c/terence-mckenna
The largest collection of talks by Terence McKenna — visionary ethnobotanist and advocate for the mindful use of natural psychedelics.
…last tail wagging of the baroque and rococo era, which was the come down from the Renaissance. So modern art, the discoveries of Freud and jung, that there was more to life than being awake or asleep, but that there were, you know, spirits. The rebirth…
…laid enough, everybody getting to be famous enough, everybody getting what they need by abandoning this. You know, I think it was Freud who compared the gathering of money to the retention of shit to the holding of your stuff, you know, to being that…
…then you get, you know, I mean, when psychoanalysis began, it was basically awaken asleep was the theory of consciousness that Freud inherited. Awake and asleep, what's the big deal? So then he showed, you know, that states of multiple personality and…
…the concept of the collective unconscious, which was enunciated by Carl Jung in the early decades of the 20th century, he and Freud basically discovered that the mind had a flip side that could only express itself in dreams, and that was. Seemed very…
…found in the morning by the street. We have a way to go before we get to those places. But still, maybe it's because of Freud and Nietzsche and all the bad boys of the 19th century or something. But we really have pried open a fairly toxic aspect of…
…the sixties. The entirety of the 20th century has gone on under the aegis of this archaic revival. It begins with Freud and Jung, or earlier with impressionism. It works its way up through abstract expressionism and it has positive and negative…
…deprived darkness. And then, you know, you can actually tease the stuff out. We in the west, probably coming down through Freud and before have the idea that introspection of all types is considered morbid, it's considered narcissistic. I mean, a person…
…a case going into it. I mean, if you had known me when I was 19 years old, I was into Jean Paul Sartre, Alfred Camus, Marxism, Freud. I was a jerk and I came down from it and I said, I can't believe it. That was all I could say for about 20…
…Science worked, darkies kept their places, everything was under control. The 20th century, the discovery of the unconscious. Bye Freud and then Joseph Goebbels, the contemporary, all of these things happened, which were basically the discrediting of western…
…table. You know, there were anticipations of the 20th century. The surrealists are not given their due in all of this. You know, Freud gets a lot of credit, but he was cribbing from the surrealists like crazy, you may be sure. In fact, major portions of…
…was on the rise and neo platonic philosopher said that he thought Christianity was a disease of the soul. And I think Freud and Jung have pretty much proved the same thing. Well, long before the viral metaphor, somewhat before the viral metaphor became a…
…our culture crisis is so much deeper. Where we are casting back to is 20, 30,000 years into the past. This is why Freud and Auschwitz and modern art and rock and roll and sexual permissiveness and drug taking and all of these things we are trying…
…psychedelic drugs should do has no room in it for this. Our model of what psychedelic drugs should do is derive from Freud and then secondarily from Jung. From Freud we derive the idea that the psychedelic drug should introduce you to neurotic thought…
…for this. Our model of what psychedelic drugs should do is derive from Freud and then secondarily from Jung. From Freud we derive the idea that the psychedelic drug should introduce you to neurotic thought processes, repressed memory, traumatic experience,…
…could destroy malignant tissue, prospering the host. And in the area of psychology there were parallel developments. The theories of Freud and Jung were being developed into increasingly useful clinical tools and approaches to mental illness, and the basis of…
…world it will be through conceiving of mind as the underlying self aware, self active, world forming grammar of being so that what Freud called the superego, what I call the overmind there have been different ways of talking about it has to be seen not…
…the concept of the collective unconscious, which was enunciated by Carl Jung in the early decades of the 20th century. He and Freud Basically discovered that the mind had a flip side that could only Express itself in dreams and that seemed very primitive…
…reinforce for me is there's something which has gone through several fashions of name, even in the 20th century it begins with Freud and it's the unconscious and it's where everything you repress is and then it goes through Jung and it's the collective…
…and of course Einstein in the early years of this century all of these people were anticipating aspects of this archaism. And so was Freud, and so was Jung and in their own bizarre way so were the nazis, and so was the psychedelic revival of the 60s.…
