You Are Not Peripheral

The felt presence of direct experience is the nexus of space and time that is completely unique to your existence. The rest is another roadside attraction.

Terence McKenna - The Apotheosis Of Male Dominator Fury

The video above could have been spoken yesterday by Terence McKenna.


It's a good time to observe and scrutinise the universe instead of grasping at material acquisition, manipulating power accumulation, indulging in trivial distractions and lending credence to the dog and pony show of corporate media and their processed-cheese, news-media, mugging-drugging self-fulfilling constructed-reality show.

Terence Mckenna & Moby Dick On The Vagina Dentata Of The Sperm Whale

As the dominator male culture takes a last few swirls round the toilet before exiting this act in the cycle it's worth appreciating that McKenna has been forecasting this from decades before. This particular Herman Melville quote used by McKenna has stood out for me time and again this year and is an exquisite example of his rhetorical skills. A talent that he sometimes attributed to drawing upon outside forces of channelled collaboration.

Time Is Speeding Up

One of the reasons I treat Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero hypothesis respectfully is I recognise his assertion that that time is speeding up. At this rate I will be sixty in a flash and eighty even faster. It's a tricky subject to pin down as the neurology for the subject i.e. more new things happen when we're we're younger then when we're older doesn't match with the traditional perception that time speeds up anyway as we become older (despite less new things happening). I've been investigating this a bit and asking as many young and old people as I can how they feel. Most regurgitate a bit of the neurology or traditional consensus but I can't help sensing a little nervousness over the subject. A sense that something is happening. People never say 'no'. They say 'no' and then explain why time 'appears' to be speeding up. My question is leading, and their answer is invariably unscientific because there is no science of what time is.

Last Saturday I met with a friend and we talked about a lot of subjects but one response stood out for the first time I've heard it. He said his sixteen year old girl could sense time was speeding up. That's a first.

Rupert Sheldrake's Google Talk - The Extended Mind

I find the Google Talks held at Mountain View are more generous than the TED talks in terms of depth as they permitted to go on for longer. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots. 

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor and Academic Director of the Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. 

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:

A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)

The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)

Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions) 

Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)

The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna: 

Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)

The Evolutionary Mind (1998) 

With Matthew Fox: 

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)

The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996) 

Michael Talbot - The Holographic Universe (As Above, So Below)

The more I study the new physics model including much of the holographic universe, the more I find it all hangs together in a way that the paradox of the standard model and quantum mechanics makes increasingly irrelevant. The materialist science junkies are relegated to smashing things up into smaller and smaller (metaphysical?) pieces while all the cool kids like Nassim Haramein and Jay Weidner are weaving them together into toroidal shaped vortexes of beauty and harmony.

Michael Talbot died prematurely from a rare cancer, and falls into that group of thinkers who challenged the materialist message sold by consumer fetishism's priests and scientists. People like John Lennon, Bob Marley and Bill Hicks who also died early, and for whom I question the nature of their death.

Remember: Study hard, work harder, consume as hard as you can and borrow hardest. Never question the premise of it all. 

Terence McKenna - Gender Talk

A lovely interview I've not heard before with Terence McKenna on GenderTalk Radio with Nancy Nangeroni using a bespoke 'Skype' set up to call in to the radio show from Hawaii. Recorded on July 15th, 1998. 

Ken Adam's Friendship & Collaborations With Terence McKenna

This is a warm, honest and affectionate (sometimes raw) interview with Ken Adam's who worked artistically with Terence McKenna. It's not to be missed in my opinion.

Blurb: Ken Adams, psychedelic film maker and new media mage will join me and we'll discuss the life and times of his good friend, Terence McKenna, along with Ken's soon-to-be-released film, "Terra Lumina." Ken captured Terence on camera and off during the halcyon days of the San Francisco Rave scene and the entheogenic rush of the mid-to-late Nineties. We'll explore the ramifications of McKenna's work as we approach 2012, the year that he loosely called, "The Eschaton." Please join us on a journey into alien dreamtime and strange attraction

Terence McKenna - Nine Recorded Hours Of True Hallucinations

I seem to recall listening to this 9 hour recording earlier this year in 15 minute chunks on Youtube before losing the plot line one too many times, due to occasional nodding off. Eventually I downloaded the pdf book off the net and read it to fill in the gaps I had no chance of identifying. 

It's very much about the young McKenna but between him and his brother Denis they experience something I don't think anyone else has described elsewhere though I have heard William Henry talk about the glowing blue electrolytic skin effect that Terence experienced during a sexual encounter he had on this trip. So there's a comparative mythology Stargate episode here but other than that it's unique and very possibly important though Dennis prefers to downplay the episode he is in some chapters the star of the story.

I've written more about it back here.

Terence McKenna - History Ends In Green

Another great Youtube upload of seven hours and more of Terence McKenna by Alchemical Archives. I've heard this recording many times before but I still fell asleep and awoke to it with great enjoyment. Here's a few quotes from other recordings that I swiped elsewhere on the net.

“It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth.”

“Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.”

“When talking about evolution it is important to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics is that there is no teleology. That means that evolution is not moving toward something. All notion of purpose has to be given up. It isn’t that things evolve or move toward higher forms. It’s just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher form.”

