Terence McKenna Quotes
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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.
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Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
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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.
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History is rooted in the future
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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.
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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.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.
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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.
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The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.
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Time will perfect matter.
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
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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.
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Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.
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The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.