"develop immunity to negativity" 10'27 @DalienTha_Alien @OutreDragon these guys wouldn't touch the subject of inculturation spectacles like #Nine11 with a ten-foot pole. no way...
08'25 "If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness."
08'25 "a memeplex's immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas" BLOG POST
09'02 @cosmopinciotti in case one needed any more proof: TWEET "develop immunity to negativity"
TWEET -pic* I like smiling
08'25 "you can get lost in symbols and call yourself an intellectual, but you'll get paid more if you call yourself a lawyer" BLOG POST
08'27 "it could be a mechanism by which the fetus ensures maternal fitness in order to enhance its own chances of survival" ARTICLE
08'27 "when pregnant women have damage in other organs, including brain, lung and liver...fetal cells show up there, too" ARTICLE
08'27 you have to understand corporatism first (god, government, law, money) before you're able to really understand the whole dimension of "9/11"
10'27 @OutreDragon I'm also particularly concerned about doing it very attentively, because I don't want to end up like this clown @Youniversoul13
@cosmopinciotti be nice...
10'27 How one proves oneself a liar... TWEET Thanks for the reminder, Dragonheart!
10'27 "unlike Zimbardo, we believe that what became apparent in his prison experiment – widely revealed through the realities of the recent abuses at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons – is simply an extreme manifestation of all hierarchical power relations" BOOK
10'27 "atheistic totalitarian regimes hold the belief that their citizens cannot be trusted to choose their own beliefs" beliefs under control are the most important reason for McKenna's final conclusion that "culture is not your friend"
10'27 but doesn't everyone who preaches something wholeheartedly do that in the name of love?
TWEET Let me tell you the worst thing you can ever do to someone. Tell them you love them when you don't.
@cosmopinciotti do you agree with everything that man says?
idolization is exactly the thing I try to stay away from
10'27 @nr1woman no, I do not TWEET
he's kind of a world champion, but with a massive ontological deficit TWEET
10'29 @cosmopinciotti There is still hope for your soul, if you focus on more than just pussies and shrooms.
10'27 @nr1woman I do not hope either. not one bit. and you hopefully see the whole spectrum of the magic of a frivolous vadge and an amanita muscaria
@cosmopinciotti seen it, done it. still hope for something "deeper"
10'27 @nr1woman What could be deeper than the adored soul of a paramour in the light of history and the vastness of the spiritual dimension?
@cosmopinciotti We are trees in a forest.
09'28 @nr1woman sure! "When I grow up I want to be a forest." BLOG POST And who lives there with the trees? TWEET
10'27 "it's quite brilliant really, and so I applaud the evil intelligence that concocted this scheme. most of us feel a need to connect with a higher spirit and awareness. this natural desire was hijacked by institutions who service the soul at very reasonable prices..." Julian Wash
10'28 "when von Moltke's Prussian blitzkrieg culminated in the French disaster at Sedan and a German Empire was finally proclaimed, ending a thousand years of disunion. Prussian schooling was the widely credited forge which made those miracles possible" BOOK
"Loyalty is everything" #RealTalk
10'28 yes, loyalty's the actual glue –The Jesus Magic– that binds this corporatist "9/11"-system together TWEET
10'28 @anaturaldreamer oops, I found a definition for love TWEET
10'28 @ceoMARS @zoltan_istvan oh dear WEBSITE popularity is a bad sign
@cosmopinciotti interesting amalgamation of images
10'28 @OutreDragon if I may venture a guess, the #tactfuldragon TWEET isn't amused by some of the darker considerations in there
10'28 @cosmopinciotti amused? no. reluctantly curious? yes.
10'28 @OutreDragon What a superb counter! As razor-sharp as elegant, beautifully precise.
That's exactly what turns me on. Pinpoint interventions.
10'28 @lifessubatomic really? wouldn't this put the whole notion of D/s romanticism into question? TWEET
10'28 @lifessubatomic I see it a bit more fundamentally TWEET with the symbiotic use of language as a beginning and a guideline.
@cosmopinciotti I'm very quick at harvesting the energy of an ideology and metabolizing it.
I only need a little taste for perspective.
10'28 @lifessubatomic I have found @failingjoyfully through Stephanie TWEET 3 days ago.
Her energy is worth the metabolization.
@cosmopinciotti people likely shortcut and reroute our direction (knowingly and not), giving us their path to beat down ahead of them.
10'28 @lifessubatomic "it's hard for me to recognize people as something I'm part of"
@cosmopinciotti when I do, it's the humanity as a whole I glimpse, that everyone has the same basic needs, and I can work with that
10'28 @lifessubatomic It surely is a noble gesture to call in the holy whole in order to avoid meaningful connections full of darkness, fog and dirt.
@cosmopinciotti only in this avenue, Uwe. You know me no other way.
10'28 @lifessubatomic it's the main street of a being together, talking together.
and I am a learning being. I need food for thought. Inspiration, baby.
