Podcast 491 – “McKenna, Alchemy, and the World Today”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“A child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it.”
“Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root.”
“Modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of Cartesian rationalism.”
“The imagination is central to the alchemical opus, because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical dimension.”
“We cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination.”
“Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism.”
“Authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That's what they're talking about, authentic being.”
“Somehow it's possible for an informing voice to come into cognition that knows more than you do. It is a connection with the collective unconscious, I suppose, that is convivial, conversational, and just talks to you about the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world.”
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