Top 711 Quotes & Sayings by Terence McKenna

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.

In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.

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

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.

Nature conserves, prefers novelty.

There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong.

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.

History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.

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.

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

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

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.

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

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

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

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

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

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

Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

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

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.

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

Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.

Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.

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.

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

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

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.

Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.

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

For all we know, we know nothing.

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

Worrying is betting against yourself.

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?

We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.

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

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

The only real experience that counts, is your own.

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.

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

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

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

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

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

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

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

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

We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.