Was he full of shit?

Freud's work was a mission in inductive reasoning which is by definition both prone to error and success. His work has stood based on its own merits which was intrinsically through intuitive reasoning and the construction of frameworks of understanding. Not once did he predicate his theories on experiencing anything that no one else could in daily life and fiction.

Comparing it to a smelly hippy who is second guessing everyone the majority of the planets ability to reason individually based only on his arbitrary interpretation of his *memories* of using comprehension compremising substances is a joke.

Loser hippies off to and please

Yeah, I've heard cases of people who were mental wrecks who cured depression, controlled schizophrenia and that sort of shit through ayahuasca, and I don't even doubt it, it's pretty obvious shit like MDMA and LSD has medical uses, I just don't think they are some sort of access to the godhead or anything like that, if there's a way to reach such a state, dropping acid is most likely not the way to illumination, but I don't even take any of that seriously, I just like tripping and having these absurd chains of thoughts on my coach.

>Yeah, I've heard cases of people who were mental wrecks who cured depression, controlled schizophrenia and that sort of shit through ayahuasca, and I don't even doubt it,

Yeah and for each of them there's a story of someone having schizophrenia outright triggered (if not caused) by using them, if not ending up as a total potato like Syd Barret

im also curious. been seeing this meme increase

Blame reddit

I'm not arguing against that either, but to claim these substances as absolute evil is pretty stupid. You can get sick if you take the wrong medicine, but people who take drugs or medicines or anything recreativelly are at least vaguely aware of that and do it of their own will, or at least should.

so reddit has been memeing him? why? in what context?

No I view them as more like video games

lol you're a faggot and you've been memed hard. laughing out loud at how big of a faggot you must be

Again, the fact that some people get thrombosis and lose their legs because they've spent 72 hours sitting playing Waifuwatch shouldn't stop anyone from playing their games for a sensible amount of time and carrying on with their lifes.

>Psychedelics are too unpredictable to be spoken about as a curative drug
>lol you been memed brah

I absolutely agree. Just in the same way I'm not going to listen to some faggot tell me he has the solution for impeaching Trump because he played Bioshock.
Potentially educational toys, nothing more

The same conclusion can be applied to literature.

Not at all, because literature is actually intrinsically composed of propositional content. It may not be in a clear analytic format but it is still totally the interpretations and perspectives of another mind as opposed to the lonely musings of your own mind exposed to simple phenomena

He was definitely on to something.
Reminder that this fucker has read more books than Veeky Forums combined.

do you have some favorite lectures of his? he's great to fall asleep to - dont mean that as insult. used to listen to a psychedelic podcast that was mostly his old lectures and people talking about "entheogens" at burning man. he was the only interesting part ever

Not really, there is a thread on Veeky Forums right now about a guy sperging because he couldn't understand the first sentence of Gravity's Rainbow, there's all the criticism to literally any book in the world which amounts to "it's good", every completely subjective and separated interpretation ever and so on.
Reading is still a passive act, the fact that a book is "propositional content" (arguable, books, as anything, exist within our world and not separated in some a priori state waiting to be discovered) does not exclude it from having no positive value. Consider YA, if anything, it might actually stump learning by appealing to the pre-conceived notions of the reader instead of challenging them with different points of view. Also, don't even bother trying to separate YA (and every other form of shit book there is out there) from literature, this is a useless effort which will only come to show how a lot of what you consider literature only has so because it got a historical paint.

For an entry-level suggestion I would go with this one he called Evolving Times.
youtube.com/watch?v=7PucjQXO2k0
Pretty much explains the infamous stoned ape theory and then he branches out into different subjects.
His lectures on Hermeticism and Alchemy are GOAT-tier, also.
youtube.com/watch?v=MH8NSQnn3AE

