Psychedelic Quotes
-
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
-
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.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
So what needs to be done is to spread the idea that anxiety is inappropriate. It's sort of like we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society, because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it's dying, and be deluded, and regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the role then, I think, for psychedelic people is to try and spread calm.
Terence McKenna
-
Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
'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.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
Terence McKenna
-
Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
Terence McKenna
-
I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
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
-
Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind
Terence McKenna
-
I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
Terence McKenna
-
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
-
The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of "To the future, without fear!" Without fear!
Terence McKenna
-
It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
Terence McKenna