Terence McKenna famous quotes

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
-- Terence McKenna

#Night #Drawing #Long

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
-- Terence McKenna

#Dream #Teacher #Commitment

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
-- Terence McKenna

#Ideas #Our World #Mind Blowing

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
-- Terence McKenna

#Mind Blowing #Psychedelic #Plans

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
-- Terence McKenna

#Our World #Names #Ego

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
-- Terence McKenna

#Government #Mind Blowing #Behaviour

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
-- Terence McKenna

#Inspirational #Life #Light

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
-- Terence McKenna

#Responsibility #Mind Blowing #Understanding

DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.
-- Terence McKenna

#Thinking #Years #Dmt

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
-- Terence McKenna

#Mind Blowing #Answers #Faces

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
-- Terence McKenna

#Pursuit Of Happiness #Marijuana #Mind Blowing

Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas
-- Terence McKenna

#Ideas #Our World #World

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.
-- Terence McKenna

#War #Engineering #Years

Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place.
-- Terence McKenna

#Views #Important #Culture

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
-- Terence McKenna

#Ego #Psychedelic #Absence

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
-- Terence McKenna

#Mind Blowing #Drug #Excellence

What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside.... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief.
-- Terence McKenna

#Faith #Believe #Mean

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
-- Terence McKenna

#Inspirational #Life #Nature

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.
-- Terence McKenna

#Struggle #Angel #Historical

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.
-- Terence McKenna

#Dream #Commitment #World

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.
-- Terence McKenna

#Intellectual #Taste #Ninety

Language betrays, in order to mean.
-- Terence McKenna

#Mean #Order #Language

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

#Believe #Belief #Form

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.
-- Terence McKenna

#Taken #Historical #Needs

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
-- Terence McKenna

#Consistency #Mind #Small Minds

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.
-- Terence McKenna

#Darkness #Bigger #Bonfire

We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -
-- Terence McKenna

#Jobs #Player #Hands

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
-- Terence McKenna

#Teaching #Fall #Reality

The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
-- Terence McKenna

#Real #Mind Blowing #Magic

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?
-- Terence McKenna

#Inspirational #Life #Attitude

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
-- Terence McKenna

#Thinking #Understanding #Messages

If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
-- Terence McKenna

#Earth #Feels

Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
-- Terence McKenna

#Light #Imagination #Empowerment

To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.
-- Terence McKenna

#Giving #Political #Mind

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
-- Terence McKenna

#Religious #Clothes #Naked

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening
-- Terence McKenna

#Thinking #Listening #Half

Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.
-- Terence McKenna

#Discovery #Mind #Matter

The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.
-- Terence McKenna

#Motivation #Views #Drug

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality
-- Terence McKenna

#Reality #Psycho

Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
-- Terence McKenna

#Book #Limits #Occult

The truth for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn't, you should seek a deeper truth.
-- Terence McKenna

#Make You Smile #Should #Deeper

So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.
-- Terence McKenna

#Mean #Citizens #Way

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
-- Terence McKenna

#Men #Environment #Deaf

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
-- Terence McKenna

#Silly #People #Understanding

Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.
-- Terence McKenna

#Destiny #Thinking #Body

Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
-- Terence McKenna

#Inspirational #Life #Art

We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
-- Terence McKenna

#Years #Strive

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
-- Terence McKenna

#Inspirational #Life #Art

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
-- Terence McKenna

#Real #Adventure #Giving

I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
-- Terence McKenna

#Jobs #Thinking #Mind

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.
-- Terence McKenna

#Moving #Eye #Years

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
-- Terence McKenna

#Mind Blowing #Apes #Facts

This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
-- Terence McKenna

#Emotional #Long #News

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
-- Terence McKenna

#Museums #Perception #World

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves,
-- Terence McKenna

#Mirrors #Ability #Mirror Image

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.
-- Terence McKenna

#Monkeys #Coral Reefs #Kind

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
-- Terence McKenna

#Facts #Psychedelic #Astronaut

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
-- Terence McKenna

#Lying #Garden #Heaven

The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
-- Terence McKenna

#Life #Animal #Ridiculous

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
-- Terence McKenna

#Real #Imagination #Library

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.
-- Terence McKenna

#Art #Two #Mind

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.
-- Terence McKenna

#Alive #Earth #Matter

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

#Ocean #Easy

We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.
-- Terence McKenna

#Perfect #Becoming #Microcosm

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world...
-- Terence McKenna

#Tiny #World #Fractions

For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
-- Terence McKenna

#Self #Talking #Sea

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
-- Terence McKenna

#Levels #Cost #Sanity

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
-- Terence McKenna

#Plot #Culture #Expansion

Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.
-- Terence McKenna

#Preparation #Dimensions #Transition

We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
-- Terence McKenna

#Long #Mind Blowing #Firsts

You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
-- Terence McKenna

#Cutting #Years #Stupidity

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
-- Terence McKenna

#Life #Religious #Feelings

Time is a topological manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land and like water flowing over land, when the land is flat, the water becomes reflective and moves slowly. When the landscape becomes disrupted, the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear and new kinds of activity emerge and out of that new activity, there comes the new states that define the future.
-- Terence McKenna

#Moving #Land #Water

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
-- Terence McKenna

#Art #Kind #Works Of Art

We are, in fact, hyper-dimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.
-- Terence McKenna

#Cycling #Shadow #Body

When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
-- Terence McKenna

#Stars #Loneliness #Heart

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
-- Terence McKenna

#Ignorance #Historical #Progress

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
-- Terence McKenna

#Civilization #People #Mind Blowing

Culture is your operating system.
-- Terence McKenna

#Culture #Operating Systems #Programming

There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
-- Terence McKenna

#Needs #Enlightened

You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
-- Terence McKenna

#Two #Interesting #Ego

Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.
-- Terence McKenna

#Spiritual #Issues #Quests

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
-- Terence McKenna

#Believe #Opposites #Mind Blowing

I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
-- Terence McKenna

#Life Is Like #Life Is #Cannabis

If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
-- Terence McKenna

#Beautiful #Self #Imagination

The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.
-- Terence McKenna

#Smart #Moving #Believe

A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness.
-- Terence McKenna

#Thinking #People #Enough

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.
-- Terence McKenna

#Ocean #Ideas #Imagination

The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
-- Terence McKenna

#Life #Fall #Communication

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
-- Terence McKenna

#Believe #Ideas #Giving

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
-- Terence McKenna

#Men #Sick #Mind Blowing

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.
-- Terence McKenna

#Reality #Tunnels #Light

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises
-- Terence McKenna

#Voice #Littles #Monkeys

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
-- Terence McKenna

#Self #Civilization #Ego

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
-- Terence McKenna

#Inspirational #Life #Spiritual

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
-- Terence McKenna

#Journey #Artist #Self

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
-- Terence McKenna

#Flames #Mind Blowing #Looks

Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
-- Terence McKenna

#Mind #Birth #Internet

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
-- Terence McKenna

#Moving #Animal #Peculiar

There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity.
-- Terence McKenna

#Thinking #Circles #Insanity