I was a chronic hardcore pothead for over 10 years. I loved shrooms and acid. I grew and sold weed and shrooms on the 90s. I dabled with speed and opiates but they weren't my thing. I got a hold of a sheet of really clean, strong LSD. It was the best Acid I ever had. One hit and your face melted. I planned to take 5 hits of acid with 8 grams of freshly dried shrooms like 2 weeks in advance. Did all my rituals, took extra care in planning. I fasted 24 hours before the planned trip. I powdered the shrooms and mixed them with a small amount of apple sauce with vitamin C crystals. I took the shrooms, smoked a big bowl of good herb and then took the 5 hits of acid and smoked more weed till the drugs kicked in. It was amazing and when I peaked I hit nirvana. It was like a whole body orgasm times a thousand that lasted for what felt like hours. Then I completely lost myself. I didn't exist anymore. Just the trip. A moment or maybe an hour of pure unfiltered clarity. When I came back I was laying naked on the floor in a corner curled up in fetal position sucking my thumb. After that I didn't get much enjoyment out of any dope. After a few weeks I wasn't interested anymore. Psychedelics lost their power for me and I could get high but I didn't trip like before and it was unsatisfying. I even quit dipping cold turkey without any noticeable withdrawal. It was like that trip burned out my inner fiend. I just stopped everything....drugs, booze and nicotine. I drink once in awhile but just for the flavor...not for a buzz. I have like maybe just under a case of beer over the course of a year. I smoke a cigar like every 2 months. Nothing hooks me now. I just read to escape.

I don't see what possible point you think you're making here. Poor minds reading bad science will yield the same result. I'm speaking of potentialities not mediocre probabilities

>Reminder that this fucker has read more books than Veeky Forums combined.

Proof?

My point is that anything is little more than ways to tickle your brain, the only human activities I can put outside of that are religious devotion and guilt-free sex. Just because you like books but dislikes video games and drugs doesn't make than anything more than useless brain exercise.

I'm speaking in regards to the intellectual developement of a more sophisticated understanding of reality. If you want to talk about how that or anything else has any intrinsic worth you're free to make the new hourly thread for that topic for me to ignore

Except literature is absolutely not a guarantee of a more sophisticated understanding of a reality, and any possibility that it has to be can be found in other forms elsewhere just as much. The fact that videogames, drugs or anything else haven't really helped you with that has nothing to do with games or drugs, and if it helped anyone else you have no bearing in deciding it.

youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk

I just said I am speaking about potentialities, why on Earth are you still harping about "guarantees"? I couldn't care less

Anything has potentiality, that's what you don't seem to get.

Well, you're still a faggot, so psychedelics couldn't have done that much.

or rather, potentiality lies in the subject, not the object of consumption.

There's the soft potentiality of "this propositional content is waiting here for you to experience"
Versus the hard potentiality of "quantum physics means I could suddenly have the secrets of the universe chaotically materialize in my brain" variety.

I'm clearly speaking of the former.

What makes videogames or drugs not propositional content?

Your Mom likes my dick just fine. I let your dad listen at the door but that is as close to faggotry as I get

Video games are infact which is why they are actually superior to drugs potentially. Although actual existing video games don't come anywhere near the quality which exists in the canon of literture and are unlikely to ever do so based on the economics and audience of their production

Quality is absolutely subjective, you can't deny someone elses expansion of perception through drugs, videogames, music, capeshit or anything else based on your limited perception of the subject.

>Quality is absolutely subjective
Oh dear.

At its most reductionistic basis which can be described as material which increases our understanding of reality it clearly is not. I am capable of being able to understand more about the patterns and structures of my angst by a careful reading of Hamlet or Kierkegaard than I am from playing Mass Effect Andromeda or smoking weed and watching Adventure Time.
You're free of course to attempt deny this as I'm not interested in having to go through the rigmarole of developing a proof of this concretely

And smoking weed and dropping acid has helped with my own existentil angst and anxiety far more than having read Fear and Trembling, but I'm not trying to ellevate weed above Kierkegaard or Kierkegaard over weed. You can't possibly claim that the possibility of opening lies anywhere outside being, and you can't possibly create a imperative path to achieving openness.

>And smoking weed and dropping acid has helped with my own existentil angst and anxiety far more than having read Fear and Trembling

Yeah but how can you know this is true outside anything but arbitrary chance or a misrecognition of memory? How do you even know your existencial angst has been helped at all?
If I read a book I can point to its propositional content, I can describe how I synthesized or adjusted my previous conception of reality with that content. What can you do from your experience with drugs other than describe an odd and arbitrary emotional change, a change why may be either purely the lottery of neurochemical adjustment or subconsciously incorporating utter phantasmatic delusion?

Mind while I said lottery of neurochemical adjustment, russian roulette may be the more appropriate metaphor

Why do you have such a negative view of psychedelics?

I'm legitimately curious, are you just a puritan or are psychedelics more dangerous than i've been led to believe?

