“Empowering Hope in Dark Times”
“Empowering Hope in Dark Times” Terence McKenna *Source – The Psychedelic Salon - 211 **Transcribed by DominatorCulture.com for readability and grammar.
This has not been an easy ten months for the people of this planet or the planet itself. I want to reach back tonight and invoke a vanished tradition, get to the heart of it and try to show how we can bring this forward in our lives to empower hope in the most dark of situations and even make these dark situations the raw material of a clearer, stronger hope than might ordinarily be the case. A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine and he wanted to tell me the story of sitting in the presence of a 104 year old Vietnamese monk. The guy had basically kept his mouth shut, the monk, and hadn’t said much around the monastery where he just sort of cleans up. Then he announced he wanted to talk about meditation and he opened his remarks by saying, “we are all luminous beings, why then do we not appear before each other radiant in our lumination?”
This is the conundrum of life. This is the problem. It was T.S. Eliot who said, “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.” Why is that? As psychedelic people, this is the problem that we grapple with in our own lives and when we look out at the world. You’ve heard me say many times, we have the vision, we have the money, we have the technology but why can we not then appear before each other as radiantly luminous beings and why cannot we reclaim our planet from toxification, disease, overpopulation and bonehead politics. You know the list. What is the hang up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?
Well what I’ve learned from life, vegetables, travels and books can be summed up in two Greek words. It’s the central message of the philosopher Heraclites. He was always my favorite philosopher but whenever I would read about him, he was called the crying philosopher. I had to live to be 44 years old to understand the poignancy of Heraclites’ message. He said in a nutshell, Panta rhei. All flows. Nothing lasts. Nothing is permanent. This is the hardest message life has to teach because what is says is: your joy is transient, your anguish is transient, your fortune, your home, your dream, your moments of great ecstasy, your moments of great insight and your moments of great empowerment. Everything is flowing through your hands at the moment that you are aware of it.
Keep reading
