Terence McKenna Quotes

Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture". ...more

Birth: November 16, 1946 - Death: April 03, 2000

This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else’s being you can’t be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don’t produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.

Topic(s): Needs , Media , Produce

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.

Topic(s): Giving , Believe , Ideas

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

Topic(s): Drug , Computer

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.

Topic(s): People , Social , Environment

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.

Topic(s): World , Dream , Impossible

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

Topic(s): People , Thinking , Imagination

The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.

Topic(s): Needs , Reason , Suffering

What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.

Topic(s): Individual , Language , Capacity

If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity.

Topic(s): Ends , Political , Hell

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.

Topic(s): Long , Humans , Night

One reaches through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain…The human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body, and we don’t ‘imagine’ anything. We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence.

Topic(s): World , Reality , Imagination

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