A Quote by Terence McKenna

I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.

Terence McKenna

Quote Topics

Authentic Believe Comfortable Don't Believe Hallucinogens Shamanism Without

Quote Author

Terence McKenna
American - Writer
November 16, 1946 - April 3, 2000

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.

Terence McKenna

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.

Terence McKenna

If a state political organization is founded in part upon a state religion with a dogma based on one or a few 'official' prophets, then shamanism, where every shaman is her or his own prophet, is dangerous to the state. [...] Shamanism, as I said, is not a religion. The spiritual experience usually becomes a religion after politics has entered into it.

Michael Harner

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

Terence McKenna

It isn't that a warrior learns shamanism as time goes by; rather, what he learns as time goes by is to save energy. This energy will enable him to handle some of the energy fields which are ordinarily inaccessible to him. Shamanism is a state of awareness, the ability to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the everyday-life world that we know.

Carlos Castaneda

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

Terence McKenna

Shamanism is not a course, but a life journey.

Alberto Villoldo

Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.

Terence McKenna

Harner has impeccable credentials, both as an academic and as a practicing shaman. Without doubt (since the recent death of Mircea Eliade) the world's leading authority on shamanism.