Quotes from Terence McKenna

I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.

DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.

The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." -

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.

You see, a secret is not something untold. It's something which can't be told.

The only spirit that ever gave me a name was St. Tammany whom reassured me of my future success early on and kept saying the name Matthew Edward Hall whom i predict will be a prophet or future savior of some sort. I've confirmed St. Tammany to be Tamanend, the only Native American Saint.

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.

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.

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.

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.

No one knows enough to worry.

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.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

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.

Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf.

Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

There's light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don't go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they're willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.