Quotes from Terence McKenna

As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.

It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.

We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.

Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

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.

Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed

Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.

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

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?

How do we fight back? By creating art.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

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

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.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.