Terence McKenna quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Terence McKenna on Wise Famous Quotes.

What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.

Every click of the cosmic clock
brings us closer to the process
for which the planet called us into existence.

Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world ...

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

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.

Our task is to create memes ... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.

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.

History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.

The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

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.

It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.

Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.

The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.

Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.

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

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.

The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.

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

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.

We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.

There is a transcendental dimension beyond language ... It's just hard as hell to talk about!

Culture is your operating system.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.

The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

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.

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

Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.

The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.

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

I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

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

In cyberspace things are built out of light.

The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.

The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.

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

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

My technique is don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

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.

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

The only real experience that counts, is your own.

I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

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

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.

If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.

The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.

Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.

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

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

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.

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

Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.

We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.

I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.

Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.

A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.

What is needed, is an awakening.

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

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

Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.

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

Language betrays,
in order to mean.

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

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

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

It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.

We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.

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