The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
Interpretation
Psychedelics suggest that our culture can prioritize emotions and spirituality over materialism, which can be a daunting idea.
This quote by Terence McKenna emphasizes the transformative potential of psychedelics in reshaping cultural values. Instead of being centered around consumerism and material goods, McKenna advocates for a shift toward cultivating emotional depth and spiritual understanding. The notion that culture could be 're-engineered' in this way presents a radical departure from conventional norms, which can be both liberating and unsettling, as it challenges deeply ingrained societal beliefs about success and fulfillment.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on modern spirituality vs. consumer culture.
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.
Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.
If God is treated as God during suffering, then suffering can reveal and present him in all his greatness.
Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they can not separate from our consciousness, shall follow it whithersoever that shall go, and are of their nature divine and immortal.
America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity - the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.
How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?
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