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Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes

Philosopher

Terence McKenna was a renowned philosopher known for his profound insights into consciousness, botany, and human potential. His ideas were deeply influenced by his family's genetic research and studies on the evolution of human consciousness.

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All Psychedelic Humans Ifs Thinking People World Mind Culture Psychedelic Experience Kind

Famous Terence McKenna Quotes

“It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.”

People Political Make Sense Categories Cult Political Correctness Correctness

Author:Terence McKenna

“The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.”

Mind Deals Inevitable Furniture Momentum Arranging

Author:Terence McKenna

“What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.”

Age Past Values Millions Happenings

Author:Terence McKenna

“When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let's be frank about it, it is enslavement.”

Mean Felt Frank Enslavement

Author:Terence McKenna

“The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.”

Messages Coming Back Closure

Author:Terence McKenna

“Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.”

“It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.”

Ifs Knows Feels Made Done Next Feel Better Next Day Hallucinogens

Author:Terence McKenna

“This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.”

Ifs Want Wells Water Situation Steps Position Keys Assuming Breathe Breathing Substance Take Control Deep Water Psilocybin

Author:Terence McKenna

“In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.”

Mind Behinds Silence Darkness Plant Aliens Swept Away

Author:Terence McKenna

“Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.”

Author:Terence McKenna

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

People States Plant Perpetual Existential Neurosis

Author:Terence McKenna

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

Mind Seems Animal Mystery Modern Depth Analysis Numinous

Author:Terence McKenna

“And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.”

Want Mean Taken Consequence Vegetables Modernity Disruptive Ennui

Author:Terence McKenna

“Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.”

Kind Mean Feelings Seems Dark Rooms Pay Attention Comfortable Empty Add Obvious Technique Pay Attention Stomach Shut Up Reluctant Dark Room Footnotes Empty Stomach

Author:Terence McKenna

“Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?”

Ifs Thinking Humans Kind Doe Consciousness Planets Expansion Dilemma

Author:Terence McKenna

“The 'public' has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit, which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet.”

Moments Planets Broken Consequence Ultimate Credit Golden Feminine Vegetables Fascists Future Life Golden Moments

Author:Terence McKenna

“How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?”

Author:Terence McKenna

“Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.”

Seems Imagination Involvement Psychedelic Psychedelic Experience Precursor

Author:Terence McKenna

“DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.”

World Want Made Seems Might Magic Add Arguing Dmt

Author:Terence McKenna

“By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.”

People Expectations Fundamentals Confrontation

Author:Terence McKenna

“What I'm talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that's the primary thing to bear in mind. It's an experience.”

World Mind Ideas Facts Talking Mystery This World Bears Terror Primaries Ecstasy Existential Mixtures Trembling

Author:Terence McKenna

“Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.”

Needs Facts Theory Make Sense

Author:Terence McKenna

“What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!”

Bigs Three Imagination Space News Transformation Big News

Author:Terence McKenna

“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.”

Ifs Play Games Red Clubs Cards Surround Embedded Deck

Author:Terence McKenna

“Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.”

Thinking May Higher Psychedelic Manifold Psychedelic Experience Temporality

Author:Terence McKenna

“The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.”

Mind Cutting Events Edges Evolve Cutting Edge

Author:Terence McKenna

“I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.”

Thinking Social Computer Tools Feminine

Author:Terence McKenna

“The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.”

Persons Citizens Models Print Hippie

Author:Terence McKenna

“What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.”

People World Lsd Freaky

Author:Terence McKenna

“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.”

Ifs Wells Important Areas Skins Procedures Diving

Author:Terence McKenna

“One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.”

Illness Absence Mental Illness Native Shamanism

Author:Terence McKenna

“Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.”

Steps Greater Bondage Every Step

Author:Terence McKenna

“The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.”

People Kind Path All Kinds Psychedelic

Author:Terence McKenna

“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.”

Years Mind Humans Reality Fall Language Social Fields Materials Thousand Ten Machines Fruit Fifty Engineering Thousand Years Ecology Lap Sowing

Author:Terence McKenna

“I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.”

Mean Fascinated Hallucinations

Author:Terence McKenna

“If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.”

Ifs Mind Looks Mean Language Originals Wander Delusion Really Mean Hallucinations Etymology

Author:Terence McKenna

“For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.”

Reason Known Planets Plant South Concentration Continents Hallucinogens

Author:Terence McKenna

“Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.”

Light Three Goal Path Yoga Breaths Filled Herbs Posture Yoga Sutra

Author:Terence McKenna

“Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.”

Thinking Kind Moments Form Grows Religious Memories Notion Psychedelic Rite Psychedelic Experience

Author:Terence McKenna

“I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.”

Ifs Thinking Real Whole Approach Institutions Priests Substitutes Ritual Offering Deities Rite Pipeline Scams

Author:Terence McKenna

“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.”

Buddhism Tradition India Ancient Crafts Dirty Priests Hinduism Heresy Dirty Work

Author:Terence McKenna

“The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.”

Whole Literature Strategy Complexes Narcotics Dmt Activation

Author:Terence McKenna

“I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it.”

People Thinking Fields Drug Plant Ancient Distinction Synthetic Hallucinogens

Author:Terence McKenna

“All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.”

Should Concepts Delusion Phenomenon Psychedelic Cognitive Explorers Hallucinations Insidious

Author:Terence McKenna

“People are concrescences of ambiguity.”

People Ambiguity

Author:Terence McKenna

“I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.”

Use Felt Modern Cures Primaries Unhappiness Neurosis

Author:Terence McKenna

“The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.”

Seems Style Possibility Unconscious Categories Motifs

Author:Terence McKenna

“Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?”

Chance Style Pure Succession

Author:Terence McKenna

“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.”

Ifs Kind Language Remains Dialogue Mysterious Evolve

Author:Terence McKenna

“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.”

Important Spiritual Path Yoga Claims Psychedelic Spiritual Path Psychedelic Experience

Author:Terence McKenna

About the Author

Born: November 16, 1946
Died: April 3, 2000
Known for: Philosopher
Quotes: 722

Related Topics

Psychedelic Humans Ifs Thinking People World Mind Culture Psychedelic Experience Kind

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Books & Sources

True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic RevivalRelated source material

Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic ConsciousnessRelated source material

Food Of The Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of KnowledgeRelated source material

History Ends in Green: Gaia, Psychedelics and the Archaic RevivalRelated source material

True HallucinationsRelated source material

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