Terence McKenna Quotes
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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
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If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity.
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
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I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
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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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You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
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The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.
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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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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
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I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'
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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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The danger is in using psychedelic drugs, just to put it out there, is madness.
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A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.
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I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.
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Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.
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'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.
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Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
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What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.
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Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.
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You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
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So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.
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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.