Terence McKenna Quotes

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.

We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.

Culture is another dimension.

I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.

And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.

I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!

The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.

This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.

Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.

I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium

Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.

In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.

An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.

If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.

Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.

Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.

The human brain is the god of technological innovation.

What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.

The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.

History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.

Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.

And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.

And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.

What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.

Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.

What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.