Terence McKenna

1:Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity. ~ Terence McKenna,

2:Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity." ~ Terence McKenna,

3:The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer ~ Terence McKenna, [T5],

4: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

5:Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engeineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. ~ Terence McKenna,

6:A real index of intelligence is humour, you know? It requires great affection for people and the world and the act of being, a forgivingness and a bemusement. The sure sign of the fanatic is an absence of humour.
~ Terence McKenna,

7:Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you might jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structure and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing.
~ Terence McKenna,

8:To merely gaze upon the images of alchemy, is to in a sense, enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at all alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver. That was the charlatan's game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people. Alchemy is the body of symbols and of literature that accreted around the effort to extract a universal medicine out of Nature for the transformation of societies and human beings. ~ Terence McKenna,

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:As Terence McKenna observed, Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.4 ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Language betrays, ~ Terence McKenna,

2:The truth for sure, ~ Terence McKenna,

3:You will ride the Tao ~ Terence McKenna,

4:Time will perfect matter. ~ Terence McKenna,

5:What you call man is time. ~ Terence McKenna,

6:Culture is another dimension. ~ Terence McKenna,

7:No one knows enough to worry. ~ Terence McKenna,

8:Take it easy man, but take it. ~ Terence McKenna,

9:History is rooted in the future ~ Terence McKenna,

10:Human history is a Gaian dream. ~ Terence McKenna,

11:Every click of the cosmic clock ~ Terence McKenna,

12:What is needed, is an awakening. ~ Terence McKenna,

13:Culture is your operating system. ~ Terence McKenna,

14:For all we know, we know nothing. ~ Terence McKenna,

15:Authority will lead you into ruin. ~ Terence McKenna,

16:Mind conjures miracles out of time. ~ Terence McKenna,

17:You're immortal as long as you live. ~ Terence McKenna,

18:Worrying is betting against yourself. ~ Terence McKenna,

19:History is the siren song of the soul. ~ Terence McKenna,

20:How do we fight back? By creating art. ~ Terence McKenna,

21:People are concrescences of ambiguity. ~ Terence McKenna,

22:You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud. ~ Terence McKenna,

23:Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf. ~ Terence McKenna,

24:The engineers of the future will be poets. ~ Terence McKenna,

25:There is no knowledge without risk taking. ~ Terence McKenna,

26:Time is a series of fluctuating variables. ~ Terence McKenna,

27:We live in condensations of our imagination ~ Terence McKenna,

28:Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. ~ Terence McKenna,

29:In cyberspace things are built out of light. ~ Terence McKenna,

30:Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf. ~ Terence McKenna,

31:Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds. ~ Terence McKenna,

32:Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret. ~ Terence McKenna,

33:Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity. ~ Terence McKenna,

34:Memory training is great psychedelic training. ~ Terence McKenna,

35:Astonishment is the proper response to reality. ~ Terence McKenna,

36:Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean. ~ Terence McKenna,

37:Cultures are virtual realities made of language. ~ Terence McKenna,

38:Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD. ~ Terence McKenna,

39:Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. ~ Terence McKenna,

40:We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation. ~ Terence McKenna,

41:Only psychos and shamans create their own reality ~ Terence McKenna,

42:It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives. ~ Terence McKenna,

43:Nature is actually the goal at the end of history. ~ Terence McKenna,

44:The only real experience that counts, is your own. ~ Terence McKenna,

45:Our medium is meat, but we are made of information. ~ Terence McKenna,

46:We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys. ~ Terence McKenna,

47:Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas ~ Terence McKenna,

48:The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. ~ Terence McKenna,

49:The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful. ~ Terence McKenna,

50:There's only the integrity of doing and having done. ~ Terence McKenna,

51:What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs. ~ Terence McKenna,

52:You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort. ~ Terence McKenna,

53:The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information ~ Terence McKenna,

54:The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined. ~ Terence McKenna,

55:The human brain is the god of technological innovation. ~ Terence McKenna,

56:Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain. ~ Terence McKenna,

57:The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman. ~ Terence McKenna,

58:The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time. ~ Terence McKenna,

59:Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image. ~ Terence McKenna,

60:Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna,

61:The surface of things is not where attention should rest. ~ Terence McKenna,

62:All time is is how much change you can pack into a second. ~ Terence McKenna,

63:It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding. ~ Terence McKenna,

64:Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language. ~ Terence McKenna,

65:Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature ~ Terence McKenna,

66:The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system. ~ Terence McKenna,

67:The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human ~ Terence McKenna,

68:What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability. ~ Terence McKenna,

69:For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity. ~ Terence McKenna,

70:History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it. ~ Terence McKenna,

71:Wife beating without alcohol is like a circus without lions. ~ Terence McKenna,

72:I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics. ~ Terence McKenna,

73:I spend as many hours a day as I possibly can smoking cannabis ~ Terence McKenna,

74:Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness ~ Terence McKenna,

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

76:The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer ~ Terence McKenna,

77:The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us. ~ Terence McKenna,

78:Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. ~ Terence McKenna,

79:Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening ~ Terence McKenna,

80:History is a series of approximations of the final singularity. ~ Terence McKenna,

81:How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self? ~ Terence McKenna,

82:I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own. ~ Terence McKenna,

83:The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles. ~ Terence McKenna,

84:The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed. ~ Terence McKenna,

85:We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over. ~ Terence McKenna,

86:Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

87:It's the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible. ~ Terence McKenna,

88:Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what's going on. ~ Terence McKenna,

89:If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan. ~ Terence McKenna,

90:I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna,

91:Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality. ~ Terence McKenna,

92:Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society. ~ Terence McKenna,

93:You either have a plan or you become part of somebody else's plan. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

95:I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky. ~ Terence McKenna,

96:Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension. ~ Terence McKenna,

97:The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation. ~ Terence McKenna,

98:The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

99:The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation ~ Terence McKenna,

100:The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. ~ Terence McKenna,

101:The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous. ~ Terence McKenna,

102:All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. ~ Terence McKenna,

103:Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any. ~ Terence McKenna,

104:Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end. ~ Terence McKenna,

105:National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented. ~ Terence McKenna,

106:Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved. ~ Terence McKenna,

107:Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet. ~ Terence McKenna,

108:Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together. ~ Terence McKenna,

109:The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. ~ Terence McKenna,

110:The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little. ~ Terence McKenna,

111:We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. ~ Terence McKenna,

112:Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

114:Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism. ~ Terence McKenna,

115:Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything. ~ Terence McKenna,

116:If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately. ~ Terence McKenna,

117:We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle ~ Terence McKenna,

118:We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten. ~ Terence McKenna,

119:One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day? ~ Terence McKenna,

120:The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature. ~ Terence McKenna,

121:Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage. ~ Terence McKenna,

122:LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality. ~ Terence McKenna,

123:The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer ~ Terence McKenna, [T5], #index,

124:I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream. ~ Terence McKenna,

125:I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing. ~ Terence McKenna,

126:There are conditions under which time and space come apart and reweave itself. ~ Terence Mckenna,

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

128:You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told. ~ Terence McKenna,

129:Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. ~ Terence McKenna,

130:The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. ~ Terence McKenna,

131:A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity. ~ Terence McKenna,

132:The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future. ~ Terence McKenna,

133:The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness. ~ Terence McKenna,

134:The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being. ~ Terence McKenna,

135:There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves. ~ Terence McKenna,

136:You don't want to become so open minded that the wind whistles between your ears. ~ Terence McKenna,

137:History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense. ~ Terence McKenna,

138:Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

140:Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about. ~ Terence McKenna,

141:The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art. ~ Terence McKenna,

142:The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model. ~ Terence McKenna,

143:Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

144:Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy. ~ Terence McKenna,

145:It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

146:Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate. ~ Terence McKenna,

147:I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension. ~ Terence McKenna,

148:The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs. ~ Terence McKenna,

149:Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves. ~ Terence McKenna,

150:Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building. ~ Terence McKenna,

151:You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

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

154:To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality. ~ Terence McKenna,

155:We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future. ~ Terence McKenna,

156:Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency. ~ Terence McKenna,

157:I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells. ~ Terence McKenna,

158:Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it. ~ Terence McKenna,

159:The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort. ~ Terence McKenna,

160:Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

162:The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself. ~ Terence McKenna,

163:We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind ~ Terence McKenna,

164:Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

166:If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code. ~ Terence McKenna,

167:I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

168:People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting. ~ Terence McKenna,

169:Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. ~ Terence McKenna,

170:The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.

(translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna) ~ Heraclitus,

171:The real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one. ~ Terence McKenna,

172:There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about! ~ Terence McKenna,

173:To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything. ~ Terence McKenna,

174:We’re moving toward a time when our technology is indistinguishable from us. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

175:Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

177:Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

179:Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with. ~ Terence McKenna,

180:We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being. ~ Terence McKenna,

181:Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity. ~ Terence McKenna,

182:There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

184:We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. ~ Terence McKenna,

185:But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it. ~ Terence McKenna,

186:Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic. ~ Terence McKenna,

187:Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community. ~ Terence McKenna,

188:This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed. ~ Terence McKenna,

189:What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom. ~ Terence McKenna,

190:If you cross an onion with a UFO, what you get is a flying saucer that brings tears to your eyes. ~ Terence McKenna,

191:Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? ~ Terence McKenna,

192:Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order. ~ Terence McKenna,

193:Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

194:The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time. ~ Terence McKenna,

195:As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes. ~ Terence McKenna,

196:I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

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

199:The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along. ~ Terence McKenna,

200:These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses. ~ Terence McKenna,

201:The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery. ~ Terence McKenna,

202:You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them. ~ Terence McKenna,

203:I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism. ~ Terence McKenna,

204:Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

205:Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works. ~ Terence McKenna,

206:The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self. ~ Terence McKenna,

207:Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us. ~ Terence McKenna,

208:Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

210:The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries. ~ Terence McKenna,

211:History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition. ~ Terence McKenna,

212:I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere. ~ Terence McKenna,

213:Many people never observe nature except when psychedelics force it upon them. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

214:The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path. ~ Terence McKenna,

215:The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

216:We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture. ~ Terence McKenna,

217:Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

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

220:The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been. ~ Terence McKenna,

221:If you’re not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing. ~ Terence McKenna,

222:It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language. ~ Terence McKenna,

223:The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics. ~ Terence McKenna,

224:DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it. ~ Terence McKenna,

225:I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time. ~ Terence McKenna,

226:Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

228:One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness. ~ Terence McKenna,

229:Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality. ~ Terence McKenna,

230:What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

232:Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair. ~ Terence McKenna,

233:Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone. ~ Terence McKenna,

234:The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor. ~ Terence McKenna,

235:By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence. ~ Terence McKenna,

236:In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum. ~ Terence McKenna,

237:The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. ~ Terence McKenna,

238:To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century. ~ Terence McKenna,

239:We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma. ~ Terence McKenna,

240:I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'. ~ Terence McKenna,

241:I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

242:The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself. ~ Terence McKenna,

243:I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with. ~ Terence McKenna,

244:Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have. ~ Terence McKenna,

245:There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about. ~ Terence McKenna,

246:There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology. ~ Terence McKenna,

247:We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years. ~ Terence McKenna,

248:What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is. ~ Terence McKenna,

249:Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste. ~ Terence McKenna,

250:Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

252:Mystery is alive in the moment, in the here and now. It just simply lies on the other side of a barrier of courage. ~ Terence McKenna,

253:The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words. ~ Terence McKenna,

254:You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world. ~ Terence McKenna,

255:I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there ~ Terence McKenna,

256:‎The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time. ~ Terence McKenna,

257:Bandwidth is broadening as we speak. The whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

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

259:It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies. ~ Terence McKenna,

260:Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant. ~ Terence McKenna,

261:The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine. ~ Terence McKenna,

262: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,

263:It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically. ~ Terence McKenna,

264:There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives. ~ Terence McKenna,

265:What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

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

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

269:Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants ~ Terence McKenna,

270:Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes. ~ Terence McKenna,

271:In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture. ~ Terence McKenna,

272:The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. ~ Terence McKenna,

273:We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer. ~ Terence McKenna,

274:Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it. ~ Terence McKenna,

275:The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious. ~ Terence McKenna,

276:What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine. ~ Terence McKenna,

277:Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated. ~ Terence McKenna,

278:If nature represents a principle of economy, then culture surely must exemplify the principle of innovation through excess. ~ Terence McKenna,

279:It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

281:What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is. ~ Terence McKenna,

282:I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them. ~ Terence McKenna,

283:In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones. ~ Terence McKenna,

284:The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

286:What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance. ~ Terence McKenna,

287:What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds. ~ Terence McKenna,

288: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,

289:Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs. ~ Terence McKenna,

290:I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

292:History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious. ~ Terence McKenna,

293:Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

295:Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book. ~ Terence McKenna,

296:Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. ~ Terence McKenna,

297: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,

298: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,

299:It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

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

302:The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

304:For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is. ~ Terence McKenna,

305:I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy. ~ Terence McKenna,

306:I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place. ~ Terence McKenna,

307:The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet. ~ Terence McKenna,

308:And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum. ~ Terence McKenna,

309: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,

310:I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

311:Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas. ~ Terence McKenna,

312:The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis. ~ Terence McKenna,

313: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,

314: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,

315: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

316: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,

317:I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small. ~ Terence McKenna,

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

319:Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of. ~ Terence McKenna,

320:The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church. ~ Terence McKenna,

321: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

322:Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work. ~ Terence McKenna,

323:Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view. ~ Terence McKenna,

324:It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other. ~ Terence McKenna,

325:What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all. ~ Terence McKenna,

326:It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us. ~ Terence McKenna,

327:No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night. ~ Terence McKenna,

328:The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient. ~ Terence McKenna,

329:The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place. ~ Terence McKenna,

330: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,

331:If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't. ~ Terence McKenna,

332: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,

333:Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy. ~ Terence McKenna,

334:You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms. ~ Terence McKenna,

335:Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences. ~ Terence McKenna,

336: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,

337: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

338: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,

339:What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime. ~ Terence McKenna,

340: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,

341:My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness. ~ Terence McKenna,

342: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,

343:Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. ~ Terence McKenna,

344:The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control. ~ Terence McKenna,

345:What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

346:I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears ~ Terence McKenna,

347:Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet ~ Terence McKenna,

348:The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

349:The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness. ~ Terence McKenna,

350:The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another. ~ Terence McKenna,

351:A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness. ~ Terence McKenna,

352: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

353: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

354:Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. ~ Terence McKenna,

355:It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable. ~ Terence McKenna,

356:There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules ~ Terence McKenna,

357: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,

358:There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment. ~ Terence McKenna,

359:We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event. ~ Terence McKenna,

360: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

361:DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic. ~ Terence McKenna,

362: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,

363:No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff. ~ Terence McKenna,

364:The spiritual atrophying of contemporary culture may be due in large measure to its loss of sensitivity to processes in the collective unconscious. ~ Terence McKenna,

365: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,

366: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

367:We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery. ~ Terence McKenna,

368:When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes. ~ Terence McKenna,

369: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,

370:Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole. ~ Terence McKenna,

371: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,

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

373:The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with. ~ Terence McKenna,

374:The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable. ~ Terence McKenna,

375: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,

376:Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary. ~ Terence McKenna,

377:I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of. ~ Terence McKenna,

378:Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego. ~ Terence McKenna,

379:The human world is simply a catalyst for nature’s intentions. We are speeding up nature’s program of dimensional transcendence. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

380:Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be? ~ Terence McKenna,

381: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

382:I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that. ~ Terence McKenna,

383:The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news. ~ Terence McKenna,

384:Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly. ~ Terence McKenna,

385:Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media. ~ Terence McKenna,

386: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

387:We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. ~ Terence McKenna,

388:We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it. ~ Terence McKenna,

389: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,

390:It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening. ~ Terence McKenna,

391: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

392: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,

393:Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us. ~ Terence McKenna,

394: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,

395:We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language. ~ Terence McKenna,

396: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,

397:'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position. ~ Terence McKenna,

398:I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity. ~ Terence McKenna,

399:The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. ~ Terence McKenna,

400: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,

401: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,

402:Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion. ~ Terence McKenna,

403: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

404:Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed ~ Terence McKenna,

405: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,

406:To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back. ~ Terence McKenna,

407:The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place. ~ Terence McKenna,

408: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,

409:The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. ~ Terence McKenna,

410:When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let's be frank about it, it is enslavement. ~ Terence McKenna,

411: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

412:The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity. ~ Terence McKenna,

413: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,

414:This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about. ~ Terence McKenna,

415:Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it? ~ Terence McKenna,

416: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,

417:I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view. ~ Terence McKenna,

418:[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,

419: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,

420:The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream. ~ Terence McKenna,

421:This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. ~ Terence McKenna,

422:The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety. ~ Terence McKenna,

423:What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense. ~ Terence McKenna,

424: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,

425: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,

426:Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes. ~ Terence McKenna,

427:I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love. ~ Terence McKenna,

428: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

429:The machines are extensions of ourselves—not our hands, as the age of mechanical technology was, but they are literal extensions of our minds. ~ Terence McKenna, Spirituality and Technology,

430:The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads. ~ Terence McKenna,

431:We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components. ~ Terence McKenna,

432:We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart. ~ Terence McKenna,

433:I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously. ~ Terence McKenna,

434:I have realized that cultures are like operating systems. We are like hardware. The human animal is a piece of biological wetware/hardware. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

435: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,

436:The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

437:Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

438:In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told. ~ Terence McKenna,

439: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,

440:The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt. ~ Terence McKenna,

441:What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation. ~ Terence McKenna,

442:It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense. ~ Terence McKenna,

443:The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls. ~ Terence McKenna,

444:What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news! ~ Terence McKenna,

445: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,

446:Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal. ~ Terence McKenna,

447:Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully. ~ Terence McKenna,

448:The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of. ~ Terence McKenna,

449:We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else. ~ Terence McKenna,

450:I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. ~ Terence McKenna,

451:The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality. ~ Terence McKenna,

452: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,

453: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,

454:What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things. ~ Terence McKenna,

455:What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity. ~ Terence McKenna,

456: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,

457:My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises ~ Terence McKenna,

458: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,

459: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,

460:What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity. ~ Terence McKenna,

461: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,

462: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,

463:I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally. ~ Terence McKenna,

464:It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that. ~ Terence McKenna,

465:The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

466:You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created. ~ Terence McKenna,

467:All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion. ~ Terence McKenna,

468:I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium ~ Terence McKenna,

469: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

470:Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially. ~ Terence McKenna,

471: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

472:Ideology is toxic. All ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

473:The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question? ~ Terence McKenna,

474:The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue. ~ Terence McKenna,

475: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,

476:Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art. ~ Terence McKenna,

477: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,

478:Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat. ~ Terence McKenna,

479: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,

480: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,

481:You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding, ~ Terence McKenna,

482:You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding. ~ Terence McKenna,

483: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,

484:It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you. ~ Terence McKenna,

485: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! ~ Terence McKenna,

486:Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation. ~ Terence McKenna,

487:This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time. ~ Terence McKenna,

488:If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. ~ Terence McKenna,

489:The party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand; but who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party? ~ Terence McKenna,

490:This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

491: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,

492:We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception. ~ Terence McKenna,

493: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,

494:Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after. ~ Terence McKenna,

495:Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. ~ Terence McKenna,

496:You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. ~ Terence McKenna,

497:This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human. ~ Terence McKenna,

498:Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engeineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. ~ Terence McKenna,

499: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

500: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,

501:If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity. ~ Terence McKenna,

502:A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead. ~ Terence McKenna,

503: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

504:Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control. ~ Terence McKenna,

505:Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control. ~ Terence McKenna,

506:Evolution is now understood to be the triumphant march out of chaos into order, connectedness, self-expression, and self-reflection that begins with the first moments following the big bang. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

507:For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined. ~ Terence McKenna,

508:I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain. ~ Terence McKenna,

509:Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion. ~ Terence McKenna,

510:The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul' ~ Terence McKenna,

511:These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!' ~ Terence McKenna,

512:Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique. ~ Terence McKenna,

513:A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself. ~ Terence McKenna,

514:Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue. ~ Terence McKenna,

515: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

516:A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities. ~ Terence McKenna,

517:I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate. ~ Terence McKenna,

518:We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together. ~ Terence McKenna,

519: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,

520:A real index of intelligence is humour, you know? It requires great affection for people and the world and the act of being, a forgivingness and a bemusement. The sure sign of the fanatic is an absence of humour.
~ Terence McKenna,

521: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,

522:History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness. ~ Terence McKenna,

523:The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing. ~ Terence McKenna,

524:We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place. ~ Terence McKenna,

525: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,

526:We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago. ~ Terence McKenna,

527: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 ~ Ayelet Waldman,

528: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,

529: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,

530: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,

531:If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating. ~ Terence McKenna,

532: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,

533: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,

534:Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. ~ Terence McKenna,

535:The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful. ~ Terence McKenna,

536:Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck. ~ Terence McKenna,

537: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

538:I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself. ~ Terence McKenna,

539: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,

540: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,

541:We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it. ~ Terence McKenna,

542:If you play the cultural game, it's like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded. ~ Terence McKenna,

543: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,

544:We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future, we are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

545:And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions. ~ Terence McKenna,

546:Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position. ~ Terence McKenna,

547: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,

548:Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone. ~ Terence McKenna,

549: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,

550:The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off. ~ Terence McKenna,

551:Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris. ~ Terence McKenna,

552:Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe. ~ Terence McKenna,

553:The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out: we want to put the body into the imagination and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

554:A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age. ~ Terence McKenna,

555:At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas. ~ Terence McKenna,

556:We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

557: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,

558: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,

559:You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna,

560:I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet—which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature herself. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

561: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,

562:Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer. ~ Terence McKenna,

563:What I see is that the carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in nature. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

564: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

565: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,

566:What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible. ~ Terence McKenna,

567: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,

568:I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products? ~ Terence McKenna,

569:The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there. ~ Terence McKenna,

570:What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. ~ Terence McKenna,

571:I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing. ~ Terence McKenna,

572: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,

573:The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience. ~ Terence McKenna,

574:Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure. ~ Terence McKenna,

575:We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and 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. ~ Terence McKenna,

576:What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening. ~ Terence McKenna,

577:Did all these people get freezed to death and stomped on by mastodons and eaten by saber-toothed tigers and ravaged by disease so you can blow it? You, with your Mercedes and your 48-foot television set? It can’t be that lame, you know? ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

578:If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

579:I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature. ~ Terence McKenna,

580:The Logos is a voice heard, in the head. And the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion. ~ Terence McKenna,

581:No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions. ~ Terence McKenna,

582:The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. ~ Terence McKenna,

583:Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you might jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structure and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing.
~ Terence McKenna,

584:Terence McKenna says, "The culture is not your friend." I am not sure we can change this culture. But I think we can rise above it and create a new world. That's why I so deeply believe in alternative spaces. That's why I believe in the power of art and activism. ~ Eve Ensler,

585: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,

586:We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms. ~ Terence McKenna,

587:The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work. ~ Terence McKenna,

588:What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience ~ Terence McKenna,

589:It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that! ~ Terence McKenna,

590: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,

591:The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. ~ Terence McKenna,

592: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,

593:Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited; we'd never know what hit us. ~ Terence McKenna,

594:A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about. ~ Terence McKenna,

595:Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

596: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,

597: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

598: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,

599:The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set. ~ Terence McKenna,

600:The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations. ~ Terence McKenna,

601:This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite. ~ Terence McKenna,

602:[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable. ~ Terence McKenna,

603:Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort. ~ Terence McKenna,

604:Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected. ~ Terence McKenna,

605:My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances. ~ Terence McKenna,

606:One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively. ~ Terence McKenna,

607:The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood. ~ Terence McKenna,

608: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,

609:We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories]. ~ Terence McKenna,

610:The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality. ~ Terence McKenna,

611: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

612:We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. ~ Terence McKenna,

613:This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing. ~ Terence McKenna,

614:My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past. ~ Terence McKenna,

615:Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place. ~ Terence McKenna,

616:You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche. ~ Terence McKenna,

617: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,

618:As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”4 ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

619: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,

620:I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?' ~ Terence McKenna,

621:Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. ~ Terence McKenna,

622: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

623:The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve. ~ Terence McKenna,

624: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,

625: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

626:Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred. ~ Terence McKenna,

627:The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension. ~ Terence McKenna,

628: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

629:What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes - the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move. ~ Terence McKenna,

630: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,

631:If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways. ~ Terence McKenna,

632:What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

633:The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being. ~ Terence McKenna,

634:Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together. ~ Terence McKenna,

635:This idea says: no, people matter. 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, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

636: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,

637:It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing. ~ Terence McKenna,

638:LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us. ~ Terence McKenna,

639:So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in. ~ Terence McKenna,

640: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,

641: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,

642:Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines. ~ Terence McKenna,

643:People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be. ~ Terence McKenna,

644:The felt presence of immediate experience is the defining phenomenon of being. If you can’t reach it, you are in trouble. You need some kind of help—psychedelics, therapy, loving kindness. Something. And if you can reach it, then you have contacted the authentic domain of being. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

645: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

646:When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity. ~ Terence McKenna,

647:In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break. ~ Terence McKenna,

648:I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business. ~ Terence McKenna,

649:Until we get this higher perspective we are going to continue to rattle the bars of our cage. The higher perspective depends on seeing things on a scale of thousands of years and potentially millions of light-years. A cosmic scale—the correct scale; the scale on which we are truly operating. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

650: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

651: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,

652:The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of culture. It is literally the response to toxic culture; the growth of ego. The more toxic the culture, the more the ego is revered as a natural value within that culture. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

653: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,

654:No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

655: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

656:The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic. ~ Terence McKenna,

657:People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century. ~ Terence McKenna,

658: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,

659: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,

660:We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on? ~ Terence McKenna,

661:Can we solve our problems and maintain our individual existences, or are we in fact furiously building a level of hierarchical control above the level of the individual that will make things like states and corporations seem like pale soup indeed? Are we in fact trying to create a superorganism? ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

662: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

663:The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant. ~ Terence McKenna,

664:This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds. ~ Terence McKenna,

665: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,

666: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,

667:Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics. ~ Terence McKenna,

668: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

669:Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong. ~ Terence McKenna,

670:Almost literally overnight you can build a website and begin to point at other websites, and bring resources into yours. This is a technology which is going turn out to not be what people think it is. It’s going to be a technology for showing each other the inside of our heads; for showing each other our dreams. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

671:A long long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret, I won't keep it. I'm against secrets, I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost. ~ Terence McKenna,

672:The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS. ~ Terence McKenna,

673:It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. ~ Terence McKenna,

674:I think that the design process—whatever that means—must become conscious, global, integrated. The entire human domain (which means the entire planet and its surrounding near space) should be enclosed and included in a coherent plan driven by human values and a thirst for transformational beauty. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

675: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,

676:...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. ~ Terence McKenna,

677:Terence McKenna once famously said that science asks “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” That miracle is the instantaneous arrival of all the laws of nature and all the matter and energy in the universe, appearing out of nowhere at the moment of the Big Bang, before going on to expand in uneven and unexplained ways. ~ Gordon White,

678:The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language. ~ Terence McKenna,

679: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

680:The first form of consciousness is having the point of view of your prey. Predatory animals have the highest form of animal consciousness; big cats. But it’s a consciousness of the exterior world. Psilocybin forced us beyond that, into consciousness of the imaginal world; the world of the imagination inside our heads. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

681:I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable. ~ Terence McKenna,

682: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,

683: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,

684:I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance. ~ Terence McKenna,

685:In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept. ~ Terence McKenna,

686:Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this. ~ Terence McKenna,

687:For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception. ~ Terence McKenna,

688:The felt presence of immediate experience. This is all you know. It’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibility, fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope—who knows. But in the moment of being we have the completion of being. It is always complete. Every moment. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

689:I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures. ~ Terence McKenna,

690:Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates. ~ Terence McKenna,

691: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,

692:We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna,

693:I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present. ~ Terence McKenna,

694:The human body is a knot in time. It is non-thermodynamic state of equilibrium maintained by the miracle of metabolism. Metabolism is a slow, controlled chemical burning of organic material; so subtle a form of burning that the energy is trapped in various membranes and cytochrome cascades and put to the work of organism. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

695:Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means. ~ Terence McKenna,

696:I have never seen a truly superior person, I don’t believe. And if I have, they were so humble and self-effacing they never would have claimed that superiority as their own. If somebody tells you they’re a superior person—my god, they’re automatically to be taken off the active list. That alone screws the pooch right there! ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

697: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,

698:I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea. ~ Terence McKenna,

699:Things are pretty strange in this world and people do it many ways and you are just an atom in a galaxy of possibilities and your opinions and your science and ‘What I think’ and all that, is just so much noise in a very complex and busy world. And its that same humbling perception that comes out of psychedelics. It just shows you, you’re very parochial. ~ Terence McKenna,

700:On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it. ~ Terence McKenna,

701:The generalized description of the psychedelic experience is: it dissolves boundaries. And the main boundary that it was dissolving and that it does dissolve is the ego. Psychedelics are an inoculation against selfishness at the expense of group values. And it is selfishness at the expense of group values that is shoving us toward Armageddon. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

702: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,

703: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,

704:The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet. ~ Terence McKenna,

705: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,

706: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,

707:What is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution, between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling toned types. If this can happen, then we will make a new world. And if this doesn't happen, nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet, where so many have preceded us. ~ Terence McKenna,

708:The world is a gene swarm. And people like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have been suggesting for years that the Earth is a kind of thermostatic self-regulator. Well, if you carry that idea far enough, “thermostatic self-regulator” is a way of saying a kind of computational engine; a kind of computer; a kind of mind! A kind of mind—the Gaian mind. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

709:What about the Internet? Is it the coming of the superorganism? It is prosthesis on an incredible scale. It is going to redefine what it is to be human. I think technologies are neither gods nor demons, it’s what you do with it. But the dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

710:Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular. ~ Terence McKenna,

711:Evolutionary theory tells us that we are some kind of advanced animal of some sort, and science has waged a noble struggle over the past 150 years to secure this position against all attacks by orthodox religious thinking. And yet, there is—after it’s all said and done—the sense that, if we are an animal, we are a very, very peculiar sort of animal indeed. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

712:Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind. ~ Terence McKenna,

713:And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization. ~ Terence McKenna,

714:When I talk about stuff like the evolution of photolithography, and moving pictures out of photography, and the evolution of surround sound, and the global airline system, and these kinds of things, these are dimension-conquering phenomena designed to shrink the Earth to a point. And of course the Internet is the mother of all dimensional conquest. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

715:Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles. ~ Terence McKenna,

716:The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

717:Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity. ~ Terence McKenna,

718:The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder. ~ Terence McKenna,

719:The twentieth-century linguistic revolution,” says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, “is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language. ~ Terence McKenna,

720:DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about. ~ Terence McKenna,

721:We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. ~ Terence McKenna,

722: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,

723:I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster. ~ Terence McKenna,

724:There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness. ~ Terence McKenna,

725:So what needs to be done is to spread the idea that anxiety is inappropriate. It's sort of like we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society, because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it's dying, and be deluded, and regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the role then, I think, for psychedelic people is to try and spread calm. ~ Terence McKenna,

726:This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. ~ Terence McKenna,

727:To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds. ~ Terence McKenna,

728: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

729: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,

730:We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” - ~ Terence McKenna,

731:...the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: the human body- its organs, its voice, its powers of locomotion, and its imagination- is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time or energy level in the universe. ~ Terence McKenna,

732:Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else. ~ Terence McKenna,

733:Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed. ~ Terence McKenna,

734: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,

735:The real truth that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one... Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control - the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others - but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself... It's like trying to control a dream. ~ Terence McKenna,

736:I think it was Plato—I’m not sure he said it first—but he said, “If God does not exist, human beings will create God.” I think the truth is they’re not even going to wait to find out. It’s easier to cut to the technical solution and sort the whole thing out later. And if the God we make and the God we find are in conflict with each other, they’ll just have to duke it out. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

737:Time is a topological manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land and like water flowing over land, when the land is flat, the water becomes reflective and moves slowly. When the landscape becomes disrupted, the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear and new kinds of activity emerge and out of that new activity, there comes the new states that define the future. ~ Terence McKenna,

738:If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.' ~ Terence McKenna,

739:What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet. ~ Terence McKenna,

740:It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. 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,

741:It’s fun to take responsibility. It’s fun to test the waters. The hardest thing to put across to one’s self and to other people is that the universe is a more friendly place than we have been told. Culture is institutionalized paranoia, and it’s very hard to decondition oneself from this. No matter how deconditioned you may think you are, there is more and more work to be done. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

742:The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual. ~ Terence McKenna,

743:I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It's a strange kind of protective denial. ~ Terence McKenna,

744: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,

745: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,

746:The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization. ~ Terence McKenna,

747:Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

748: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,

749:Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between "power for oneself and power over others," she writes: "In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be. ~ Terence McKenna,

750:There’s no way to get a big perspective like education and psychedelic experiences. If we can see history for what it is—it’s a 25,000-year, nearly instantaneous transition from one state of being to another. And, yes, there are 1,500 generations of people who live in that paper-thin transition time. But when it’s over, it’s over. And we will leave history behind the way you dump a used placenta, I’m sure. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

751: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 ~ Terence McKenna,

752:If you had to generalize 100,000 psychedelic experiences—the ones where people thought they were God, the ones where people had to be taken to the ER room and have their stomach pumped; all of them—if you generalize what these substances do, is: they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. If you love it, you’ll love it. If you hate it, you’ll hate it. But that’s what they do: they dissolve boundaries. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

753:One reaches through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain...The human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body, and we don't 'imagine' anything. We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence. ~ Terence McKenna,

754:What is happening, I think, it's really bigger than psychedelics, it's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That's what's happening. ~ Terence McKenna,

755:The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs. ~ Terence McKenna,

756: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

757:If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me. ~ Terence McKenna,

758:It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are in the presence of the mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide. ~ Terence McKenna,

759:And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization“. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present. ~ Terence McKenna,

760: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,

761:And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism. ~ Terence McKenna,

762: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

763:There is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever... One exists in eternity, one has become eternal... One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity. ~ Terence McKenna,

764:I think the primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the twentieth century—the primary contribution of twentieth-century thinking, if you will—is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. Information is a deeper and more primary concept than space, time, matter, energy, charge, spin, angular momentum. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

765: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

766:The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that 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 and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies. ~ Terence McKenna,

767:I think there's a very strong Calvinistic bias against a free lunch. The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation, and that sort of thing, is abhorrent to people because they believe that the vision of these higher dimensions should be vouchsafed to the good, and probably to them only after death. It is alarming to people to think that they could take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have these kinds of experiences. ~ Terence McKenna,

768:We are getting set to take flight into what has always been our destiny. We’re special. We are not outside the plan. But we’re in a loop of the plan that the rest of organic nature is not participating in. We are the hands of the planetary mind. And the technologies that we have assembled are for the purposes of the planetary mind. Surely, it must sense the finite nature of the life of the planet and the star itself. We are a kind of strategy for moving energy around. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

769:Nobody ever said it was going to be comfortable to be a human being and to ride one of these bipedal bodies from the cradle to the grave. It’s an uncomfortable—but I maintain—manageable situation. But you have to have the lights on. You have to have your emotional responses in order, your intellectual responses in order, you have to have garnered some sense of how we got to this situation, and you have to have some sense of the tools available to transform it. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

770:If I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of psilocybin I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever. The Western mind is particularly phobic of this subject. We have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills, so that they can bungee-cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses—so concerned are we to fulfill society’s need for thrills. But this is something else. It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

771:There is this persistent theme in all of these notions that death is made more easy, whatever that means, if you've learned the territory before you get there. And you know, in the Mahayana Buddhist situation it even becomes as extreme as saying; 'life is essentially a preparation for death, a studying of the maps of a learning of the skills a packing of your picnic basket so that when you get out there and demons are sniffing you up one side and down the other you don't bungle your mantras'. ~ Terence McKenna,

772:From one point of view the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be alive and intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union of all the senses with memory of the past and anticipation of the future. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerful hallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, both as a species and as individuals. The Transcendent Other is Nature without her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, and causality. ~ Terence McKenna,

773:Why doesn’t science take that on board as a major problem in the description of nature: the emergence of complexity? Well, you ask a scientist, they say, “Well, you see, these are separate domains of nature. How atoms become molecules has nothing to do with how animals become human beings.” This is bullshit! This is just some kind of compartmentalized thinking where you don’t want to come to grips with the overarching metaphors that are working on various levels. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

774: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,

775:And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade. ~ Terence McKenna,

776:One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind. ~ Terence McKenna,

777: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 its a feather bed. ~ Terence McKenna,

778:Language is old. Honeybees do it, dolphins do it. It’s even possible (when you think of chemical communication) that flowers and ants do it. Nature is knit together by communication—which has rules, has syntax, and so is language. If you’ve ever stood in a rainforest or any species-dense environment—it’s alive with signals, with sounds, with odors that are carrying messages. These things are not just produced for aesthetic effect, they have intended hearers and so forth and so on. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

779: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,

780:Transcendence is favored. Nature seems to be in the business of building systems which transcend themselves. We can see that as far back in time as we care to look, and throughout all of nature. So it seems like we actually have a hell of a tailwind helping us toward the transcendent Other. Probably that is what will make the difference. We couldn’t have done it by ourselves, but we happen to be in a universe which is itself involved in the process of bootstrapping to higher levels. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

781:Nine million computers a month are being connected together. Now, people think that computers are office machines, but all of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention. And the fact that we now have turned our attention to information—the true stuff of reality—is a hopeful sign. For three centuries we’ve been obsessed with matter. We thought that was the true stuff of reality. Well, it turns out that’s just nonsense. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

782:We’re going to have to decide how much of the monkey we want to take with us into the future. We don’t want to take the homicidal killer, we don’t want to take the male dominator—but it would probably be a mistake to leave the body entirely behind. After all, the body gives us our orientation in the world, and our sense of ourselves as somehow coextensive with animal life. But how much of what we call human is really human is going to be major topic for discussion from here to the end of time. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

783: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. ~ Terence McKenna,

784: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,

785:The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. ~ Terence McKenna,

786:We are, in fact, hyper-dimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that. ~ Terence McKenna,

787:When you analyze nature as an integrated system of chemical reactions—gene transfer, catalytic self-regulating activities, hypercycles of energy, nutrients, and metabolism—when you analyze nature from that point of view, you see that it seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness. Mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

788: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,

789:We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination. ~ Terence McKenna,

790: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,

791:We are preparing to depart for a dimension which can only be called the imagination. This is what culture is. 8,000 years ago—when we began to crowd into cities and build walls and define everything into grids and mandalas—that was the beginning of the excrescence of mental space. That’s what we’re living in. These are all ideas. This was just unorganized matter put through the mills and presses of design to create a world that reflects the world that is living on the other side of our foreheads; the world of our imagination. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

792:We are out of control. We are, basically, severely addicted to things and cannot stop ourselves. And we know—or we should know—that there is not enough petroleum, heavy metal, so forth and so on in the planet to give all the thing-addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy. We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole, to Turkmenistan and Borneo, to the upper Amazon and to the Tajiks. Everybody wants kids, you know? Everybody wants the pause that refreshes. What are we going to do about this? ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

793: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,

794:From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself. ~ Terence McKenna,

795:Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin. ~ Terence McKenna,

796:Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming. ~ Terence McKenna,

797:The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to! ~ Terence McKenna,

798:It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques - all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture... And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple. ~ Terence McKenna,

799:But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the over-mind. You won't read about it in "Scientific American" or anywhere else. You will carry it out. ~ Terence McKenna,

800: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,

801:I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom. ~ Terence McKenna,

802:To merely gaze upon the images of alchemy, is to in a sense, enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at all alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver. That was the charlatan's game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people. Alchemy is the body of symbols and of literature that accreted around the effort to extract a universal medicine out of Nature for the transformation of societies and human beings. ~ Terence McKenna,

803:What really we are given is a seamless continuum of phenomena that we are asked—not to understand, that’s preposterous; why should talking monkeys understand reality?—but to feel. We can feel. We have an extremely complex body and nervous system and perceptual apparatus which ushers us into feeling. So you have not mastered a situation when you understand it. When you understand the situation you’re probably on the road to catastrophe. When you feel the situation you are probably moving into a good position, then, to act in that situation. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

804:There are processes, nuclear waste build-up, urbanization, land disturbance, there are processes which, if allowed to run on indefinitely, would wreck the whole system and pitch it into chaos. Buy Confucius said "No tree grows to heaven," and what he meant by that was: it's fruitless to project any process to infinity because any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario. If no fruit flies died in six months the Earth would spin out of its orbit from the weight of fruit flies. Now, I don't thing that's true. (laughs) But what an image! ~ Terence McKenna,

805:My faith is with technology and with psychedelics. Politics aren't going to take us much further. We're awakening as a planet to the very good news that all ideology is parochial and culturally defined, like painting yourself blue or scarifying your penis. A culture is a limited enterprise. How could someone be so naive as to imagine that an ideology, a thought system generated by the monkey mind, would be adequate to explain the universe? That's preposterous. It's like meeting a termite who tells you he's a philosopher. What could you do but smile at the very notion. ~ Terence McKenna,

806:See, all that’s holding together the illusion of the historical world is our inability to communicate with each other. Here is somebody over here. They are working on data encryption. Here is somebody who’s working on nanotechnology. Here’s starflight. Here, longevity. Here, cures for viral diseases. Well, none of these people talk to each other. None of them know of each other’s existence. And yet, one by one, they will arrive at their goals and this will all be fed together into a civilization that nobody is managing and nobody can imagine. ~ Terence McKenna, Spirituality and Technology,

807: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,

808:No other drug can compete with cannabis for its ability to satisfy the innate yearnings for Archaic boundary dissolution and yet leave intact the structures of ordinary society. If every alcoholic were a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis, the social consequences of the ‘drug problem’ would be transformed. Yet, as a society we are not ready to discuss the possibility of self-managed addictions and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants we ally ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come. ~ Terence McKenna,

809:The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda. ~ Terence McKenna,

810:It was H. G. Wells who said, “History is a race between education and catastrophe.” It’s a white-knuckle enterprise. Catastrophe edges inches ahead, education moves ahead. And again, if it were a level playing field I’d be betting on catastrophe, because I believe that nature favors the good, the true, and the beautiful. I’ve got all my money on education. I think we’ll make it, but I think we have to scare ourselves to death in order to keep focused. You know, we’re primates and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

811:Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of the more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath Philo Judaeus—a Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard but beheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:
A more perfect archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as the truth of things. ~ Terence McKenna,

812: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,

813:Sometimes people say to me 'These states that you're talking about, can't they be achieved without drugs?' And my answer to that is, 'My God, who would want to?' What would be proved by achieving these things without drugs? If the things I'm talking about began to happen to me without drugs I would be very very concerned and alarmed. And also I think there is something to be said for admitting that we cannot do it alone. That if you want this spiritual insight, if you want the Gaian matrix to welcome you, then humble yourself to the point of making a deal with a plant. That's the key. ~ Terence McKenna,

814:By age 8, most of us—if we have the time on our hands—are able to carry out an analysis of being where we reach the conclusion that everything is events in the nervous system. You know? I mean, we understand this. We understand that light being reflected from objects then creates neurochemical events which reconstruct an image of the outer world. So we pay lip service to this idea that everything is a neurological event, but in fact we have a very strong faith in the so-called three-dimensional Newtonian world. And yet this is the faith that can be deconstructed on psychedelics. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

815:The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That's what science is good for.
It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down. ~ Terence McKenna,

816:Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life’s meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style. ~ Terence McKenna,

817:Alcohol is used by millions of people, both men and women, and I will make no friends by taking the position that alcohol culture is not politically correct. Yet how can we explain the legal toleration for alcohol, the most destructive of all intoxicants, and the almost frenzied efforts to repress nearly all other drugs? Could it not be that we are willing to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it is allowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps us all infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator world characterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy? ~ Terence McKenna,

818:I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe. ~ Terence McKenna,

819:Psychedelics show us something which capitalist, consumer-fetish oriented society doesn’t want us to know. What psychedelics show us is the incredible richness of our minds. That you—little you—can produce more art in a twenty-minute burst of hallucinatory intoxication than the Western mind has produced in the last 500 years. Our socially created space is incredibly impoverished. You know? We have Picasso’s contribution and Pollock’s contribution, and everybody’s contribution—but it, all together, is as nothing compared to the richness that resides in each one of us a half inch behind your eyebrows. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

820:It’s inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another 500 or 1,000 years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created, will be the first to be swept away. So it’s very, very important that people take back their minds, and that people analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire human story—from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

821: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,

822:If you view our development over the past few centuries, we’re entering into some aggregation phase triggered by pheromones spread through technology, and we are beginning to create some kind of a superorganism. And the fear of some people is that, once inside this superorganism, we will be forced into a permanent status as a sub-level of the hierarchy. In other words, you will have to give up your individuality and you will just become a kind of liver cell or brain cell or something in this organism. But I don’t think this is the case. I think we have the unique ability to combine these two modes of existence. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

823:Our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves—unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. And that means we need to fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things by limiting our numbers, by limiting our extraction of natural resources and toxification of the environment. We need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet—not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver, and maintainer of balance. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

824:We are such ephemeral creatures in time. We’re like mayflies or something. Mayflies, who only live for seven days. In other words, our temporal window of perception is so extreme—I mean, people say, “Well, nothing much ever seems to happen.” Well, a hundred years ago there were no movies, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, Internet, atom bombs, antibiotics, DNA sequencing—you know, it’s endless. So, in the space of… and yet, people say, “Eh, nothing much ever seems to happen,” you know? An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

825:All societies are about the maintenance of boundaries. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a stockbroker in New York, a Zen monk in Kyoto, a Hasid in Jerusalem—your society is held together by boundaries and definitions. And anything which dissolves those boundaries and introduces relativity into cultural modeling is felt to be threatening, because we like to believe that our reality is somehow sanctioned; that this is how it should be. But, in fact, that’s just a cultural judgment. All cultures think that their culture represents a sanctioned reality. It doesn’t. It just represents the current download of their linguistic enterprise. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

826:Monotheism exhibits what is essentially a pathological personality pattern projected onto the ideal of God: the pattern of the paranoid, possessive, power-obsessed male ego. This God is not someone you would care to invite to a garden party. Also interesting is that the Western ideal is the only formulation of deity that has no relationship with woman at any point in the theological myth. In ancient Babylon Anu was paired with his consort Inanna; Grecian religion assigned Zeus a wife, many consorts, and daughters. These heavenly pairings are typical. Only the god of Western civilization has no mother, no sister, no female consort, and no daughter. ~ Terence McKenna,

827: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,

828:This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed. ~ Terence McKenna,

829:I have been vehemently accused by people who didn’t understand me of not believing in anything. I don’t believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a candle for me at night. It’s a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip. After all, what is the basis for believing anything? I mean, you have to understand: You’re a monkey. In some kind of a biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the economy of survival—this is not a philosophy course. So belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn’t to be believed, it’s to be dealt with—experienced and modeled. ~ Terence McKenna,

830:All “technology” really means—in the McLuhan sense—is: “the extensions of Man.” The extensions of Man. And so, language is a technology, shamanism is a technology, psilocybin is a technology, and, certainly, the Internet is a technology. It’s—slowly, I think—dawning on a number of people that, if we’re talking about hallucinogens as consciousness-expanding drugs, then 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! The drugs of the future will be much more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like drugs. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

831:Life is some kind of opportunity. It’s an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos—for 20, 40, 70 years—we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum, it is a puzzle, it is something to be figured out. And I have the faith that, if we can figure this out, we can somehow not only make a better world for our children, but in some other profound way we can even undo what has been done. This would be the ultimate dream: that somehow we can discover an elegant escape that will leave us with the clear understanding that the problem was an illusion. It was an illusion. It was the last illusion. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

832:I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit from shinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination, but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divine imagination will lead us into complete paranoia. ~ Terence McKenna,

833:What we have to do is dematerialize culture in every way possible. And that means pharmacologize culture, computerize culture, network culture, virtualize culture, and make of it, thereby, a tool for the production of our poetic flights; a technology for the putting in place of our dreams as exhibits that we can show each other. This is what it is. This is what technology can be in the service of boundary dissolution. In the service of boundary maintenance you get hydrogen bombs and sarin. In the service of boundary dissolution you get psychoactive substances, and the Internet, and sexual experimentalism, social justice, tolerance, and community. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

834:It’s very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point and, as I say; the tools, the data that holds the potential for our salvation is now known, it is available: it is among us, but it is misrepresented, it is slandered, it is litigated against, and it’s up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us at some point in the future, which is: What did you do to help save the world? ~ Terence McKenna,

835:The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.

At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward. ~ Terence McKenna,

836:I think that the ultimate result of all this electronic technology is the literalizing of consciousness: that consciousness is coming into being. That’s why, you know—the 19th century had no industry equivalent to Hollywood. And Hollywood is a huge sector of the national economy, and what is it concerned with? It builds dreams, it peddles images. It’s entirely involved in the production of the imagination. And think of a company like Industrial Light and Magic: they’re not kidding! And when you look at their corporate ledger you understand they’re not kidding, and wish you had stock in it because Industrial Light and Magic is making very real money. ~ Terence McKenna, Spirituality and Technology,

837:If we empower ourselves and become reacquainted with the authentic dimension within us, then we won’t put up with this crap anymore. This is what happened in the 1960s. People wouldn’t put up with it anymore and they poured into the streets and raised holy hell. Scared everybody to death. Why wouldn’t they put up with it anymore? Because they saw how shoddy, chintzy, and knocked-together it is. We’ve been sold a pig in a poke! It’s not worth having. These things don’t make us happy, they don’t bring us wisdom, they don’t give us depth. It’s an infantile, insulting, ridiculous society, except that it’s holding a gun to the head of every living thing on this planet. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

838:We tend to operate along very short-term goals. It’s very hard for us to put in place a project that looks 40 or 50 years ahead. It was interesting—a couple of years ago there was an article in the Whole Earth Review about a chapel at Oxford: that the main beam of this chapel, which was an oak beam about so by so, was rotted through with worms and had to be replaced. And it was no problem because, 800 years ago, an English king planted an oak tree that was to be grown for the specific purpose of replacing this beam when it should need to be replaced. And so this 750-year-old oak tree was cut and the beam hewn and put into place. And it inspired them to plant another oak tree—which is not a bad idea! ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

839:We have to find the door, because the place is filling up with shit. It’s very simple. And there are many doors. Here’s a door: extinction! How do you like them apples? If you can’t find any other door, nature will kick open that door and push you right through it. And yet, you know, we possess creativity on a scale undreamed of. We can find a way out. There’s no problem. We have the technologies, the money, the resources. We have everything we need except the will. It’s a mental quality lacking in us: the will to do it, the will to undertake planetary-sized projects, the will to make a plan that has a 20-year, a 50-year, and a 500-year benchmark. But we are going to have to very quickly cease our infantilism. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

840:For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another. Don’t you get it? It’s the same flesh. It’s the same flesh! Nobody knows anything you don’t know. And even if they do, it’s not your knowledge, so what good is it doing you? The idea that it’s okay for you not to understand mathematics, or not to play the violin—because somebody else does it very well—is a complete cop-out. You will be held responsible for what you know and what you can do. And using the excuse that you lived in the same world with Jascha Heifetz is not going to get you off the hook of not knowing how to play the violin. (I say this as someone who does not play the violin.) ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

841:You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then, essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche…and it’s from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are we caught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to return to first premises. ~ Terence McKenna,

842:I think what we have to do is begin, then, to design this process. It is now moving fast enough that it is within the ken of each one of us to see progressive consolidation of change taking place in the world around us. We, as human beings, I think, are destined to be the design and control element in this thing; in this global Gaian process. Never mind that we have done it so badly up to now, because now—meaning the 20th century—is a completely different kind of epistemic world than any world that preceded it. And to the degree that we can shed the inherited behavior patterns of previous centuries, previous cultural styles, and actually take hold of the tools present at hand, we can guide and control this evolutionary process. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

843:Let’s look at what the competition is peddling. What the competition would have you believe is that the universe sprang from nothing, in a single moment, for no reason. Well, now, whatever you think about that theory—in the interests of being awake, please notice that that is the limit case for credulity! Do you know what I mean by that? I mean that, if you can believe that, you can believe anything! That is the most improbable proposition the human mind can conceive of. I challenge you to top it. You know, I mean—I know the Scientologists think God is a clam on another planet, but I don’t think that tops this idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason. That is article of faith number one. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

844:Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.
The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was born. ~ Terence McKenna,

845:Neither Bwitists nor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world. This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walk together. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We have two hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of these self-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "one heartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not find it there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction of their selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated in Bwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow of many qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved in the presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence of belowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of its opposite. ~ Terence McKenna,

846: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,

847:What we have very, very suddenly—almost overnight—put in place is, number one: an entirely global system for collecting information about reality and ourselves. We never had this before. We didn’t even have it thirty years ago. Now you can find out what’s going on. You can go, if necessary, anywhere you need to go: within 72 hours you can be on the ground almost anywhere on Earth, checking out what’s going on. In the meantime, anthropological data, sociological data, climatological data, demographic data, political data, defense strategy data—all of this stuff is available. We now know at least what cards are in play. And this is the first time this has been so. We are now a global culture. You know, from the rainforests of the Amazon to the wastes of the Kalahari, from Nome to Santiago—it’s one family, one people. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

848:Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present context primarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yet percolated throughout society that the advancement of women is a program vitally connected to the survival of human beings as a species. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on the character of the atoms which compose them, and what we are most menaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. If women played a major role in policy formation and execution on the part of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benign and ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism not as a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypic images, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of our emphasis that is expressed through our institutions. ~ Terence McKenna,

849:How did we get into this situation? If you came in a flying saucer and observed the Earth, I think you would come to the conclusion that the breakout process, or the anomaly in the mix, is the human element. Animals of all sorts have existed on this planet, integrated into all kinds of ecosystems. And only in the phenomenon of human beings do you get this breakout away from genetics, away from the raw transmission of hereditary characteristics, and into a whole new realm of being; a whole new ontos of possibility which is epigenetics—codes, self-generated: language, song, dance, painting, chanting. All of these things are forms of expression, but they are not genetic expression. What seems to be happening—on this planet at least, and in the universe generally—is a conservation of complexity. A speeding-up of process and a conservation of complexity. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

850: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,

851:It was warm and salty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old, old thing. I tried not to think about how much at the mercy of these strange people I now was. But in fact my courage was failing. Both Dona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold and mantislike. A wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed to splatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged light. I felt my lips go numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to my hammock and lay back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowing river of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind of dream mental pirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, and this was the last impression I had. When I regained consciousness I appeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave of brightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high. Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realised that my wave was speeding toward a rocky coastline. ~ Terence McKenna,

852:At the top of the culture it’s profoundly intellectually bankrupt. There is no plan except to keep peddling stuff basically until the forests are gone and the oceans polluted. And this is not malevolent. It’s not malevolent, it’s simply: they are clueless! They have run out of steam. And so the answer is to try and keep the game going as long as possible—with daytime TV, with casino gambling, with lotteries, with endless distractions, with pop culture fads, with cults of celebrity, with spectacular trials and gory mass murders and endless circuses, while the people at the top are saying, you know, sooner or later the shit is going to hit the fan. Sooner or later the dam will burst. And they say, “Well, let’s make sure it’s later, not sooner. Because I’ve got two kids at the Sorbonne, I’m paying off a Mercedes, and I need to get this taken care of before it all falls apart.” So in the absence of any cultural plan imposed from the top, this strange dynamic is happening. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

853:It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed. In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle. He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.” In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.” Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind. Freud called introspection “morbid”—unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. The ~ Tom Hodgkinson,

854:The questions of God – meaning in Milton’s phrase “The god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven” – I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short, our world! The world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world, the psychedelics want to connect us up to… Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it. ~ Terence McKenna,

855:We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. ~ Terence McKenna,

856:If you'll cast your mind back to the situation in the early years of the Christian era and imagine the mentality of a Roman aristocrat, a person of power in Roman society. Their physics is drawn from democritean atomism, in other words they are thoroughgoing materialists. Their social theory is drawn from Epictetus and Plato. They are in fact extremely modern people by our own standards. However, among the gardeners and kitchen help and stable boys, there is news of a momentous event in the Middle East - a Jewish rabbi has triumphed over death and risen after three days in the tomb. Should the master of the Roman household have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk among the help, he would have just dismissed it with a sneer, "What preposterous idea!" And it is a preposterous idea, nevertheless, the fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts, and within a 120 years after the annunciation of the birth of Christianity, its missionaries were beating on the gates of Rome attempting to convert the Emperor. ~ Terence McKenna,

857:The hardest thing to imagine is human history going on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more years. That’s impossible! We see around us the processes that make of history a self-limited game. The clock’s ticking, folks. You think we can do gene-splicing and Internet and psychedelic drugs and manipulation of our genetic material and starflight and anti-matter and quantum teleportation and all these things? You can extrapolate that five-hundred years into the future? Don’t be ridiculous! No, history is some kind of a phase transition. It only lasts about 25,000 years. Some people think that’s a long time, some people think it’s a short time. It depends on where you stand. I think of it as, snap! You know? One moment you’re hunting ungulates on the plains of Africa, and the next moment you’re hurling a gold ytterbium superconducting extrastellar device toward Alpha Centauri with all of mankind aboard in virtual space being run as a simulation in circuitry. You know? It’s just first the one thing, then the other thing. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

858:We are forever infantile if we do not avail ourselves of the psychedelic experience. It is on a par with sex. It makes my flesh crawl to imagine someone going from birth to the grave without ever having sex. Fortunately, life is scripted in such a way that few escape this edifying experience which most—if you question them around age 11—would seek to avoid. Well, the psychedelic experience is not made inevitable—except by death, if you insist on waiting that long—but a mature exploration of life includes it because it shows you who you are. It gives you a conducted tour of the captain’s quarters. You may not have even known the captain’s quarters existed! How much is your ignorance worth to you? We need to eliminate the unconscious mind. This is really what it comes down to, folks. We cannot—in an era of 30-minute delivery of thermonuclear weapons from anywhere to anywhere—we do not have the luxury of carrying around with us an enraged bull primate. We cannot afford the luxury of the unconscious, the hidden motive, the unexamined drive, the misunderstood acquisition. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

859:The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis

because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through plant

hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from nature and the

unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God

Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The

psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and

persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.

