The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.
Terence McKennaWhat is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.
Terence McKennaThis is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
Terence McKennaAt still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
Terence McKenna