Terence McKenna Historical Quotations

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.

We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?

The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.

This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.

History is rooted in the future

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.

Human history is a Gaian dream.