Update: Please see the comment by Mike V. at the end of this post for a more nuanced view of both mental illness and the drugs used to treat it.
Need a shot in the arm on this grey, sullen day nearing the Winter Solstice? Turn on with Terence McKenna.
With or without psychedelics, we can turn our backs on a culture that has gone sterile and dead. One by one, two by two, whole groups, neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions. We can drop out of consumer capitalism into a much more ancient, sane, and sustainable way of being. As McKenna says in another youtube video: “Culture is not your friend.” And in yet another: “Culture is your operating system. It is fragile, it can be changed.”
Yes. Let us defragment our mental hard drives, bust out of our carefully tended boxes, transform our monotonous chemicalized lawns into wild abundant gardens, strip off the masks of propriety and greet each other soul to soul, gaze into the eyes of animals and birds and insects and fire and wind and water — so that we may open, open, open.
The military/industrial/academic/pharmaceutical industry banks on that label “schizophrenic” and other stupid, stupid names, so that it can continue to dumb/numb our exquisitely attuned body/mind/souls to the mysteries of the Earth and the cosmos through which she slowly spins, gathering all and everything to her, holding, building, transforming — and releasing it all again in continuous, brilliant, streaming exchange.
2 thoughts on “Terence McKenna tells it like it is”
Whew!
McKenna may tell it like it is for you, Ann, but I’m glad he’s not speaking for me. There are so many things in this short video that I disagree with, but this isn’t the forum for such a debate.
I’d like to say, however, that when schizophrenia is mentioned in any type of media there is going to be a great deal of misinformation spewed forth.
This issue is very close to my heart as I lost my wife to schizophrenia. In an effort to help her I became an amateur expert in mental illness after 12 years of intensive study.
What everyone, and I mean everyone in our world, should understand is that making generalized statements about mental illness of any kind is a serious mistake. Some of what McKenna says is of value, but so much of what he says is flippant and misinformed that I cringed as I listened to him.
I agree that the pharmaceutical industry is complicit in the demise of our culture, viewed in total, but that is definitely not the final word on this industry.
Yes, some people are gifted and different and seem slightly odd and as a result, are misdiagnosed with mental illness. That’s tragic. But huge numbers of people in our world suffer horribly, are genuinely ill and need medical care. Medications invented by man can and have helped these victims.
McKenna should make that distinction, in my view.
Mike V.
Mike,
Thank you so much for this cautionary story from your own life. I will update the post alerting the reader to your comment.