Zendarts: Terence McKenna

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The Psychedelic Transhumanists - Article

"Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process. And yet, the future being as slippery as it is, there are as many visions for how this might occur as there are visionaries to guess at it. Computer scientists tend to have one transhumanism; genetic engineers, another. However, coherent themes emerge for those who have taken it upon themselves to make a sweeping survey of human inquiry, integrating a keen reading of the vectors of our technology with postmodern insight into the nature of mind." (Read the Rest at H+magazine)

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Terence McKenna quote

..."I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn’t perturb it, because as Marshall McLuhan said, 'whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t a fish'. Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness; and yet we know it’s there. Well, the reason we know it’s there is because if you perturb it, then you see it; and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it, which is the mind/brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion, then you see: it’s like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water – suddenly the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible, because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic is like a dye-marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, 'Oh, I see – it works like this… and like this'." ~Terence McKenna, The Importance of Psychedelics...
(via The Archaic Revival)

Image: "psychedelic splash" by Perbear42

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

...“The real message of psychedelics, I think, is to reclaim experience and to trust yourself. Your perceptions are primary. Your feelings are correct. Everything must constellate out and make sense and parse with what you know. If you don’t start from that assumption then you are off center to begin with. And the psychedelics will dissolve the cultural programming that has potentially made you a mark and restore your authenticity.” ~Terence McKenna...