A Quote by Terence McKenna
It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
Related Quotes
The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.
The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
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.
The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.
That authentic experience that happens both in the artist and in the audience you can classify as a mystical experience. You can classify it as aesthetic shock, or even a psychedelic experience. Some people seek to recreate that experience through drugs. But the other way that you can do it is through art, and through spectacle. We have those experiences when we go to rock shows, or when we listen to a piece of classical music, or read a particular poem, or see a painting.
I am surprised by the word psychedelic. João Gilberto Noll does not accept realism in a straightforward way, but I am more inclined to call Quiet Creature a realist text than I am to call it a psychedelic one. The transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.
The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
If you have a belief and you come against an experience which the belief says is not possible, or, the experience is such that you have to drop the belief, what are you going to choose — the belief or the experience? The tendency of the mind is to choose the belief, to forget about the experience. That’s how you have been missing many opportunities when God has knocked at your door.
To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.
My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous.
By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical.
I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what your experience of God differs from what you've heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.
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