# Thought-Provoking Discussion - Terence McKenna



## Pluralized (Jul 17, 2015)

If you like challenging your long-held belief systems, give this a listen. I finished this wonderful book recently by Terence's brother Dennis called Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss and, though I'm terrified of exploring these realms myself due to heavily negative experiences with psychedelics as a teenager, this fascinates me as purely a discussion of obscure psychology. Terence was a fearless psychonaut and presents his ideas extremely clearly. 
It's not for everybody but might be enjoyable for someone so here you go.
[video=youtube;OKZTV5bXw9w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKZTV5bXw9w[/video]


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## ShadowEyes (Jul 17, 2015)

I'm on my phone right now, but when I get home, I'll take a look-see. All I know is that philosophy is a really hard subject to understand and overturn. I recently picked up St. Thomas Aquinas and it's just a slog. Why did you read that particular book, Plu?


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## Pluralized (Jul 18, 2015)

> Why did you read that particular book, Plu?


I've been fascinated with entheogenic plants since I learned about peyote as a kid. Since learning about ayahuasca and wanting to explore more about the effects of DMT on the human consciousness, I stumbled onto Terence and Dennis McKenna, active in this field for decades. Even if you're opposed to drug use in any setting, these discussions make for fascinating parallels between cultures and individual human experiences. 

There's another book worth checking out: Closer to the Light -- all of these things relate right back to N,N--Dimethyltryptamine in one way or another.


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## Riis Marshall (Jul 18, 2015)

Hello Folks


I tried reading Castaneda when I was in my twenties and I thought it was a bunch of silliness. I tried again in my forties and I was firmly convinced it was a bunch of silliness. My final try was in my sixties when I concluded it was a total load of pretentious drivel.


As far as chemical substances are concerned, I'm convinced you can achieve the same results either with a Valsalva manoeuvre or self-hypnosis. With some practise you can take yourself really deep and go almost anywhere you want to go.


It's free, legal, guaranteed to have no potential to fry your brain (anybody watched Peter Green try to play the guitar recently?) and it keeps you a reasonably safe distance from the criminals in your neighbourhood.


All the best with your philosophical musings.


Warmest regards
Riis


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## Pluralized (Jul 18, 2015)

> With some practise you can take yourself really deep and go almost anywhere you want to go.


I firmly believe this too, though increasing encroachment of digital information and device-addiction make it unlikely most will ever taste these realms naturally, if at all. It's fun to hear about these experiences vicariously, which is a great way to spare your brain cells the havoc.

There's a documentary about DMT called 'The Spirit Molecule' that I highly recommend. Somehow, all these different people have strikingly similar experiences under the influence of this endogenous neurotransmitter, and there are marked parallels to near-death experiences and other 'religious' experiences and I just find the whole thing terribly fascinating.

Weird thought: they've been giving this stuff to lab rats for half a century now, inducing these powerful 'trips' on poor rats and other mammals. Wonder what kind of terrifying stuff rats see when they're overdosing on DMT? 

Thanks for humoring me on this topic, forum. Its potential for controversy is obvious and most can easily write it off as 'foolishness' but having listened to the testimony of many people whose faculties I believe to be sound, the underlying neuroscience is part of what interests me, but more deeply, the spiritual connections to the physical realm in which this substance represents one of the few existing tangible links. Makes me want to watch 'Flatliners' again, if only to ponder the alternates.


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## Pursuit (Jul 20, 2015)

Our minds have boundaries, some people choose to cross them and never come back .


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## dale (Jul 21, 2015)

i've been wanting to take DMT for a while now. but to be honest? i'm leery of it. i don't do crap like lsd and shrooms well anymore
like i did when i was young. (and honestly? even back then, it only ended good 1/2 the time) but i've heard so much about DMT,
 it tempts me to do. but then i think..."dude...what if you "come to" 20 minutes later and you've done something you can't ever take back?" and so i stay away from it.


