Podcast 288 – “What’s So Great About Mushrooms?” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's impossible to stop the forward march of information.” “This is the chaos at the end of history.” “Because our culture crisis is so much deeper [than during the Renaissance], we are casting back to 20,000 or 30,000 years back into the past.” “I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is a task of recognizing it when you find it.” “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.” “Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.” “One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is because they catalyze the evolution of language.” “I see the whole world we're living in as basically the legacy of LSD.” “The dreams of the alchemists of the 16th Century have been entirely realized in the technical accomplishments of the 20th Century.” “[Acid] heads are in charge of designing the cutting edge of culture.” “But there are no professionals in the field of self-exploration. That's everybody's job. I mean, you all are Ph.D.s in consciousness exploration, or if you're not you should be, because what else have you got going?” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Occupy Video Streams Livestream.com Ustream.com OccupyStream.com Links to David Graeber's Work Wikipedia entry about David Graeber Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination by David Graeber A conversation with anarchist David Graeber about anthropology on the Charlie Rose program Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber