Quotes About Psychedelic Experience

#1. 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

#2. Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.

Terence McKenna

#3. The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.

Terence McKenna

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

Terence McKenna

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

Terence McKenna

#8. Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.

Terence McKenna

#9. I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature.

Terence McKenna

#10. The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.

Terence McKenna

#11. Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#12. In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

Terence McKenna

#13. Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place.

Terence McKenna

#14. There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

Terence McKenna

#15. We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#16. And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.

Terence McKenna

#17. 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

#18. To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

Terence McKenna

#19. The notes sound like they're coming from inside your mind ... It was the closest thing to a psychedelic experience I've ever had.

Robin Pecknold

#20. 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

#21. What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

Terence McKenna

#22. This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#23. It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.

Pete Townshend

#24. Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what's in there.

Dennis McKenna

#25. The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.

Terence McKenna

#26. 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

#27. My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today.

Laura Huxley

#28. That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

Bill Hicks

#29. The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.

Terence McKenna

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

Terence McKenna

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

Terence McKenna

#32. I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

Terence McKenna

#33. What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.

Terence McKenna

#34. Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

Terence McKenna

#35. Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.

Terence McKenna

#36. Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.

Terence McKenna

#37. My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

Terence McKenna

#38. What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#39. Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#40. I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#41. I was looking for something and I wasn't sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses, I had a psychedelic experience where I looked up at the clouds and went, 'Oh!' I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen.

Adam Lambert

#42. Unless you can guide the mind inward, and take the attention beyond the comprehension of mind, and directly experience life, you never reach to the ultimate truth of life.

Roshan Sharma

#43. I believe it's true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event.

Ralph Metzner

#44. The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.

Terence McKenna

#45. What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

Terence McKenna

#46. You want a showman, go see rock 'n' roll bands today. You want to have a shamanistic experience, get psychedelic, then you watch The Doors.

Ray Manzarek

#47. Know what [drug] you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience.

Alexander Shulgin

#48. But if they don't try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.

Sam Harris