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## dale (Jul 21, 2015)

it seems fairly easy to make, though. i'm sure i could pull that part off quite easily.


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## John Oberon (Jul 21, 2015)

If you ever want a real spiritual connection to the physical realm instead of a hallucination, try Christ, not drugs.


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## Pluralized (Jul 21, 2015)

I don't want anyone to think this thread is advocating for the use of hallucinogenic drugs; I merely enjoy the vicarious study of altered states of consciousness through the experiences of psychonauts and people with the constitution for it (and the skills to explain such experiences in a lucid, gripping fashion like Senor McKenna). 

Funny, the parallels between the world's religions in this regard as well. Prayer, meditation, call it what you will, all produce a 'squirt' of DMT from the pineal gland, and it causes all kinds of effects. There's no correct deity, giving the world's religions proper weight, so I'd like to ask that separate threads be used for the propagandizing of internal thought and the very personal realms of spiritual experience if you need such a platform.


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## musichal (Jul 21, 2015)

Well, I have never taken DMT - at least not knowingly, and my hallucinogenic excursions halted in early '70s.  LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms provided my experiences.  For me, there was nothing religious about it.  I had both hallucinations and illusions (the later being a flawed perception of something actually present, such as the road turning into a giant rubber band while driving).  I never had a "bad trip" but I only ever partook when in a good frame of mind to begin with, which I always thought key.

When the road turned to a rubber band I had the presence of mind to pull over, park the car, and spend my vision-quest lakeside.  For twelve hours.  Had a good friend with me who was in the same shape and we pretty much kept an eye on one another.  He told me what he saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted, as I also shared my perceptions.  I remember plugging an 8-track tape of a Jerry Garcia album and saw the music coming out and floating on the air.  I found hallucinations interesting, in a detached kind of way.

I did once feel that I floated in the air ten feet or so above my body for an hour or so.  I remember thinking I coul simply fly away, but worried that I might not find my way back, so I hovered.  They called it mind-expanding back then, but I thought that was all BS.  I simply took enough poison to confuse perception in my brain, without taking enough for it to be fatal.  I listened to this guy - consciousness-expanding he says.  I say about as much as a binge drinking session.  I had fun.


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## John Oberon (Jul 21, 2015)

You enjoy people who can explain their hallucinations lucidly...no offence intended whatsoever, but did your pineal gland just squirt some DMT or something? If I'm not mistaken, there's nothing lucid about a hallucination. It's the epitome of unreality. Isn't that right? I mean, that's the definition of a hallucination, right? You think something's there, but it's not...right? And that's the whole point of these drugs and these people - to see and experience things that aren't real, but just a chemical fireworks display, right? And they find meaning in these things that don't exist unless they detonate another chemical missile in their brains. And you enjoy studying their thoughts on unreality? Why? To what purpose?

I find reality plenty enjoyable and engaging enough.


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## Kevin (Jul 21, 2015)

*You think something's there, but it's not...right? And that's the whole point of these drugs and these people - to see and experience things that aren't real, but just a chemical fireworks display, right?*  -- yes and no ... the first part of your statement could describe anything that only you can see, experience or feel. Is it real? Obviously there's nothing physically there...but if you experience it as if it were real, without it being blurred, is that not 'lucidity'?  Your dreams, you see and talk to people that may be dead or...? Are those real? No? You mean they didn't happen? You didn't 'see' anything? Do they have any meaning? Are they significant to you?  Is an idea real? Yet you attach profundity to it. Why? It's just an idea.  Books are ideas, they're not real. Just a bunch of words... Words are ideas, they're not real. When I write 'lion' there's not really a lion there. So here you are writing 'fake' things, using your imagination, images from your head and yet you can't understand how someone might be interested in the images others have had because they were chemically induced. Okay. You're entitled...


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## JustRob (Jul 21, 2015)

I'm about an hour into listening to the guy. He is an entertaining speaker but so far as being thought-provoking, I have already remarked in WF today that that depends on how much one thinks without being provoked. As for any long-held beliefs, having only lived for seventy years so far I haven't had time to acquire any yet. 

