Top 711 Quotes & Sayings by Terence McKenna - Page 2

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.

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

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

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.

Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

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

For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

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.

We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

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.

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.

We live in condensations of our imagination

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

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

So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.

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

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

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.

We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.

This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.

Language betrays, in order to mean.

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules

And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.

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

I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it.

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.

DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.

The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.

I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

How do we fight back? By creating art.

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

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

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?

No one knows enough to worry.

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

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.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.

You're immortal as long as you live.

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.

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.

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