Yesterday I came across an interestingly odd — even loopy — article on Scientific American Blogs about the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.
Apparently McKenna came up with the 21 December 2012 apocalypse long before anyone have delved into the intricacies of the Mayan calendar. The article is a report of an interview with him in 1999 not long before his death, and supposedly tries to uncover whether McKenna was serious in proposing the December 2012 apocalypse or whether he was just being outrageous for the fun of it.
Well you won’t find an answer to that but reading the article, which contains more than a few grains of truth, will give you an insight into the mind of a genuine fruit-loop. Or was he loopy? Maybe he was just a far-sighted shaman.
Anyway I’ll leave you to read the article but here are a few other quotes from McKenna. At first sight many seem crazy, but look deeper and they contains some surprisingly perception nuggets of wisdom and deep thought.
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviours are acceptable.
Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it’s there it doesn’t require your belief — and if it’s not there why should you believe in it?
And last, but not least …
Pay Attention.
And keep breathing.