Personally I am highly susceptible to the effects of drugs, prescribed that is, and even avoid caffeine as much as possible. When I was once prescribed tranquillisers I had to stop taking them because they were too stimulating. They were never prescribed again. Eventually the only way to bring my mind down to a level with the rest of mankind was dosing with the chemical cosh Largactil and twenty-four sessions (the then legal maximum) of ECT. I was accepted back into society once I was certified brain-dead by my measure. 

His remarks about visual experiences interested me as I appear to have no conscious visual memory. Obviously it does exist as I can recognise people but I can't recall what anyone looks like on demand. Only during illness, especially my once bad migraines, my visual experiences used to increase, even to the extent of being able to construct simple shapes visually within my mind, but usually such efforts were engulfed by the multicoloured dragons. Seeing those was the best part of having a migraine, but migraines tend to fade away with advancing age. Perhaps if my visual experiences were as profound in my youth as my conceptual ones then those aspects of my brain burned out to protect my sanity a long time ago. Unsurprisingly I don't remember.

One point that this chap makes is that there are common experiences in this domain shared by many people. Is the text in my signature below just a coincidence then? Shared experiences ought to point to some form of reality although what that is is another matter.

This chap is proceeding quite cautiously, but so he must if he's to take anyone along with him. Personally I'm still coming to terms with the possibility that I have accidentally accessed my own future memories to construct a plot for my novels, but that's thought-provoking even for me.

My novel (Really sorry to mention that yet again) is about a time machine of sorts. H. G. Wells actually wrote two stories about time distortion. One, The Time Machine, became a main-stream classic while the other, The New Accelerator, was apparently sidelined, maybe because it depended on drugs rather than a physical mechanism. My novel seems to borrow facets of both stories but is not a veiled promotion of drug-abuse, something of which I have no experience.

Thanks for introducing this chap to me though.


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## musichal (Jul 21, 2015)

John Oberon said:


> *You enjoy people who can explain their hallucinations lucidly...no offence intended whatsoever, but did your pineal gland just squirt some DMT or something? If I'm not mistaken, there's nothing lucid about a hallucination. It's the epitome of unreality. Isn't that right?* I mean, that's the definition of a hallucination, right? You think something's there, but it's not...right? And that's the whole point of these drugs and these people - to see and experience things that aren't real, but just a chemical fireworks display, right? And they find meaning in these things that don't exist unless they detonate another chemical missile in their brains. And you enjoy studying their thoughts on unreality? Why? To what purpose?
> 
> I find reality plenty enjoyable and engaging enough.



My experiences were good.  I never lost the me in my mind.  I recognized that Stop signs don't really jump up, split at the bottom and run down the street, that it was hallucination caused by the drug I'd taken.  Often this was not true of others around me who had taken the same drug, often at a lower dosage but sometimes the same.  I don't know why.  I think drugs sometimes magnify our innate personalities, and those who have issues will have worse on hallucinogenics.  Those more stable seemed to maintain that stability.  Don't know exactly whether that is true, but I do know I could trip my butt off back then and come through intact and remembering visions.  

I would not at all be interested in trying any drugs today, other than a very rare toke or two.  Not sure how this old body and mind would respond, and have no inclination anyway.  Been there several times, lost all the tee shirts and the memories are plenty to satisfy that curiosity, which is what it was, for me.


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## ppsage (Jul 21, 2015)

Well, there's psychonauting and then there's getting intoxicated. Both are difficult on the heart so slowing down is eventually indicated, if material existence is still a concern. For me the former is about shaping the existential lens which creates what is thought real. Kind of a psychological thing.