…and thousands of years without a problem. Cocaine very quickly develops into a problem. The enthusiasts of cocaine in the 19th century, Freud and his school were riding on the great wave of optimism about cocaine that clustered around it when it was found…
…is it la esseance? That's right. So coming into the 20th century, that was it the hashish and the opium thing. Well then Freud, and behind him Jung, began to look at the products of pathological fantasy and the products of folklore and alchemy and the…
…see, I mean it's a complete dissolving of your personality, of the boundary constraints, everything. And so then what was offered after Freud and Jung by Aldous Huxley and people like that to model it was some kind of confirmation of eastern philosophy it…
…an illimited growth in the psyche. The word ego means different things to different people. You've got like the ego is described by Freud. The ego is described by Ayn Rand. The ego is described by the eastern traditions that built down on it. I've noted…
…which doesn't reach the ceiling. It's just in the middle of this room there's this pillar. Well obviously, in the light of Sigmund Freud this must be phallic and so forth and then you get the lingam in the shaivite tradition in India. But I think that…
…20th century. The archaic revival begins with the breakdown of the Victorian Weirdness about sex, basically through the work of Freud and Jung. Both Freud and Jung were looking at a lot of anthropological data, ethnographic data also then the importation,…
…archaic revival begins with the breakdown of the Victorian Weirdness about sex, basically through the work of Freud and Jung. Both Freud and Jung were looking at a lot of anthropological data, ethnographic data also then the importation, the discovery by the…
…20th century as a very you know it's like trying to turn a battleship with an oar. It's very, very slow going but with Freud and Jung we get the discovery of the unconscious I mean they discover it through a spyglass at 900 yards but they do announce…
…with the publication of the first books becomes associated with accessing the database of the culture. Well what we've learned through Freud and Jung is that the database of the culture goes deeper than we may have anticipated and that the final keys…
…like this psychedelic experience isn't new in the sense of a cultural endeavor, let's call that the discovery of the unconscious, and Freud attributed that to the romantic poets so would you say that one could see the whole modern and post modern era of…
…a case going into it. I mean if you had known me when I was 19 years old I was into jean Paul Sartre, Alfred Camus, Marxism, Freud. I was a jerk and I came down from it and I said I can't believe it that was all I could say. For about 20 minutes…
…than that it's been going on throughout the 20th century: the discovery of the purification of mescaline in Berlin in 1897. Freud begins to publish around the turn of the century, Jung. They are discovering the primitive unconscious they are revealing to…
…was on the rise in the occupying philosophers, said that he thought Christianity was a disease of the soul and I think Freud and newton had pretty much proved the same thing. Well long before the viral metaphor, somewhat before the viral metaphor became…
…I, you know that occurs to me is we human beings come equipped with something called the unconscious mind, discovered by Freud and Jung in Vienna, you know for us but apparent throughout history. The unconscious mind, and part of this technological and…
…adventure, one of them of the 20th century has been the discovery and description of the unconscious and it begins with Freud, who discovered that people have dirty minds essentially, in other words he just dropped down one level and saw that there…
…could talk your way from neurosis to health and in a way psychoanalysis is part of the new age. I mean the relationship between Freud and Jung to Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and some of these people is a fascinating study in itself. So yes there is a lot of…
…19th century back to people like Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and the pataphysicians, the surrealists the physicists around Einstein, Freud, Modern art, modern dance, jazz, all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive, to reclaim the…
…that comes down through the French, English, German Tradition of constipated male dominance. And instead you know, intuit that's what it is in Freud and Jung and the new age and intuit our way out. But now we're close the intuition is rising to the no…
…last tail wagging of the baroque and rococo era, which was the come down from the Renaissance. So modern art, the discoveries of Freud and Jung that there was more to life than being awake or asleep, but that there were you know spirits, the rebirth of…
…getting laid enough, everybody getting to be famous enough, everybody getting what they need by abandoning this I think it was Freud who compared the gathering of money to the retention of shit, to the holding of your stuff, to being that possessive…
