McKenna: Girl of the Year 2012

[undead]

American Girl is headquartered in Middleton WI, just outside of Madison WI. I've known some graphic artists that work there or work on contract for them. In this cultural milieu it's not at all a stretch to imagine that McKenna is a reference to Terence.

We are not slack-jawed, dazed, glazed, unemployable psychotic creeps. We are pillars of society. You can't run your computers, your fashion houses, your publishing houses, your damn magazines, you can't do anything in culture without psychedelic people in key positions. And this is the great unspoken truth of American Creativity.

Evidently true.

I think all the proselytizing makes you drug people look bad. It's not for everyone. Anyone interested will gravitate towards it anyway without the glowing reviews, and anyone not interested will just be pushed further away, strongly suspecting you guys are full of shit and don't know it. And that doesn't make the uninterested forever cast out of the heavenly realms of enlightenment. I know plenty of people enlightened in their own way, never tripped or only had low level trips in the lame ass party set and setting, and so what? There are so many ways to get there, wherever 'there' is. There are different types of people, and even those different types can get there in different ways, depending on where they are in their lives, in their moods, so many factors. You drug people know this. So why do you keep up with the "oh you have to try this attitude." It's only so much preaching to the choir. I love mushrooms and probably smoke more herb than any three off you combined, but even I get turned off by this drug culture nonsense. I never bothered reading or learning about Terence. Maybe that's my problem right there, right? I'm sure he's a great guy, sounds like he really helped turn on some of you. But I didn't need him.

My favorite thing to do recently is see how drunk, stoned or tripping balls I can be and have no one around me know. I'm getting pretty good at it. I find drunk is the toughest one to hide.

Proselytizing is a phase in getting turned on that all serious heads go through to some extent, even if it is only a fleeting thought of how nice it would be if everyone did this. Personally I don't feel the need to do this any more, having turned on a number of my friends and family already, because I found that it usually isn't worth the effort if a person isn't already interested. It is always nice to facilitate a positive introduction to psychedelics, for sure. A person who is distributing these substances has a responsibility to promote their use in a positive way, though, and that is were proselytizing the psychedelic culture is really important, because misuse of these substances has terrible consequences.

As far as changing the minds of people who are against it (for those of use who still care that much) probably the best strategy is to use the tools to do something outstanding that makes people ask "How do you do that?" And then you can tell them without sounding like a religious lunatic.

It's only so much preaching to the choir. I love mushrooms and probably smoke more herb than any three off you combined, but even I get turned off by this drug culture nonsense.

Maybe you're not doing it right, and that's why you need to smoke so much herb. Lot's of people self-medicate their problems with lots of herb when they could be resolved some other way. Cigarette smoking comes to mind. When people mix tobacco with herb in joints they often fail to understand the non-addictive and detoxifying nature of cannabis because they always have withdrawal from tobacco that drives them to smoke more joints endlessly. I'm not saying this applies to you (how should I know?), but what you said made me think of a lot of people I know.

Not that it is a bad idea to smoke lots of herb, but using it in a positive and conscious way will hopefully inspire someone to find the cause of their problems and get to a point where they don't need that much. That's for the customers and subsistence producers mostly, I think, because after a point if you can afford to smoke all the time - why not?

[crikkett]

I think all the proselytizing makes you drug people look bad. ... I love mushrooms and probably smoke more herb than any three off you combined, but even I get turned off by this drug culture nonsense. .

I never would have tried mushrooms, except we found a huge patch of a silocybin variety growing within a mile of my house. (It was a decade ago, word got out, wasn't my fault, they're gone now).

Anyway it's like explaining the bliss of an orgasm, which is very difficult to do without scaring (or harming) the uninitiated; the initiated have no need for explanation.

dada's right - psychedelics aren't for everyone and it's not right to push them. We should be tolerant and supportive of frightened uninitiates*. If I never took psychedelics again I wouldn't miss it, but I lead a better life because of the lessons I learned from magic mushrooms.

-----
*help for a better word here please?

[undead]

^^^^

Choose the best answer:

A. "the uninitiated"

B. "squares"

C. "ignorant, mouth-breathing animals"

[NaturalMystik]

Mushrooms are a tad gentler than DMT, but they both take you to the Logos/hyperspace. No other psychedelics have this defining characteristic;

Perhaps deserves it's own debate in another thread, but I think Salvia Divinorium (a mint/sage hybrid created by indigenous peoples of mexico), could also fit into this category. It can definitely put one in touch with the machine elves, the green lady, and transport you to other dimensions at a fairly low dose. It shreds the ego and flings the doors of perception wide open... What I find most interesting about these natural entheogens is how such similar experiences and contacts are reported among a wide variety of unassociated users.

