Terence McKenna Quotes
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Time is a topological manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land and like water flowing over land, when the land is flat, the water becomes reflective and moves slowly. When the landscape becomes disrupted, the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear and new kinds of activity emerge and out of that new activity, there comes the new states that define the future.
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What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside.... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief.
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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 psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.
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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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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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We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
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Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
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We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern.
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I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.
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The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
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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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Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.
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This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.
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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
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The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
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What they psychedelics cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
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The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
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The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
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The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.
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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.