…idea of mind to the idea of conscious ego, or is it more complicated than that? Well in other words we know Freud had a notion of how the personality was constructed. Jung brought another vocabulary to bear. Are these meaningful vocabularies? Is there…
…me on this path. I had taken LSD before I had smoked DMT and I was able to hold it within the model provided by Freud and Jung and Huxley and ordinary literatures of mystical experience. But when you smoke DMT it seems to carry you into a data field…
…LSD or in some cases psilocybin, this doesn't seem to confirm our ideas about the human unconscious, the cheerful theories of Freud, Jung, and wright it seems instead to imply that the universe is a system of condensed levels of manifestation that we…
…in the morning by the street sweepers. We have a way to go before we get to those places but still, maybe it's because of Freud and Nietzsche and all the bad boys of the 19th century or something but we really have pried open a fairly toxic aspect of…
…tension between the psychedelic community which is to my mind an exiled tribe of scientists. The psychedelic community we're the heirs of Freud and Jung, but booted out of the tent of science because we dared to use the human brain body as an instrument…
…culture crisis is so much deeper. Where we are casting back to is 20 000, 30 000 years into the past. This is why Freud and auschwitz and modern art and rock and roll and sexual permissiveness and drug taking and all of these things we are trying to…
…we see around us. So this impulse throughout the 20th century has been building toward the archaic. As I said Freud, Jung, jazz, abstract expressionism, house music all of this stuff but the central quintessence of this archaic impulse is shamanism…
…pound, and the glorification of barbarism and the recovery of the unconscious, first the sexual nature of the unconscious through Freud, Later the mass archetypal structure through Jung in other words the great movements of the 20th century, even marxism, can…
…the 20th century, where are the ideas that the psychedelic community can lay clear claim to? Was Einstein loaded? Was Marx, was Freud? Were the people who fractionated DNA the first time? Were the people who went to the moon? Were the people who…
…was the 19th century. The 20th century is more chaotic because you have, in the early years of the 20th century you have Freud who announces the unconscious. He gives it a sexual spin but he does admit that we aren't all nice little ladies and gentlemen…
…thing that I have ever seen that turned anybody around on the dime was psychedelics. You know the talking cures invented by Freud and Jung at the beginning of this century. It takes years, sometimes it never happens the body work that came along behind…
…of LSD taking of the 1960s just preceding that from about 1963 to 65 we were frantic for maps of the unconscious. And Freud was useless. I mean the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what Freud called day residues…
…unconscious. And Freud was useless. I mean the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what Freud called day residues and repressed sexual desire and stuff like didn't wash within 10 minutes you could tell that was not…
…the hard image of realism and gives you a feeling tone thing which was very antithetical to Victorian Edwardian thought. Then Freud and Jung describe different aspects of the unconscious. But to do it Freud has to talk about repressed primitive sexual…
…antithetical to Victorian Edwardian thought. Then Freud and Jung describe different aspects of the unconscious. But to do it Freud has to talk about repressed primitive sexual imaginings. Jung talks about folklore, fairy tales and mythology. Meanwhile the…
…psychedelic experience. That's what makes the shaman a shaman, that's what made the archaic in fact archaic, and so people like Freud and Jung and the surrealists and the dadaists and the abstract expressionists all of these people were very close to the…
…you contrast the state of modern of paradigm shift that I'm suggesting, we know nothing about the mind. There are a few theories Freud, Jung, Reich, so forth and so on but these are just guesses tossed into the unknown and yet in principle, the mind…
…about your own psyche and what might lie within. You know, it's only been within the confines of the 20th century that Freud and Jung introduced Western people to the idea that there were repressed and atavistic portions of the human psyche. So I... And…
…body. That's what a hormone is: an organic catalyst within the body which suddenly shifts the focus of the individual from what Freud called the polymorphic perversity of the ego to the felt presence of the other, conceived in that case as a sexual…
…world it will be through conceiving of mind as the underlying self aware, self active, world forming grammar of being, so that what Freud called the superego what I call the overmind there have been different ways of talking about it has to be seen not…