10'29 McKenna reconsidered TUNNEL by Patrick Lundborg 03'04'13
A dozen years after his untimely death, our perception of Terence McKenna is still up in the air, still very much in a formative stage. Very little has changed in the way Terence is revered (frequently) and criticized (rarely). His person and work are treated as though he was still alive, an impression no doubt strengthened by how hundreds of his hypnotic lectures are broadcast around the globe 24 hours every day. In addition, no new figure-head has emerged within the field to extend, update or replace St Terence's gospel. For reasons like these, the psychedelic underground has clung to the McKenna that he himself designed and presented, with very little in terms of clarification or questioning.
When Terence's brother Dennis in 2011 announced via Kickstarter that he was embarking on a book project that would tell the "actual" story of his life with Terence, including unknown details about the La Chorrera experiment, the excitement was obvious. Many people including myself contributed to the funding of Dennis' writing project, which reached fruition via the book Brotherhood Of The Screaming Abyss published in late 2012 – amusingly, very close in time to Terence's famously prophesized 'end of history'.
Prior to this, updates leaked out from the ongoing project, most notably via an Esalen Institute event that was also podcast at the Psychedelic Salon in July 2012. The fallout from the sharing of this book excerpt and the related conclusions drawn by presenter Bruce Damer were more dramatic than those involved may have expected. Many psychedelicists popped up to comment on the information revealed, some notably hurt or even incredulous. While this response may not have been the main reason, the most crucial paragraph was ultimately removed from Dennis McKenna's finished book. In other words, this information can only be gathered from the Esalen event and the subsequent debate. Even this podcast was temporarily removed from the internet, but it is now available again, presumably without any editing of 'sensitive' passages.
So what, precisely, caused this brouhaha? Here is what Dennis McKenna wrote and later removed from his book manuscript: "Terence's pivotal existential crisis came abruptly. Sometime in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened and I don't know exactly what happened. I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me and she has volunteered few details and I am reluctant to probe. It happened when they were living for a time on the Big Island and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was, 'a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning.' And this induced panic in Terence and probably, I speculate, a feeling that he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms and he took other psychedelics such as DMT and Ayahuasca only on rare occasions and with great reluctance."
Those well familiar with Terence McKenna's career will appreciate the loaded nature of this revelation. In case one fully does not realize the implications of it, Esalen speaker Bruce Damer goes to some length to high-light how Terence's terrifying shroom trip affects the impression of his last decade. What has upset and troubled many Terence fans is the realization that while the man travelled around the world advocating the use of 'heroic dose' psilocybin trips for crowds of thousands, he himself had been scared so badly by a mushroom trip that he gave up shrooms altogether. And this double book-keeping went on for 10 years. Privately Terence would question the value of his teachings and his role, but in public there is no notable shift whatsoever in his message before the terrifying trip in the late '80s, and after it. A person with a critical mindset could draw strongly negative conclusions from this, and even through the most benign lense, it is a troubling revelation.
But there is another aspect to this recent information that I personally find more troubling than the masquerade that has caused Terence fans to feel confused or betrayed. From a few additional comments made at the Esalen gathering, it appears that the theme of Terence's dramatic bad trip dealt with his emotional involvement with other people, a private conundrum which brother Dennis in his book traces back to an event involving their father in Terence's childhood. While charming and extrovert in his role as a bardic performer, Terence apparently strove to avoid any deeper private relationships, and the mushroom 'spirit' (or his own subconscious) presumably took him to task for this unfulfilled aspect of his life. This would be a fairly typical admonition towards self-improvement to receive under psychedelics, and any experienced psychedelicist – and this would certainly include Mr McKenna – knows that there's nothing to do but roll with the punches when you're getting roughed up for your shortcomings as a human being. Yet it seems that Terence could not accept or handle this one, and instead he did the classic beginners mistake of rejecting the warning message. Rejection, denial or other defensive responses will unfailingly trigger the negative spiral of a bad trip, at the end of which one may find an existential abyss like the one described above.
The crucial point of this scenario isn't that Terence had a bad trip, but that he couldn't handle the criticism that Innerspace levelled at him. Such a reaction is not something you would expect to find in a person with 25+ years of heavy psychedelic trips behind him. The psychodynamic cleansing of inner wardrobes and private skeletons is something you tend to deal with at the beginning of the psychedelic career, not towards the end. The question being raised, and this is what troubles me, is whether Terence McKenna had gone through all his psychedelic adventures without ever actually facing an inner confrontation of personality, defenses and hang-ups that is crucial to further spiritual growth on the path of the trip. Is it even possible to chew down 5 grams of dried Cubensis for two decades and never having to pass the rough crash course in self-improvement referred to as 'Gnothi Seauton -Know Thyself- 101' in the Psychedelia book?
