Terence McKenna Quotes

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.

What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.

This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

I spend as many hours a day as I possibly can smoking cannabis

Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.

History is the siren song of the soul.

The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.

There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.

We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.

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.

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

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

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.

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules

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?

The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

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

All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

The engineers of the future will be poets.

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

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

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.

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

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

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