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  • TERENCE MCKENNA: The real issue is what kind of mental world shall people inhabit?

  • What kinds of hope shall be permitted?

  • What kind of value systems shall be allowed?

  • And the value systems that agrandise the possession of things

  • the tearing up of the earth

  • competition classism racism sexism

  • have led us to the brink of catastrophe.

  • Now I think we have to abandon western cultural values and return to the

  • deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plans.

  • That's the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature.

  • And if we can do this then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.

  • Very little of the past can be saved.

  • The architechtonics the machines the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda

  • the silly religions the assinine asthetic cannons \rvery little of that can be saved.

  • But what can be saved is the sense of love and \rcaring and mutuality

  • that we all uh put into and take from the human enterprise.

  • You know theres a Grateful Dead song that says

  • you can't go back and you can't stand still

  • if the thunder don't get you than the lightning will

  • and we now hold

  • through the possession of these psychedlics

  • catalysts for the human imagination

  • of sufficient power that if we use them

  • we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle

  • that is carrying us towards the brink of apocalypse.

  • We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship

  • that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be waiting us.

  • But its a cultural test.

  • Nature is pitiless.

  • Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been risked.

  • But if it proves inadequate

  • nature will cover it over with the same kind of

  • cool impunity that she covered over the \rdinosaurs, the trilobines and the crosockdarigiens fishes

  • and all those other folks who came before.

  • So what we must do I think is see our future in the imagination.

  • Catalyse the imagination.

  • Form symbiotic relationships with the plants.

  • Affirm archaic values and spread the good news

  • that what is out of control

  • what is in fact dying

  • is a world that had become too top heavy with its \rown hubris.

  • Too bent by its own false value system and too dehumanized to care about what happens to its own children.

  • So I say good riddance to it.

  • Bring on the archaic revival and

  • lets create a new world. That's it.

TERENCE MCKENNA: The real issue is what kind of mental world shall people inhabit?

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