McKenna and Mushrooms
There is a 3:14:16 file that exists in the world which compiles all the meat of every interview ever given by Terence McKenna, who is a philosopher, a mystic, a shroom head, a shamanist, a Jungian, and, if I remember correctly, an ethnobiologist. He offers what on the surface seem to be coherent arguments for the reasons why we are fascinated with aliens and why mushrooms are, from the point of view of biological design, the most cogent shape for the UFO. You had to take everything he says with a grain of salt if not for his sharp wit which renders everything he says apt to justifiable skepticism from your part, although, again, he has moments of brilliance, as in
It's almost as though Western science was fascinated by energy. For 5,000 years, we pursued understanding energy. And this process ends with thermonuclear explosions in the deserts of the American Southwest. We can light the fire that burns in the heart of the distant stars. We know how to do that. That's what the Western mind achieved, political issues aside. The Eastern mind was not interested in energy. It was interested in time. And they spent 5,000 years deconstructing it, looking at it. And you don't use atom smashers, you don't use enormous physical pressure. It's a different problem, and you bring different tools to bear. You meditate. You look inside yourself. You study the movement of water around pebbles. You consider the situation. You study history.
As with almost if not all thinkers who tinker with the difference or even the synthesis of Oriental and Western modes of thinking, he derides all ideological systems borne out of the West and faffles with these very linguistic tools from the West to assimilate and render Oriental thinking into coherent shape, uplifting the value of lived experience while sneering at phenomenology and existentialism, in the same breath lumping these with Marxism, fascism, capitalism, and the patriarchal society.
Contrary to, say, Talbot, however, he does not clutch at mysticism to get humanity out of the hell Eurocentric individualism and American commodity fetishism unleashed upon the world; he maintains that psychedelic substances are the means by which to access the subconscious, and by extension, personal growth. That they offer glossolalia (see below) is support that ultimate reality is linguistic in essence and that mind and consciousness is hampered by ego and rationality. He lumps Nietzsche and Freud and Schopenhauer and Hegel into one class of thinkers, who have inherited the West's penchant for negatives, and by implication contrasts them with shamans, who come out of both good and bad experiences positive and whole. Again, grain of salt, if only because my skepticism comes from French continental philosophy, and that I really did find no place in my head or arguments or sheer necessity for Oriental frames of thought. These, to me, are more poetic than philosophical, and wrangling them into a European-born and -bred discipline leads to incoherence and grief (as defined by, of course, European-born and -bred disciplines. Foucault's voice is loud and clear, that motherfucker).
Attempting to compare, much less synthesize, the East and the West is the exemplar of comparing oranges and apples, while all in all insisting that "fruit" is objective reality, without calling it "objective." Epistemic problems have always been the West's problems: the East never had, to my knowledge, had to deal with the epistemological problems generated by a metaphysics, because those problems do not even occur, or if they do, they do so not as epistemological ones but immediately as moral-political ones. This is because Oriental metaphysics is solid, and I am suspecting that the reason for this is simple, that any major religion from the Orient did not put as much a premium as the West did on the individual before it got its metaphysics in order. There in the East is a certain untouchable isness to the cosmos (which by the same token does not work well in the West, even with the presence of a Heraclitus) that cannot bow to man's individuality, because, to begin with, Oriental religions look at time and change, at in constantia constans, eternal flux, or some other large moving thing, always as the paradigm for smaller things, like man. In the West (from the modern period, at least), this entire anthropomorphic shift was inevitably allowed to uproot and question all metaphysics because you anchor solidity and certainty on the very thing that you by the same irretrievable gesture make that which you are: a lone individual. Thereby and forever replacing larger things with smaller ones, until you get to a metaphysics of the really, irrelevantly, now meaninglessly, small: the person and his entitlements, and then proceed to define the large in terms of that (and call it a "revolution" or some such shit). That Eastern eyes are stereotypically small is a great irony: it is the Western eye that is myopic, having had already defined what eye muscles are in terms of the largest framework it can conceive - modern science. The Orient has poetry, and therefore, its metaphysics is infinitely sturdier, its eye larger - so large, in fact, that eyes are not even an issue at bottom. Chinky eyes weren't a thing, after all, until the white man defined what the Age of Exploration was.
This is precisely why the Orient celebrates the loss of self as enlightenment, as nirvana, and the West, as schizophrenia.
