Terence McKenna Quotes

The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.

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

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.

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

We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

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.

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.

Culture is your operating system.

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.

Language betrays, in order to mean.

One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.

The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.

It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

Time will perfect matter.

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.

We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.

Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.

Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.

When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.

Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

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

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

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

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

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

Human history is a Gaian dream.

I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.

What you call man is time.

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.

What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.

What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.

Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.

Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.