Best 634 quotes of Terence Mckenna on MyQuotes

Terence Mckenna

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    A long long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret, I won't keep it. I'm against secrets, I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization“. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And I want to thank all the women that support me. I have wonderful support systems from women of all types who seem dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna can always be improved. I'm extremely grateful for that. The frontiers are enormous in that dimension.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

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

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Terence Mckenna

    Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.