Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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What you call man is time.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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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?
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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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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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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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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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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
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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.
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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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Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
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What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
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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.
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
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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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So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.
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Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.