I did learn many things, like the words anele (to anoint), glossolalia (speaking in unidentifiable languages), grok (to understand intuitively or empathetically), and folie a deux (a delusion shared by two people). Anyway. This is me fangirling a bit because I got to be near a philosopher (or whatever the hell McKenna wants to be known as) and smile at the things he says and not preempt a headache in self-defense.
It's almost as though Western science was fascinated by energy. For 5,000 years, we pursued understanding energy. And this process ends with thermonuclear explosions in the deserts of the American Southwest. We can light the fire that burns in the heart of the distant stars. We know how to do that. That's what the Western mind achieved, political issues aside. The Eastern mind was not interested in energy. It was interested in time. And they spent 5,000 years deconstructing it, looking at it. And you don't use atom smashers, you don't use enormous physical pressure. It's a different problem, and you bring different tools to bear. You meditate. You look inside yourself. You study the movement of water around pebbles. You consider the situation. You study history.
As with almost if not all thinkers who tinker with the difference or even the synthesis of Oriental and Western modes of thinking, he derides all ideological systems borne out of the West and faffles with these very linguistic tools from the West to assimilate and render Oriental thinking into coherent shape, uplifting the value of lived experience while sneering at phenomenology and existentialism, in the same breath lumping these with Marxism, fascism, capitalism, and the patriarchal society.
Contrary to, say, Talbot, however, he does not clutch at mysticism to get humanity out of the hell Eurocentric individualism and American commodity fetishism unleashed upon the world; he maintains that psychedelic substances are the means by which to access the subconscious, and by extension, personal growth. That they offer glossolalia (see below) is support that ultimate reality is linguistic in essence and that mind and consciousness is hampered by ego and rationality. He lumps Nietzsche and Freud and Schopenhauer and Hegel into one class of thinkers, who have inherited the West's penchant for negatives, and by implication contrasts them with shamans, who come out of both good and bad experiences positive and whole. Again, grain of salt, if only because my skepticism comes from French continental philosophy, and that I really did find no place in my head or arguments or sheer necessity for Oriental frames of thought. These, to me, are more poetic than philosophical, and wrangling them into a European-born and -bred discipline leads to incoherence and grief (as defined by, of course, European-born and -bred disciplines. Foucault's voice is loud and clear, that motherfucker).
Attempting to compare, much less synthesize, the East and the West is the exemplar of comparing oranges and apples, while all in all insisting that "fruit" is objective reality, without calling it "objective." Epistemic problems have always been the West's problems: the East never had, to my knowledge, had to deal with the epistemological problems generated by a metaphysics, because those problems do not even occur, or if they do, they do so not as epistemological ones but immediately as moral-political ones. This is because Oriental metaphysics is solid, and I am suspecting that the reason for this is simple, that any major religion from the Orient did not put as much a premium as the West did on the individual before it got its metaphysics in order. There in the East is a certain untouchable isness to the cosmos (which by the same token does not work well in the West, even with the presence of a Heraclitus) that cannot bow to man's individuality, because, to begin with, Oriental religions look at time and change, at in constantia constans, eternal flux, or some other large moving thing, always as the paradigm for smaller things, like man. In the West (from the modern period, at least), this entire anthropomorphic shift was inevitably allowed to uproot and question all metaphysics because you anchor solidity and certainty on the very thing that you by the same irretrievable gesture make that which you are: a lone individual. Thereby and forever replacing larger things with smaller ones, until you get to a metaphysics of the really, irrelevantly, now meaninglessly, small: the person and his entitlements, and then proceed to define the large in terms of that (and call it a "revolution" or some such shit). That Eastern eyes are stereotypically small is a great irony: it is the Western eye that is myopic, having had already defined what eye muscles are in terms of the largest framework it can conceive - modern science. The Orient has poetry, and therefore, its metaphysics is infinitely sturdier, its eye larger - so large, in fact, that eyes are not even an issue at bottom. Chinky eyes weren't a thing, after all, until the white man defined what the Age of Exploration was.
This is precisely why the Orient celebrates the loss of self as enlightenment, as nirvana, and the West, as schizophrenia.
I did learn many things, like the words anele (to anoint), glossolalia (speaking in unidentifiable languages), grok (to understand intuitively or empathetically), and folie a deux (a delusion shared by two people). Anyway. This is me fangirling a bit because I got to be near a philosopher (or whatever the hell McKenna wants to be known as) and smile at the things he says and not preempt a headache in self-defense.
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