Quotes from Terence McKenna

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

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!

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

We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.

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.

Nature conserves, prefers novelty.

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.

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?

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

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, 'What is it?' In that moment art can be created.

When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?

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

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