Quotes

1.
"We have to recognise that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception."
- Terence McKenna

2.
"If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."
- Terence McKenna

3.
"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

4.
"Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable."
- Terence McKenna

5.
"Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe."
- Terence McKenna

6.
"It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us."
- Terence McKenna

7.
"The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams."
- Terence McKenna

8.
"LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us."
- Terence McKenna

9.
"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

10.
"The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."
- Terence McKenna

11.
"The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us."
- Terence McKenna

12.
"Find the Others."
- Terence McKenna

13.
"Unexamined cultural values & limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions."
- Terence McKenna

14.
"Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
- Terence McKenna

15.
"Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?"
- Terence McKenna

16.
"It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy."
- Terence McKenna

17.
"My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite."
- Terence McKenna

18.
"Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet"
- Terence McKenna

19.
"The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature."
- Terence McKenna

20.
"Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored."
- Terence McKenna

21.
"People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.”
- Terence McKenna

22.
"What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance."
- Terence McKenna

23.
"The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer"
- Terence McKenna

24.
"How do we fight back? By creating art."
- Terence McKenna

25.
"The engineers of the future will be poets."
- Terence McKenna

26.
"We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter: The freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter"
- Terence McKenna

27.
"If nothing lasts, then the conclusion is that the felt presence of immediate experience must be what life is for."
- Terence McKenna

28.
"We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable."
- Terence McKenna

29.
"The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow-- and our best people are working on that very problem!"
- Terence McKenna

30.
"You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told."
- Terence McKenna

31.
"The universe seems to be evolving toward greater connection-- the only end is the moment when every point is connected to every point."
- Terence McKenna

32.
"There is a great discovery which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort and ignore: Nature is some kind of minded entity."
- Terence McKenna

33.
"The world is made of language--I can't say that enough."
- Terence McKenna

34.
"Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton."
- Terence McKenna

35.
"No one knows enough to worry"
- Terence McKenna

36.
"Some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and nothing can stop it."
- Terence McKenna

37.
"Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved."
- Terence McKenna

38.
"Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language."
- Terence McKenna

39.
"The primary contribution of 20th-century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary."
- Terence McKenna

40.
"I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small."
- Terence McKenna

41.
"Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns."
- Terence McKenna

42.
"Culture is some kind of a collective hallucination. It’s infantile. It’s an epistemological cartoon, and it’s breaking down."
- Terence McKenna

43.
"The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous."
- Terence McKenna

44.
"Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences."
- Terence McKenna

45.
"Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it."
- Terence McKenna

46.
"As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it’s hard for us to be at peace with ourselves."
- Terence McKenna

47.
"We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious."
- Terence McKenna

48.
"The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor."
- Terence McKenna

49.
"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