Best Terence Mckenna Quotes & Sayings

There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use of drugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism. — Terence McKenna

And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools. — Terence McKenna

It is of the first order of importance to remember this, that the shaman is more than merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and who must shamanize in order to remain cured. — Terence McKenna

Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug. — Terence McKenna

Time will perfect matter. — Terence McKenna

In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure. — Terence McKenna

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. — Terence McKenna

The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review. — Terence McKenna

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

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses. — Terence McKenna

Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together. — Terence McKenna

I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it. — Terence McKenna

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous ... The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world. — Terence McKenna

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

The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak. — Terence McKenna

The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. It is a notion that is, in fact, utterly absurd, yet terribly important. Those so-called rational assumptions flow from this initial impossible situation. Western religion has its own singularity in the form of the apocalypse, an event placed not at the beginning of the universe but at its end. This seems a more logical position than that of science. If singularities exist at all it seems easier to suppose that they might arise out of an ancient and highly complexified cosmos, such as our own, than out of a featureless and dimensionless mega-void. — Terence McKenna

By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other. — Terence McKenna

I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright. — Terence McKenna

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

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

Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition ... What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns. — Terence McKenna

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

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

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

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

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation. — Terence McKenna

History is rooted in the future — Terence McKenna

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

Monotheism strenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style that periodically places the ego and its values in perspective through contact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mystery of plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy and wholeness, what Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious. — Terence McKenna

It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection. — Terence McKenna

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

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

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

It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired. — Terence McKenna

As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna