Terence 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Terence McKenna

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable. ~ Terence McKenna

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious. ~ Terence McKenna

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

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation. ~ Terence McKenna

We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. ~ Terence McKenna

What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction. ~ Terence McKenna

You see, a secret is not something untold. It's something which can't be told. ~ Terence McKenna

Worrying is betting against yourself. ~ Terence McKenna

No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night. ~ Terence McKenna

We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind. ~ Terence McKenna

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. ~ Terence McKenna

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

We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed. ~ Terence McKenna

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen. ~ Terence McKenna

The party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand; but who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party? ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human
being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity. ~ Terence McKenna

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair. ~ Terence McKenna

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines. ~ Terence McKenna

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

It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems. ~ Terence McKenna

And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then "THEY" recruited me and said, "you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization". And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present. ~ Terence McKenna

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. ~ 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

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

My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past. ~ Terence McKenna

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