Terence McKenna Quotes

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.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.

Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.

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

I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.

Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.

A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.

What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.

The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of "To the future, without fear!" Without fear!

No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.

The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

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.

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

This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.

I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'

Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.

I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

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.

If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity.

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.

The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.

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.

A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead.

The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood.

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.

The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.

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

The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.