C.M. McKenna Quotes

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

Ayahuasca is a symbiotic ally of the human species.

Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

Mind conjures miracles out of time.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.

No one knows enough to worry.

For all we know, we know nothing.

We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

We live in condensations of our imagination

You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.

The only real experience that counts, is your own.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.

The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.

To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

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

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

The trouble with happiness is people don't practice it.

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.

If you don’t take responsibility for programming yourself, then someone else will.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.

We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.

I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.

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.

The Jews are the most hateful and the most shameful of the small nations.

The best marketing is education.