The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were

conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature

from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was ~ Terence McKenna,

860:I think the state is largely irrelevant. I think the corporations are these international electronic organisms made of capital that operate transparently and invisibly, and it is probably their agenda which the planet is following. And I don’t say this conspiratorially—somebody’s running the world, and corporations are a logical force to follow on. The nation-state didn’t do a good job. I mean, the nation-state, for cryin’ out loud, brought us to the thermonuclear standoff, you know? Sony just wants to muck with your mind with weird commercials, but they don’t propose a thermonuclear exchange over commercial issues. And I think that nation-states valued war as an instrument of policy, and I think corporations find war horribly disruptive and expensive—I mean, not the corporations which sell armaments, but that’s a minority. One of the good things about being ruled by corporations is that, to do business, you have to have stability: you can’t have a bunch of crazy political ideologies or people busting up the infrastructure and all that. That’s a horrible interruption of business as usual. ~ Terence McKenna, Spirituality and Technology,

861:Just what is going on? Just… what do you think is going on? I mean, have you backed off from it? Do you have a grip on the outlines of the problem? Or are you just sort of adrift inside the context? Because the situation is mighty peculiar, friends! What we have here is a kind of creature made out of information, apparently loose in an environment of meaning, on the surface of a planet upon which gene swarming is happening. And all of these things—gene swarming, self-reflection, production of epigenetic codes like writing and this sort of thing—have no precedent. We don’t go out and collect other forms of these things, they all are generated out of us. We, as moderns, as inheritors of Cartesian rationalism, look out at a universe that our science tells us is energy, matter, conservation of mass and momentum, and yet we never notice the peculiar enigma posed by the question: who’s looking? Who’s looking? How is it possible that the coextensive continuum of apparent being is coordinated inside organism into an experience of ongoing becoming with which we have some kind of identification? This is very weird! It should provoke more comment than it is. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

862:What is important is to understand the true boundaries of reality, not the probable boundaries of possible future events. Although boundary conditions operate on the future, they are probabilistic constraints, not absolutely determined fact. We assume that ten minutes hence, the room we are in will still exist. It is a boundary condition that will define the next ten minutes in our space/time coordinate. But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence; that is free to be determined. One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist at any future moment. This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty. There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that. But we can make the inductive leap of faith that has to do with accumulated experience. We project that the existence of the room will remain a boundary condition, but in principle in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake and this building might not be left standing. However, for that to happen, the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted in some unexpected and improbable manner. What is so curious is that such a thing could occur. ~ Terence McKenna,

863:I’ve spent a lifetime taking drugs, knocking around the world, having affairs, being married, being unmarried, this, that, and the other. If somebody asked me, “So what do you know? What have you learned?” I would have to say what I’ve learned is that nothing lasts. There’s a hard thought. Is that a cause for joy or despair? Well, if you’re thinking about everything you loved and how it’s going to turn into mush as you’re shoveled into the grave, it’s a hard thought. But, on the other hand, if you think about all the jerks who’ve oppressed you, it’s a great consolation to know that they, too, will go down into that good night. Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion—not a feeling—to be drawn from that observation. The conclusion to be drawn from it is, then: the felt presence of the immediate moment must be what life is for. And somebody who could take that perception and use it that way could immediately transcend all kinds of neurotic behavior—longings, regrets, doubts, fears. No. You just say no. The felt presence of immediate experience. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

864:It’s really strange to me that science is in the act of flinging open the curtains on a staggering vision of what it is to be alive in this cosmos. I mean, we now can look back through the Hubble and other telescopes thirteen billion years, to within six-hundred million years of the primary explosion that presumptively created this universe. Meanwhile, we’re tearing open the nature of the human genome, the nature of the heart of the atom. This is the great, great age for the expansion of the scientific vision. But the population is somehow incapable of staying up with what’s going on, and so we have the greatest proliferation of occultism in all forms since the 16th century. It’s almost as though there’s a bifurcation of the culture. The scientific—the makers of new science are going deeper and deeper in a direction that the rest of the public not only cannot follow them into, but is actually headed the other way. And it’s a condemnation of our educational system that people have not understood that science, for all its flaws, is the only tool for understanding the nature of reality that has any kind of track record whatsoever. The others just have a story to tell. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

865:If you think about the life of the universe as we all have learned it from Carl Sagan, you know that we all began as an infinitely small, dense, hot dot. But that didn’t last long, because there wasn’t much going on, because there was so much energy that no arrangements could be made. Then there was a massive explosion and a tremendous drop in temperature. And at that point electrons could settle into orbits around atomic nuclei and you get atomic chemistry, which condenses into stars made of pure hydrogen and helium, which cook out iron and carbon: you get more complex chemistry with more complex bond possibilities. This allows the molecular bond to form for the first time. Suddenly an entirely new universe of possibilities springs into being. And at the end of that cascade of possibilities is organic life. Organic life, then, contorts and conserves information and folds it in upon itself and replicates it and distorts it, and you get more and more advanced forms of higher plant organisms, plants, and animals. Ultimately, this process ushers into human beings with culture; electronic culture. And then, finally, the cataclysmic connectedness of the 20th century. From a psychedelic point of view this is all a connected process. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner,

866:Most people think (or at least I think most people think) that when you get to be—I dunno, 30, 35, 40, or something—you have jumped all the hurdles. You got your college degree, you had some children, you made some money, you lost some money, maybe you had a marriage, maybe you had several, and anyway, people sort of get the feeling: well, I’ve done it. Actually, the major adventure still lies ahead. And the major adventure is to claim your authentic true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuse, actress, whatever. But it will not give you true being. And maybe this is the voice of somebody who just turned fifty talking, but I thought it would get simpler. It doesn’t. Because this rejection of culture thing is the last and hardest step to take. And there are all kinds of impediments to taking it. The fact that in middle age, if you’ve played the game right, you get a lot of money—that’s totally stultifying in most cases in terms of going forward to the next level. It’s almost as though culture is an enterprise self-organized to buy you off at the moment when you might be most dangerous to its values and goals. ~ Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination,

867:Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the Greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or, isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It’s, you know, kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying. That the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one! You know, you don’t understand Monica? You don’t understand Netanyahu? It’s because nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control—the world bank, the communist party, the rich, the somebody-or-others—but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. Because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It’s like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

868:What we are doing at this moment is incredibly unnecessary and archaic. And we do it because it’s how we’ve always done it: gather together and talk. But, you know, Tim Leary had a wonderful saying back in the sixties; he said, “Find the others.” Find the others. Well, if you go onto the net, no matter what your concern is—you know, the restoration of south German harpsichords, or whatever it is—there are hundreds of people waiting to share their secrets with you, to passionately communicate with you, to draw you into a community. The net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity. You know, if you’re a 245-pound white male and you want to present yourself as a seven-year-old black girl who’s made a great victory over polio—hey, nobody can stop you from doing that on the net. On the net you are who you say you are. And all interest groups, no matter how peculiar and formerly insulated, can contact each other instantly. So the idea, the very notion, of orthodoxy is melting away. Freakery is the wave of the future. The bohemians knew it, the ’pataphysicians knew it, the dadaists knew it, the surrealists knew it, the hippies, even the zippies. Eccentricity and the empowerment of individuality is a paradoxical part of living in an electronic collectivity. ~ Terence McKenna, Spirituality and Technology,

869:The first thing which science has not taken on board is the fact that, as you get nearer and nearer the moment in time that we call the present, things become more and more complicated. Now, that may seem like a trivial statement, but there’s no reason for the universe to work like that. Why does the universe go from simple to complicated? Why do you get, at first—moments after the big bang—an ocean of free electrons at such a state of temperature and energy that no molecular bonds can form, atomic systems can’t even form because the bond strength is overwhelmed by the thermal energy in the system. Then it cools down and atoms condense—a more complicated thing than electrons by orders of magnitude. Further cooling, further nuclear cooking of the most primitive elements—hydrogen and helium—in gravitationally aggregated masses called stars cooks out the heavier elements. They emerge. They were never seen before until fusion began to occur in these hydrogen masses. And these fusion processes cook out iron, sulfur, carbon—bingo! Carbon. Molecules! Now, an order of magnitude in their complexity greater than atoms as atoms are to compared to electrons. And then, you know—and I’m compressing 13 billion years of emergence here into 30 seconds—then, out of the molecular soup, you get long chain polymers. Out of the long chain polymers you get molecular transcription systems, i.e. pre-biotic stuff. Out of that you get non-nucleated DNA. Out of that: nucleated DNA. Out of that: membranes, organelles, organisms, higher organisms, differentiation of tissue, our dear selves, culture, language, technology, and the eschaton. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,

870:We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling.

And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.

The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much. ~ Terence McKenna,

871:History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace. ~ Terence McKenna,

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