Terence McKenna Quotes
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And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization“. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.
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I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
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This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
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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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If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
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Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
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We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
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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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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
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Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
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We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.
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People are concrescences of ambiguity.
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Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.
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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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Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
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There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
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The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review.
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Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
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The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.
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These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!'
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
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I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
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What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!