Tuesday, 20 September 2011

Terence McKenna: How Evolution Occurs (1984)

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This is another early Terence McKenna lecture that was given sometime in 1984. Particularly considering the year it was delivered, there is more talk about psychedelics and the psychedelic experience than could be found elsewhere. But McKenna doesn't confine himself to only talking about psychedelics. Other topics include his early thoughts about language, culture, and the fact that the psychedelic community may be some sort of mutant population that is just waiting for certain selective parameters to change and enable the mutants to steer our species in a new direction. He gives Insight in to what intrigues him about glossolalia and explains how he went about invoking it in a mushroom session. Also we hear a very clear explanation of how he views the possibility of immortality.


“Human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts in your head by simply uttering small mouth noises.”


“It is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man which is evolving. Culture carries along. At the present moment we are able to speak 21st centuries ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at about the 1950s level.”


“I believe that people have deeper and subtler senses of humor. I think that people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity. I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction simply because so much LSD was taken in the Sixties. And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.”


MP3


Edited from the Psychedelic Salon Podcast

1 comment:

datavismo said...

This talk is HUGE... I can´t even begin to express how grateful I am for these. THANK YOU