[dada]

"I smoke more herb than any three people here" was just a colorful turn of phrase. Obviously I don't know how much herb anyone here smokes, so I have no way of knowing if I smoke more or less. Perhaps I should have used "I smoke as much herb as the next guy/girl." The point being that while I may be psychedelic, I personally find psychedelic culture to be distasteful.

[Bruce Dazzling]

you've got an unpleasant enlighteneder-then-thou attitude.

No, it just seems that way to you because you have nothing positive or original to contribute to any conversation of significant depth. Also, you are a misogynistic crank and your sex life is probably pathetic because of this. I would imagine that is why you spend your time dragging down the quality of conversation on this board, and I am not going to suggest for you to do something different because I don't give a fuck about you or your miserable little existence.

You'll be taking a week-long break from the board for this personal attack, undead.

[Stephen Morgan]

The insulting is a little uncalled for, undead, but, Stephen, your perspective is based completely on ignorance because you've never taken these substances. You make yourself look like an idiot. Mushrooms are the exact opposite of glue-sniffing or binge-drinking. It's not really a debate; it's just a matter of people who have used plant entheogens and people who haven't. The latter is uninformed on the matter.

People say the same about LSD. No-one seems to say the same about crack, but I don't know why not. Very energising. Pleasant enough to be habit-forming. A great pick-me-up in the morning, and if it's too muich you can have some smack to take the edge off. The only negative effect is addiction, but stay close to your dealer and you'll be fine. And, unlike LSD it wasn't invented by a huge pharmaceutical giant, it wasn't used in CIA mind control experiments, it hasn't been shown to rewire your brain permanently to turn you into a pervert.

As far as I'm concerned when you fuck about with your own brain you lose the right to assess your own experience.

[Weather Balloons]

As far as I'm concerned when you fuck about with your own brain you lose the right to assess your own experience.

Not bad, but that's ignoring the notion that everyone is constantly fucking about with their brains in one way or another. Accepting any idea as an absolute fact requires the exclusion of any ideas that would contradict what is otherwise believed to be certain. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't believe at least ONE idea to be absolutely certain. How is accepting an idea as fact not "fucking about with your own brain"?

Personally, I feel that trying to explain the benefits of psychedelics to a person who has no interest or experience in them is quite similar to trying to have a rational discussion about an organized religion with someone who has accepted said religion as an absolute certainty. It's most likely a waste of breath, but there's always the chance that you'll be able to sneak in some tidbit of information which expands their perspective.

Anyways, Robert Anton Wilson can say it better than I can.

[barracuda]

People say the same about LSD. No-one seems to say the same about crack, but I don't know why not. Very energising. Pleasant enough to be habit-forming. A great pick-me-up in the morning, and if it's too muich you can have some smack to take the edge off. The only negative effect is addiction, but stay close to your dealer and you'll be fine. And, unlike LSD it wasn't invented by a huge pharmaceutical giant, it wasn't used in CIA mind control experiments, it hasn't been shown to rewire your brain permanently to turn you into a pervert.

There's a significant amount of evidence that points towards the crack cocaine/CIA symbiosis. Gary Webb's entire late career, for example. But otherwise, yeah, I'd say you're right. I used to enjoy a bit of booyah before breakfast from time to time. As to glue sniffing, I say avoid it. It's just a stepping stone to huffing gasoline.

[brainpanhandler]

As far as I'm concerned when you fuck about with your own brain you lose the right to assess your own experience.

Not bad, but that's ignoring the notion that everyone is constantly fucking about with their brains in one way or another. Accepting any idea as an absolute fact requires the exclusion of any ideas that would contradict what is otherwise believed to be certain. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't believe at least ONE idea to be absolutely certain. How is accepting an idea as fact not "fucking about with your own brain"?

Personally, I feel that trying to explain the benefits of psychedelics to a person who has no interest or experience in them is quite similar to trying to have a rational discussion about an organized religion with someone who has accepted said religion as an absolute certainty. It's most likely a waste of breath, but there's always the chance that you'll be able to sneak in some tidbit of information which expands their perspective.

Anyways, Robert Anton Wilson can say it better than I can.

Perhaps a better analogy would be, it's like trying to explain the glory of a sunset to someone blind from birth, although that's being unkind to the blind from birth as they didn't choose their blindness.

Thanks for the RAW vid. Love that guy. I doubt there are many members here that don't or aren't familiar with him. And yet you'd think from the protestations around here about censorship and closed mindedness that we were all a bunch of ignorant fuddy duddies chained to our delusional worldviews fed to us by the intellectual ptb.

