Terence McKenna Quotes
Nature loves courage.
The engineers of the future will be poets.
Nothing lasts... but nothing is lost either.
Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.
Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.
I've come to see the body as the placenta of the soul.
The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer.
If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!
Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.
The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
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 believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. There may be entities seeking control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. It's like trying to control a dream.
I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. ... We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern...
My technique is don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
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. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building to the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all it what it's really all about.
Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves... What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language we must have a new reality...
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivableworld, you see.
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.
We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.
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.
One exists in eternity, one has become eternal... One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.
Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion.
We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future, and no longer casting blame outward on institutions or hierarchies of responsibility and control, but by realizing the opportunities here, the responsibilities here, and the two may never be congruent again, and the salvation of your immortal soul may depend on what you do with the opportunity.
Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate, which make us what we are but don't want to be.
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.
It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.
At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.
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.
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.
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.
People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
The world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it.
We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation.
What we are looking for are middle size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible.
Unexamined cultural values & limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.
We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
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 existance is defined in terms of control.
If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
It's all about personal empowerment, and personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.
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.
If nothing lasts, then the conclusion is that the felt presence of immediate experience must be what life is for.
This is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. … What we must become is clear.
I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience is that nature seeks to communicate.
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.
I think People are in love with the journey. People love seeking answers. But if you were to suggest to them that the time of seeking is over and that the chore is now to face the answer, now that's more of a challenge!
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this 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.
The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light.
What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is to clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple others, obvious, things to be done.
Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything... This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.
We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter: The freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
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.
As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
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.
I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.
We have to recognise 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.
Understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own.
The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises.
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.
We have to recognise 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.
We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia or Peru or much of the third-world then it appears that the apocalypse has already arrived.
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
There was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment.
We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
