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I am continually fascinated by what Terence McKenna expressed. Ever since I somehow got pulled into investigating the mysteries of the stars and planets, I’ve been reading and listening to the thoughts of the great thinkers out there.

Future Hi, a glorious resource of readings by some of these thinkers. From the mythology of Joesph Campbell, to the alien expressions of Terence McKenna, there are hours and hours of readings available for free. Take a gander, and don’t hesitate to download something that you find interesting. Give it a listen. Even if you don’t listen to the whole thing, you’re bound to get a little insight into the minds of these thinkers. My whole reason for writing this is from the first part of “The Invisible Landscape” read by Terence McKenna. Here’s is an excerpt that I typed out from listening to the first 5 minutes.

…think of myself as a teacher primarily or at oral, I think of myself as a researcher who because of the unorthodox nature of the research, has to submit to this kind of situation for peer review. That’s what this is, this is peer review of my wrath, not teaching in any sense of the word. So before I get into it I’ll say a little bit about my attitude towards epistemology and system making generally. This is one of the slightly uncomfortable moments, because I have to make distance between myself and large numbers of other people and say: “I do not believe in the wars of atlantis”, “I do not believe in reincarnation”, “I do not believe in the healing power of crystals”, and a whole string of alienating “I do not believes”. Fact of the matters is, I don’t believe in belief. I think belief is a tremendously stultifying force. What I’m interested in is freedom. And I noticed very early that a belief absolutely precludes the possibility of holding to its opposite. And therefore if you believe something, you have signed away its opposite and limited yourself. This comes close to the ideal, but not the fact, of how science is supposed to be waged. So I’m an impression and fact collector. and I will propound a number of ideas that are very controversial, I guess. And I want you to understand that they appear controversial to me, and the controversy over their applicability to reality rages in me at least as strongly as it will rage in any dialog that I have with any of you.

The area that we’re working in, at the fringe of science, at the frontier of psychology is too chaotic and disorganized to be called a science at this point. We’re in the Baconian phase of it where you merely collect facts, catalog facts and wait for emergent patterns to be visible. And this is what I’ve done, and I began as a skeptic, fairly confident that this kind of examination of reality and collection of facts would support the rationalist, reductionist, minimalist mapping of reality. And I discovered to my delight and amazement that the world is quite a complex place, quite a large percentage of it goes on outside the descriptive power of any metaphor that we presently have a handle on. And so I just want to put that out. That my attitude is one of a kind of skepticism that allows. And I am well known as the proponent of the notion that there is an extra-terrestrial or a trans-human intelligence accessible through certain psychedelic drugs. I have that experience often. But I am not a believer in it. I am very puzzled by it. I return again and again to reason as the measure against which all these things have to be played. So peer review is very important I think, because we’re moving in an area where very little is known. We’re somewhat in the analogous position to the early explorers of the Amazon who would sail up the main flow of the Amazon and note in their logs, past a river mouth that, “Mmm… two miles wide…origin: unknown.” This is what we are charting. Enormous unknown flows of which we are only able to chart the most gross expressions of these things. OK, so that’s enough about method.

Labels: audiobooks, reading

// posted by Wes Rogers @ 15:35