Terence McKenna Quotes

I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.

The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.

As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.

History is rooted in the future

The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.

Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.

Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

What is needed, is an awakening.

The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.

The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.

The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.

Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.

One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.

I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.

The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.

A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.

‎The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.

Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants

Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.

The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.

Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.

What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.

I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.

Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.

I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.

The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.

I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.

There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.