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    Terence McKenna - 1989 - Plan Plant Planet

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    Plan/Plant/Planet Plan/Plant/Planet by Terence McKenna Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century. This means reaching back in time to models th

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    Terence McKenna - 1989 - Plan Plant Planet

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    Plan/Plant/Planet Plan/Plant/Planet by Terence McKenna Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century. This means reaching back in time to models th

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    Plan/Plant/Planet Plan/Plant/Planet by Terence McKenna Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century. This means reaching back in time to models th

    Copyright:

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    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    311 views5 pages

    Terence McKenna - 1989 - Plan Plant Planet

    Uploaded by

    galaxy5111
    Plan/Plant/Planet Plan/Plant/Planet by Terence McKenna Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century. This means reaching back in time to models th

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    Plan/Plant/Planet

    Plan/Plant/Planet
    by Terence McKenna

    Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical
    crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we
    should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the
    twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant
    mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam
    engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century.

    This means reaching back in time to models that were successful


    fifteen thousand to twenty thousand years ago. When this is done it
    becomes possible to see plants as food, shelter, clothing, and sources
    of education and religion.

    The process begins by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so


    long. Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be
    declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal
    plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

    Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary


    Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic
    plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural
    inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need
    a new set of lenses to see our way into the world. When the medieval
    world shifted its worldview, secularized European society sought
    salvation in the revivifying of classical Greek and Roman approaches
    to law, philosophy, aesthetics, city planning, and agriculture. Our
    dilemma will cast us further back into time in search for models and
    answers.

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    Plan/Plant/Planet

    The solution to much of modern malaise, including chemical


    dependencies and repressed psychoses and neuroses, os direct
    exposure to the authentic dimensions of risk represented by the
    experience of psychedelic plants. The pro-psychedelic plant position is
    clearly an anti-drug position. Drug dependencies are the result of
    habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behaviour; these are precisely the
    tendencies in our psychological makeup that the psychedelics mitigate.
    The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to
    inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of
    view within the individual. It is foolish to suggest that there is no risk,
    but it is equally uninformed to suggest that the risk is not worth taking.
    What is needed is experiential validation of a new guiding image, an
    overarching metaphor able to serve as the basis for a new model of
    society and the individual.

    The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our


    individual and group existence in the world. What I call the Archaic
    Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional
    attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them.
    The Archaic Revival spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male
    dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization, something
    that can not be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective
    awareness. Rather, it will follow naturally upon the gradual
    recognition that the overarching theme that directs the Archaic Revival
    is the idea/ideal of a vegetation Goddess, the Earth herself as the much
    ballyhooed Gaia--a fact well documented by nineteenth-century
    anthropologists, most notably Frazer, but recently given a new
    respectability by Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, and
    others.

    The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vegetable mind--the


    Gaian collectivity of organic life--the closer their connection to the
    archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style of social
    organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought
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    Plan/Plant/Planet

    was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of
    the Hellenistic Era, before the Mystery religions were finally
    suppressed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.

    My conclusion is that taking the next evolutionary step toward the


    Archaic Revival, the rebirth of the Goddess, and the ending of profane
    history will require an agenda that includes the notion of our
    reinvolvement with and the emergence of the vegetable mind. That
    same mind that coaxed us into self-reflecting language now offers us
    the boundless landscapes of the imagination. Without such a
    relationship to psychedelic exopheromones regulating our symbiotic
    relationship with the plant kingdom, we stand outside of an
    understanding of planetary purpose. And an understanding of
    planetary purpose may be the major contribution we can make to the
    evolutionary process. Returning to the bosom of the planetary
    partnership means trading the point of view of the history-created ego
    for a more maternal and intuitional style.

    The widely felt intuition of the presence of the Other as a female


    companion to the human navigation of history can, I believe, be traced
    back to the immersion in the vegetable mind, which provided the ritual
    context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of self-
    awareness, self-reflection, and self-articulation: the light of the Great
    Goddess.

    What does it mean to accept the solutions of vegetable forms of life as


    metaphors for the conduct of the affairs of the human world? Two
    important changes would follow from adopting this assumption:

    · The feminizing of culture. Culture would be feminized on a level that


    has yet to be fully explored. Green Consciousness means recognizing
    that the real division between the masculine and the feminine is not a
    division between men and women but rather a division between
    ourselves as conscious animals--omnivorous, land-clearing, war

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    Plan/Plant/Planet

    makers, supreme expression of the yang--and the circumglobal mantle


    of vegetation--the ancient metastable yin element that constitutes by
    far the major portion of the biomass of the living earth.

    · An inward search for values. Inwardness is the characteristic feature


    of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The
    animals move, migrate, and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live
    in a dimension characterized by the solid state, the fixed, and the
    enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it
    must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of the
    vegetal imagination. Perhaps this is what the reconnection to the
    vegetal Goddess through psychedelic plants, the Archaic Revival,
    actually points toward: that the life of the spirit is the life that gains
    access to the visionary realms resident in magical plant teachers. This
    is the truth that shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness
    of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth-century
    visionary Hildegard von Bingen.

    A new paradigm capable of offering hope of a path out of the cultural


    quicksand must provide a real-world agenda addressed to the
    escalating problems that the planet faces. There are several domains in
    which the rise of awareness of Veriditas might help stave off
    armageddon:

    Detoxification of the natural environment. The process of


    detoxification is naturally carried out by the combined action of the
    atmosphere, the biological matrix, and the oceans. This planetwide
    process was able to take care of even urban industrial waste, until
    modern industrial technology became a truly global phenomenon.
    Planting species of datura, the plants once a part of the religious rites
    of the Indians of Southern California, and other plants that leach heavy
    metals from the earth and sequester them in their cellular tissue are
    examples of a natural process that could help clean up our
    environment. Recognizing the many ways in which the biological

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    Plan/Plant/Planet

    matrix of the earth functions to avert toxification, recognizing that


    nature is working to sustain life, might go a long way toward building
    a political consensus to actively participate in saving that same life.

    Connectedness and symbiosis. Like plants, we need to maximize the


    quality of connectedness and symbiosis. Plant-based approaches to
    modeling the world include awareness of the fractal and branching
    nature of community action. A treelike network of symbiotic
    relationships can now replace the model of evolution that we inherited
    form the nineteenth-century. The earlier model, that of the tooth-and-
    claw struggle for existence, with the survivor taking the hindmost, is a
    model based on naive observation of animal behaviour. Yet it was
    cheerfully extended into the realm of plants to explain the evolutionary
    interactions thought to cause speciation in the botanical world. Later,
    more sophisticated observers (C.H. Waddington and Erich Jantsch)
    found not the War in Nature that Darwinists reported but rather a
    situation in which it was not competitive ability but ability to
    maximize cooperation with other species that most directly contributed
    to an organism's being able to function and endure as a member of a
    biome. Plants interact with each other through the tangled mat of roots
    that connects them all to the source of their nutrition and to each other.

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