Terrence McKenna - Go it Alone

the issue that hovers around the psychedelic experience it was mentioned last night it's strong in my life I haven't found any real solution other than hold your nose and jump but the issue is surrender this is something real you don't find people going into the ashram in the morning to meditate with their knees knocking and fear because of how terrifying and profound they know that meditation is going to be that if they were going in there to smoke DMT you know they would be fully riveted on the modalities of what was about to happen I

mean we can tell from shinola it's just that we don't always prefer shinola and and I'm not like I don't advocate it you know people like sometimes there are people who are disappointed because they say well how often do you do it well the answer is not very often I mean if I can get it in a couple or three times a year I feel like I'm hitting it pretty hard and the more successful it is the less often you have to do with I mean I know people who say DMT is their most favorite

drug and when you say well when was the last time you did it they say whoa 1967 there's it only lasted four minutes they're still processing it and and they are still processing it they're not just whistling Dixie I mean I it is to my mind the just the most well I mentioned this earlier the question how do they keep the lid on this stuff and I suppose here I'm preaching to the converted because every many people last night said they had an interest in this kind of thing but they don't keep the lid on

sexuality no society has ever had it so under control that people didn't have sex I mean they may have had sex under weird conditions and under you know ritual strictures and listen but we are like this salamander that has the option of never developing into its mature form and to my mind that that's a tragedy because this is our birthright and somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state the - I I feel very strongly are linked and that of course we can't

get control of the world because we are children in some profound way and we don't like being children it's but the culture has reinforced a form of infantile ism and the way I explained it to myself is it's a kind of unwillingness to go it alone on a certain level I don't know how many of you remember in brave new world Huxley's brilliant dystopia but there's a scene in there where Bernard who is the guy who's out of it in the novel because in his fetal fluid they got an alcohol contaminant and so he's different

from everybody else in this society and he occasionally has original thoughts and he and his assigned girlfriend for the evening or whatever she is are in a helicopter and they sweep out past the crematorium where they're recollecting elements for reuse and he suspends the helicopter over the Black Bay and and she immediately becomes very agitated Restless anxious and pleads with him to return to the city and what it is is it's her anxiety over being alone in the presence of nature she literally can't take it and I think there are a lot of people in

our society and each of us in our own way at different times who have within us this neurotic and infantile creature that can't face it alone and that this going at alone thing is very important you know platanus the great Neoplatonic philosopher he spoke of the mystical experience as the flight of the alone to be alone and in the psychedelic experience there is this issue of surrender because a lot of people want to diddle with it they want to be able to say they did it but they don't ever want to face an actual moment

where they put it all on the line and yet the whole issue with this stuff is to let it lead to let it show what it wants to show so somehow individually we have to reclaim our experience the the real message more important even than the psychedelic experience the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience that as people the real universe is you know within your reach always everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor and we insert ourselves like ants or honey bees

into hierarchies of knowledge so we say well what's going on in the world well turn on CNN and you know and then somehow we're ordered then say AHA okay it's 85 degrees in Baghdad and the wind is out of the Northeast at 15 miles an hour and we feel somehow better now because we're getting the information but what we have done is sold out direct experience and all institutions require this of us that we somehow redefine ourselves for the convenience of the institution and this redefinition always involves a narrowing a denial so that you know

if you want to be in Marxist society if you want to function in Marxist society you have to define yourself as a Marxist human being well it turns out in a Marxist society there are no homosexuals because that just happens in decadent societies so then you know if you happen to notice any tendency like this in yourself you have to deny its existence because it does this just doesn't happen in a Marxist society and similarly every society has this in our society if you hear voices we have mental hospitals for you if you if you

have vast visions of the future you know we have drugs that can help you and make this go away so we so then somehow in modern society the discovery of psychedelics is the discovery that all of this cultural machinery is just Wizard of Oz stuff you remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the curtain is swept back and they see the little guy there and he says booming out over the loudspeaker ignore the little man pulling the lovers ignore the little man pulling the levers will the little man pulling the levers is what

sweeps into view with psychedelics and you discover aha culture is provisional you know whether we have nine wives or three whether we tattoo ourselves blue whether we eat insects or not all of these things are just decisions that we make and then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom and we live within that and we hunt down and kill all the people who disagree with this and that's called having a culture having a way of life being somebody that with you know I don't see history as a wrong turning I see it the metaphor that I

like is that of the prodigal son that there was a reason for this long descent into matter this peregrination it was a shamanic journey of some sort you know the shaman goes into the the world pool or ascends the world tree to go to the center of the axis of the cosmos to recover the pearl the pearl or the gift or the lost soul and then returned with it and this is what history was I think it was a descent into the hell worlds of matter energy space and time for the purpose of recovering something

that was lost it wasn't lost by us it was lost by the breathing the die systole of the planet just climax of climate moved us into paradise and then moved us out of paradise I mean not that the story of Eden is the story of history's first drug bust I mean it's the story of a whole lot of tension over who's going to take or not take a certain plant which confers knowledge and yahwah wandering in the garden says to himself if the man and the woman eat of the fruit they will become as we

are the issue was Co equality called knowledge with the Creator well where where do we stand you know and man's existential march that how does that work can we always accept the subservient infantile position I mean is knowledge to be dispensed by gods and if not gods than be institutions that appoint themselves as gods over us or is it actually that maturity begins with somehow claiming this birthright and it is a birthright and I don't know if if the society can survive the claiming of this birthright by a large number of people certainly in the

1960s when this was attempted everything everybody got very agitated and then it was frozen out in in so-called primitive or preliterate societies there is the office of the shaman and the shaman is deputized to act for all of us in the same way that we have airplane mechanics to fix jet engines we have shamans to explore these hidden and fairly terrifying other dimensions the people who self-select themselves into a group like this in a society like that would be the candidates for this kind of shamanic voyage