Terence McKenna Quotes
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What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.
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The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
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What you call man is time.
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Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
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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.
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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
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Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
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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.
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If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
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The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.
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What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
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Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.
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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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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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The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.
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The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
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We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.