Quotes from Terence McKenna

Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

The only real experience that counts, is your own.

Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.

Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.

It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.

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

We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.

Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.

The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.

Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?

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

We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.