Top 711 Quotes & Sayings by Terence McKenna - Page 9

And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.

I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.

In cyberspace things are built out of light.

Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes - the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move.

The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.

The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.

We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration.

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.

When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.

We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.

There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.

It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.

The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.

I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.

Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively.

If you play the cultural game, it's like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.

It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.

Culture is your operating system.

Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed

DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.

Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.

And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.

And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization“. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.

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.

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.

We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.

So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.

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 sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.