Terence McKenna quotes - page 3

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)
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. View quote
Terence McKenna
We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place. View quote
Terence McKenna
The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself. View quote
Terence McKenna
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. View quote
Terence McKenna
The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed. View quote
Terence McKenna
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. View quote
Terence McKenna
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. View quote
Terence McKenna
Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity. View quote
Terence McKenna
No one knows enough to worry. View quote
Terence McKenna
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. (Terence McKenna)
Time will perfect matter. View quote
Terence McKenna
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life. View quote
Terence McKenna
Human history is a Gaian dream. View quote
Terence McKenna
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. View quote
Terence McKenna
It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding. View quote
Terence McKenna
We are being sucked into the body of eternity. View quote
Terence McKenna
We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions. View quote
Terence McKenna
Somewhere around 1945 we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival, some ethical norm was shattered. View quote
Terence McKenna
First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me-the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero. View quote
Terence McKenna
Yet science is going to tell you that the only things worth describing are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. This is being these are the only phenomena that science can describe and that's the name of the game as far as they are concerned. But we, to claim our freedom, to take advantage of the tiny moment between immense abysses of unknowability, perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations, perhaps transitions into other life forms, these things we don't know, but in the moment of being human we have the unique opportunity to figure things out. And I have the faith that it is possible, sometime, somewhere, to have a conversation, perhaps no progress will be made until the ninth hour, but to have a conversation in which reality could be literally pulled to pieces, beyond the point of reconstructing. (Terence McKenna)
For approximately 500 years [science's] argument for its pre-eminence was that it could create beautiful toys: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that is a fool's argument for truth! I mean, that's after all how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an entirely rational way to proceed. View quote
Terence McKenna
The nightmare of every government on earth is a million people assembled in the town square of your capital city, demanding that you pack up to Switzerland. no body can say No to a million people on the streets. View quote
Terence McKenna
History is a set of nested resonances with each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it. This event horizon is like a series of ghost horizons, and once you enter into history, you enter into the outer shell of the temporal field of the attractor or the concrescence. View quote
Terence McKenna
if we are all god's children than why have we rigged the earth with dynamite and are flipping coins to see gets to set it off. View quote
Terence McKenna