Reality Switch Technologies: McKenna & Gallimore

 

 

“You are in possession of an exquisite machine motionlessly buoyant in the softly circulating fluids of your skull. A world-building machine. And psychedelic molecules are the tools for tuning and operating this machine.”

 

 

Says Andrew R. Gallimore in his new book Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds. Very interesting book, worth checking out. 

 

In the spirit of Reality Switch Technologies, I found myself revisiting a bunch of Terence McKenna’s quotes on psychedelics and the exploration of new worlds. Quotes that shed light on the profound relationship between human consciousness and psychedelic experiences.

AI has helped me order Terence McKenna’s quotes into thematic sections for a more structured and coherent understanding of his ideas. Enjoy!

 

– Bradley C and GPT

 

 

For more on Gallimore’s work and its connection to McKenna’s legacy, delve into the detailed insights shared on Graham Hancock’s website:

Switching the Reality Channel: Psychedelics as tools for the discovery and exploration of new worlds.

 

With no further ado…

 

1. Nature, Reality, and the Power of Words

• “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
• “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”
• “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
• “In trying to think conservatively about the possibility of a non-human local intelligence, it seems to me that in a way nature herself presents as an intelligence—that the understanding of nature is the understanding of complex integrated systems of such complexity that to deny them consciousness is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind; that for anyone not burdened by that prejudice it’s self-evident that nature is alive, cognizant, responding.”
• “Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.”

2. Ego, Selfhood, and Consciousness

• “Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
• “If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.”
• “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”
• “The word ‘self’ is as great a mystery as the word ‘other’. It’s just a polarity between two mysteries.”
• “My voice speaking is a monkey’s mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agreed-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises.”

3. Culture, Society, and the Creation of Reality

• “The dominator culture is increasingly more and more sophisticated in its perfection of subliminal mechanisms of control. And I don’t mean anything grandiose and paranoid. I just mean that through press releases and soundbites and the enforced idiocy of television, the drama of a dying world has been turned into a soap opera for most people. And they don’t understand that it’s their story, and that they will eat it in the final act, if somewhere between here and the final act they don’t stand up on their hind legs and howl.”
• “We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.”
• “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
• “Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, dis-ensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies.”
• “If you’re a person of decent intent and moderate intelligence, and you read the great minds of your culture and study their thought, it’s insufficient, because everyone is bound within an illusion of language. The entire enterprise of culture is this illusion of language.”

4. Psychedelics, Perception, and Transformation

• “Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”
• “Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.”
• “A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.”
• “The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before.”

5. Science, Anti-Dogma, and the Quest for Understanding

• “We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity.”
• “The main difference between our world and the world that science tells us we’re living in is that science denies the quirky, freaky, cosmic-giggle, high-plottedness, completely improbable, totally quirky humor that binds everything together.”
• “My technique, which I recommend to you, is, don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”

6. Life, Death, and the Human Experience

• “The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”
• “[I often like to think that] our map of the world is so wrong that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from.”
• “Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”
• “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
• “We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.”