Only Maybe: Terence Mckenna

Showing posts with label Terence Mckenna. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

James Joyce - Modern Psychonaut

“I am convinced personally that Mr. Joyce is a genius all the world will have to recognize.”

– Aleister Crowley, The Genius of Mr. James Joyce

“Joyce’s prose prepared me to enter psychedelic space.”

– Timothy Leary, FLASHBACKS

“(Finnegans Wake is) about as close to LSD on the page as you can get…”

– Terence McKenna, Surfing on Finnegans Wake

“If you’ve never had a psychedelic, reading Joyce is the next best equivalent.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, RAW Explains Everything

“I have read Finnegans Wake aloud at a time when takers of LSD said, ‘that is JUST LIKE LSD.’ So I have begun to feel that LSD may just be the lazy man’s form of Finnegans Wake.”

– Marshall McLuhan, Q & A

“Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until centuries after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.”

– Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

“Joyce’s book is called Finnegans Wake. The missing apostrophe creates another pun,
which Joyce explained to friends as a warning to the ruling classes:
the oppressed rise, eventually, in every historical cycle.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance

“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either
shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”

– James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

I thought it would be fun on the occasion of Bloomsday 2015 to offer up a smattering of James Joyce’s hierarchitectitiptitoploftical influence on the psychonaut counter culture, and hopefully provide a novel context for his great works, which might help them extend beyond the trappings of highfalutin literary scholarship.

Please feel free to explore for yourself:
The collected works of James Joyce

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

ALL SEEING EYES

“These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious. Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough.”

- Terence McKenna in Riding Range w/ Marshall McLuhan

If we're going to live in a Brave New World / 1984 mashup can I at least humbly request that my Netflix recommendations be a bit more doubleplusgood?

I originally drew the Joyce & Pound / 0 & 1 bit for RAW's now mythic Tale of The Tribe class, in reaction to his observation that (pardon my poor paraphrasing) Pound's The Cantos modeled history as linear progression moving up & down (from inferno to paradiso), and that Joyce's Finnegans Wake modeled history as a cyclic process going round & round (from swerve of shore to bend of bay). With further nudging by his equation that Joyce + Pound + Mcluhan = Internet. (I may not have that notation exactly right, Mcluhan may have been a multiplier, but you get the idea)

My first exchange with RAW concerned the shape of things to come. I proposed to him the model of an escalating spiral, to which he said he agreed, though wasn't dogmatic about it. I do find it encouraging though what visual concept results from combining the historical trajectories of both Joyce & Pound...

Excelsior!

bc
bobbycampbell.net
@RGC777

Friday, October 19, 2012

TRIALOGUES

I find the series of Trialogues conducted between Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham incredibly fascinating. I have listened with inflamed imagination to their discussions over and over and over again, finding them thus far inexhaustibly thought provoking.

For the most complete collection (42+ hours) of their discussions I refer you to The Psychedelic Salon's Trialogues Archive (Which includes numerous recordings of their private discussions donated by Ralph Abraham)

Though before I try to sell you on the deep cuts, let's parade out the hits:

METAMORPHOSIS: CAST OF CHARACTERS TRIALOGUES AT THE EDGE OF THE MILLENNIUM - June 6, 1998
Part 1: SHELDRAKE Part 2: MCKENNA Part 3: ABRAHAM

As perhaps the world's biggest fan of this material, I dreamed the dream of getting to actively participate in the discussion, and in my own small way, via e-mail, got to do just that.

from:    Bobby Campbell rgc777@gmail.com
to:    Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake
date:    Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 1:47 PM
subject: Hello again, Ralph & Rupert!

Dear Sirs,

In regards to Morphic Resonance, and if I'm to understand Einstein
correctly that forces result from geometry, might the force that
results from the peculiar geometry of the subatomic void/plenum
provide the impetus for form et al?

with great regard,

bob campbell

from:    Ralph Abraham
to:    Bobby Campbell
date:    Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 6:39 PM
subject: Re: Hello again, Ralph & Rupert!

that certainly seems reasonable ... however,
in the usual models for the quantum vacuum,
there is no intrinsic geometry
rather, geometry emerges from the plenum

eg, see this (if you have not already)
http://www.ralph-abraham.org/articles/MS%23119.Fuzzylumps/

thanks for writing

ralph

from:    Rupert Sheldrake
to:    Bobby Campbell
date:    Tue, Feb 5, 2008 at 7:26 PM
subject: Re: Hello again, Ralph & Rupert!

Dear Bob,

I don’t know if I understand Einstein correctly so I can’t judge if you do. But I think if there were some simple answer like this that arose from the physics we’d probably know about it by now.

Best wishes

Rupert

-----

I shd like to note that Ralph's link sent me down a particularly illuminating rabbit hole, the fruits of which went straight into Agnosis!

Oh! and check out: The World Wide Web and the Millennium
A talk by Terence Mckenna & Ralph Abraham from August 1, 1998
Which somehow remains more relevant and insightful about the internet than most contemporary media theory.