Terence McKenna discusses whether reality is real or not?
If you were to meet a termite that stated that his or her goal in life was the perfect modeling of the cosmos, you would think it to be quite a comical undertaking, and yet how different are we that we should presume to know more than a shadow of the truth.
Linguistic Truth, or the Truth of Language and the Illusions that Language Weaves
“Someone quite intelligent said language was invented so that people could lie. In other words, it gives you the fudge factor of obfuscation, where someone says, why did you do that? Well the best approach is, I didn’t do that. You thought I did that. What you thought you saw, you didn’t see. In other words, lawyers are some of those who have done the finest work with language, and behind them politicians.
The true potential of language, which is to elevate and unite the community was early on betrayed into the production of the illusion, illusory, and ideological goods that could then be marketed among the people and to spread confusion.
Psychedelics reflect on this because psychedelics stretch and pull and melt and recast the illusion producing machinery of language. I think the one thing Psychedelics do for everyone (whether they have a good trip or a bad trip because is up to them to interpret what they make of this) is it shows you the relativity of your viewpoint, that it’s just ‘your point of view’, you inherit from a geographical area, a culture, a set a parents, it has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchor in some kind of metaphysical super-space, it’s just your cultural point of view and travel actually does the same thing and I’ve always felt there was an weird affinity between psychedelics and travel and I suppose many people have or we wouldn’t called a trip, we wouldn’t called a journey; but travel shows you the relativity of culture and what’s really happening when you travel is you’re moving from one language domain to another. We don’t think of it that way but that is in fact what is happening… that like all tools it shapes its user in ways that are not suspected until is too late…
It’s not like there is a ‘kings X’ where grey beards in white coats tend the sacred vestal fires of reality, there is no reality, there are only people who do know this, or people who don’t know this and are therefore being manipulated by the people who do know it and what that means then is that people who can cut through this many many illusions… the illusion of materialism… the illusion of business as usual.. the illusion of benevolent institutions carefully guiding us toward reasonable destinies… If you cut through all that, if you disabuse yourself of all that… you will empower yourself to eventually be able to stand up in delicate social and political situations and just say… BULLSHIT!… THAT’S BULLSHIT!”
From the talk the taxonomy of illusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amUjyR…
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