“At five dried grams (of magic mushrooms) it’s very easy to invoke a voice, a kind of logos-like phenomenon, which operates as the typical hierophant. It’s the teaching voice. It’s Virgil to Dante. It’s a very large and superior force which takes you by the hand and then narrates the various scenarios that you’re conveyed through. … The trick is to get something out of it and get away clean.”

“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.”

“We’re very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding. But has anyone stopped to notice that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding, necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown becomes larger and larger. It’s like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that there’s an awful lot of darkness.”

“I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language. Because what you cannot think you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine you cannot steer your culture and go. So I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulates the evolution of human culture generally.”

“Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.”

“The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.”

Terence McKenna - Eros & The Eschaton (Why Consumer Culture Is Brainless Culture)

"We have to stop consuming our culture. 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. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral -- get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play 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."

Terence McKenna - New York City, 29 April 1994

History is a race between education and catastrophe.


Do not consume.


Nothing comes unannounced.


Do not follow.


His New York Times obituary is here.

Terence McKenna - What's So Great About Mushrooms?

Terence McKenna's shtick about the stoned ape theory which is pretty much disproven now (and actually he knew it was a good story designed to reframe the entheogen Psilocybin discussion) but it's still a good narrative that displays his linguistic talents and polymath ability.

Terence McKenna - How Evolution Occurs

Terence McKenna talking about language, evolution and psychedelics in 1984

Culture & Ideology Are Not Your Friends

There are a number of shorter Terence McKenna clips condensing this theme but I don't think there's any substitution for listening to one of Terence's finest think pieces on the subject of culture and ideology, which just like nationalism, flag waving and patriotism are the most urgently needed legacies of the nation state era that we need to dispense with. 

I say it again. People who wave flags (metaphorically or literally) are dangerously misinformed. Those ideas belong to the 18th century and are part of the problem instead of a global solution we most urgently need.

Terence McKenna - Hermeticism & Alchemy

Another terrific recording of Terence McKenna with long forays into the roots of renaissance art and classicism as many people are unaware of McKenna's art historian roots before his Asia travels around Japan, Indonesia and Thailand.

Terence McKenna - Build Your Own Damn Boat (Wagon)

One of my all time favourites for range and depth.

9/11 & Terence McKenna Synchronism (The World & It's Double)

Alchemical Archives writes: On the 10 year anniversary of  the WTC attacks  still find myself more interested in the many synchronicities involving this date over the actual event itself, which needs to be put into perspective against the horror thats been exported in its name. Because this date is so embedded in our consciousness its allowed a window on to synchronicity other dates have not provided (although i suspect all moments sync under inspection). I know Terence's Timewave Theory has many holes in it but maybe he was close to something else, maybe events send ripples forward and backward through time pointing to a holographic model of spacetime leaking into our linear model of existence. There is a WTC reference at 51.11 the talk was given on 11 September 1993

In this lecture, Terence McKenna talks about the tragic situation we humans have placed ourselves in, and ways in which the boundry dissolution effects of psychedelic medicines can possibly save our species from what appears to be a certain extinction. . . . "What the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable."

"It seems to me that culture, at least this culture, is a shabby lie."

"We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort. . . . You don't get serial killers in the chipmunk population."

"We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of
matter, and pretty much confined to its surface."

"We're in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it."

For approximately 500 years [sciences] argument for its pre-eminence was the beautiful toys that it could create: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that is a fool's argument for truth! I mean, that's after all how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an entirely rational way to proceed.

Images: Oculus, Jones/Ginzel (1998)
Location: Chambers Street/World Trade Center, Park Place

Oculus consists of 301 mosaic panels by artists Kristin Jones, Andrew Ginzel and Rinaldo Piras. The project presents the eyes of three hundred individual New Yorkers translated from a photographic study conducted by Jones/Ginzel into stone mosaic by the classically trained Piras. The centerpiece of the work is an elliptical glass and stone mosaic floor, with a magnificent micro mosaic eye at the center of an ultramarine vortex with the image of the City of New York woven into the picture.

Terence McKenna - The Light In Nature

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. 

It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. 

At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. 

But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward." 

~ Terence McKenna -The Light In Nature (1988) Esalen

Terence McKenna - Tree Of Knowledge

Ten and a half hours of Terence McKenna speaking in Boulder Colarado between May 29-31 1992. I've listened to all these many times so I guess I have an 'ology' in McKenna but there are two talks randomly stored on the other computer and which I haven't been able to hunt down again, that I so want to find because I've never heard them posted by anybody else and they are unforgettable. The first is one talk by Terence to a UFO audience and for some reason Terence is really angry (the only time I have heard it in his voice) and he harangues the audience with the most vociferous proselytizing of the DMT on record.

I know he always proselytized DMT (and psilocybin with good reason) but on this occasion it's hell for leather and if I'm not mistaken it was provoked by a mystery fax he received before the lecture. The other lecture that I'm itching to find is a McKenna speech where he channels the 'other' who informs him that the earth will split in two in 2012, which is  eerie because that's exactly what a number of psychics and hypnotic regression experts have said will happen a decade or so later. It's one of those very tiny absurd details in hundreds of hours of listening to people from disparate sources where the correlation has made me sit up and WTF so to speak. When I say the earth splits I mean one dimension remains here and another earth ascends. Check out the Dolores Cannon posts to see what I mean.