Mckenna Terence 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

As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves. — Terence McKenna

We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous. — Terence McKenna

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

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

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

I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics. — Terence McKenna

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable. — Terence McKenna

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction. — Terence McKenna

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

Time will perfect matter. — Terence McKenna

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable. — Terence McKenna

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with. — Terence McKenna

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, — Terence McKenna

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is? — Terence McKenna

Authority will lead you into ruin. — Terence McKenna

And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective. — Terence McKenna

You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair. — Terence McKenna

The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness ... Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities ... The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away. — Terence McKenna

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip. — Terence McKenna

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

Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy. — Terence McKenna

In fact, we are most in agreement when we are silent with each other, because then our assumptions about how we are in agreement are able to fully unfurl themselves, but all it takes is someone breaking that silence and stating the contents of their mind, for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us. Because it turns out, you know, I think it's one way, you think it's another, I believe we're doing X, you think we're doing Y, I think we're serving so and so, and you think we're serving somebody else. And this is why I think great relationships are built in silence, because then nobody ever finds out what's really going on. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

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

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity. — Terence McKenna

And I want to thank all the women that support me. I have wonderful support systems from women of all types who seem dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna can always be improved. I'm extremely grateful for that. The frontiers are enormous in that dimension. — Terence McKenna

There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you ... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles. — Terence McKenna

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

History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it. — Terence McKenna

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort. — Terence McKenna

The Truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. I've looked into marginal areas of human experience -historical and otherwise- with a rational mind, and what I've found is that doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the New Age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane ... — Terence McKenna

We live in condensations of our imagination — Terence McKenna

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

Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas — Terence McKenna

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works. — Terence McKenna

What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet. — Terence McKenna

The felt presence of immediate experience
this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor. — Terence McKenna

The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before. This is a process of education. — Terence McKenna

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

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. — Terence McKenna

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language. — Terence McKenna

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

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

Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors. — Terence McKenna

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent. — Terence McKenna

What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse. — Terence McKenna

Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us. — Terence McKenna

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History is rooted in the future — Terence McKenna

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation. — 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

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

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

The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us. — Terence McKenna

All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact. — Terence McKenna

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! — Terence McKenna

What is needed, is an awakening. — 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

Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet. — Terence McKenna

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model. — Terence McKenna

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary. — Terence McKenna

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. — Terence McKenna

It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth. — Terence McKenna

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together. — Terence McKenna

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved. — Terence McKenna

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

To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again — Terence McKenna

The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago ... Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting. — Terence McKenna

It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind. — Terence McKenna

But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it. — 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

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

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

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