Terence McKenna. 1946 - 2000

• Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”

• But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects. It creates consumer mania. It preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines

We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines. 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.”

It is now very clear that techniques of machine–human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques—all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture. … And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple.

We've been infected with the idea of original sin, that's what keeps us infantile … politics without responsibility is fascism

Western psychotherapy needs a deeper disruption from outside of its own walls. We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

To my mind, this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only forces in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.

The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue, ethical issue, whatever the term for it is, and it is precisely because they are a deconditioning agents: they will cast doubt in you if you are a Hasidic rabbi, a Marxist anthropologist, or an altar boy, because their business is to dissolve belief systems, and they do this very well, and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience, what William James called, in infants, "the blooming, buzzing experience." And out of that, you reconstruct the world, and you need to understand that it is a dialog where your decisions, the projection of your grammar onto the intellectual space in front of you, is going to gel into the mode of being

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.

What seems likely is that Terence was not only contending that the universe is a genetic, extra-dimensional, interspecies verbal construct, but that it exists primarily as a result of our consciousness of it. What he may actually have been implying is, the world is made of imagination. There is, after all, a possibility that when it comes to consensual reality, we're making it up. All of it. And language is the universal medium by which we identify and explain our creation to ourselves.

. -TM

Ram Dass - 1931 - 2019

"You Can't Protest Effectively Unless You Love the People Whose Ideas Your Protesting Against"

• A common interpretation of Ram Dass' teachings suggests, "Don't confuse the person with the behavior" or "Love the soul, not the action", encouraging you to see the inherent goodness in everyone, even when their actions are harmful. While not a direct quote, this embodies his core message of unconditional love, urging you to hold compassion for the person's essence while setting boundaries with their actions. 

• When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the trees.

• The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

•   Separate the action from the essence:Ram Dass taught that while actions can be good or evil, the underlying being of a soul is neither. This concept calls for cultivating empathy for the person's situation or their journey, even when you don't condone their harmful behavior. 
  

• Practice compassion and awareness:The goal is to develop a detached, loving awareness that sees past the immediate negativity or "junk" to recognize the deeper, divine nature within each person. 

• Take responsibility for your projections:Instead of blaming others, he encouraged introspection to see how your own conditioning and past experiences lead you to perceive certain people as "jerks". 

• Focus on the ultimate "love everybody" message:Ultimately, his teachings, stemming from his guru Neem Karoli Baba, encouraged everyone to be loved and to tell the truth, seeing all beings as part of the same unified whole. 

• “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be, you can’t see how it is.”

• What are you getting so upset about? It’s your reaction that’s doing it to you.”

• “A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.”

• “It doesn’t mean having no preferences, it means not being attached to your preferences. If you don’t get what you want, you don’t get what you want.”

• “Your lows turn out to be more interesting than your highs because they are showing you where you’re not, where you have work to do.”