Breaking Convention: Psychedelic Pharmacology for the 21st Century, 2017
As well as being among the first recorded Westerners to explore ayahuasca, both Terence McKenna a... more As well as being among the first recorded Westerners to explore ayahuasca, both Terence McKenna and William Burroughs were proponents of what McKenna has termed ‘the syntactical nature of reality’: the notion that the world is made of words and symbols, and that decoding and manipulating of these symbols will lead to observable changes in reality. This led Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin to experiment with the cut-up technique, pioneered as a means of writing avant-garde poetry by Tristan Tzara, but becoming a method of divination and sympathetic magic in the hands of Burroughs and Gysin. This paper argues that Burroughs and McKenna both display an almost Kabbalistic sense of the textual nature of perceived reality, but draw fundamentally different conclusions from this shared perspective.
Breaking Convention: Psychedelic Pharmacology for the 21st Century, 2017
As well as being among the first recorded Westerners to explore ayahuasca, both Terence McKenna a... more As well as being among the first recorded Westerners to explore ayahuasca, both Terence McKenna and William Burroughs were proponents of what McKenna has termed ‘the syntactical nature of reality’: the notion that the world is made of words and symbols, and that decoding and manipulating of these symbols will lead to observable changes in reality. This led Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin to experiment with the cut-up technique, pioneered as a means of writing avant-garde poetry by Tristan Tzara, but becoming a method of divination and sympathetic magic in the hands of Burroughs and Gysin. This paper argues that Burroughs and McKenna both display an almost Kabbalistic sense of the textual nature of perceived reality, but draw fundamentally different conclusions from this shared perspective.
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