“To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.”

— Terence McKenna

Closing statement.
History Ends in Green (1983)

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Terence McKenna 111

American ethnobotanist 1946–2000

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Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

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“The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. […] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.”

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) American computer scientist

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“We know the necessary conditions for the changing of minds. Now that we see the deep pathology of our past, we can make new patterns, new paradigms. "The sum of all our days is just our beginning...."”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

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“Why have our standards fallen so low? Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. There are no longer any natural constraints which depend on materials such as wood and stone. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

(1986) n.p.
Structures are no longer valid', in "Ein Gespräch..."

“If we have no intuition of ourselves as independent, unmediated beings in the world, then we cannot conceive ourselves surviving our liberation; for what our liberation will do is dissolve the structures and dismantle the mechanisms by which Woman is mediated by Man. If we cannot imagine ourselves surviving this, we certainly will not make it happen.”

Marilyn Frye book The Politics of Reality

Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 80

“We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: What am I? I am the desire not to die. I have always been impelled — not that evening alone — by the need to construct the solid, powerful dream that I shall never leave again. We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.

“We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“For many years we Communists have struggled for a cultural revolution as well as for a political and economic revolution, and our aim is to build a new society and a new state for the Chinese nation. That new society and new state will have not only a new politics and a new economy but a new culture. In other words, not only do we want to change a China that is politically oppressed and economically exploited into a China that is politically free and economically prosperous, we also want to change the China which is being kept ignorant and backward under the sway of the old culture into an enlightened and progressive China under the sway of a new culture. In short, we want to build a new China. Our aim in the cultural sphere is to build a new Chinese national culture.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

We Want to Build a New China
On New Democracy (1940)
Original: (zh-CN) 我们共产党人，多年以来，不但为中国的政治革命和经济革命而奋斗，而且为中国的文化革命而奋斗；一切这些的目的，在于建设一个中华民族的新社会和新国家。在这个新社会和新国家中，不但有新政治、新经济，而且有新文化。这就是说，我们不但要把一个政治上受压迫、经济上受剥削的中国，变为一个政治上自由和经济上繁荣的中国，而且要把一个被旧文化统治因而愚昧落后的中国，变为一个被新文化统治因而文明先进的中国。一句话，我们要建立一个新中国。建立中华民族的新文化，这就是我们在文化领域中的目的。

“Defined simply, innovation is, of course, the introduction of something new. We presume that the purpose of introducing something new into a process is to bring about major, radical change. Process innovation combines a structure for doing work with an orientation to visible and dramatic results. It involves stepping back from a process to inquire into its overall business objective, and then effecting creative and radical change to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in the way that objective is accomplished.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

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Terence McKenna 111

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