Terence McKenna Quotes

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.

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.

No one knows enough to worry.

We live in condensations of our imagination

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

The only real experience that counts, is your own.

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

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.

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

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.

The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak.

Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.

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.

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

You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.

Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.

Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.

I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.

Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.

The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.

The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.

The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.