this is what reality is. It's a seamless felt aperception of pattern. Language is a compromise, a downloading, a a slicing up, but dissecting and dividing for purposes of understanding. But the smart money knows that you have to take the perceptions of language and recombine them into a, uh, in a union with feeling...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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be happy, life passes us by. This is because western ideologies are always ideologies of delayed gratification. It comes after death, after retirement, after coitus. It's always after something that it comes. Well I've got news for you. This kind of thing is chasing your own tail. The felt presence of immediate experie...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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itself. So if you want a relationship with fidelity to being, you must complexify yourself. You must recognize the ambiguity of your sexuality, the ambiguity of your grip on your understanding of your place in the world, your ignorance of the meaning of life, the destiny of biology. This admission of ignorance is not a...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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form of infantilism, in the same way that you suckle at your mother's breast and then at the tit of the university and the government. Eventually one has to admit, whether one is Hasid, Chinese, Indian, American, whatever, that one's culture is infantile, idiotic, constructed by, for and of morons. And that it is an in...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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and, uh, what then should be the response of alienated, psychedelic, uh, uh, people and communities to, to the dilemma in which we find ourselves? I think it can only be, uh, to produce art. To put the art pedal to the floor. That essentially speaking at least for myself my involvement with psychedelics is part of a la...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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me that things, physical objects had living universes inside of them. And I now think as Aldous Huxley thought, that as human beings our fascination with jewels and bright objects, which we share with magpies and packrats, uh, is, uh, a a kind of a spiritual intuition, that glitter is the path to follow. You know Plato...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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And show me two forms of beauty and I have no trouble telling you which I think is the more beautiful. So moral philosophy, too tricky. The search for truth, possible catastrophic error. The worship of beauty, no blame. A reliable arrow into the mystery. Stick with the beautiful. Follow the beautiful deeper into beauty...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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must change. And people some s- sometimes say to me well do do you think psychedelics is all that's necessary? Psychedelics to my mind is simply the only game in town. Not because it's a sure thing, but because everything else will certainly fail. If hortatory preaching could carry the day, we would have turned the ben...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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the last million years the glaciers have moved southward from the poles miles deep in ice crushing everything in their paths. There were human beings who witnessed everyone of those glaciations. How much whining was there? I don't know. But somehow we're all here tonight. Those people didn't drop the ball. They kept th...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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heritage. And if we can dissolve boundaries between the ego and the hidden portions of ourselves and the hidden portion of nature we will find that we are each of us but the tip of a universal iceberg that connects to all other separate and assumed to be separate universes. Gregory Bateson said nature is a seamless web...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy
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[audience cheers and claps] TM: My pleasure! [audience cheers and claps] [music] Save the following quote? Completed this talk? Review: Rating: Saved Share Transcript ASKTMK Terence McKenna Search Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing. The Terence McKenna Page © 2016-2020 asktmk.com Contact
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Appreciating Imagination Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Youtube Reviews Date Location Words 1997 (sessions 1 and 2) Appreciating Imagination 55604 End of Results http://zetareticulae.org is really co...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Interview on KBOO FM Radio Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Reviews Date Location Words 1997 KBOO FM RADIO 3643 End of Results No youtube link available, try the following: PO: Hi, I’m Paul O’Brien, prod...
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TM: Definitely, yes. I mean, you can…management is not a dirty word. It has a connotation now because it’s so associated with rapacious capitalism, but all management means is paying attention to the details that must be paid attention to. I mean, a synonym for management is husbandry. Heidegger said, “The purpose of l...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+on+KBOO+FM+Radio
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TM: My method is rational. My techniques are shamanic. Uh, was it Lautréamont or Polinaire (sp?) or someone, who said the deliberate disordering of the senses…oh, Rimbaud. Arthur Rimbaud, the symbolist poet. A deliberate disordering of the senses worked for Rimbaud. Is there any advice that you’d like to give our aud...
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Ask TMK Talks Wiki Login Search Talks Wiki Login Dreaming Awake at the End of Time Share Download PDF Download Audio Download Video Last Updated: 15/09/18 Info Youtube Reviews Date Location Words 13 December 1998 Fort Mason, San Francisco, California 13384 End of Results Terence McKenna - "Dream...
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Well, it's a pleasure to be in San Francisco. This is sort of a hometown of mine. One of my home towns. I've been on a tour, or a rave... spoken three times and raved twice in the past five or seven days. This is the end, so if I'm comfortable with this stuff at all I must be comfortable with it this evening. And it's ...
