Terence McKenna Quotes

It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.

I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.

The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.

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.

And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.

I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.

What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.

Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.

We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.

In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.

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

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

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.

This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

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.

Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.

Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.

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

Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.

Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.

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.

I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.

Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

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.

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.

That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.

Human history is a Gaian dream.

When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.

One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind.

This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.

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

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.

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.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.