Terence McKenna quotes

Terence McKenna was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, and advocate for the exploration of consciousness through psychedelic substances. His lectures and writings inspired a generation to reexamine the relationship between mind, culture, and nature. He remains a leading figure in the fields of psychedelia and countercultural philosophy. Here are 124 of his quotes:

Nothing lasts but nothing is lost.

Terence McKenna

Who is to say what is real and what is not? «Real» is a distinction of a naïve mind, I think. We're getting beyond that.

Terence McKenna

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

Terence McKenna

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

Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.

Terence McKenna

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.

Terence McKenna

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

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

Terence McKenna

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.

Terence McKenna

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

Terence McKenna

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.

Terence McKenna

It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques– all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture... And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple.

Terence McKenna

A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness.

Terence McKenna

I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.

Terence McKenna

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

Terence McKenna

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

Terence McKenna

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

Terence McKenna

The view of science is that all processes ultimately run down, but entropy is maximized only in some far, far away future. The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely and linearly extendable into the future. In the spiral time scheme of the timewave this assumption is not made. Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws that are conditioning existence and into another radically different set of laws. The universe is seen as a series of compartmentalized eras or epochs whose laws are quite different from one another, with transitions from one epoch to another occurring with unexpected suddenness.

Terence McKenna

We've been infected with the idea of original sin, that's what keeps us infantile... Politics without responsibility IS fascism.

Terence McKenna

I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.

Terence McKenna

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.

Terence McKenna

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.

Terence McKenna