Terence McKenna Quotes

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.

We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.

We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.

Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, 'When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.'

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.

It's the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible.

If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.

To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

What is needed, is an awakening.

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.

The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.

Mind conjures miracles out of time.

What I'm talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that's the primary thing to bear in mind. It's an experience.

All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.

Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor.

The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.

We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.

Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!

In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.

This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.

Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.

The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.

This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.

In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.

Culture is another dimension.