The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss Quotes

“Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us.”
― Dennis J. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

“Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the “elegance” of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it “makes sense.” It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)”
― Dennis J. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

“Thanks to Luis Eduardo, I learned a number of things about Pablo I hadn’t gathered during our previous conversations. The big surprise was that Pablo had been a powerful ayahuasquero years earlier, but had given up that practice after getting into fights with other shamans, brujos, on the astral plane.”
― Dennis McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

“Whatever the predicted end date, we’ll wake up the next day facing the same intractable woes we faced the day before. Rather than confront those challenges, however, many of us will choose to focus our hope and dread on a new zero point ahead, longing for some resolution to our dilemma, some final outcome no matter how catastrophic. Strange, perhaps, but we are a species so adept at denial that even a vision of the apocalypse is a welcome distraction from the thought of devoting ourselves to making the time we are afforded the best it can possibly be.”
― Dennis J. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

“Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. That’s no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life.”
― Dennis J. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

“Nobody has ever escaped from time, though all of the world’s religions are scams predicated on the notion that we can.”
― Dennis J. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss