Terence McKenna Quotes
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
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Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.
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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.
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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.
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My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
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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.
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.
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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.
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Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
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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.
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One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
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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.
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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.
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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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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.
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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.
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I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.