Terence McKenna Quotes
-
I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
-
Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
-
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.
-
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!'
-
Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?
-
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.
-
What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
-
One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
-
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.
-
Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
-
Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.
-
Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.
-
To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again
-
History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.
-
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
-
If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
-
An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.
-
The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.
-
The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
-
You're immortal as long as you live.
-
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
-
One reaches through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain...The human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body, and we don't 'imagine' anything. We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence.
-
What is needed, is an awakening.
-
Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.