We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.
Terence McKennaWe get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.
Terence McKennaThis unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.
Terence McKennaWhat WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.
Terence McKennaSo the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.
Terence McKenna