Terence McKenna Quotations | Page 5

We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.

Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

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.

There is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. ... One exists in eternity, one has become eternal ... One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.

As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.

What is needed, is an awakening.

To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.

I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.

A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.

History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.

The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.

I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.

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.

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.

You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.

Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants

Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.

The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.

If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.

What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.

The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.

I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.

I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.

If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.

And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.

Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.

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.

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.

History is rooted in the future

You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.

The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.

Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.

Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.

The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.

There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.

Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.

Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.

The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.

The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.

Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.

People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind

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.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.

The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again

No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff.

This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.