Not the game goy you are replying to but look at the 60s hippie generation. They all took a bunch of LSD created by the government and 20 years later they turned into a bunch of sheepish yuppies with supple minds for the capitalist agenda. This is not a coincidence.

>If psychedelic experiences quite reliably makes people in to better human beings,
[citation needed]

>petty-bourgeois became petty-bourgeois
woah, that can't be a coincidence

They are a weird mix of capitalist and socialist. This has happened in all of western world to varying degree. Career politicians, sanctuary jobs, culture manufacturing, half-baked ideologies, idiocracy, mediocracy, consensus politics. Everything operates on a double standard these days.

That is the fruit of the generation of pacifists. No conflict allowed, everyone should agree on these principles and we will compromise.
Of course, women are also to blame. Alas, they did not invent feminism, why would they have?

McKenna was wrong about:

- the Timewave
- society being edenic and female-run prior to the incursion into history. (He couldn't resist making his own reinterpretation of Genesis, when he should have just avoided the idea altogether)

McKenna was right about:

- everything else

I always thought he was a joke. And I even have a psychedelic outlook that can get pretty counter-modern and paradoxical.

But I really dislike 'psychedelic' people who pile on needless nonsense and schizobullshit, like in like Goa Trance (electronic music is trippy enough without pseudo-Eastern pretensions grafted onto it) or shit "Visionary" artists like Alex Gray (like you don't need to literally paint chakras and visionary eyes everywhere etc. Way too on-the-nose. Fucking middle-school-tier).

There's literally nothing wrong with being middle class, there's nothing wrong with having an experimental culture based on anti-war sentiment either.

The sad part was the drugs and how it corrupted the whole message and culture into anti-intellectual drivel. The drugs fried all their fucking brains so no real progress of thought or philosophy could be made, it just turned into another fad easily controlled by media and capitalism, and in turn they all grew up to be yuppie conservative born-again christian cocksuckers.

>i dont understand what im responding to

i've been listening to a lot of podcasts made from his talks after hearing about the bard from our buddy tao lin.

mckenna does seem a little cracked, especially when he starts to ramble on about time waves and novelty theory and the i ching, but i think he's worth listening to. he uses words interestingly and his accounts of psychadelics makes me want to try shrooms.

>...which while may be amusing on a personal psychological basis ultimately reveal nothing of substance. Certainly not of substance to the issues he's referring to.

Pretty much this. Compare with Hunter Thompson:

"That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

or PJ O'Rourke who said something along the lines of "Did I reach enlightenment using psychedelic drugs? Absolutely. Did I remember what enlightenment was the next day? Nope."

This is basically what every serious person ends up realizing after drug experimentation. It's a chaos of sensory experience that means nothing whatsoever for you or mankind. You just learn a lot more reading books, it turns out. And psychedelics also exacerbate mental illness severely for certain people. And they tend to make smart people distracted idiots for a few years.

You need to find better Gurus. There are plenty of them.

I don't like everything he says, but he says some stuff that's very insightful and true. Watch this video for example. He had a way with words, and a good understanding as to why so many people are unhappy.

youtube.com/watch?v=1iFpw0uIkbo

Hating him because "le drug man!" is dumb, you're no different than an old man stuck in the past who thinks weed is just as bad of a drug as heroin.

McKenna is explicitly anti-guru. You clearly have no familiarity with his actual work.

How is it inaccessable? McKenna and his ilk are not elitist, they WANT you to try it as well. They are literally trying to sell the trip to as many as possible because they thought it would change the world for the better of more people had transpersonal experiences.

>not realising that the most profound breakthroughs in physics came at the 60s movement, the appreciation of Eastern mysticism, and the artworks created out of psychedelic headspace.
>not realising that to this day the leading thinkers in computer science use psychedelics to enhance their ideas
You literally don't know what you're talking about.

he says that, but then he starts talking about novelty theory and 2012. it sounds suspiciously like a guru to me.

you can label yourself (or not label yourself) all you want, what matters is what you actually are

What about novelty theory makes him a guru? It doesn't make any sense, user. So there are topics you are not allowed to discuss otherwise it means you automatically take an inner circle and start telling them in detail about how to live their life?

>use psychedelics to enhance their "ideas"

WEW we've got a scholar here m'boys

I'm not talking about myself. Look up LSD microdosing in Silicon Valley, for example.

