C.M. McKenna Quotes

The way to get killed around machinery was to take things for granted.

Being dead is being weak and walled off.

You can't just plain die. You got to do it by the book.

The best way to appreciate our political process is to volunteer for a campaign and support a candidate you believe in.

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

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.

We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.

The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.

A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.

‎The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.

Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants

Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.

The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.

Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.

What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.

I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.

Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.

I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.

The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.

I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.

There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.

The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.

The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.

All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.