Mckenna Quotes

The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work. ~ Terence McKenna

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream. ~ Terence McKenna

Scream silently in your prayer; remember the pain of others. ~ Megan McKenna

There's four things a real man has to be able to do for a woman."
"Exactly how many man-lists do you have?"
He let my wrist go and ticked the items off on his fingers. "Fix her car. Grill her a steak. Kick the ass of any guy who makes her cry. And fuck her so hard she wakes up half-crippled."
"Oh my God. ~ Cara McKenna

If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.' ~ Terence McKenna

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

The essence of a mature human being in religious terms is the ability to see, to be aware of others' suffering and to be touched by it. ~ Megan McKenna

Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating. ~ Terence McKenna

Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross. ~ Megan McKenna

The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing. ~ Terence McKenna

Tonight he was a firm adherent to the classic McCloud school of thought; plant bugs first, apologize later. ~ Shannon McKenna

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

Time is a series of fluctuating variables. ~ Terence McKenna

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination. ~ Terence McKenna

It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection. ~ Terence McKenna

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. ~ Terence McKenna

Every culture that's ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they've been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we're whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you're not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that's been developed ... ~ Terence McKenna

What God did for Jesus in standing up for Him, standing behind Him in life and in death, and in standing in communion and solidarity with Him, the Father also does for us, here and now, in our lives. ~ Megan McKenna

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life. ~ Terence McKenna

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. ~ Terence McKenna

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

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew. ~ Terence McKenna

I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself. ~ Terence McKenna

A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself. ~ Terence McKenna

You will ride the Tao
toward the concrescence
and will be able to live in the light
of its anticipation. ~ Terence McKenna

Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf. ~ Terence McKenna

Would've been worth anything they took from me, just to hear you say my name. ~ Cara McKenna

There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves. ~ Terence McKenna

By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other. ~ Terence McKenna

You Shape Your Own Reality Every Day ~ Shannon McKenna

Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of the more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath Philo Judaeus - a Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard but beheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:
A more perfect archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as the truth of things. ~ Terence McKenna

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. ~ Terence McKenna

In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break. ~ Terence McKenna

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind ~ Terence McKenna

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

I'm sorry." Her voice cracked. "McKenna-"
"Not sorry enough." He pressed his wet face to hers, his mouth rubbing over her cheeks and chin in feverish, rough half kisses, as if he wanted to devour her. "Not nearly enough. You say you've had to live without your heart...how would you like to lose your soul as well? I've cursed every day I've had to live without you, and every night that I spent with another woman, wishing that it was you in my arms-"
"NO-" she moaned.
"Wishing," he continued fiercely, "for some way to stop the memories of you from eating away at me until there was nothing left inside. I've found no peace anywhere, not even in sleep. Not even in dreams..." He broke off and assaulted her with hungry, shuddering kisses. The taste of his tears, his mouth, made Aline disoriented and hot, her head reeling from shocks of pleasure. McKenna seemed possessed by a passion that bordered on violence, his lungs wracked with hard breaths, his hands tightening with a force that threatened to leave bruises on her tender flesh. "By God," he said with the vehemence of a man to whom entirely too much had happened, "In the past few days I've suffered the torments of the damned, and I've had enough! ~ Lisa Kleypas

The human brain is the god of technological innovation. ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. ~ Terence McKenna

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago. ~ Terence McKenna

Ayahuasca is a symbiotic ally of the human species. ~ Dennis McKenna

Washington State has a strong tradition of a positive relationship - positive working relationship between labor and management, whether in the private sector or the public sector. It needs to continue to be that way. ~ Rob McKenna

In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture. ~ Terence McKenna

He shook his head, staring at her like a condemned man who beheld the face of his executioner. "Aline," he whispered, "Do you know what hell is?"
"Yes." Her eyes overflowed. "Trying to exist with your heart living somewhere outside your body."
"No. It's knowing that you have so little faith in my love, you would have condemned me to a lifetime of agony." His face contorted suddenly. "To something worse than death. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech. ~ Terence McKenna

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other. ~ Terence McKenna

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip. ~ Terence McKenna

We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories]. ~ Terence McKenna

But we need to search for and find, what we need to own and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governments, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. In the present circumstances, I'd say the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. ~ Megan McKenna

Th-they're following my tracks . . . ," and she could feel her breath being stolen from her body. She was going to die! ~ Lindsay McKenna

He undressed before her, dropping his shirt to reveal a tautly muscled torso and a chest covered with with black hair. His big-framed body was clearly built for power rather than elegance. Yet there was something innately graceful about the long lines of muscle and sinew, and the heavy breadth of his shoulders. He was a man who made a woman feel safe, and at the same time, deliciously overpowered. ~ Lisa Kleypas

When the third soldier, the leader and one she'd struck with the limb, joined the others, Lia gasped. The three men stood talking in low voices for several minutes, and then they drew closer, heads down, slowly following her muddy footprint trail. Lia breathed ~ Lindsay McKenna

I really need to get better at participating in my own fantasies. ~ Cara McKenna

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

What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the Mandela, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening. ~ Terence McKenna

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

Success in life is about being lucky - ask any failure!

