Terence McKenna Quotes

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.

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

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

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?

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.

DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.

Worrying is betting against yourself.

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

Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.

Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.

Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.

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.

We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

How do we fight back? By creating art.

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

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.

Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas

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.

I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there

Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?

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

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

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

Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what's going on.

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

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.

The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.

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.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

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.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

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.

Mind conjures miracles out of time.

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