A Situação Humana – Terence McKenna

Vídeo original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKdN8cfc1ak

Transcrição:
So, just to bring it all around here… the great exhibit which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our critics is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. I mean, that’s mind over matter. That’s the violation of every scientific principle in the books. And yet it is the most trivial experience any of us have, we expect to command our body, we expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh into action and it will follow. The body is the nexus of the mystery of life, and our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, colections, and so forth and so on… the felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.

That’s why it’s called a escape, because it’s a escape, from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what’s on the tube, from consuming trash media, it’s a escape from all of that into the authenticity of the body. This is why sexuality is so humm-humm-edgy in this society. They’d make it illegal if they but could figure out how, it’s the one drug they can’t care from our grip and so, they lay a guilt trip about it. But sexuality and psychedelics, by carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body, carry us back to a authentic values.

And more and more the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it’s not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization, it’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. That the Earth is a coherent whole. It’s a thinking, feeling, intending being. That in terms of our value structures it would be foolish to imagine as anything other than female. And when cultural values created by male dominance and science and linearity and so forth and so on when those values are dissolved, what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant experience of Matrix. What James Joyce called the “Mama Matrix Most Mysterious”. Nothing more than our bodies and the Earth out of which our bodies came. History as we have lived it on the West has been turned our back on that.

And now, History has failed. Western cultural institutions having become global cultural institutions now show themselves to be inadequate to inspire, lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in. In this moment then, this reconnecting with the Gaian mind, becomes kind of moral imperative. So this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal sindicates, or about untaxed billions, or about the mental health of our youth, or any of that malarky. I mean my God, the most destructive drugs known to the species are peddled at every street corner without restriction. The real issue is what kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope shall be permited? What kinds of value systems shall be allowed? And the value systems that agrandize the possession of things, the tearing of the Earth, competition, racism, sexism, has led us to the brink of catastrophe.

Now I think we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plants. That’s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of Nature. And if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated. very little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the (?) aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved. But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring, and mutuality, that we all… huh… put into, and take from the human enterprise. You know, there’s a Grateful Dead song which says “you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, if the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.”

And we know hold through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power, that if we use them, we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us to the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship, that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be waiting us. But it’s a cultural test. Nature is pityless. Intelligence is a grand experiment upon a great deal has been risked, but if it proves inadequate, Nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that it covered over the dinossaurs, and the trilobytes, and the crossopterygian fishes, and all those other folks who came before.

So what we must do I think is to see our future in the imagination. Catalyse the imagination. Form symbiotic relationships with the plants. Affirm archaic values. And spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact dying is a world that had become too top-heavy with its own hubris. Too bent by its own false value systems and too dehumanized to care about what happens to its own children. So I say, good riddens to it. Bring on the archaic revival, and let’s create a new world! That’s it!