[dada]

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't believe at least ONE idea to be absolutely certain.

But if they were absolutely certain, they wouldn't need to make an effort to believe it.

Bob is the last Buddha on the road for me. I know I have to kill him, but he's a slippery son-of-a-bitch, that one.

[MayDay]

People say the same about LSD. No-one seems to say the same about crack, but I don't know why not. Very energising. Pleasant enough to be habit-forming. A great pick-me-up in the morning, and if it's too muich you can have some smack to take the edge off

Bullshit. Crack is not 'pleasant enough to be habit forming', it's addictive enough to be habit forming, duh. For many users it's really not a pleasant experience at all, and neither is the intense craving that quickly follows the relatively short, intense burst of, um, 'energy' the high provides. It also teaches you nothing about yourself and the world around you, it reinforces selfish, egotistical behavior patterns, and causes you to do horrible things to people you once loved. It is practically the exact opposite of lsd. As for crack being "a great pick me up in the morning", this is a ridiculous notion- unless you're idea of a 'pick me up' requires you to repeat every 30-40 minutes in order to avoid hours of trembling, paranoid anxiety.

The only negative effect is addiction, but stay close to your dealer and you'll be fine. And, unlike LSD it wasn't invented by a huge pharmaceutical giant, it wasn't used in CIA mind control experiments

Again, set and setting (thank you, Leary). The CIA used the drug in combination with all manner of tortures to the subjects involved. They had no idea of the true nature of the chemical compound they were dealing with, except that it caused whatever the subject was experiencing to be intensified exponentially.

The physical and emotional environment that the cia created for the subjects of their tests was the exact opposite set of conditions that informed/ experienced users strive to surround themselves with when using this chemical.

it hasn't been shown to rewire your brain permanently to turn you into a pervert.

Guilty as charged. Proud little faggot pervert here. Sure beats the fuck out of the alternative- repressed, guilty, awkward, never truly able to let go and feel the wild, brain changing ecstasy of uninhibited physical and spiritual connection between two (or more) bodies, to feel it so completely that the others' pleasure becomes your own and vice versa. (edit)- I'd like to know where lsd has "been shown to rewire your brain permanently to turn you into a pervert." That sounds like utter bullshit to me. Sources??
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I would suggest reading 'The Joyous Cosmology' by Alan Watts for brilliant elucidation of the profound, life changing experiences that these compounds are capable of producing:

"But here the depth of light and structure in a bursting bud go on forever. There is time to see them, time for the whole intricacy of veins and capillaries to develop in consciousness, time to see down and down into the shape of greenness, which is not green at all, but a whole spectrum generalizing itself as green—purple, gold, the sunlit turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the emerald. I cannot decide where shape ends and color begins. The bud has opened and the fresh leaves fan out and curve back with a gesture which is unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, "Thus!" And somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The meaning is transparent in the same way that the color and the texture are transparent, with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be right inside the structure and color. Which is of course where it is, for light is an inseparable trinity of sun, object, and eye, and the chemistry of the leaf is its color, its light."

"A journey into this new mode of consciousness gives one a marvelously enhanced appreciation of patterning in nature, a fascination deeper than ever with the structure of ferns, the formation of crystals, the markings upon sea shells, the incredible jewelry of such unicellular creatures of the ocean as the radiolaria, the fairy architecture of seeds and pods, the engineering of bones and skeletons, the aerodynamics of feathers, and the astonishing profusion of eye-forms upon the wings of butterflies and birds. All this involved delicacy of organization may, from one point of view, be strictly functional for the purposes of reproduction and survival. But when you come down to it, the survival of these creatures is the same as their very existence—and what is that for?"

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/JCBODY.HTM

I know Stephen will probably ignore this. Oh well.

[wordspeak2]

Joe Hillshoist- Yes, it's five *dried* grams of mushrooms. According to McKenna that would equal about sixty grams fresh.

Sunny- I *really* wish you would someday. I think you're the type who could go far with them. I'd much rather see people like you tripping seriously for the first time than college kids fooling around with it.

