Terence McKenna Quotes
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There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.
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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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In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.
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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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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.
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People are concrescences of ambiguity.
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
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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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Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
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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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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
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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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To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
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No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
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The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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 momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.
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But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.