Top 100 Quotes About Terence Mckenna
#1. I've been watching a lot of Joan Didion interviews on YouTube. I love her. My drummer has gotten me into looking at Terence McKenna interviews.
St. Vincent
#2. Terence McKenna pointed out that the profundity of [halluncinogenic inebriation] and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy.
Rick Doblin
#3. 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
#4. The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.
(translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna)
Heraclitus
#5. Terence McKenna says, "The culture is not your friend." I am not sure we can change this culture. But I think we can rise above it and create a new world. That's why I so deeply believe in alternative spaces. That's why I believe in the power of art and activism.
Eve Ensler
#6. 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
#7. You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.
Terence McKenna
#8. Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
Terence McKenna
#9. Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.
Terence McKenna
#10. Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
Terence McKenna
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
Terence McKenna
#16. Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
Terence McKenna
#17. 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
#18. The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
Terence McKenna
#19. The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality..
Terence McKenna
#20. The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.
Terence McKenna
#22. 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
#23. You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
#24. 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
#26. There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.
Terence McKenna
#27. What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
#28. There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.
Terence McKenna
#29. The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
Terence McKenna
#30. Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.
Terence McKenna
#31. If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.
Terence McKenna
#33. Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna
#34. The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
Terence McKenna
#35. In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
#36. This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
Terence McKenna
#37. 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
#38. I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
Terence McKenna
#39. What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.
Terence McKenna
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna
#43. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Terence McKenna
#44. 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
#45. I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
Terence McKenna
#46. 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
#48. I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.
Terence McKenna
#49. 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.
Terence McKenna
#50. Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
Terence McKenna
#51. Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
Terence McKenna
#52. Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.
Terence McKenna
#54. Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
Terence McKenna
#55. 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
#56. I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
Terence McKenna
#57. What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
#58. Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness ... Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities ... The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
Terence McKenna
#59. Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.
Terence McKenna
#61. We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.
Terence McKenna
#62. 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
#63. The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
#64. Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
Terence McKenna
#65. Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture.
Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
Terence McKenna
#66. The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.
Terence McKenna
#68. LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.
Terence McKenna
#69. Our task is to create memes ... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.
Terence McKenna
#70. Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.
Terence McKenna
#71. Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!
Terence McKenna
#72. Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
Terence McKenna
#73. 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
#75. 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
#76. History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
Terence McKenna
#77. I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.
Terence McKenna
#78. 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 ...
Terence McKenna
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
Terence McKenna
#84. All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
Terence McKenna
#85. The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
Terence McKenna
#86. 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
#87. 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.
Terence McKenna
#88. What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Terence McKenna
#89. The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
Terence McKenna
#90. Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.
Terence McKenna
#91. The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
Terence McKenna
#92. It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.
Terence McKenna
#93. The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
Terence McKenna
#94. Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
Terence McKenna
#95. The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.
Terence McKenna
#96. That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
#97. Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
Terence McKenna
#98. National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.
Terence McKenna
#99. 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
#100. Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.
Terence McKenna
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