TIPS TO BECOME A SUPER INTELLECTUAL:

>brag about "difficult" muschroom/acid trips
>tell "wacky" acid stories
>JOE ROGAN PODCAST ALL DAY
>"muh McKenna"
>own 3 books: Cosmos, Food of the Gods, and Way of Zen
>smoke cigarettes constantly
>habitual marijuana smoking
>preach to your peers as a guru

Sounds like a fun life, desu.

Don't forget about that 40 hour week day at the factory and overtime on saturday

I really have to disagree with the last paragraph you wrote. I think that psychedelics can be a great thing for people with disciplined lives. One or two trips can have a really lasting effect on your self-esteem, work ethic, or pleasure-seeking behavior. Minor doses are also very effective for some programmers, and other people in fields that require bashing your head into a wall intellectually. People who smoke a lot of pot generally lose the urge after they take a substantial dose of shrooms.

Hippies are the worst, though. On the milder end you have college kids who devote themselves to selling brownies as a business. Which isn't necessarily bad as long as you don't see it as something spiritual that you must devote almost all your spare time and thinking to.

>but is there something going on that's making him trendy right now? someone told me jim carrey is starring as him in a movie.

wow i hope this isn't actually happening because it sounds horrible.

he took people to inner circle environments all the time (the various raps he gave around the world). listen to any of the q/a sessions he held. people were looking for answers and he readily gave them out. he told his followers how to live their lives by rejecting capitalism and western religion and to start taking psychadelic drugs.

novelty theory is particularly relevant because he essentially used it to predict the end of the world (a mighty cult-ish thing to do). and, no, him saying he might be wrong to cover his ass doesn't matter.

look, i like the guy. he has some neat ideas and is fun to listen to. but there was something of a would-be messiah in his persona, despite how hard he tried to make sure nobody got that impression.

Yeah, ok. Point taken.

>him saying he might be wrong doesn't matter
It matters enormously, user. Probably THE critical difference between a guru and a guide.

The psychedelic experience is a doorway which leads to a hallway which leads to only what you want to find within yourself.

In other terms, a drug is nothing but a high-yield (fast but not perfect) technique to reach partly what your reason and heart cannot achieve fully in your opinion. If anything, it is a total lack of confidence in your reason and in your abilities to philosophy to be at ease with life; ease which remains unlikely, given that the choice of doing these drugs with the goal of opening your awareness and opening your mind is already a sign of close-mindedness and poor ability to reflect.

if you have to ask, the answer is yes

You've always written off any thinker that conflicted with your current paradigm? Then how did you ever grow intellectually or spiritually?

Anyone who claims that Spirit depends on Matter is lying.

Just listen to any of his lectures and he will tell you about some obscure 3rd century persian book he read 5 years ago that related to this specific 17th century bible translation or something all the time, dude was a savant.

The advent of .onion (tor) dark net markets such as the silk road has lead to more people having the confidence to try these drugs. Before that, you could never be confident about what you were getting. Previously the types of people who had access to psychedelics were people with drug connections already, now there are many people who don't even smoke weed who get into these drugs. We are in the middle of a psychedelic resurgence.

0:29
youtube.com/watch?v=dqYZS8Z5cZQ&t

Wow, druggies compassionate as always. You're really one with the universe aren't you.

>Strawmanning this hard.

simply having a millenarian idea does not make someone a guru. I can't believe you're this dumb.

McKenna repeatedly and forcefully rejected his own guru-hood. He explicitly downplayed the similarities between the psychedelic experience and eastern spiritual traditions. His entire schtick was about how no one has the universe completely figured out, and that the only thing you can trust is your own individual experience. This is literally the opposite of guruism.

>some medicine can kill people who shouldnt have it
>HURRRR BAN MEDICINE DUM DUM

But that's exactly what he did user

You're completely right, but the danger of a posteriori empiricism like modernism for example is the destruction of the balance between the manmade and natural world, which this druggie is trying to avoid.

>McKenna repeatedly and forcefully rejected his own guru-hood.

This does not mean that he wasn't a guru.

>He explicitly downplayed the similarities between the psychedelic experience and eastern spiritual traditions. His entire schtick was about how no one has the universe completely figured out, and that the only thing you can trust is your own individual experience.

