C.M. McKenna Quotes

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.

I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium

Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.

In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.

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.

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

Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.

Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.

The human brain is the god of technological innovation.

What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

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.

The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.

History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.

Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.

And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.

And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.

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.

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.

Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.

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.

Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.

Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.

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

Diets are essentially training courses in how to feel fat and feel like a failure.

Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.

If she had learned anything in the past weeks it was that there was enough to be ashamed of in the course of a messy human life without being ashamed of loving someone.

I don’t see it as my role to save or rescue anybody any more than regular people feel the need to rescue each other from sleeping and dreaming.

Reading is an escape people use in order to get away from reality. It is a chance to be free and explore who you are.

The first step toward power is to accept reality

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

A grieving son was given the opportunity to write parting words on a card at his mother's funeral. He quoted the verse, "And morning came and Jesus was standing on the shore.

The essence of a mature human being in religious terms is the ability to see, to be aware of others' suffering and to be touched by it.

When visiting the Grand Canyon, make sure you hike into the canyon. And be careful not to fall or step in mule poop.

It’s ego – the false self – that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.

She never imagined that at twenty years old she'd already be a widow in black. On the bright side, she was no longer married to Dario, but her future still looked grim.

You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.