Heraclitus may be the safest dead philosopher of all. He was a predecessor of Pythagoras
and believed in chaos principles full time. He knew that 'everything is in a state of flux'
much earlier than anyone else - his contemporaries still thought that the world was made of
fire or cheese or mice. Heraclitus saw the world to be built up according to perception:
'Seawater is bad for fishes and good for men. A hill goes both up and down.' His peers said
'it would take a Delian deep sea diver to get to the bottom of him.' He was so out there
that nobody knew what he was talking about, but all agreed with his sentiment that he was
cleverer than anyone else. Good for bringing into a conversation about chaos principles in
nature.
Some people (science A level students) know this equation inside out and feel righteously
smug therewith. Let's catch up! This equation was invented by Einstein in the early part of
this century. It concerns the energy you get from the complete annihilation of a quantity of
matter. E stands for energy. Yes - it does. M is the mass, ie. whatever it is that you're
hypothetically destroying for nasty unfluffy reasons of your own. C squared is the velocity
of light. This is enormous - 300,000 km/p/hr. Since C 2 is such a huge number, it stands that
the amount of energy released is immense. It is why an atom bomb creates such a tremendous
explosion, and why stars (which convert mass into energy) shine so brightly. Since
everything has loads of energy it is also why mystics claim a pebble is as alive as you are.
Since you're a bluffer not an expert don't talk about this equation in scientific circles
unless you do it with great humility. Instead, use it in 'let's talk about life' talks
with other, less experienced bluffers. Why not try it at six am? No-one will be in a state to
doubt the verisimilitude of your words.
Terence McKenna is an ethnobotanist and respected psychedelic philosopher. Everyone talks about him but not many people have read his books. We'll teach you to do the same! McKenna talks a lot about psychedelics and their effects. His most readable book is FOOD OF THE GODS , which charts his experiences with psychedelics in the Amazons. You can say anything about psychedelics and successfully claim it to be a McKenna quote. If you want to tell people you have read FOOD OF THE GODS here are three things you should know:
Even more worth talking about is McKenna's history/information graph, called TIME WAVE ZERO. You can read about this in THE INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE, although we advise against it because it's a really heavy book. This is all you need to know. Using the I CHING (a chaos means of divination that says chance has purpose) McKenna devised a graph measuring periods particularly rich in events that accelerate the creative advance into novelty against man's history. Examples of such periods would be the creation of fire, tools, language, music and computers. Because it was a graph he could follow the pattern of the line through and see how things will look in the future. He noticed that humans are not only getting more creative, but that the speed with which they're doing it is increasing. Two important things to note here: