A Quote by Terence McKenna
Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
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I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.
Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.
The idea of combining the physics of modern particle theory with cosmology was very young when I started working on cosmology.
Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for example, Plotinus is immensely influential, and Neo-Platonism becomes at least one major component of mainstream Islamic philosophy as well.
I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.
I wouldn't say that The Fabric of the Cosmos is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.
The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.
There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.
Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents... Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well.
Big bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth.
In my cosmology, indigenous wild deer are more important than exotic ornamental shrubs.
All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military's interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant.
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.
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