What does /his/ think of this guy?
DUDE
Has anyone here read Food of the Gods? Is it worth reading and are the arguments backed by solid evidence?
>>1375854
He sure spins a good yarn
>>1375854
Mildly interesting but a bit of a charlatan.
>>1375941
It is definitely worth a read.
You should not expect a scientific work with 10 footnotes a page.
It is pretty much a work of philosophy, trying to make sense of human history from very unusual perspectives. There is of cause a good portion of BS to be expected due to speculation, but the fascinating part is, that many ideas really do make sense.
I see it really as a training for my mind, to think around borders of cultural conditioning and open up to how weird this world, our history as a species and reality in general really is.
>>1376514
This. His prose is definitely not scientific and occasionally really, really fucking obnoxious, but it's an interesting and influential piece of afternoon reading. Supplement with R. Wasson if you want to learn from someone who isn't a burnout.
The "stoned ape theory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnEKoFrx1rI
I like listening to McKenna when going to sleep.
A deep soothing voice telling fantastical tales of our world is really comfy.
>>1375854
I love his vocabulary
>>1375854
Genius polymath. Listen to his full talks and read his books
anyone here ever met any machine elves?
>>1375854
Depends on what you want and why.
He'll always have a spot in my heart for popularizing the BRF tek, as well as Penis Envy.
>>1376514
^This, it's not ethnography, though he was an ethnographer.
>>1376804
Second.
>>1378161
Genius is a stretch but polymath isn't.
So back on topic, there's a trajectory in his talks that he started out rather technical, he comes from a solid academic background, and as he became more and more a thing on the talk circuit he appeared to dumb down his message (to the extent that he could) in order to "preach the word" as it were.
There's lots of caveats and unspoken understandings the longer you start to get involved with the guy's corpus. He's rants against culture aren't even against the West but against certain fractions of modernity. His advocation of DMT as a sacrament is always fraught with little subtle nods to Saivism and Enochian and Alchemy.
IMO he hits the DMT=spiritual gnosis angle a little to hard. I'm of the opinion that they're two rather separate spheres of outline with an area of overlap like a Venn diagram.
In any case if you want some of his better work, though it was made before some fundamental confirmations in neuroscience, hit up the Trialogues, and if you're into the history of philosophy, I particularly recommend "Skepticism and the Balkanization of Epistemology", it eventually boils down to a kind of a loveletter to instrumentalism.
>>1380893
Not from LSD or shrooms. I have yet to acquire DMT. I completely understand what people are referring to when they say that, but I haven't met them myself. I only know that they're there.
>>1380937
You can totally contact alterity with a large dose of psicubes.