Top 711 Quotes & Sayings by Terence McKenna - Page 8

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

We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.

If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, 'When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.'

So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.

All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.

Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.

If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me.

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.

What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.

Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.

But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the over-mind. You won't read about it in "Scientific American" or anywhere else. You will carry it out.

The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.

What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.

I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.

We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.

Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.

The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.

Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.

I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.

If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.

You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.

What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet.

I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.

Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.

Memory training is great psychedelic training.

What is needed, is an awakening.

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.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.

You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.

Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.

Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.

I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.

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

We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.

The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.