…our culture crisis is so much deeper. Where we are casting back to is 20 30 000 years into the past. This is why Freud and auschwitz and modern art and rock and roll and sexual permissiveness and drug taking and all of these things we are trying to…
…and the 20th century has been all about confronting the bankruptcy of all of that. And from the time of surrealism and Freud and Jung and dada right through to rave music and jazz and rock and roll and abstract expressionism these are all archaic…
…create a more caring meaningful world or they can be denied the way sexuality was denied until the force of the work of Freud and others just made it impossible to maintain the fiction any longer. This choice of how quickly we develop into a mature…
…in fact the concern of surrealism is nothing less than the pictorial representation of the contents of the unconscious as described by Freud and Jung. So in a way, what we're talking about here is not so much the culture Shaping power of psychedelics or…
…of some notion as cheerful as instant psychotherapy. Okay, so then jack the metaphor slightly higher. It must be then that it was not Freud but Jung who was right, and so it must be that this is an insight into not only my personality, my past, my…
…the archaic revival in which I tried to say that the entire cultural impulse of the 20th century, beginning with Freud and Jung discovering the unconscious beginning with Picasso dragging back primitive West African masks to Paris and inserting them into…
…And as this tendency, this nostalgia has been sorted out over the last hundred years by generations of scholars, beginning with Freud and Jung and Blavatsky and Crowley and then coming up through all the folklorists and deconstructionists, as this thing has…
…world it will be through conceiving of mind as the underlying self aware, self active world forming grammar of being, so that what Freud called the superego, what I call the overmind there have been different ways of talking about it has to be seen not…
…beginnings of it the first swell back to the turn of the century with relativity and theosophy and surrealism and the work of Freud and Jung on the unconscious. But it's a discovery, a moving toward a realization that the values that can serve us are…
…experience augments the ego to a new level rather than extinguishes the ego, it gives a truer picture of reality. Well you know Freud had this concept that he called the super ego and this term has somewhat fallen out of use because we all tend to…
…revival is the idea that all of the and I see the whole of the 20th century the discovery of the unconscious by Freud and Jung, the dissolving of the naturalistic image at the hands of the cubists, the probing of the dream state by the surrealists…
…there already is this superhuman organism and that our freedom is largely illusory. We are all moving to the tune of what Freud called the superego, what I call the overmind, because I don't like the notion of superego as a little torchlight parades and…
…with the publication of the first books, becomes associated with accessing the database of the culture. Well what we've learned through Freud and Jung is that the database of the culture goes deeper than we may have anticipated and that the final keys…
…like this psychedelic experience isn't new in the sense of a cultural endeavor. Let's call that the discovery of the unconscious, and Freud attributed that to the romantic poets. So would you say that one could see the whole modern and post modern era of…
…was on the rise and neoplatonic philosophers said that he thought Christianity was a disease of the soul and I think Freud and Jung had pretty much proved the same thing. Well, I'll tell you about monotheism now and I say christianism patriarchy…
…a pure lifestyle. But I really don't think so. I think that the notion of sacrifice, which has been written about by Freud and Zimmer and all kinds of people, already indicates an uncertainty about our relationship to this other that previously, you know…
…19th century. I mean people like Alfred Jarry and rené Clair and Marcel Duchamp and these people. They were enunciating long before Freud and Jung the presence of the unconscious as a Frontier into which the locomotive of marxist history looked like it was…
…psychedelic drugs should do has no room in it. For this our model of what psychedelic drugs should do is derived from Freud and then secondarily from Jung. From Freud we derive the idea that the psychedelic drugs should introduce you to neurotic thought…
…For this our model of what psychedelic drugs should do is derived from Freud and then secondarily from Jung. From Freud we derive the idea that the psychedelic drugs should introduce you to neurotic thought processes repressed memory, traumatic experience,…
