Mckenna Terence Quotes

The engineers of the future will be poets. — Terence McKenna

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. — Terence McKenna

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face. — Terence McKenna

Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited! — Terence McKenna

You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world. — Terence McKenna

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries. — Terence McKenna

A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness. — Terence McKenna

Astonishment is the proper response to reality. — Terence McKenna

The truth for sure,
when it arrives,
will make you smile.
If it doesn't,
you should seek
a deeper truth. — Terence McKenna

Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism. — Terence McKenna

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control. — Terence McKenna

We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event. — Terence McKenna

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't. — Terence McKenna

I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness. — Terence McKenna

You're immortal as long as you live. — Terence McKenna

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. — Terence McKenna

All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. — Terence McKenna

Time will perfect matter. — Terence McKenna

What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability. — Terence McKenna

Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas — Terence McKenna

We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery. — Terence McKenna

National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented. — Terence McKenna

Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret. — Terence McKenna

The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself. — Terence McKenna

I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with. — Terence McKenna

[ ... ] thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. — Terence McKenna

I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension. — Terence McKenna

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness. — Terence McKenna

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work. — Terence McKenna

It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding. — Terence McKenna

Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. — Terence McKenna

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy. — Terence McKenna

There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use of drugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism. — Terence McKenna

It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is. — Terence McKenna

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds. — Terence McKenna

Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs. — Terence McKenna

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language. — Terence McKenna

The felt presence of immediate experience
this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor. — Terence McKenna

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself. — Terence McKenna

History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition. — Terence McKenna

No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff. — Terence McKenna

The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles. — Terence McKenna

The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for. — Terence McKenna

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. — Terence McKenna

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent. — Terence McKenna

The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined. — Terence McKenna

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time. — Terence McKenna

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance? — Terence McKenna

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it. — Terence McKenna

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it. — Terence McKenna

The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future. — Terence McKenna

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime. — Terence McKenna

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant. — Terence McKenna

Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science. — Terence McKenna

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. — Terence McKenna

I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage. — Terence McKenna

I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way. — Terence McKenna

I don't know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing. — Terence McKenna

Nature is actually the goal at the end of history. — Terence McKenna

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment. — Terence McKenna

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. — Terence McKenna

The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.
(translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna) — Heraclitus

The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics. — Terence McKenna

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. — Terence McKenna

Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of. — Terence McKenna

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. — Terence McKenna

I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere. — Terence McKenna

No one knows enough to worry. — Terence McKenna

We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. — Terence McKenna

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, — Terence McKenna

I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own. — Terence McKenna

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together. — Terence McKenna

History is a series of approximations of the final singularity. — Terence McKenna

Half the time you think your thinking you're actually listening — Terence McKenna

One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness. — Terence McKenna

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences. — Terence McKenna

There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology. — Terence McKenna

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything. — Terence McKenna

Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us. — Terence McKenna

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code. — Terence McKenna

What you call man is time. — Terence McKenna

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. — Terence McKenna

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation. — Terence McKenna

Language betrays,
in order to mean. — Terence McKenna

I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells. — Terence McKenna

Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated. — Terence McKenna

It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies. — Terence McKenna

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas. — Terence McKenna

Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants — Terence McKenna

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting. — Terence McKenna

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity. — Terence McKenna

Mind conjures miracles out of time. — Terence McKenna

I spend as many hours a day as I possibly can smoking cannabis — Terence McKenna

Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community. — Terence McKenna

Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most. — Terence McKenna

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic. — Terence McKenna

History is rooted in the future — Terence McKenna

Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with. — Terence McKenna

The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort. — Terence McKenna

When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation. — Terence McKenna