According to the late, great Terence McKenna, culture is “the greatest barrier to your enlightenment”. Although society encourages us to explore our roots, look at our past to see where we need to go, put ourselves in pigeon-holes and identify who we are with arbitrary and useless concepts, McKenna was a big believer in the exploration of consciousness and advocated the opposite in order to really develop.
“Culture and ideology are not your friends,” McKenna says in this thought-provoking video. “How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings been squashed, twisted, rejected and minimized by cultural values?”
“And if you don´t think culture is your enemy, ask the 18 year-old kid who is sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers,” he goes on, in an excerpt from one of his most powerful speeches. McKenna says we are living in a virtual reality which limits our human-ness, and we don´t need to be inside a real-life computer program for this to be the case.
“The Universe,” McKenna says, “is inside of YOU”.
