Terence quotes

"So the thing that I thought would be interesting to unpack a little this evening is what I call “the balkanization of epistemology” — or what [McKenna's son] calls simply the “curse of relativism.” This is the idea that you can’t tell what’s going on anyway, so no matter how squirrelly what you think, it’s no squirrellier or no less squirrelly than what anybody else thinks. All ideas are somehow on this even footing, including ideas that have taken hundreds of years and the talent of thousands of people to put together, and something somebody just channeled in from Francis Bacon, who’s living under Catalina Island in a state of suspended animation with a troupe of Atlantean engineers who are uploading human fetal tissue to who-knows-where.
"This balkanization of epistemology: it’s sort of like, if you believed in economic theory, thinking that it would be a good idea if everybody printed their own money. And then to the degree that you had vigor for the use of your printing press, you could run off more and more copies of whatever meme you had invested in, and I suppose these things would compete. In your imagination they would compete — but anybody who’s studied economics for ten minutes can tell you there’s something called Gresham’s Law, which is that “bad money drives out good money.” And I think it’s even more true with ideology. Squirrelly ideas drive out ideas of depth and substance. There’s a kind of danger of being gently — without quite noticing what’s going on — ushered into a world of increasingly more cartoonlike ontological and epistemological fantasies about what’s going on, or what’s partially going on.

- this came from somewhere online, abrupt something

"The plants seem to be the things that shake us out of these cultural conventions. We have this very bad habit of - when we encounter a new experience, we describe it; and as we describe it, we erase its reality, and replace it with a map. And foreverafter, when we encounter that input, we access the map and overlay it over the thing and say, "Ah, I know what this is." And so by the time a child is 5 years old, they have completely entered into a symbolic construct which hides the real world from them, and fortunately these plant teachers seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language, which, for us, is the relativity of being. And then, you're freed because you have seen something incontrovertible - there's no going back, then. That is the first great gateway on the path: to realize the relativity of language and the malleability of the world....
"Coming out into the desert is typical of people seeking visions. The first thing you have to do is leave the polis. Culture is this effort to hold back the mystery, and replace it with a mythology, which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology, whether they be shamans or priests."

This came from a 10/2010 psychedelic salon (plants talk)