Terence McKenna Quotes
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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
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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?'
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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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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
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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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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.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
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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.
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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.
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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.