Top 100 Terence McKenna Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.
Terence McKenna
#4. 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
#5. It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas ... And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
Terence McKenna
#6. 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
#7. The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
Terence McKenna
#8. It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.
Terence McKenna
#11. Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien ... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
Terence McKenna
#12. 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
#13. To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again
Terence McKenna
#14. The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
Terence McKenna
#15. LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.
Terence McKenna
#16. I'll try to be around and about. But if I'm not, then you know that I'm behind your eyelids, and I'll meet you there
Terence McKenna
#17. The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
Terence McKenna
#18. I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.
Terence McKenna
#19. Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
#20. Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
Terence McKenna
#21. All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
Terence McKenna
#22. Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.
Terence McKenna
#23. This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
Terence McKenna
#24. The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
Terence McKenna
#25. You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
#26. Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
Terence McKenna
#27. 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
#28. Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
Terence McKenna
#29. Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
Terence McKenna
#31. The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
Terence McKenna
#32. By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
Terence McKenna
#33. We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern ...
Terence McKenna
#34. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
#35. Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
Terence McKenna
#36. The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
Terence McKenna
#38. The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
#39. History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
Terence McKenna
#40. There is a transcendental dimension beyond language ... It's just hard as hell to talk about!
Terence McKenna
#41. 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.
Terence McKenna
#43. The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.
Terence McKenna
#44. We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.
Terence McKenna
#45. DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.
Terence McKenna
#46. The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
Terence McKenna
#47. Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.
Terence McKenna
#48. I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.
Terence McKenna
#49. Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
Terence McKenna
#50. Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.
Terence McKenna
#51. There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity.
Terence McKenna
#54. The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
Terence McKenna
#55. What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
Terence McKenna
#56. Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.
Terence McKenna
#57. 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
#58. The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
Terence McKenna
#59. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
Terence McKenna
#60. 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
#61. One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?
Terence McKenna
#62. Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
Terence McKenna
#63. It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.
Terence McKenna
#64. Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
Terence McKenna
#65. What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.
Terence McKenna
#66. And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.
Terence McKenna
#67. The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
#68. 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
#69. I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.
Terence McKenna
#70. The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.
Terence McKenna
#71. What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
Terence McKenna
#72. To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Terence McKenna
#73. Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
#74. Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves,
Terence McKenna
#75. Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.
Terence McKenna
#76. And I want to thank all the women that support me. I have wonderful support systems from women of all types who seem dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna can always be improved. I'm extremely grateful for that. The frontiers are enormous in that dimension.
Terence McKenna
#77. The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
Terence McKenna
#79. Half the time you think your thinking you're actually listening
Terence McKenna
#80. What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.
Terence McKenna
#81. I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
Terence McKenna
#82. I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.
Terence McKenna
#83. We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Terence McKenna
#84. Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
Terence McKenna
#85. If you play the cultural game, it's like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.
Terence McKenna
#86. You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
Terence McKenna
#87. Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.
Terence McKenna
#88. Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
Terence McKenna
#89. So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream.
Terence McKenna
#90. If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.
Terence McKenna
#91. The truth for sure,
when it arrives,
will make you smile.
If it doesn't,
you should seek
a deeper truth.
Terence McKenna
#92. Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna
#94. Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
Terence McKenna
#95. 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
#96. The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
Terence McKenna
#97. A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead.
Terence McKenna
#98. 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
#99. Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
Terence McKenna
#100. We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.
Terence McKenna
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