Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKennawas an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 November 1946
CityPaonia, CO
CountryUnited States of America
We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.
Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.
Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.
The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.
Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.
Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.
It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.
What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.
Language betrays, in order to mean.