TERENCE MCKENNA: The real issue is what kind of mental world shall people inhabit?
What kinds of hope shall be permitted?
What kind of value systems shall be allowed?
And the value systems that agrandise the possession of things
the tearing up of the earth
competition classism racism sexism
have led us to the brink of catastrophe.
Now I think we have to abandon western cultural values and return to the
deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plans.
That's the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature.
And if we can do this then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.
Very little of the past can be saved.
The architechtonics the machines the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda
the silly religions the assinine asthetic cannons very little of that can be saved.
But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring and mutuality
that we all uh put into and take from the human enterprise.
You know theres a Grateful Dead song that says
you can't go back and you can't stand still
if the thunder don't get you than the lightning will
and we now hold
through the possession of these psychedlics
catalysts for the human imagination
of sufficient power that if we use them
we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle
that is carrying us towards the brink of apocalypse.
We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship
that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be waiting us.
But its a cultural test.
Nature is pitiless.
Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been risked.
But if it proves inadequate
nature will cover it over with the same kind of
cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs, the trilobines and the crosockdarigiens fishes
and all those other folks who came before.
So what we must do I think is see our future in the imagination.
Catalyse the imagination.
Form symbiotic relationships with the plants.
Affirm archaic values and spread the good news
that what is out of control
what is in fact dying
is a world that had become too top heavy with its own hubris.
Too bent by its own false value system and too dehumanized to care about what happens to its own children.
So I say good riddance to it.
Bring on the archaic revival and
lets create a new world. That's it.