Worth the enjoyment
Taxonomy for the Terra Incognita of our "Present."
30 years later and quite contemporary with his sharp discussion of language and illusion with wit. He is a shaman. Our life is our own, outside the confines of the culture. He represents this as a human experiencer and student. He brings an energy field which needs to be more than a trickle amongst us living today. We who pushing pulling and melting the illusion are smiths blowing glass for light to play forging the sword of our best sense.
McKenna is on both sides of this Mechanization transfiguration that was being born (or, more accurately, the disfiguration.) He stands in I would say the original real adepts lineage: a spirit in man reaching to a higher level of spiritual energy by respecting the ethenogen. Thinking and feeling man as Shaman.
Technological man is not Shamanic but as abstract as a universe that is fields and forces only. As in say human health the wellness innovations and methods are blindly and uncritically welcomed and incorporated into human life. Or fiendishly as in injections of biological weapons.
I think McKenna who I doubt read Berdyaev would have agreed with his statement “We face the question, is that being to whom the future belongs to be called man, as previously, or something other?” Given the subsequent colonization of the human person by genetic engineering, hormone treatments, and plastic surgery—just for starters—one would have to conclude that Berdyaev was more than prescient.
Berdyaev, like his contemporaries Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner, warned about the rise of technology and its impact on human flourishing. Though he died in 1948, before the advent of television and well before the totalization of the technological and technocratic which has become the information revolution and the dominance of social media, his words are far seeing and startlingly so—
“The greatest victories of man in the realms of science, as in that of the technical mastery over nature, have become the principal cause of man’s dehumanization. Man is no longer master of the machines which he has invented. Our contemporary mechanized civilization is fatal to man’s inner life, for it destroys his integrity, disfigures his emotional life, makes him the instrument of inhuman processes, and takes away from him all possibility of contemplation by a rapid increase.”
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