Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that a fear of losing control in psychedelic experiences reflects a deeper misunderstanding of true control in life.
Terence McKenna's quote highlights the egocentric nature of contemporary culture, which often prioritizes control and dominance. He argues that the fear associated with psychedelic experiences stems from a misunderstanding of control itself; true freedom and understanding come from letting go of the need to dominate one’s experiences and accepting the unpredictability of life. In essence, McKenna invites us to reconsider our relationship with control and encourages a more open, exploratory approach to consciousness.
In practice
In a discussion about personal growth and exploring consciousness.
We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.
It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.
. . . we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.
We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.
The federal government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it . . . is now universally admitted.
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