"McKenna - Mckenna vs The Black Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

These Buddhists aren't kidding: you are here for a very brief moment, and you can sit on your thumb and do whatever you want, but in fact the clock is ticking. What are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna blow it off, or be a hedonist? What are you gonna do with that? If most people took it seriously, a hell of a lot more would be done with more attention to quality and intent. And they're always talking about this stuff -- intent.

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I have to say I do feel lucky, even at this late stage of the game, I feel lucky to have lived the life I lived, and even though I have this horrific thing I feel lucky in terms of dealing with it. I don't feel like its a death sentence.

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TM: Until I'm able to run upstairs I think I just have to yield to fate. Its not clear entirely what's happening with me. If I'm getting well, that's pretty easily managed. If I'm in fact slowly slipping away, you just want to do it right and set a good example and not be a pain to your relatives, friends, and fans. And that seems pretty easy to me. It all gets very private once they tell you're about to kick.

ED: "It" being?...

TM: Life, or the management of your persona and reputation. So it's all about getting through life without disgracing oneself in some fundamental way.

ED: Do you think your illness might be turned into a spectacle?

TM: Not unless I would cooperate. Leary must have originated all those plans of dying on the net. At this conference [AllChemical Arts, September, 1999], somebody kept coming up to me and saying, Are you read for the cryogenic discussion yet? And I said, No, I don't think were going to be doing that. I don't seek to live forever. I don't want the removal of my head to become a Net event. I think part of what death is about biologically is reshuffling the gene-pool. If genes were to last forever, death would never have entered the scheme of things.

ED: Does it bother you that you probably wont be around for 2012?

TM: I'd always assumed I'd live to see 2012. It doesn't bother me very much. Very few prophets live to see their prophecies -- Joachim de Fiore didn't, Marx didn't. If its gonna happen, its gonna happen, it doesn't need cheerleading. Its built into the morphology of space and time.

That's all a very funny thing about me and my career that's different from Leary, different from all of these people: this strange relationship to prophecy and the eschaton. My fans don't understand any of that stuff, and my critics don't understand much of it either. So we all just have to put up with it until it clears itself out of the way.

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I find to my surprise about myself, that I'm not really afraid of death. I'm pretty concerned about dying. I don't want dying to turn into some kind of wet, sticky, thrashing kind of thing. Death, hell, what are you buying? You have no idea, so why even give it a moments' thought?


Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole. So people can stand around the edge of the hole and say, Well it was this or that, but in fact, it represents some kind of limit case in the thermodynamics of information. You just can't hand messages back over that threshold. So get yourself pointed right, do not your mantras bungle, and that's about it. When you're actually dead, all bets are off. The best answer I've gotten yet out of this is from Don Delillo's Underworld, where the nun discovers that when you die you become your website.



ED: Your website is pretty cool.

TM: It needs work, especially if its gonna be me for eternity. It definitely needs work.

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ED: What do psychedelics say about all this?

TM: I don't know what psychedelics say about death. I think they say a great deal about dying. I think they model dying. In a way, shamanism is proto-Buddhism. Taking plants and spending your life in esoteric philosophy and taking drugs is basically on a meditation on death. Buddhism is some form of learning how to die. And that seems worth doing. And unavoidable. If you're a serious person, how could you not confront this kind of stuff?

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ED: How have you changed emotionally?

TM: I'm much more resonant and in tune with the Buddhist demand for compassion. The world needs to be a more compassionate place. It is not moving toward that as I see it. More and more people are exploited by fewer and fewer people, more and more effectively. And the tools of exploitation, which are advertising and propaganda and all of that, grow ever more powerful and irresistible.

This is really the challenge for the future. We can build a civilization like nothing the world has ever seen. But can it be a human, a *human* civilization? Can it actually honor human values? It's one thing, the rate of invention or gross national product or production of industrial capacity -- all of these things are all very well. But the real dilemma for human beings is how to build a compassionate human civilization. The means to do it come into our ken at the same rate as all these tools which betray it. And if we betray our humanness in the pursuit of civilization, then the dialogue has become mad.