Thread by @owenbroadcast

alright im stuck in my car rn and trying not to wake my wife up so its time for a thread on terrence mckenna. might have to pause at some point but lets do it.

https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast/status/1442476301789671429

so, if you dont know you can look him up, but he’s basically [the] mushroom guy. if you’re into mushrooms you would know who he is. mainly his ideas were disseminated in talks and a few books, he has a few interlocking theories about life, the mind, the universe, mushrooms, etc.

i suppose in the current popular “spiritual stuff” domain he would be most well known for coining the term “machine elf” for the beings people often see on dmt. he was an early DMT guy in the sense that he was talking about it when it was still ostensibly difficult to find.

in terms of my own intellectual and spiritual development he was an extremely important person. i was basically a full on terrence mckenna devotee for a while. that means that i used his general worldview and aims and cosmology as my modus operandi for a significant time.

said more simply, that means that i was doing drugs and making art in his general context, within his model. that basically being “theres this aspect of things that the psychedelic experience illumines, and we can make art to bring that to others.”

this process, and what is illumined by the psychedelic experience, being viewed as critical in terms of human development and the future and... everything. kind of like at the center of “it all” - religion, art, the universe, evolution, is this experience, and this process.

i used to get up, and when i wasnt working at a weird job, just paint and listen to terrence mckenna talks all day, all the time. so any audio he has that is between easy and medium difficulty to find, ive heard it, multiple times. the hard ones to find, i have listened to many.

if you think about it, if youre in a room painting for 12+ hours a day, you can listen to a whole weekend series of lectures and courses in a day. and then youre doing that all the time. i also read most of his books and other things in that ballpark so, that was “it” for me.

its probably most efficient to, instead of laying it all out and going backward to re-highlight things, to just go through the things i started to feel like he got wrong, or that would lead to dead ends, that essentially caused my slow breakup with that worldview and cosmology.

i say all this honestly, lovingly, in a way. i was basically, at least, an amateur student of the guy so, in a way as odd as it is i kind of see myself as downstream of him. what i would humbly call the general errors, i have the advantage of hindsight and more data. thats it.

it could have plausibly been the other way around, and i could have been the weirdo mega psychedelics guy at his time, and he could be the one who came later and learned from my mistakes. its just circumstantial that i happen to me on this end, in my view. anyway:

A) the main error i think that is the biggest mistake (maybe). terrence mckenna has this view of culture as sort of like an exoskeleton that the human being wears and adopts, like clothing. this is kind of true i guess, in a way. even if not 100% correct there is something to it.

the mistake comes in viewing this as an intrinsically negative phenomenon. he said “culture is not your friend”. in this model, he viewed this experience as adopting a mask, a false face, or really - more like some organism takes you over and starts taking precedence over “you”.

in his view “culture” is like a brainworm that gets in and obscures your real true self, who you actually are - and part of the general process he advises is stripping this away and getting rid of this fake facade to see and find who you really are. “culture is not your friend”.

now, while there can potentially be an aspect of this that is true, it is not definitively this way. culture is not INHERENTLY negative. in some ways, it is like a tool we use in a positive sense. it has positive manifestations. it isnt always bad, its not always pathological.

i started to see culture, to keep the analogy going, more like a mech suit the human wears. in some ways, it empowers you and gives you certain abilities and advantages. sure, it could be bad, but its not like a disease, inherently, which is 100% how he characterizes it.

i also started to doubt that there is this “pure self” underneath “the culture” as though the two are polar opposites, as though if i dug down deep enough into myself i would find some subterranean layer that was totally separate from my life, nation, time, family, culture, etc.

that realization actually came later. now, i would phrase it as: those things are not 100% incidental to who i “actually” am. maybe there are incidental aspects but who “i am” is partially tied to them, intrinsically, for sure. however at the time i wouldnt have articulated that.

at the time i would have just said, well there are parts of culture i like. whats wrong with that? why is there something inherently wrong with identifying with positive aspects of culture? isnt that good? i assume in retrospect, as a painter, painting, that was probably a factor

could go on about that but lets keep moving. another break was in terms of the goal and endpoint of this process. a central metaphor or idea in the mckenna cosmology and worldview is the dream of potentially bringing something back from the psychedelic realm, “for the tribe”.

the idea being that, you go to this “other place” that is kind of like a realm of infinite potential and unfettered ideas and pure creativity and like, if you could just bring something back from this realm, like some impossible object or something, and could show it to others...

that they would see it and it would finally prove... something. that it would show them that this other way of thinking and being exists, that this other realm is real, that the limits we place on ourselves and our way of thinking and being, that theres so much more out there.

taking a “chunk” of the psychedelic or higher realm or whatever back here physically obviously being impossible, this being a metaphor for what we could potentially do in art, with words, with some creative formula, we could do some analogy for this process in real life.

well, eventually i realized, even when i was still down with all this stuff, that actually, no one would care. it wouldnt change anything. people dont work that way. even if we took everything about this view as true and valid, peoples minds and lives arent changed in that way.

if this were all true and you could, theoretically, lets say, take a 5D hyperdimensional straight up magical impossible glowing self transforming object from the “other” realm / “way” and show it to someone, 99% of people would just be like “oh, cool”, and go back to normal life.

my wife just woke up so im going to pause this and pick this up later.

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