Terence McKenna Quotes
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I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
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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.
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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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A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.
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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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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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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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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
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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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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 was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.
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History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
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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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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
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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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The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.
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Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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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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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
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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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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.