…it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications. And it seemed to me as I read my Darwin and Freud that there had to be some kind of quickening influence in human emergence that if not outright transcendental, was certainly unique and…
…to be a functioning being. Umm. On the other hand there's some kind of umm tension culture is a compromise. You know Freud titled one of his books civilization and its discontents, meaning that civilization was a kind of fallen state that we had put…
…archaism, that in the sciences, the arts, everywhere the archaic ideal is raising its protean head and it begins with Freud in the early years of the 20th century discovering by interviewing these viennese bourgeois housewives that human beings were brutes…
…in the way that the 15th century discovered the new world the 20th century discovered the parallel continuum. It begins with Freud and noticing something about the fantasies of these viennese housewives, and you know then Jung splicing in the myths and then…
…I mean you don't have to feel constrained and you have to feel constrained. Well, too bad Maria Gambutis can't mud wrestle Sigmund Freud. I'd like to invite people also in terms of telling stories also dreams I think would be, you know often do contain…
…pound and the glorification of barbarism and the recovery of the unconscious, first the sexual nature of the unconscious through Freud, Later the mass archetypal structure through Jung in other words the great movements of the 20th century, even marxism can…
…both individual and social change over the next visible historical horizon? Well obviously just on the surface of it Freud in civilization and its discontents made the point that sexuality is necessarily repressed for civilization to be possible. Sexuality…
…about your own psyche and what might lie within. You know it's only been within the confines of the 20th century that Freud and Jung introduced western people to the idea that there were repressed and atavistic portions of the human psyche. So I and…
…taboo structures. As soon as anthropologists arrived anywhere they found systems of taboos and that's why early twentieth century anthropologists, Freud wrote his book on socialism and taboo. I'm very interested in this question. And taboo means that which is…
…actual culture, that's not so don't you think they were projecting a lot of that after all, people like James Fraser and Freud came from the most taboo ruled societies that have ever existed on earth. Victorian England and fin de siècle Vienna were so…
…the great overarching picture. And in some way we have lost our way and it remained for giants of 20th century thought like Freud and Jung to announce the startling fact that there was a human unconscious. And then it took still a different generation of…
…here. There are different models about what the psychedelic experience is. Here's a couple building on western psychotherapy as elaborated by Freud and Jung. One view of what psychedelics are is: it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business…
…probably felt the same way a hundred years ago if you had been in Vienna in 1899, jukenstiel was bursting at its seams and Freud was beginning to formulate his theories and the Paris air show of 1905 was in the planning. There has always been this uh…
…19th century, back to people like Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and the pataphysicians, the surrealists, the physicists around Einstein, Freud, Modern art, modern dance, jazz all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive, to reclaim the…
…comes down through the French, English, German Tradition of constipated male dominance and instead, you know, intuit that's what it is in Freud and Jung and the new age, intuit our way out. But now the intuition is rising to the surface. We no longer…
…experienced as chaos, you know. Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins painting them. Freud announces that we are not just Christian ladies and gentlemen, but right beneath the surface the incest drive, cannibalistic…
…in the nearby semi-arid wilderness looking for fossils and later collecting butterflies and then after that building and launching rockets, Freud notwithstanding. And it was lots of fun, but there was certainly lots of fun inside books. So last night was…
…thoughts absurd for people to think of themselves as... heterosexual, homosexual, exclusive this, exclusive that. After all, you know, Freud showed that our fantasies almost always contain counter elements to our expressed choices, gender or otherwise. And I…
…I was invited here to dumb it down. So you know if you had Darwin You'd get natural selection, if you had Freud You'd get sexual repression. So you've got McKenna so you're going to get psychoactive catalysis of consciousness, because that's basically why…
…Well then 20 minutes later, ideas are beginning to accompany this melting and flowing of perception. We've now reached surrealism and Freud and Jung, the discovery of the unconscious. Well then it keeps going, it gets more and more intense. Now we don't…