Although he pushed this argument a bit, most of his content is his own, unexamined individual experience expanded as universal, while not subjecting it to any sort of skepticism and criticism.
Considering that his whole career was based on pushing his worldview on naive students, it make sense to find an analogue of his persona to the figure of a guru (although, in this case, it's stripped of its traditional connotation).

That said, I don't have any major objection to his advices and worldview, although I do not follow them (and when I do it's purely incidental, rather than justifying them with what McKenna said about it). They're perfectly compatible with a productive, ethical and social life. This still does not mean that McKenna wasn't a pseudo-guru, it just means that being a pseudo-guru is not a flaw or a moral failing per se: I'm sure that many people have benefited from his teachings.

>At its most reductionistic basis which can be described as material which increases our understanding of reality it clearly is not.
Again that's an interpretation you've drawn from your culture and in no way a timeless truth.

You don't know what a guru is, you're just twisting the definition to fit your incorrect conclusion. All of your words are useless.

Next you'll call Robert Anton Wilson a guru.

He is a guy who elevates his worldview as universal, and treat it as a prescriptive tool to be imparted to his subjects (in this case, his listeners, who are pushed into following his advices and methods).

It's not a cult, but he is certainly a self-help guru (pseudo-guru was maybe a bit too general as a definition).

>He is a guy who elevates his worldview as universal
Incorrect. McKenna never elevated any of his ideas to dogma.

>treat it as a prescriptive tool to be imparted to his subjects
Incorrect. When I listen to McKenna, I hear him speaking to me as an equal, not a subject. Maybe you just have a weakly developed self image and are threatened by anyone attempting to speak decisively?

>in this case, his listeners, who are pushed into following his advices and methods
Offering up ideas that the listener can choose to either engage with or disregard is not 'pushing' anyone to do anything. It's just how communication works.

>he is certainly a self-help guru
Incorrect. Gurus present themselves and their behavior as the prime example a follower must mimic. McKenna did not present himself as a paragon of anything, and was vocal about his flaws and failings as an individual. He remarked numerous times that for all his psychedelic experimentation, he still had a troubled personal life (failed marriage, etc.)

He was an entertainer who was wrong about some stuff and right about some other stuff. Your working definition of guru is worthless.

>McKenna never elevated any of his ideas to dogma.
He costantly does by giving very precise prescriptions on morality, virtue and psychedelic usage, while never showing any sign of doubt or self-awareness in what he is saying.

>When I listen to McKenna, I hear him speaking to me as an equal, not a subject.
This has nothing to do with my point.

>Maybe you just have a weakly developed self image and are threatened by anyone attempting to speak decisively?
Maybe you're just trying to pathologize your opponent instead of actually responding to his points? Would it be fair if I discarded your appreciation for McKenna as a search for a daddy figure on the internet?

>Offering up ideas that the listener can choose to either engage with or disregard is not 'pushing' anyone to do anything. It's just how communication works.
Yet you're refusing to analyze the way in which he communicates with his ''disciples''.

>Gurus present themselves and their behavior as the prime example a follower must mimic. McKenna did not present himself as a paragon of anything, and was vocal about his flaws and failings as an individual. He remarked numerous times that for all his psychedelic experimentation, he still had a troubled personal life (failed marriage, etc.)
That's why I've used the term ''self-help guru'', which does not imply any of the things you've implied about my definition.
It does not matter wether he is actually following strictly his teachings, what matter is the existence itself of these teachings, and the way in which they are proposed to the youngs.

>He was an entertainer who was wrong about some stuff and right about some other stuff. Your working definition of guru is worthless.
Seems like I've hit a nerve here. You should analyze this emotional response of yours, and individuate the roots for such a irrational, arbitrary and dismissive response.

If you respond yes to this question you have not done psychedelics

Mushrooms had a positive effect on my ability to feel empathy towards others and to view my actions as others would.
It's not like a magic goat told me the secrets of the universe.
You're a close-minded bore and probably no fun at parties

Fuck Silicon Valley, fuck your stupid computer science druggie macbook steve jobs shit. If you weren't such a pseudo-spiritual drug head retard you would realize silicon valley and technology in general has done more harm to the human spirit than helped it.

Half you faggots on Veeky Forums and all the hipsters on Reddit are going to grow up into asshole parents. The "Yuppie 2.0" generation is going to dawn on future generations who will hopefully have better ideas than us and won't ruin our brains with drugs and alcohol.

terrence mckenna is a crackpot and a shill for the interpol cia