Terence McKenna Quotes
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.
McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
As the U. S. entered Baghdad during the Iraq War, the Information Minister continued to deny American success. This quotation illustrates a common Arab custom of greatly exaggerating military successes and grossly minimizing failures. Often, this would be done despite the fact that the people he was addressing knew full well that he was not being accurate. Every nation in military conflict tends to make minor adjustments with reality for propaganda purposes, but the Arab culture seems to do this to an extreme. In the 6 day war, the official Egyptian announcements said that they had destroyed much of the Israeli air force, at the same time that they were begging the United Nations to impose a cease fire and the Egyptians really knew that their entire air force had been destroyed and there were virtually no Israeli air losses. They also realized the world would know the truth in a day or so, yet they persisted in the absurd lie. Some scholars argue that for the Arab Culture oratory and language is poetry and describes hopes and ideals and not reality if it is unpleasant, but this theory is not universally accepted.
Ernest Hemmingway was one of the first writers to observe this problem which would be felt by so many as the pace of change in politics, science & technology, economics and warfare would end centuries of people feeling that humans had control over the world.
“Erzatz” is a German word meaning imitation with the connotation that the imitation is far inferior to the original.
Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".
