Terence McKenna Quotes
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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.
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History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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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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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
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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.
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The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.
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One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
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What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.
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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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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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One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.
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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
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This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
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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.
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No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind.
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In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.