Terence McKenna Quotes
-
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization“. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
-
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.
-
Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.
-
I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
-
Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
-
You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.
-
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 pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.
-
I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
-
The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information
-
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.
-
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?
-
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
-
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
-
What is needed, is an awakening.
-
It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
-
Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.