Terence McKenna (Terence Kemp McKenna) Quotes

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

Terence McKenna

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Quotes to Explore

• 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
  • People
  • Children
  • Culture

• 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
  • Reality
  • Fall
  • Teaching

• 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
  • Body
  • Facts
  • Shadow

• The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Attention
  • inspirational
  • Should

• 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
  • Trying
  • Understanding
  • Process

• Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what's going on.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Kind
  • Obligation
  • Imposes

• The engineers of the future will be poets.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Poet
  • Engineers

• 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
  • Reality
  • Smoke

• 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
  • Moments
  • Language
  • Childhood

• Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Problem
  • Moving
  • Animal

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

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Knows

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

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Together
  • Should

• Language betrays, in order to mean.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Mean
  • Language
  • Order

• 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
  • Progress
  • Enough
  • Existence

• 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
  • Worship
  • Capitalism
  • Boundaries

• There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Struggle
  • Angel
  • Crisis

• The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Mind
  • Bigger
  • Domain

• 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
  • Kind
  • Issues
  • Bunch

• I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Job

• We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Consciousness
  • Monkeys

• 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
  • Voice
  • Matter
  • Noise

• The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • World
  • Tension
  • Feminine

• 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
  • Values
  • Stuff
  • Digital

• Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Reality
  • Kind
  • Tests