Terence McKenna Quotes
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The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.
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The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.
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I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance.
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I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.
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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?
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What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
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We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
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The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.
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A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
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So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream.
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In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
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The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.
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Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.
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Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
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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
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The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
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What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes - the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move.
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The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.
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I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.
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Culture is another dimension.
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And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
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We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind
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These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!'
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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.
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Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.
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Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.
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This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
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If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
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