Terence McKenna: The World & It’s Double – 1/11
alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com 11 September 1993: This World …and Its Double. “It seems to me that culture, at least this culture, is a shabby lie.” In this lecture, Terence McKenna talks about the tragic situation we humans have placed ourselves in, and ways in which the boundry dissolution effects of psychedelic medicines can possibly save our species from what appears to be a certain extinction. . . . “What the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable.” “Culture denies experience.” “We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to its surface.” “We’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason, and science, and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm.” “We’re in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.” “All the boundaries we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved [when using psychedelics]. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. Government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them.” “The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been …



