Terence McKenna Quotes
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No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
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Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.
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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.
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We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.
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Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.
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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.
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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
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For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind
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I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
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And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.
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I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.
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The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
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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.
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What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
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Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.
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The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.
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Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
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Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
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And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.