Terence Mckenna - Culture is your operating system

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Alex3917 · 2009-09 · Strong recommendation

If you are interested in learning more about them, this is pretty much the best podcast on the Internet: [LINK] And many of the talks on Pyschedelic Salon are also very good, especially the one by the Erowid founders which I submitted this morning, called The Role of Drug Geeks in Society, and also the talk by Dr. Andrew Weil. Also check out some of the talks by Terence McKenna, the man was pretty much a living god: [VIDEO]

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Alex3917 · 2012-10 · Recommendation

If you want to know where the metaphor of philosophy as an operating system comes from: [VIDEO] (The video is called Culture Is Your Operating System, but what he's talking about is the philosophical assumptions that are completely invisible unless you find a way to step outside your culture.)

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Alex3917 · 2011-06 · Recommendation

"How does making you see things that aren't real challenge any hierarchies?" While LSD and psilocybin do sometimes cause people to hallucinate, this is only one small part of the psychedelic experience. The real value is in how the drugs change your thinking. It would take an entire book to explain this, but here are a few YouTube videos to give you the basic idea: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] It's difficult to explain how exactly they challenge hierarchies, but the 35,000 foot overview would be that psychedelics tend to make one more prosocial, whereas hierarchies tend to be fueled by antisocial behaviors. They also tend to give one self-confidence and internalize one's locus of control, whereas again hierarchies can only exist when people lack self-confidence and have relatively external locii of control. Essentially hierarchies are built on the backs of those trying to fill some sort of void in their lives, whereas psychedelics undermine this by giving one perspective and making one whole. Here is the best description I've found: "What is the psychedelic experience? For me it's the full and overwhelming realization of all the beauty, love, and pain, the wonder and possibility, of the human experience. For the first time you see your life truly objectively, what's going wrong, and what's going right. You grasp and grapple with how you can do better, and you are overcome by the newfound desire to strengthen your community, your relationships, and your karma. And so it proceeds for

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