Cultural Program Alteration

Here's quintessential trippy dude Terence McKenna talking about culture as a kind of operating system of the mind that can be overwritten by a deeper, more "vitalistic" program through shamanic practices such as ingesting psychotropic plants. This is akin to my own take on culture, religion, capitalism, evolution, the world...ever since age 19 when a series of temporary mind alterations ("perturbed brain chemistry") wiped clean the old hard drive. To experience stepping off a bus, exhaled into the cityscape like a gush of seawater from a great whale to hear the trees in the park singing my name while they tossed the moon like a ball and the gutters rang with bells...well. I never went back to Kansas. I became the smallest weed cracking through the sidewalk and the farthest star winking in the fog. It flashed through my body: it's all more beautiful, alive, connected and simple then I could know with my head. That's been my stance ever since, seemingly outside the cultural norm but deeper inside something more real. A place where old cliches like "love makes the world go 'round" are reborn to their original radiant profundity. In those days I came upon a shattered store window and plucked a shard from the wreckage. It became an icon for me, a piece of my old world view that showed me where I'd been limited and now had broken free. I still keep that hunk of glass upon an altar of bird nests in my studio and still revel in the beauty of this elegant universe and my place in it.

This clip has some fine far out art by the likes of Alex Grey and Mark Henson, among others, and a rather eerie soundtrack.