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Terence McKenna Quotes

Total quotes: 44
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Tagged: Moon, Space Travel, Ocean, Fear, Consciousness, Introspection, Interconnectedness, Contradictions
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, Trialogue #24: The Heavens
Tagged: Imagination, Reality
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna- You are a Divine Being
Tagged: You're Special, You Are Magic, The Universe Loves You, Going Home, Death, The Return, Inspirational
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: empowerment, Self-Esteem
“Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
— Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Tagged: Nature, Rape, Exploitation, Climate Change
“Avoid gurus, follow plants.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: plants, Learning From Nature, Against Guru Culture, Gardening
“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Sanity, Society, Alienation
“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Western Civilization, Colonialism
“As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side”
— Terence McKenna, This counts, somehow it matters
Tagged: The Universe, The Direction of the Cosmos, Two Polarities, New vs. Old, Habit, Routine
“People say, 'is there risk, to DMT? It sounds so intense. Is it dangerous?' The answer is yes, it's tremendously dangerous. The danger is the possibility of death by astonishment.”
— Terence McKenna, Descriptions of the DMT Experience
Tagged: DMT, The Awe of Psychedelics, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, Visions Beyond Visions
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, Mushrooms, Mankind, DMT, and Hyperspace
Tagged: Psychedelic, Mind Expansion, Eulogy, Epitaph, Consciousness, Love, Cute Things To Say Before You Die
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Tagged: Magic, Reality, Words, Syntax, Constructs
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Limited Reality, Bureaucracy Of Nature, Vault on Reality, Seeing Seeing
“We actually all create our own universe, because we are all operating with our own private languages which are only very crudely translatable into any other person's language.”
— Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Society
Tagged: Private Languages, Secret Communications, Bubble of Reality, What You See When You See
“Once a culture has complete understanding of its genetic information, it reengineers itself for survival.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Evolution, Cultural Zeniths, Points Of Re-Implosion, Rebuilding Cultural DNA, From The Explosion
“For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Examples of Similes, Similes, Following Leaders, Trust Yourself, Don't Follow Others, Pave Your Own Way
“Our map of the world is so wrong that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from.”
— Terence McKenna, Philosophical Gadfly
Tagged: Nasas Avant Garde, Understanding The Universe, Language Is Everything, Literature vs. Science, Quote of the Moment
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Chaos, Ego, Archetypes
“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
— Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Tagged: Beliefs, Ideology, Nihilism, Fanaticism
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Consciousness, Drugs, Hemp
“The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions.”
— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival
Tagged: Imagination, Going Beyond Us
“Art—sculpture, poetry, painting, dance—is like the footprints of where the imagination has been.”
— Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination
Tagged: Imagination, Art, Impressions from The Other World, Traces of Ideals
“We all want our children to be well-adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well-adjusted to.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Parenting, Growing Up, Being Weird, normal, normalcy, Being Normal
“Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate— just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Memes, Producing Work, Viral Media
“Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Television, TV, Media, Content, Brainwashing, Coercion, manipulation
“History is the track in the snow left by creativity wandering in the Divine Imagination.”
— Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
Tagged: History, Theology, Outside Time
“The every-colored stars of imagining what one can imagine.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Imagination, Stars
“If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Planning, Preparedness
“Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Ideology, Fundamentalism, Fanaticism
“We don't actually know what our predicament is.”
— Terence McKenna, This counts, somehow it matters
Tagged: The Question of Human Life, Existential Problems, Uncertain Biological Creatures
“I don't feel the need to believe, to proclaim as true or untrue.”
— Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination
Tagged: Openness, Extreme Liberalism, Perspectivism
“Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.”
— Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Tagged: Psychos, Shaman, Reality
“And often it’s very erotic, although I’m not sure if that’s the word. But it’s almost like sex is the surface of which this is the volume. And I’m a great fan of sex; I don’t mean to denigrate it. I mean to raise DMT to a very high status.”
— Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna - DMT
Tagged: DMT, Erotic Drugs
“I thought I must have died. This couldn’t happen to somebody, and come back. It’s the most challenging, enlightening, astonishing, terrifying, joyous, strange thing in the world. I don’t mean to scare anyone off but these are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. People should be very careful.”
— Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna on DMT
Tagged: Next Dimensions, What Is Out There, Different Kinds of Space Travel
“We have lost touch with chaos because it is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, the ego. The ego’s existence is defined in terms of control. The endless modeling process that the ego carries out is an effort to fight the absence of closure. The ego wants closure. It wants a complete explanation.”
— Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
Tagged: Chaos, Control, Ego, Ego is the Enemy
“To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.”
— Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green
Tagged: Psychedelics, Mushrooms, LSD, Dissolving Reality
“It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience. DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so.”
— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Tagged: DMT, Drugs, Language, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine
“We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them. We need to turn off the metaphorical televisions which are hooking us into the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon and Madison Avenue and what-have-you. We need, instead, to turn on our terminals, and to begin to interact with like-minded people throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the salvation of mankind, I firmly believe– because it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their fates, feel the interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family.”
— Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Society
Tagged: New World Orders, Dreaming of Utopias, Dreaming of New Realities
“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 it's a feather bed.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Courage, Dreams, Philosophers, Shaman, Abyss, Magic
“I had a friend back in the 60s who one day on LSD took a toothpick and he sat for fourteen solid hours with the toothpick and a large red brick and he demolished it. He reduced it to nothing with this toothpick, and his fingernail long after the toothpick was gone, and this is what we have to do to the ideological concrete in which we are set. We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a, have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.”
— Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Society
Tagged: LSD, Examples of Metaphors, Extended Metaphors, Moving The Plates of the Earth
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