Terence McKenna Quotes
-
Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
-
The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.
-
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.
-
I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
-
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
-
As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
-
The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
-
The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.
-
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
-
Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
-
It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
-
What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
-
In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
-
Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!
-
Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
-
The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
-
I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
-
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
-
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.
-
Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
-
Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
-
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
-
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.
-
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer