Terence McKenna, Carl Jung, or Alan Watts? Whos work should i look more into and who should I ignore?

dude machine elves lmao

should you kill yourself by cutting your wrists, jumping off a building or hanging?

also, youre still in the 60s, there is a wide variety of more serious approaches today to everything people like them opened.

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Jung is the only one that isn't a pseud hack for teenagers.

These are very different authors, they wrote in different contexts. what's your interest? Psychology? Or Psychoactive substances. Alan Watts in a joke, he is fake and has nothing relevant to say, also: he lacks writing skills. jung ideas are only interesting regarding his archetypes and his concept of individuation. although for this you might read bergson and deleuze (but b. is boring and d. is spaced out) if you are looking for verbose psychotrippy poetry, enjoy mckenna. he is a beautiful jester. i think he is an artist, a poet. at least for the first half of his carrier. if you are interested in his work, you might reed his biography, that his brother wrote, first.

but again, whats your interest?

This Alan Watts is garbage. Even D.T. Suzuki, a jingoistic "Grorious Nippon" neo-Platonist who swindled gullible beatniks into thinking he was an authority on Zen Buddhism, thought Alan Watts was a clueless tool.

Lama Surya Das wrote a book about buddhism. But it doesn't matter how much you read if you don't put it into practice, you'll still be a no-nothing asshole.

These guys don't have a whole lot in common. I started listenning to McKenna in my late teens, and while his ideas and eloquence are of another world, there are some fishy shit scattered across his thousands hours of talk. Notably his presumed ties with the CIA, and political anecdotes in the mist of his techno-psychedelic babble (No one is in control etc..) Typical counter-culture talk aimed at pacifying marginalized and potentially dangerous individuals and fueling more chaos à la Brave New World, namely unlimited access to exponentially increasing information diluting the important bits of knowledge. I ignored these things for a while but after years of tracing almost every sources in behavioral science and geopolitics back to the CIA, one has no choice but to wonder. I still listen to the man though, no intellectual has such a huge imagination and far out ideas than McKenna himself. Then I got into Jung once I reached some intellectual maturity. I have been reading Jung extensively for the past 5 years. He is my biggest influence. Mckenna has a great talk on Jung, it's named Addressing the Jungian Society if I'm not mistaken. I am not familiar with Alan Watts

>jester
I've heard similar things before, "jester" to me implies that he know's he's full of shit, you know he's full of shit, but everyone goes along with it anyway. Why?

please elaborate about the CIA connection

watts is comfy don't listen to these pseuds

>he know's he's full of shit, you know he's full of shit

that is a misleading reduction of what a jester is. the jester is found throughout history, sometimes blatantly obvious, sometimes in disgues. he is found different cultures and in stories and even within the dynamics of your own consciousness, he might appear in your dreams, either as a subject or as the dream itself. the jester conveys ambiguity, he impregnates the situations with uncertainty and he does that with all kinds of hidden tactics

a comy charlatan

>DT Suzuki was a neo-platonist
Where can I learn more about this?

Carl Jung is an interesting and entertaining re-working of the failures of Freudian psychoanalysis, but is not to be taken seriously. He is the most academic of the bunch, and therefore the most dangerous to the Veeky Forums type, because his claims may seem more reasonable than they are. The collective unconsciousness and the archetypes found within it are especially tenuous concepts.

Alan Watts is the safest speaker in this group, I think, because he never says anything terribly ambitious. He is an extremely well-educated individual of wide interests. His primary interest is not in achieving greater academic truths, but in living well and communicating to others how to live well, fueled by his extensive involvement in and reading of Zen, Buddhism, Western esotericism, Episcopal Christianity, etc. He identifies himself as a "spiritual entertainer." He's the most reasonable and wholesome of the bunch.

McKenna is certainly entertaining and worth diving into just for the sake of it but one should not take stock in anything he says at all. He is as ambitious as Jung in his claims, without Jung's intelligence or academic backing. As people have characterized him already, he was a trippy jester whose excessive substance abuse produced colorful but schizoid ideas.

/thread

Jung is actually interesting though, even though people consider him a mystic. Those two other guys are basically pop-psychologists who talked the talk but didn't walk the walk.

You can tell a lot about someone who says: "Follow your dreams, believe in your bliss!" but die of alcoholism themselves.

i read a lot of books by jung, in German. he is not very academic... he is a gnostic, or at least he tries be be one. he is not really educated, and he has no clue about philosophy or science. and he was superstitious in a bad way. i really like jung for a long time, but the more i know, the more i see the ridiculousness of his ideas. just one example: he has no clue about lucid dreaming although he worked with dreams and texts from tibetan buddhism.

What does he say which isn't true?

>Terence McKenna, Carl Jung, or Alan Watts
this reads like a "that guy with gauges who is totally enlightened but just sits in intro religions classes and listens to podcasts" starter pack

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I don't know about the other two but Watts is a fucking tool. Do you really want to get life advice from someone who died from alcoholism?

Watts' popularity with certain groups gets him a bad rap; listen to a few of his lectures (the full things, not snippets over music on youtube). His books are good too. Jung is good, McKenna is less trustworthy.

ELIADE GUENON EVOLA NIETZSCHE HEIDERGGER HERACLITUS ULYSS

Carl Jung, of those, is the least of a charlattan. But any of them is basically a waste of time.

I would say if you are interested in this stuff start with Joseph Campbell.
His works are very easy for the average person.

he's not academic? in what sense? he seems very well educated to me

This.
I just finished The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and I've watched the interview that spawned Power of Myth.
Both amazing, much better than trying to trudge through Jung as a non philosopher.

I feel like the collective unconscious is undeniable though

I'll admit this is Tumblr/The Secret tier, but I always liked this quote by Mckenna.
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”

What does Veeky Forums think?

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Why would you limit yourself to three terrible choices?

Jung could use more academic verbiage and dress up his thoughts to look more respectable but there's no real difference between him and someone like McKenna, I'm pretty sure Jung himself admitted all his notions didn't even originate in empirical observations but were revealed to him. McKenna is more fun to listen to anyways

This but with Guenon instead

I've always liked McKenna. There is probably no person who is as experienced at throwing themselves into the abyss as McKenna was. People who have never tried hallucinogens don't realize how much courage it takes to purposely ingest a large dose of these substances for the purpose of introspection. For that I admire McKenna. His novelty theory is interesting and worth understanding though it is also worth doubting.