Famous Quotes & Sayings

Terence McKenna Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Terence McKenna.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1197587

It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1698812

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1789123

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1339446

Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2247660

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 553026

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 604223

I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 291995

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 430364

There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 706887

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2091375

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day? — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 522259

The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 763079

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1073033

What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside ... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected ... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1907375

Half the time you think your thinking you're actually listening — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2045194

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1436215

Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 213912

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 857293

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1539298

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1693412

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1891511

We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1450602

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1708925

Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1459139

That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1697032

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1468553

I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1482293

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1684006

If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1617593

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1483421

So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1610305

There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1568491

You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1502893

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 ... — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1512077

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2053888

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2262784

Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited! — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2248677

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! — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2243916

And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2226800

Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2224996

Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2194224

The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2193080

We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2183277

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 2059441

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 2056082

Every culture that's ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they've been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we're whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you're not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that's been developed ... — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1828400

We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2052811

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2043800

Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2033036

The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 2011235

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1969497

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1948517

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1270079

It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1861367

We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1831657

There's light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don't go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 410883

You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 623162

Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behaviour that we don't understand. In the nineteenth century there was a term, melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression ... but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, were poured into this label melancholia ... Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing ... A book about schizophrenia [says that] the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining. Marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in their own self-created value system. I said, that's it! That's it! Now I understand! — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 610088

Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out! — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 588785

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 580212

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 541546

There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 540545

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 538863

When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 489793

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 455994

The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 417132

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 662193

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 377439

There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 345982

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 343617

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 325546

For all we know, we know nothing. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 257208

The human brain is the god of technological innovation. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 186998

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 132851

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 103597

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 80318

History is rooted in the future — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 77498

At 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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1008128

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1350680

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.' — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1320440

I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1285182

This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1284013

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 77490

Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1136071

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1116455

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

Terence McKenna Quotes 1091963

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1040409

Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.' — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1039468

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. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 1420381

I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies ... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 969758

This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 926868

Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 875257

The engineers of the future will be poets. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 846070

I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful ... This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 842803

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 791642

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 762326

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self? — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 753184

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 689194

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes 685219

I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time. — Terence McKenna