Terence McKenna Quotes
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The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.
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I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!
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It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.
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I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.
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I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.
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And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
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The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.
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To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.
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One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.
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We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
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Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet.
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The real truth that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one... Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control - the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others - but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself... It's like trying to control a dream.
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It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques - all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture... And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple.
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Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.
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Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.
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Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed
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We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
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The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.
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The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.
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Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
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But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the over-mind. You won't read about it in "Scientific American" or anywhere else. You will carry it out.
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And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.
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And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.