![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
McKenna on Culture & Closure
Zac pointed out a great lecture by Terence McKenna in which he drops the following pearls:
[…] culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with closure, to force closure. That’s why cultural trips are so bizarre, why they don’t make sense to anybody but the Witoto or the Waorani or the Americans or the Japanese; if you’re not inside the culture it seems crazy. The cultures don’t make sense because they’re not trying to make sense. What they’re trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human being, who is living in the light of closure, a more manipulateable, a more malleable, a lesser thing.
[…] The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That’s the honest position, given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various memes of closure that are around, psychedelics do that. That’s why they are so politically controversial and potent because — more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake — they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning. They show that these things are provisional, and that beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic, time-and-space-bound, feeling-defined, pre-linguistic mode of being, which is real being. Not becoming, not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension that commodification of culture and delayed gratification and all these other buzzwords create, but a deeper level of authentic feeling. And it was there all the time, but is denied by the culture.
Here’s the rest of the lecture, which deals very much with the topics we’ve been discussing here in the past few days.
July 2nd, 2005 at 7:58 pm
God, McKenna got it right in the Q & A followup.
“You can find your own mind on the Internet.”
Granted, he used a search term that directed back to a transcript of one of his talks. But I felt the same way simply by reading the lecture. Been there and done that. Not in a ho-hum sort of way, but more like, “God, this guy senses the same shit I sense.” I guess, that’s also why I like the little echo chamber we’ve set up. I feel like we’re coming up with something here. We’ll probably never know what it is we’re inching towards, but that in and of itself is its beauty.
If I can let you all in on something, I have NEVER experienced the unconditional respect for outlandish ideas as I have with the handful of people who belong to this amorphous mass of intense speculation. My entire life has been spent either denying my imagination or having to passive-aggressively defend the unorthodox ideas that come to me. Often it was much better not to share. And this is hence, why most of my life I have been under the impression that I am insane and on the verge of a breakdown.
I remember the day it all started in fact. The worst day of my life that led into years of anguish. I saw something at a 7/11 that changed my life forever. I’m now beginning to realize that it wasn’t the worst day ever. There are no bad days — just days. And this is good. What I saw, sensed, felt, imagined, was there for anybody to experience, except the sheer gravity of the “epiphany” I experienced, made it so much more important to me and nonexistent to everybody else. It struck me with a panic that no human should ever have to feel. Because what I saw was quite literally nothing, yet it took on the form of everything and everything I discovered was worthless. The panic came from the inability to express what I saw. I internalized the vapid banality of the system and registered it as a flaw in my own existence. It can kill you!
Life is nothing more than an unknown and unknowable process. Love is essential to happiness and a zest to continue.
July 2nd, 2005 at 8:31 pm
if i may play carlos santana`s guitar for you now………………..you know what i mean, if you can hear his sound. it resonates with all that is love and becomes more of that. and it may not be a guitar. it may be a flower or a smell or a smile. whatever it is for you now when you find it, you just have to let it grow inside and expand to be all that you are. and it becomes you. when you choose. every time.
and if you`ve ever heard terence laugh you will know that he knows that hip-gnosis.
July 2nd, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Is “hip-gnosis” a pejorative?
July 2nd, 2005 at 9:59 pm
if you go to deoxy they have the same lecutre as an audio recording
July 3rd, 2005 at 12:01 am
no, i`m a hypnotherapist. it was a play on words. when you`ve taken a heroic dose of mushrooms and you`ve squeegeed your third eye you recognise the tone in the laughter……………………..