Terence McKenna Quotes
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
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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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Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!
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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
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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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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.
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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
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History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.
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Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.
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The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
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I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
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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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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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Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
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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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At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
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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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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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History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.
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Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.