The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to go beyond cultural barriers in communication to connect with the natural world.
In this quote, Terence McKenna suggests that human communication is often confined to the limitations of cultural languages, which can create misunderstandings and barriers. He advocates for a deeper connection with the inherent communication systems present in nature, implying that by transcending these linguistic confines, we can achieve a more profound understanding of ourselves and our environment.
In practice
In a discussion about cultural exchange, one might quote McKenna to emphasize the importance of understanding beyond language.
We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
Funk is the unending cycle of life. It's the ultimate concept—wherever your imagination will take it.
Conventional economics is a form of brain damage. Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world, it is destructive.
The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals. And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig, is a bear...is a boy.
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