Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Terence McKenna. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".
McKenna formulated a "novelty theory" regarding the nature of time based on fractal patterns, which he claimed to discover in the I Ching, and predicting a transition of consciousness in the year 2012. Despite the pseudoscientific nature of novelty theory, promotion of its ideas and its connection to the Maya calendar helped fuel widespread beliefs about 2012 eschatology.
You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth .
All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
People are concrescences of ambiguity.
Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants.
Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
It is of the first order of importance to remember this, that the shaman is more than merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and who must shamanize in order to remain cured.
Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
In cyberspace things are built out of light.
And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.
To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.
Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.
It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding.
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.
Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry... Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.
The human brain is the god of technological innovation.
We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.
I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.
There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.
If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.
The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.
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.
I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
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.
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.
This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.
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.
As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.
The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.
Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.
The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity... It's the limit case for likelihood.
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.
Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.
Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
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.
My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.
I don't know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.
We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.
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.
Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.
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.
We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.
Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.'
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.
You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
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.
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.
We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.
For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.
What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?
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.