"Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination."
Read quote
4 likes
Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 22 of 36)
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant."
Read quote
3 likes
"The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control."
Read quote
3 likes
"Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds."
Read quote
3 likes
"And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum."
Read quote
3 likes
"In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break."
Read quote
3 likes
"What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction."
Read quote
3 likes
"Our medium is meat, but we are made of information."
Read quote
3 likes
"The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience."
Read quote
3 likes
"The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us."
Read quote
3 likes
"A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity."
Read quote
3 likes
"I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it."
Read quote
3 likes
"The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic."
Read quote
3 likes
"Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us."
Read quote
3 likes
"No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions."
Read quote
3 likes
"What is happening, I think, it's really bigger than psychedelics, it's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That's what's happening."
Read quote
3 likes
"Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made."
Read quote
3 likes
"The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment."
Read quote
3 likes