Podcast 102 – “Build Your Own Damn Boat”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

05:33 Terence begins with a discussion of "the felt presence of immediate experience."

08:10 Terence McKenna: "The thing I like about the Zippy culture and the house, trance-dance, techno culture is that it’s about feeling. The combination of young people, drugs, a fairly sexually charged social environment, and syncopated music is just all designed to draw you into you and your friends and your scene, and your hood, and your place in the cosmos and not sell you out as a consumer to Hollywood, or Manhattan-manufactured forms of entertainment."

10:01 Terence McKenna: "The culture is so capable of assimilating and disarming its critics through hype and fashion. I mean, I was horrified to see that ad, ‘Alan Ginsberg work kakis’. Did you see that!"

12:28 Terence McKenna: "What Rupert’s [Sheldrake] theory carries as an implication is what Prigogine now proclaims, which is, what we thought were eternal natural laws are simply something more like habits. Habits of Nature."

26:49 Terence begins his discussion of paradigm shift.

28:57 Terence McKenna: "So, human freedom is the precondition for the assumption of man’s flaw, man’s fall. You know, what Thomas Aquinas called the felix culpa, the happy flaw."

30:12 Terence McKenna: "A paradigm is a lens through which you see the world, and everything is transformed when you look through this lens."

32:42 Terence McKenna: "If habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism. It’s more like a creature. It learns, It gains experience. As it matures it changes its strategy. As it expands its experience it gains new domains of emergent subtlety."

36:36 Terence McKenna: "The dimension of human freedom is a precondition for guilt. Only the free can be guilty because only the free can be responsible for what they do."

48:37 Terence McKenna: "What we call nature is a novelty-conserving engine, that what nature glories in is novelty."

49:48 Terence McKenna: "Sometimes for ‘novelty’ I’ve used the phrase ‘density of connection.’ "

1:01:13 Terence McKenna:"And when you think about it, if you really believe in eternal laws of nature then you have a philosophical mess on your hands."

1:05:35 Terence McKenna: "Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism there is not consciousness."

1:12:35 Terence begins a discussion about memes.

1:27:49 Terence McKenna: "We are very fortunate to live through an age of enormous reappraisal."

1:30:17 Terence McKenna: "Humor is an admission of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. And in a sense, to take it to a deeper level, magic is a deeper perception than science. Because science believes that the world is truly there it is naive in its emphericism. Magic knows that the world is made of language. That the world is the construct of forceful imagination. And the people who don’t know this are walking around in the world of the people who do."

1:31:27 Terence McKenna: "Do not lease other people’s linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds. Build your own values and your own house of mirrors."

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