Terence McKenna Quotes

Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.

Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.

Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.

...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness.

We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.

The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.

One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.

So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

No one knows enough to worry.

For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.

DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

The 'public' has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit, which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet.

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.

We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don't matter. And that now doesn't matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.

The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.

And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the “thou shalts” and “thou should”, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.

It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.

The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.

The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.

In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.