"culture replaces authentic feeling with words. as an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, 'that's a bird, baby, that's a bird,' instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. all mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. this is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception, and what the psychedelics do is they burst apart this cultural envelope of confinement and return us really to the legacy and birthright of the organism."
-terrence mckenna
-terrence mckenna
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
le:
well i don't think you have to use psychedelics to get there.
strangelight:
That's great. I was about halfway through the quote and I thought to myself, "well, that's what drugs are for," and then I reached the end and realized that that was the point. The great thing about pyschedelics is that even very very minimal use can make one more sensitive to the world around them. At least, I hope that's as true for others as it is for me.