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## Pluralized (Jul 21, 2015)

John Oberon said:


> You enjoy people who can explain their hallucinations lucidly...no offence intended whatsoever, but did your pineal gland just squirt some DMT or something? If I'm not mistaken, there's nothing lucid about a hallucination. It's the epitome of unreality. Isn't that right? I mean, that's the definition of a hallucination, right? You think something's there, but it's not...right? And that's the whole point of these drugs and these people - to see and experience things that aren't real, but just a chemical fireworks display, right? And they find meaning in these things that don't exist unless they detonate another chemical missile in their brains. And you enjoy studying their thoughts on unreality? Why? To what purpose?
> 
> I find reality plenty enjoyable and engaging enough.



With all due respect, I think that perhaps applying opinion to this topic without having done any research, might be causing part of the confusion. The unique thing about DMT (which differs from all other hallucinogens in that it is endogenous, or produced in the human brain already), is that it's not toxic in the least and the experiences people have with it are invariably perceived as ultra-reality and, as many have stated, 'as if the filters are removed and you're looking at raw, unadulterated reality in its purest form.' Anyway, I find it terribly fascinating and the point of the post was to share enthusiastically my fascination and not to invite gainsaying and recommendations to instead seek out solace in imaginary beings (however I do applaud the intrinsic irony). 

And most all of my glands squirt many types of substances, not all of which have been identified by Western science.


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## John Oberon (Jul 22, 2015)

Christ was imaginary? That's a news to me and most of the world. Perhaps you're applying opinion to this topic without having done any research. There's plenty of documentation, you know.

I have no problem with your fascination with hallucinations. I like to base my beliefs on reality and firm facts, and I try not to waste too much time on unreality. I think life's too short for that kind of silliness. I like pursuing truth, not artificially induced fantasies. Hallucinations serve no purpose other than as a symptom of illness or weakness. When you're healthy or free of poison, hallucinations stop. I'd like to deal with reality from a position of strength and that philosophy has served me quite well so far. I have discovered that when I'm sick or weak, I'm much more prone to believe lies and miss truth. It is at those times that I cling to The Truth.


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## JustRob (Jul 22, 2015)

The irony is that while I would enjoy contributing further to this thread I would make so many references to my WIP that it would get tedious, even for me. I mean, if I'd just wanted to discuss the concepts I would never have started writing it as apparent fiction in the first place, so would never have joined WF to enter this thread and encounter this dilemma. Who needs temporal paradoxes with this sort of thing happening?


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## Pluralized (Jul 22, 2015)

> Christ was imaginary? I cling to The Truth. Lulz and stuff.



Go deal with reality from a position of strength in some other thread. I don't need your validation, don't care about your perception of 'illness' or whatever, as that's not what this thread is for. Before we both get sucked into an unproductive discussion that will probably get us banned, go see if you can piss on someone else's leg about your beliefs. If you don't like what I've brought up here, great - but again, I don't care at all and will not engage you further. And now, through the magic of Her Greenship, I can't see you.  

Back to McKenna/DMT - I think the important stuff is lost on most experiencers. Most come out of their experience with a loose recollection of what happened, what they saw/felt, but there's a potent experience right at the heart of it that might be too heavy for comprehension to deal with or the mind must be conditioned in such a way as to see and feel it in the present moment, not dropping back to the expectation of what's to come which pervades most of our minds. This, I think, gives meditation a worthy mention, as accessing those present-moment states is where the breakthroughs occur. Read 'Black Elk Speaks' and see the parallels with DMT experience from McKenna and Strassman and the like, or study Edgar Cayce and his visions recorded while unconscious. Rasputin. Blavatsky. Moses! It's uncanny how the central themes repeat themselves. Everyone does shape their own reality, I believe, but the funny thing about DMT and its effect on the monkey mind filter is how similar some of these experiences are across cultures and oceans and centuries.


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## Terry D (Jul 22, 2015)

A discussion about someone promoting the use of an illegal drug violates our rule about promoting illegal activity:

*Content Which Encourages Illegal Activity: Except within the creative boards and with the proper disclaimer, posts which encourage illegal activity will be edited or removed. Again this is at staff discretion and is not open to debate.
*​This thread has also degenerated into a debate about religion. It is now closed.


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