Terence McKenna Quotes
-
The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
-
I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.
-
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
-
Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.
-
Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.
-
...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness.
-
Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
-
For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
-
The danger is in using psychedelic drugs, just to put it out there, is madness.
-
DMT raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.
-
The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.
-
I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.
-
I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
-
It culture invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
-
The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.
-
It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
-
That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
-
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.
-
The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
-
The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.
-
And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.
-
We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.
-
The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.
-
What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet.