Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Dennis McKenna

You monkeys only think you're running things.

I get frustrated with people who say that a drug experience can have no spiritual validity. I'm here to tell you that all experience is a drug experience. We're all on drugs all the time, largely because we are MADE of drugs

Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what's in there.

All experience is a drug experience. Whether it's mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it's mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it's all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.

Ayahuasca is a symbiotic ally of the human species.

No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You don’t need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courage—courage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker.

As the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger

Think for yourself, and believe in yourself. Keep your skeptical antennae tuned in and in good working order at all times. We are free to develop our own hypotheses, which should be based in available evidence. When it comes to faith, have faith in yourself. And don't forget to love, laugh, be kind to each other. Don't take things so seriously, especially yourself. If the universe is a cosmic joke, remember to giggle. And remember to be astonished.