Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
Terence McKennaNo culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
Terence McKennaThis 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 McKennaAnd 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 McKennaPsychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
Terence McKennaThe idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
Terence McKenna