…Well I suppose that was the answer I needed to hear it put my problems in perspective I realized you know you don't ask Freud to clip your fingernails for god's sake. So in that sense I'm not sure about intention, but the way I understand intention is…
…Modernism is part of this much larger phenomenon which I call the archaic revival, the discovery of the unconscious through Freud and Jung, the deconstruction of the image, first the image seen through impressionism and then the image imagined as…
…taboo structures. As soon as anthropologists arrived anywhere they found systems of taboos and that's why early twentieth century anthropology, Freud wrote a book on totem and taboo and they're interested in this question. And taboo means that which is…
…cultures, not just patriarchal etc. Don't you think they were projecting a lot of that? After all people like James Fraser and Freud came from the most taboo ruled societies that have ever existed on earth Victorian England and fin de siècle Vienna were…
…20th century is experienced as chaos. Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins painting them. Freud announces that we are not just Christian Ladies and gentlemen. But right beneath the surface, the incest drive, cannibalistic…
…a case going into it. I mean if you had known me when I was 19 years old I was into jean Paul Sartre, Alfred Camus, Marxism, Freud I was a jerk. And I came down from it and I said I can't believe it. That was all I could say for about 20 minutes…
…than that. It's been going on throughout the 20th century: the discovery of the purification of mescaline in Berlin in 1897 Freud begins to publish around the turn of the century, Jung. They are discovering the primitive unconscious. They are revealing to…
…19th century, back to people like Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, and the pataphysicians, the surrealists the physicists around Einstein Freud, Modern art, modern dance, jazz, all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive, to reclaim the…
…that comes down through the French, English, German Tradition of constipated male dominance and instead, you know, intuit that's what it is in Freud and Jung and the new age intuit our way out but now the intuition is rising to the surface. We no longer…
…having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud Concerning the dynamics of the psyche that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul ups in the…
…forms. It comes in the natural and available form of the dream, which always to some degree has shaped human culture. But for Freud and Jung in the early 20th century and their followers the dream took on a whole new significance that it had never had…
…arises a lot of it sexual and related to self identity and I don't have to discuss this with you, just refer you to Freud and the whole gang. Everybody understands how bent we are. The question is why? And I think this is why? Because we have been…
…is the presence of these English speaking entities in the trance. I mean that I did not expect I from Jung and from Freud you expect residual memories and but not these entities, these beings. And then the question is: where are they? Who are they? Well…
…or fairies, and to my mind this is confounding. This is no mere extension of the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and Jung. It begins to look as though you know the mind is not even in the brain there's some kind of extended landscape…
…this mystery at the center of the psilocybin intoxication is not simply the contents of your unconscious mind or unfulfilled fantasy as Freud thought, or it is in fact a contact with a gaian intelligence of some sort and if you're a rationalist as I…
…Scientific Male dominated, materialist civilization. It begins with phenomena like pataphysics in the 1880s in France and surrealism and Freud and Jung and abstract expressionism and even the nazis had a piece of the action because of their understanding…
…and bringing that in the same tendency which had infected mannerism then came in as surrealism in the 20th century and because of Freud and Jung and all this stuff. So I think that the whole history of 20th century art is a reaction against morbid…
…we call it schizophrenia and slam the door. But you know these dimensions have been with us since 10 000 times longer than Freud and people just have to come to terms with them. Now it's because of accidents of botany and history. European man has been…
…of LSD taking of the 1960s just preceding that, from about 1963 to 65, we were frantic for maps of the unconscious and Freud was useless. I mean the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what Freud called day residues…
…unconscious and Freud was useless. I mean the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what Freud called day residues and repressed sexual desire and stuff like that didn't wash. Within 10 minutes you could tell that was…