C.M. McKenna Quotes

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.

I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.

Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.

There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.

Time is a series of fluctuating variables.

It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.

By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.

The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.

It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.

It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.

No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff.

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.

It's the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible.

Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.

The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.

The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.

I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.

I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.

What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.

I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.

I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.

The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.

When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.

Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!

The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles.

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.

We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.

Culture is another dimension.

I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.

And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.

I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!

The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.

This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.

Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.