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1996-05-06
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From: shafey@hammel.qal.berkeley.edu (Omar Shafey)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Terence McKenna Interview
Date: 10 Oct 1994 00:02:13 GMT
Message-ID: <37a0a5$fls@agate.berkeley.edu>
A good interview with Terence McKenna was published today in the San
Francisco Chronicle/Examiner Sunday Magazine. The cover title is
"Apocalypse Soon: Psychedelic Anthropologist Terence McKenna Takes
on the Brave New World" but the article itself is titled "Millenium
Witness."
For those who are interested but can't manage to look up a copy, here
are some of the juicier quotes gleaned from the interview:
"Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about
behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern-
dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different
awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote
questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value
examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral
patterns"
"The important thing about cannabis is its consciousness-altering
efffect, and I think the Establishment is perfectly aware that
that's the issue. They're keeping cannabis illegal because it
causes people to question the social values that they're being
programmed with."
"Bill Clinton is an international corporatist, exactly as George
Bush was an international corporatist. There is only one agenda
for the American Establishment - that is to dominate the world
and wring its resources from it in order to create an unconscionable
amount of wealth for a tiny number of people.That's the game that's
being played even as the signs accumulate that this will ruin the
planet. The great struggle that looms ahead ...(unless) we die
under anesthesia from 700 channels of MTV ... is the struggle
between capitalism and ecological values: Do we turn everything
into products? Do we destroy all resource bases in order to deliver
junk to people who are made unhappy by it? Or do we begin to limit
consumption, redefine what an upper-class lifestyle really means
and attempt to get hold of ourselves?"
"Nobody ever went to hell on psychedelics, or very *few* people. (For)
hardcore dissipation ... you go to Jack Daniels, methedrine, coke,
junk (heroin), and pills."
"I founded (with my ex-wife in 1985) ... a botanical preservation project
designed to locate rare, endangered plants with a history of shamanic
usage and preserve them all in a botanical garden in Hawaii."
Q: Why?
"To cut the costs and research cycle for drug companies. In other words,
drug companies will not have to mount an Amazon expedition. They can
simply order 100 kilos of this plant from us for lab analysis."
__________________________________________________________________________
There is, of course, much more about cosmic giggles, plant gnosis, and
the evolution of the human brain and civilization as hinging on the
effects of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, etc.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about Terence. In many ways I agree
with his critiques of the economic and political order and I am sympathetic
to his calls for an "archaic revival." On the other hand, alot of his
cosmic mushroom theorizing strikes me as the ravings of a guy who is
tripping hard and trying to convince me that his hallucinations are "real".
Also, I detect a bit of self-contradiction (perhaps hypocrisy?) as
evidenced in the quotes above. In one, Terence decries the turning of
everything in the world into marketed products while at the same time
he is commodifying the most sacred shamanic plants in order to assist
drug companies in their pursuit of profit. Is't he "selling out" to the
"Establishment" he so vilifies or is he just being realistic?
Oh, by the way, Terence predicts that the world as we know it will be
massively transformed in the year 2012. We only have to wait 18 years
to find out whether he's a visionary or just another crackpot!