Terence McKenna Quotes

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed

Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.

The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.

The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.

If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.

Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.

National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.

I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.

Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.

There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.

Time is a series of fluctuating variables.

It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.

By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.

The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.

It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.

It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.

No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff.

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.

It's the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible.

Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.

The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.

The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.

I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.

I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.

What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.

I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.

I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.

The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.

When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.

Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!

The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles.

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.