Dada- Well, in my opinion/experience you cannot reach the same place without these plant substances. This is another thing I like about McKenna, is he talked openly about traveling India taking in the different spiritual cultures, and it's very clear that the Buddhist meditation thing is not on the as level as the plant-based shamanism that you see primarily in South America. This is what I hear from many people I know who have traveled to these places, and it's also what I find in my experience. I've gotten into meditation and did a long Vipassana course at one point, and know many people who have, and I don't deny that you can get to a very high place. But it's not even remotely on the same planet as a really did mushroom or DMT experience, or even a mescaline or salvia one. These experiences are truly, truly something else entirely.
Psychedelics really don't combine with alcohol; they're going a totally different direction. I don't drink a lick. So I hope you don't take this the wrong way... but, agreeing with undead, maybe that's why you need to smoke so much weed. I smoke weed daily, but I need very little to get extremely high, and I don't drink a lick of alcohol. Psychedelics also opened up my third eye in a way that led me to stop eating all processed foods, and it's a different world of consciousness here. I do think meditation can bring an awareness of how food affects you, but psychedelic plants are a shortcut.
As far as "proselytizing," I mean obviously when you have a completely life-changing experience you want to share it. I badly want others to see what I've seen, felt what I've felt. It's completely ineffable. Words are all we have, though, so I try to use them to convince people to have the experience and explain how to get there, as McKenna did. However, I disagree with the Timothy Leary approach of mass-proselytizing. I think it's about quality, not quantity.
Personally, my goal in this regard is to try to try to get people who have already had psychedelic experiences (I include conscious cannabis smoking in that) to actually encounter the Logos. There is no hyperbole that exists to describe this dimension.
I mean, my primary mission is exploring these places myself. Talking to others about them is tertiary. But if I hadn't ever read McKenna I never would have had the proper outlook and knowledge to get there myself, so I can't discount that.

But anyway, dada, I do understand why you find some of "psychedelic culture" to be distasteful. I blame Timothy Leary for some of that. I think if you read or listened to some McKenna you'd find a whole different perspective and energy. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that McKenna went the all-natural route. There is a huge difference between synthetic or semi-synthetic substances and plant psychedelics.

NaturalMystik- I've never had a full-blown salvia experience, so I can't say exactly. From what I've heard you're right as far as the mind-blowing intensity; salvia can be that wild. But there's something completely unique about that alien encounter with DMT/mushrooms, according to McKenna and some others. But since I haven't been there on salvia I can't speak to it exactly. I plan to really give it a go at some point, and peyote or San Pedro cactus, as well.
Re: "What I find most interesting about these natural entheogens is how such similar experiences and contacts are reported among a wide variety of unassociated users.. "
...yes, *exactly.* People go to hyperspace. It's a real thing; it's completely undeniable. Peoples' exact stories aren't the same, but there are distinct similarities, very similar entities, etc. There apparently exists another "dimension." Exact language aside this is simply a fact. Beings in this dimension are friendly and wish to communicate with us; many people experience profound universal knowledge/wisdom. What McKenna coined "luv" is rained down on you by whatever-it-is; this is a force far greater than sexual attraction; it is indescribably pleasing. As a species on the whole we've barely barely begun to even wade in these waters, and the oceans seems near-infinite.

And, Stephen, people have used these substances all throughout history. It's not "fucking about with your brain." It's connecting with a nature spirit. DMT is in fact *found inside our brains.* It's endogenous. What it is is exploring aspects of our souls and perhaps the universe, at the very least some spirit on Earth, that are usually suppressed by our consumerist society. The truth lies in the experience; you have to have the experience to judge it. Crack has a very dark energy and does not lead the user to brilliantly indescribable landscapes. And what MayDay said.

The role of the CIA vis-a-vis LSD in the sixties is a totally separate conversation. Probably a lot of folks here are familiar with the book "Acid Dreams," which is imho a great primer on the subject. LSD is LSD; it's only so interesting. It's not going to take you into hyperspace. Hyperspace is the great mystery.

Thanks for this thread, you'all. It was well-timed, as I'm about to open up Terence and Dennis McKenna's first book, "The Invisible Landscape," and I needed some motivation, because I know it's going to be a challenge to follow.

[Joe Hillshoist]

you've got an unpleasant enlighteneder-then-thou attitude.

No, it just seems that way to you because you have nothing positive or original to contribute to any conversation of significant depth. Also, you are a misogynistic crank and your sex life is probably pathetic because of this. I would imagine that is why you spend your time dragging down the quality of conversation on this board, and I am not going to suggest for you to do something different because I don't give a fuck about you or your miserable little existence.

You'll be taking a week-long break from the board for this personal attack, undead.

WTF Thats way too harsh.

[Joe Hillshoist]

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't believe at least ONE idea to be absolutely certain.

But if they were absolutely certain, they wouldn't need to make an effort to believe it.

Bob is the last Buddha on the road for me. I know I have to kill him, but he's a slippery son-of-a-bitch, that one.

You don't tho, cos he never set himself up as one. Quite the opposite in fact.

He's just a dead guy who was quite good at thinking and many of his ideas are still appropriate today.