Psychedelic Quotes

• The danger is in using psychedelic drugs, just to put it out there, is madness.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Drug
  • Danger
  • Madness

• 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.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Mind
  • Mean
  • Drug

• We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Culture
  • Identity
  • Consciousness

• 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.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Culture
  • Maturity
  • Manipulation

• Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Absence
  • Denied
  • Shamanism

• I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Understanding
  • Psychedelic
  • Integration

• Memory training is great psychedelic training.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Training
  • Memories
  • Psychedelic

• If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Dying
  • Differences
  • Pun

• What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Competition
  • Littles
  • Term

• What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Credit
  • Levels
  • Complexity

• 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.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Ego
  • Views
  • Dialogue

• We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Order
  • Dimensions
  • Disguise

• It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Matter
  • Influence
  • Frightening

• This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Committed
  • Comment
  • Ambiguity

• The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Important
  • Spiritual
  • Path

• It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Together
  • Age
  • Culture

• What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Feels
  • Attitude
  • Should

• What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Attention
  • Kind
  • Church

• Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Boundaries
  • Compounds
  • Dissolving

• So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Psychedelic
  • Unanswered

• Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Humans
  • Population
  • Contact

• This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Walking
  • Facts
  • Drug

• Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Understanding
  • Fraud
  • Familiarity

• The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.

  

  Terence McKenna
  • Drug
  • Plant
  • Function

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