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and others who unfortunately slip my mind, at the ceremonial center of Palenque in Chiapas. We've been doing these events somewhere in Mayan Mexico for the past ten or twelve years. Many of you are graduates, which doesn't mean you can't come again, but I want to invite all of you there. If you're interested in ethnobo...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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through my venues and I hear the feedback and I feel the ambiance of the people and the throb of the zeitgeist, it all sort of just simply dissolves into an ongoing commentary on our moment in space and time, and the various dimensions, adumbrations, and opportunities of our dilemma. But I want tonight to couch it for ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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You're with me, yes. It's very hard to give these lectures in such a way so that every person hears something different. [audience laughter] Which is what is supposed to be going on, you know. Well, so thinking about this comment, that "people are asleep," I see several implications. I asked myself, "What is 'awake' in...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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who has run the edges, I've noticed something somewhat counter-intuitive to that teaching, and it's this... it's that, to contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will... to achieve that requires... a pre...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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and I had taken my eye off the ball. I had become very gentle, very relativistic in my approach to other people’s opinions and behaviors. I was “easy-going” is what I’m trying to say. Too easy-going. And in that situation of semi-unconsciousness and openness the cosmic giggle approaches. And I compare this-- this is cl...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher’s Amphiatrium Sapientium that’s chiseled over the alchemist’s doorway… I can’t do it in Latin but it says, “While sleeping, watch.” “While sleeping, watch.” --And I’ve noticed that while going to sleep there is a barrier. A place in the process of going to sleep that is li...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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[10:00]
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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I’ve talked basically, essentially about the individual’s relationship to the concept… to the fact. But there’s also a social or a political, species-wide implication. It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep… always. ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people quantum physics provides the answers. Their next-door neighbor may look to the channelling of archangels with equal fervor. I mean if this is not a Balkanisation of epistemology I don’t know what it is. It is accompanied by a related ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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you know, gaze in wonder --conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or isn't it comforting to believe that...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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seeking control-- the world bank, the communist party, the rich, the somebody-or-others --but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. Because this process that is underway will take the control-freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It's like trying to control a dream, you ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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destiny, these choices that you have, and then have people understand that they choose, you choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake or to be one part of the time in some situations and one part of the time in other situations. Now, if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field that is creat...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention. I mean, if you’re a devoté of the theory of stochastic, random unfolding of events, then you have to look very carefully at how un-random and how mythical and archetypal most people's lives are. You know, if you take psychedelics and hurl ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior, in nature. What do I mean by that? I mean, you can be the janitor at Microsoft and the Vice President and Chief of Operations, his daughter can bring him lunch one day and you can, from a distance, have your eye fall upon her and fall in love with her, an...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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[20:00]
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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she bears you go off to Harvard and the Sorbonne… it’s just a matter of running the clock forward. These things have… I mean to you it may seem like a miracle, but to those of us who are students of human happenstance it’s inevitable. I mean, you can launch your story. And I’ve, you know, in the course of taking psyche...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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comparing dream on many scales. You have to really struggle, I think, to believe that you actually live inside the model of reality that science and Newtonian physics and the mathematical analysis of nature have given us. Not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers everything that is important-- ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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the plasticity of time in the dream, and I think I would argue as the devil’s advocate that it is the plasticity of historical time and the acceleration, the sense of an out-of-control spin-up or spin-down into new domains of possibility… it is the strongest evidence at hand that we are in some kind of dream. I’ve stru...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the twentieth century, the primary contribution of twentieth century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this body and soul are all made of information. Information is a deeper and more...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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relationship to dream and human culture I have realized that cultures are like operating systems. We are like hardware. The human animal is a piece of biological wetware/hardware. And it has been, we know, pretty much as we confront it today for at least 140,000 years. At Klasies River Cave Mouth in South Africa they h...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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kings of Ur, and that was the cultural operating system. And if in a deal trading goats for olives a dispute arose, people had reference to the central operating system and these things were determined. Well now, “Ur-101” was fine for olives and goat trading but it didn’t support higher mathematics, it didn’t support r...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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such anxiety. If you meet an aboriginal person from the Amazon for example, they may be running “Witoto 3.0” as their operating system. Nicely supports animistic magic, huge capacity when it comes to making fish traps and bird traps. Witoto is a powerful operating system for a rainforest aboriginal. In our culture ther...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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[30:00]
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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all going at the same time. Some will run Mormonism, some will support Catholicism, others, Kabbalah goes at the speed of light. Others support quantum physics, some support econometrics, others support political correctness, and these things are mutually exclusive. And so, looking at this and looking at this clash of ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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that at great length but for those of you who are not biologists, “neoteny” is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. It’s used to describe animal behavior, for instance I’ll give the most spectacular example of neoteny. There is a kind of animal which lives in ponds in Africa and it reproduces like ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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beings look like fetal apes. Why? What is neoteny? Well this is hotly debated among evolutionary biologists but the point I want to make is a socio-political comment which is, “Culture itself is some kind of neotenizing force.” Because what culture provides is a bunch of rules - so you don’t have to think, and a bunch ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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“You wanna know where people came from? Well, when the sky god got out of his canoe at first waterfall and took a leak then we, the true people, appeared like ants and we’ve been living here ever since.” “Oh… huh. Gee thanks, I’m glad I asked.”
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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This is what culture does for you. But now technology throws a curve, and the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is. We figure out that what you’re supposed to work for isn’t worth having. We figure out that our politicians are buffoons. We figure out that professional scientists are repu...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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of clueless people who are figuring out which fork they should use. But this position is presented as alienation and therefore somehow tinged with the potential for pathology. You know, it’s a bad thing to be alienated. Now let’s speak for a moment, in order to fulfill the promise read in the introduction, about psyche...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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us from. So again, this neotenization thing is like the condition of unconsciousness that I described as the precondition for the cosmic giggle. Glamour, acts of magical conjuration, hypnotic delusion, and illusion, hysterias, fads, pseudo revelations, strange truths whispered in every quarter-- this is the character o...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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call “elegance of thought.” You know, people say, “Well how can you tell one theory from another… I mean is science better than religion,” and this and that-- After a lot of arm-waving it should be conceded that the final call is aesthetic. That because we are monkeys, because we are so far from god, we cannot set know...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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[40:00]
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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Trickier… even trickier. “The beautiful.” What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste. Really… really. And if you have no taste, god help you, because you are self-condemned to an appalling nightmare. You won’t be getting it, al...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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because these aren’t fine things but because they’re so slippery --but toward beauty. And with that in place, to my mind life... hope follows as a natural consequence. We talk a lot, and I’m sure there are people in this room who are well-versed and connected into the world of virtual reality which is a very hot topic ...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time
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steel and glass is not immediately erased the way you clear a screen. And the cost of making it is great. But Ur was a virtual reality. The Agora at Athens, ancient Rome, Canterbury Cathedral, these are virtual realities. Men and women have toiled at agriculture, at warfare, at childrearing, at many, many activities in...
https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time