Also meant to add: There is a Cervantes-like obsession in the McKenna brothers with the lovingly focused impossible task. Their attempts to execute actual alchemy are both earnest and batshit, and they know that, and like Don Quixote who has flashes of awareness, they keep at the doomed to fail delusional effort because it’s righteous to fail being wrong for the right reasons.
It’s all very baroque performance arty on some level.
Love your writing. It’s always evident that you’re both blisteringly bright and that you have done a lot of work on yourself, now in possession of the Authentic Person’s proper self assessment. It’s a subtle and uncommon pairing.
On the topic at hand, I really keep coming back to McKenna myself a lot because I just can’t make the man. He’s like some kind of bizarre inconsistency heuristic on all levels of his life. It’s abundantly clear he was comfortable working on collapses metaphors making mythos real.
"If anyone wants me to go into those criticisms, we can. Just comment to let me know." I don't know anything about them, so please do.
"The Schizophrenic, which I’m also going to treat as a cartoon because nobody really needs to take 50-year-old ideas about mental illness seriously." What do you mean by that? Ideas about schizophrenia at their time or schizophrenia in general?
Well, the short answer is Eliade and Campbell both just kinda remixed different cultures to make their points. It's not bad, it's also just not scholarship.
As for schizophrenia, our understanding of the nature and causes of the condition has evolved tremendously with the advent of brain scanning technologies like fMRI machines.
I have little interest in going back and renegotiating those shifts in psychiatric understanding. To give you an idea, the DSM (diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders) was first published in 1952, came out with a second edition in 68, had its 7th printing the year the IL was published, and would be entirely replaced with the DSM3 in 1980.
Each edition is wildly different to reflect new trends in how mental health is understood (and insured, but that's a different story). The main # editions are not compatible with each other.
You can think of them as a generation on the state of the science. We're now on the DSM-5, 3 generations after the latest DSM when Terence wrote the invisible landscape.
So, imo, it's irresponsible to really consider anything he says a serious commentary on schizophrenia. The DSM has huge problems, no doubt, but it's a pretty good indicator of how much the field has changed.
Also meant to add: There is a Cervantes-like obsession in the McKenna brothers with the lovingly focused impossible task. Their attempts to execute actual alchemy are both earnest and batshit, and they know that, and like Don Quixote who has flashes of awareness, they keep at the doomed to fail delusional effort because it’s righteous to fail being wrong for the right reasons.
It’s all very baroque performance arty on some level.
Agreed. Holy folly.
Love your writing. It’s always evident that you’re both blisteringly bright and that you have done a lot of work on yourself, now in possession of the Authentic Person’s proper self assessment. It’s a subtle and uncommon pairing.
On the topic at hand, I really keep coming back to McKenna myself a lot because I just can’t make the man. He’s like some kind of bizarre inconsistency heuristic on all levels of his life. It’s abundantly clear he was comfortable working on collapses metaphors making mythos real.
Fun stuff.
Thank you for saying so. That's pretty much what I'm aiming for, lol.
"If anyone wants me to go into those criticisms, we can. Just comment to let me know." I don't know anything about them, so please do.
"The Schizophrenic, which I’m also going to treat as a cartoon because nobody really needs to take 50-year-old ideas about mental illness seriously." What do you mean by that? Ideas about schizophrenia at their time or schizophrenia in general?
Well, the short answer is Eliade and Campbell both just kinda remixed different cultures to make their points. It's not bad, it's also just not scholarship.
As for schizophrenia, our understanding of the nature and causes of the condition has evolved tremendously with the advent of brain scanning technologies like fMRI machines.
I have little interest in going back and renegotiating those shifts in psychiatric understanding. To give you an idea, the DSM (diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders) was first published in 1952, came out with a second edition in 68, had its 7th printing the year the IL was published, and would be entirely replaced with the DSM3 in 1980.
Each edition is wildly different to reflect new trends in how mental health is understood (and insured, but that's a different story). The main # editions are not compatible with each other.
You can think of them as a generation on the state of the science. We're now on the DSM-5, 3 generations after the latest DSM when Terence wrote the invisible landscape.
So, imo, it's irresponsible to really consider anything he says a serious commentary on schizophrenia. The DSM has huge problems, no doubt, but it's a pretty good indicator of how much the field has changed.