Here’s a selection of Terence Mckenna Quotes, covering topics such as dmt, nature, life, lsd and cannabis.
We really hope you enjoy these quotes and that they give you something to think about.
Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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.
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? what good is their understanding doing you?.
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong.
We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
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.
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.
The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
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 existence is defined in terms of control.
The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.
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.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.
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.
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 have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture.
Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we’re going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.
Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.
As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it’s hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet
Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it’s there it doesn’t require your belief- and if it’s not there why should you believe in it?
What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
We don’t have to look far for miracles because they’re all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it’s surface is alive with mystery.
The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
The only real experience that counts, is your own.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
That’s what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you’re dealing with.
The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.
The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
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 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.
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.
I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
The word ‘self’ is as great a mystery as the word ‘other’. It’s just a polarity between two mysteries.
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
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.
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.
When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation.
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.
There is a transcendental dimension beyond language… It’s just hard as hell to talk about!.
The truth for sure,
when it arrives,
will make you smile.
If it doesn’t,
you should seek
a deeper truth.
when it arrives,
will make you smile.
If it doesn’t,
you should seek
a deeper truth.
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.
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.
We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.
The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.
My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
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.
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
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.
Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.
The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.
Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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