Terence McKenna repeatedly rejected LSD due to what he called its 'abrasively psychoanalytic' nature. I never quite understood what he meant, but the new information from brother Dennis & Co. suggests that what Terence referred to was not some intrinsic flaw in LSD, but rather that the acid kept bringing him to doors that he was not interested in opening. To whatever degree these things can be generalized, it seems that LSD per se offers a structured progression in which the psycho-dynamic baggage must be dealt with in order to reach further heights, or else it will be a meaningless experience of funny colors, emotional stalemate, or even a bad trip. The beloved Psilocybin and DMT however, while they insist on self-improvement just as strongly, will still offer plenty for the mind to work with, even if the door to Gnothi Seauton 101 remains closed. The Mushroom Voice ('the Logos') and the various entities will still be there and happy to impart wisdom and dialogue which has no bearing on the inner emotional imbalances of the tripper: even without cleansing there will be a show. And Terence, the self-confessed 'vision freak', was all about the impersonal presentations in Innerspace, from the sight of gigantic spaceships to conversations with little elfs about the future of language.
Is it possible that someone, a person of a brilliant mind, could spend 25 years in the farther reaches of Innerspace and never once face the forceful demands on inner cleansing and self-improvement? If this was the case with Terence McKenna, and it does seem to match the new insights that have emerged, then a plate loaded with food for thought has just been served. Not just concerning the man himself and the nature of his personality, but also about the long-term relationship between psychedelicists and Innerspace, the supposed aquisition of wisdom from these experiences, and the possible need for a more directed or explicit model for beginning acidheads. It is vital to go through Gnothi Seauton 101, the earlier the better, and the longer you try to evade it, the harsher it will ultimately become. As Terence McKenna seems to have learned the hard way.
Comment) I've never been one of those uncritical devotees of Terence (for one thing, I don't believe in neither Timewave Zero nor the Stoned Ape theory), but I certainly like him as a thinker and orator. The news shared by Dennis isn't that dramatic to me, but I can see why some people feel badly hurt by it. Some to the extent that they even accuse Dennis of being jealous or whatever. If you had Terence as a personal guru, this revelation of his secret bad trip must come as a serious blow.
My take is a little different... as I write above, I find it just as troubling that he still had places where the mushroom could confront and reveal him as a "phony" or "poorly developed". After 25 years of tripping you should be fairly clean inside, unless you've been playing games all along. So that bothered me a bit, and makes me wonder exactly what all his trips were like. Did he navigate past all the personal issues to only seek out the fun stuff? If so, how did he manage that under 5 grams dried Cubensis?
There are people out there with specific personality defects that will use psychedelic drugs as a way to show that they're "OK" and "strong". They achieve this by taking large doses and then actively steering the trip away from any kind of personal confrontation. By my experience, if the drug has your number, there is no getting away, but looking at others (and maybe Terence) it seems that even with high doses, you can sail past all the submerged rocks and sea monsters, if your will (or defense system) is strong and well-organized enough. This seems to me a terrible waste of psychedelics, and I've always urged people not to try and control the experience, but remain open and float downstream. Ancient advise, but it holds true. What's the use of taking 300 mikes of acid if you're going to spend the trip avoiding all the important personal stuff the acid wants to show you? I've never understood this.
Anyway, with reference to St Terence, the problem I see is that there is such a gap between what he advocated, like heroic doses of 5 grams alone in darkness, and the obviously terrible trip he had. He pushed for very high doses and high-risk trip behavior, while never revealing that he had had a bad trip. If he had been more cautious and thoughtful, and urged people to take it slow and steady, and also testified about his own bad trip (which Tim Leary did), there wouldn't have been such an abyss between the hardcore message and the troubled reality. He should have restated his position after that bad trip and developed a more sensible advocacy. Individuals receive instruction on serious, life-altering experiences, which can be both good... and sometimes bad. The message must be intelligent, sincere and defendable.
Schwann) Dennis removed the podcast because I, and maybe some others, reaffirmed the fact that TMK did not stop taking shrooms in 1988 because I was with T. in Africa in '96 where he "broke the rules"...I've completed an autobiographical account of my doing with both Terence and Dennis, who wrote the intro for "Journey to Everywhere". Why not read it and save yourself some debate? WEBSITE
Schwann: "Journey to Everywhere" is a non-fictional account of the authors travels with Terence and Dennis McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham plus many interesting characters and Psychonauts. BOOK
Patrick) Thanks for the feedback. I felt I had done a sufficient amount of fact-checking on this issue before posting my thoughts, but of course there is always another layer of information, particularly in psychedelic circles. I'm not sure why Dennis would have to remove the paragraph in its entirety because Terence later took shrooms. It would have been enough to remove the claim that he never did mushrooms again. The story of the bad trip is – I presume – still valid, and of great interest to Terence's many admirers.
I'll see if I need to rewrite something in my earlier post, but most of it was just general reflections.
10'29 "I wonder how long it took to emerge, the psychedelic...It seems such a strange notion that we can distance psychedelic from psychology." COMMENT
10'29 "Also evident in the manifesto is an appealing subcultural and anarchistic thread.
For example, Grey sees witchcraft as rhizomatic as opposed to hierarchic."
10'29 "In short, the book is written primarily for people with one foot inside the door, and one of its main objectives is to provide these fine men and women with the tools and knowledge needed to develop a fully-blossomed psychedelic lifestyle." INTERVIEW
10'29 "Both these elements go directly against the dogmas and hierarchies of Christianity, Judaism and Islam." INTERVIEW
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