Category: Terence McKenna

Psychedelic Salon – Podcast 066 – “Chaos and Imagination” (Part 2)

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:29 Terence McKenna:
“The ego is essentially paranoia institutionalized.”

03:53 Ralph Abraham:
Considers the possibility that ego became strengthened when psychedelic usage became less frequent.

05:29 Terence:
Talks about a “psychedelic rebirth.”

08:15 Terence:
“A calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing, and I have just the calendar all worked out.”

09:48 Terence:
“It’s an effort to deny man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and what we actually want is a calendar that says ‘all is flow, all is flux, all relationships are in motion to everything else. It’s a truer picture of the world.”

13:22 Rupert Sheldrake:
Comments on the fact that the Islamic calendar fits the definition of Terence’s suggested calendar.

16:22 Rupert:
“One of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine, and creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb, coming out of darkness.”

20:56 Terence:
“I think it’s the notion of as above so below.” . . . “In talking about these things you can’t force closure.”

22:14 Ralph:
Explains how the painting in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the black virgin) is actually a representation of the goddess chaos.

26:19 Terence:
Explains how the Faustian pact with the physical world that humans have made by adopting the “deadly cultural forms” of written language, moveable type, etc. have had a negative impact on our self-image. . . . “In the absence of this boundary-dissolving ecstasies, and replacing that with the machinations and plottings of the ego leads very, very quickly into a cultural cul de sac. . . . This was the wrong-turning.”

29:15 Terence:
Explains the difference between dominator and partnership.

33:17 Terence:
“You cannot trust the dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end.” . . . “Who is it who has the power to pry the dead fingers of the dominator culture from the instrumentality of power?” . . . “Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor.”

39:14 Terence:
Discusses the question of whether there can be consciousness without an object.

https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-066-chaos-and-imagination-part-2/

Psychedelic Salon – Podcast 065 – “Chaos and Imagination” (Part 1)

PROGRAM NOTES:
02:29 Ralph Abraham: “So I should like now to speak about the chaos
of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination.”

05:41 Ralph:
“Chaos, Gaia, and Eros are the gods, or concepts, of the primitive types.”

13:56 Ralph:
“People have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base.”

20:55 Terence McKenna: “Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language.”

22:16 Terence:
“The birthright that connects us to the divine is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination.” . . . “We have a secret history. Knowledge of which has been lost to us and only now is recoverable . . . ” . . . “We are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species.”

24:34 Terence:
“Once we lived in dynamic balance with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost.” . . . and then he explains what it is that we have lost and how it was lost.

27:46 Terence:
“There are certain episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving.”

29:00
Terence: “The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s going on.” . . . “For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.”

32:37 Terence:
“For me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

37:30 Terence:
“There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left us no choice.”

45:01 Terence:
“Fear it is that guards the vineyard.” . . . “So the fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control.”

https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-065-chaos-and-imagination-part-1/