Terence McKenna Quotes
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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 people notice about when they are on LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.
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Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
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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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Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
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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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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.
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I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.
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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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You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.
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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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Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
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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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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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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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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
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Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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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 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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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.
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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.