My Favorite McKenna Quote Ever

[Mars]

"Though my conclusions may sound as flaky as anybody else's, it was hard for me to get this flaky. I didn't embrace it. I was forced to it. And this method works, you see. I mean, there are two ways to get flaky: you can just GET flaky, which takes no effort at all, you just announce you're a walk-in, start eating wheat-grass juice and tithe to Maitreya; or you can get flaky by testing the edges, by stretching the envelope of being. And this works for the most hard-headed among us. The aerospace-insurance-adjuster-mentality is not only who I am speaking to, but who I feel I represent. No kidding, really. At age 18 I was a Marxist, an Existentialist, I had ambitions in the field of aeronautical engineering. I discovered that you can take that kind of a mentality out into the theatre of real experience and you can come back a space-bunny just like everybody else. So what that means then is that a "straight" person - and I speak as someone from the 60s with apologies to all our gay friends who later appropriated that word, because when I say straight I mean "unstoned" - a straight person is not a guardian of truth or probity. A straight person is simply a frightened, proto-flake."

Full video clip on YouTube below:

Terence Mckenna on Seeking the Stone (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6088867521723616224)

[Mars]

"If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity."

[sidecross]

I heard Terence McKenna quote a poet who died in the trenches of World War One, and to the best of my memory this is the quote.


‘I lean over meanings edge and feel the dizziness of things unsaid.’

[drew hempel]

Hey whatever happened to Dennis McKenna's quest to get Ayahuasca cleared by the FDA for treating alcoholism? http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2003/05/08/5951

He proved that post-users had greater levels of receptors for serotonin.

[nanouk]

http://home.swipnet.se/mrhawk/jpfulgud.gif

"Does one become ugly because one believes in God, or does one believe in God because one is ugly?"

"Oh Yes! I am ready!"

Joakim Pirinen, Cartoonist Superieur. McKennaist Philosophy.

[Mars]

Sidecross, the quote you speak of was also in the "Mckenna on Alchemy" post.

Many of you who've stuck with me know that I love to quote this poem by this obscure poet who died in the trenches in France in the first World War, Trumble Stickney, and he wrote a poem called "Meaning's Edge" and the punch line goes like this "I look over meaning's edge and feel the dizziness of the things you have not said," and I think that every one of these weekends, this is the effort - to carry you to the edge of an abyss and then push you over into the dizziness of the things unsaid and they will always be unsaid.

[sidecross]

Mars & Caprinardo Delirio thank you both for bringing out the quote; it is the one I had in mind.

Edit: I first heard the full quote on a tape of a talk at The New York Open Center titled: The Edge of Meaning