C.M. McKenna Quotes

The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.

In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.

When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let's be frank about it, it is enslavement.

The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.

It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.

History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.

There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.

Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.

In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

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.

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.

Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?

History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.

Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.

The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.

We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.

The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.

As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.

It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.

The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.

The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.

I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.

You're immortal as long as you live.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

I think [the death penalty is] very expensive, and the delays are inordinate, delaying closure for the victims' families.

Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, and cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product.

Just as one year in a dog's life is equivalent to seven years in a human life, one year in the high-technology business is like seven years in any other industry.

Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.

This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.

I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.