Terence McKenna Quotes

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.

The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.

All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.

What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.

I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.

A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.

The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.

Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.

We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.

Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.

We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.

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.

On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.

The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.

The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.

I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.

The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.

If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

In cyberspace things are built out of light.

You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.

Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.

There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.

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.