Terence McKenna Quotes
-
Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
-
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
-
The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
-
We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.
-
I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
-
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!'
-
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
-
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.
-
Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
-
I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
-
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
-
There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
-
I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
-
There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.
-
I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
-
You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.
-
When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
-
The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
-
Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
-
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.
-
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.
-
What I'm talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that's the primary thing to bear in mind. It's an experience.
-
I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
-
Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.