Terence McKenna Quotes

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 felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.

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

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.

History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.

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

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.

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.

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

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

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.

In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.

Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.

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

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

History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.

It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.

It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.

This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.

Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.

You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.

The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.

I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.

We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.

It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.

We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.

The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.

Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.

It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.

We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.

Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.

The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.

Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.

The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.

Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.