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Terence McKenna Quotes

Total quotes: 27
“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”
— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Tagged: Moon, Space Travel, Ocean, Fear, Consciousness, Introspection, Interconnectedness, Contradictions
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna- You are a Divine Being
Tagged: You're Special, You Are Magic, The Universe Loves You, Going Home, Death, The Return, Inspirational
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: empowerment, Self-Esteem
“Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
— Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Tagged: Nature, Rape, Exploitation, Climate Change
“Avoid gurus, follow plants.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: plants, Learning From Nature, Against Guru Culture, Gardening
“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Sanity, Society, Alienation
“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Western Civilization, Colonialism
“As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side”
— Terence McKenna, This counts, somehow it matters
Tagged: The Universe, The Direction of the Cosmos, Two Polarities, New vs. Old, Habit, Routine
“People say, 'is there risk, to DMT? It sounds so intense. Is it dangerous?' The answer is yes, it's tremendously dangerous. The danger is the possibility of death by astonishment.”
— Terence McKenna, Descriptions of the DMT Experience
Tagged: DMT, The Awe of Psychedelics, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, Visions Beyond Visions
“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.”
— Terence McKenna, Mushrooms, Mankind, DMT, and Hyperspace
Tagged: Psychedelic, Mind Expansion, Eulogy, Epitaph, Consciousness, Love, Cute Things To Say Before You Die
“We actually all create our own universe, because we are all operating with our own private languages which are only very crudely translatable into any other person's language.”
— Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Society
Tagged: Private Languages, Secret Communications, Bubble of Reality, What You See When You See
“The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions.”
— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival
Tagged: Imagination, Going Beyond Us
“Art—sculpture, poetry, painting, dance—is like the footprints of where the imagination has been.”
— Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination
Tagged: Imagination, Art, Impressions from The Other World, Traces of Ideals
“We all want our children to be well-adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well-adjusted to.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Parenting, Growing Up, Being Weird, normal, normalcy, Being Normal
“Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate— just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Memes, Producing Work, Viral Media
“History is the track in the snow left by creativity wandering in the Divine Imagination.”
— Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
Tagged: History, Theology, Outside Time
“The every-colored stars of imagining what one can imagine.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Imagination, Stars
“Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
— Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
Tagged: Ideology, Fundamentalism, Fanaticism
“I don't feel the need to believe, to proclaim as true or untrue.”
— Terence McKenna, Appreciating Imagination
Tagged: Openness, Extreme Liberalism, Perspectivism
“Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.”
— Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Tagged: Psychos, Shaman, Reality
“I thought I must have died. This couldn’t happen to somebody, and come back. It’s the most challenging, enlightening, astonishing, terrifying, joyous, strange thing in the world. I don’t mean to scare anyone off but these are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. People should be very careful.”
— Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna on DMT
Tagged: Next Dimensions, What Is Out There, Different Kinds of Space Travel
“We have lost touch with chaos because it is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, the ego. The ego’s existence is defined in terms of control. The endless modeling process that the ego carries out is an effort to fight the absence of closure. The ego wants closure. It wants a complete explanation.”
— Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
Tagged: Chaos, Control, Ego, Ego is the Enemy
“To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.”
— Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green
Tagged: Psychedelics, Mushrooms, LSD, Dissolving Reality
“It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience. DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so.”
— Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Tagged: DMT, Drugs, Language, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine
“We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them. We need to turn off the metaphorical televisions which are hooking us into the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon and Madison Avenue and what-have-you. We need, instead, to turn on our terminals, and to begin to interact with like-minded people throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the salvation of mankind, I firmly believe– because it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their fates, feel the interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family.”
— Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Society
Tagged: New World Orders, Dreaming of Utopias, Dreaming of New Realities
“I have been vehemently accused by people who didn’t understand me of not believing in anything. I don’t believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a candle for me at night. It’s a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip. After all, what is the basis for believing anything? I mean, you have to understand: You’re a monkey. In some kind of a biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the economy of survival— this is not a philosophy course. So belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn’t to be believed; it’s to be dealt with— experienced and modeled.”
— Terence McKenna, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Active Nihilism, Believing In Nothing But Everything, Belief, Ideological Structures
“We have to stop CONSUMING our culture. We have to CREATE culture. DON'T watch TV, DON'T read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your OWN roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are — NOW — is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to ICONS. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral — get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play 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.”
— Terence McKenna, Reclaim Your Mind
Tagged: Cultural Diversion, Against Pop Culture, Media Eats Your Brain
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