C.M. McKenna Quotes

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.

So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.

What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!

Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.

That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.

If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.

You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.

We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

Memory training is great psychedelic training.

I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.

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.

The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.

Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.

In cyberspace things are built out of light.

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed

Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.

The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.

The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.

If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.

Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.

National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.