Terence McKenna Quotes

The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.

The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.

All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.

So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.

What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!

Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.

That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.

If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.

You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.

We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

Memory training is great psychedelic training.

I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.

I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.

The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.

Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.

In cyberspace things are built out of light.