Terence McKenna Quotes
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
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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.
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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
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into on a psychedelic experience was somebody's idea of a playpen.
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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?
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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
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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.
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If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
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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 and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
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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.
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Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.
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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?
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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.
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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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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.
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What is needed, is an awakening.
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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.
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It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
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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.
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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.