By author: Paul McKenna ~ Denis John George

These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!' ~ Terence McKenna

The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety. ~ Terence McKenna

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. ~ Terence McKenna

What is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution, between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling toned types. If this can happen, then we will make a new world. And if this doesn't happen, nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet, where so many have preceded us. ~ Terence McKenna

We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind ~ Terence McKenna

We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer. ~ Terence McKenna

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

Would That All Yahweh's People Were Prophets!(Numbers 11:29) ~ Megan McKenna

I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small. ~ Terence McKenna

If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. ~ Terence McKenna

What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. ~ Terence McKenna

I don't have something you don't; you believe something I don't. ~ Jed McKenna

The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman. ~ Terence McKenna

But Bear said I shouldn't talk to strangers because they would be scared of me. I always thought I was supposed to be afraid of them, but Bear said I would just end up talking them to death and that any nefarious purpose they might have had would become moot.
When Bear McKenna accuses you of talking too much, you know you have a problem ~ T.J. Klune

The third thing about witnessing, the most important part and the thing that most people don't seem to understand. is that you have to take it further than just one step back. You have to keep going with it. Its not a passive thing. like you just sit back and observe. You don't just observe your character, you deconstruct it. You have to be aggressive about it. This is a way or simulating the enlightened perspective, which would be useful to anyone who wants to wake themselves up from the dreamstate instead of just in it. ~ Jed McKenna

We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual. ~ Terence McKenna

Love, its power and authority, always gets there first, comes to believe first, and always waits for the others, especially the leaders, to catch up! This is the reality of what happened among the disciples and the community of the Beloved Disciple, John, and those closest to Jesus, called His friends. They mature and develop differently from other disciples, and the community of the Church has to struggle with the fact that the last one anyone thought would be the leader was the one who betrayed Him and contributed to the dissolution of the disciples when Jesus was arrested and crucified. ~ Megan McKenna

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else. ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it. ~ Terence McKenna

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

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. ~ 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

He was the best lover I'd ever had. So far ahead of the competition, I couldn't even recall their names or faces. ~ Cara McKenna

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about. ~ 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

Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind. That continent has been rediscovered in a time of great peril for ourselves and our world. Is this coincidence, synchronicity, or a cruelly meaningless juxtaposition of hope and ruin? ~ Terrence McKenna

For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism ... We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves. ~ Terence McKenna

The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness. ~ Terence McKenna

All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact. ~ Terence McKenna

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture. ~ Terence McKenna

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with. ~ Terence McKenna

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

I don't know what I want yet, for the future. I just know I want...I want you to need me back," I whispered.
"Sweetheart, I already do. I need you for what you let me be for you last night. ~ Cara McKenna

Those were the girls she'd been most jealous of, growing up - not just the thin, fashionable ones, but the types who surfed or rock climbed, who lived in such obvious peace with their bodies. Took joy in using their bodies. Mastered them. Merry's had always felt like a bully. A great, heavy oaf pinning her to the ground, taunting. ~ Cara McKenna

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works. ~ Terence McKenna

Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone. ~ Terence McKenna

There's nothing left to contend against and nothing left that must be done, and there will never be anything that must be done ever again. ~ Jed McKenna

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate. ~ Terence McKenna

We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place. ~ Terence McKenna

It's very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point and, as I say; the tools, the data that holds the potential for our salvation is now known, it is available: it is among us, but it is misrepresented, it is slandered, it is litigated against, and it's up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us at some point in the future, which is: What did you do to help save the world? ~ Terence McKenna

The true goal of all spiritual practices is to keep yourself fooled, to maintain the self-deception, to see what's not and not see what is. That's why the stated goals are always unverifiable and ill-defined: its not about attaining them, its about pursuing them. Who wants to wake up? When we have a little itch that threatens to awaken us in the night, we want to scratch the itch and make it go away. not let it evict us from our slumbers. Same thing here. In this sense. spiritual practice - meditation. for instance - is one hundred percent effective. If a spiritual practice satisfies your urge to do something spiritual. if it makes you think you're making progress. if it scratches your itch without disturbing your slumber, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. ~ Jed McKenna

And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience. ~ Terence McKenna

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art. ~ Terence McKenna

I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky. ~ Terence McKenna