Terence McKenna quotes - page 5

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:

Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility.

Terence McKenna

This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information.

Terence McKenna

We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.

Terence McKenna

We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them.

Terence McKenna

I mean, naïve empiricism worked well enough, until the discoveries of quantum physics seventy or eighty years ago revealed the hideous secret that the bedrock of reality is a funhouse basement!

Terence McKenna

We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels.

Terence McKenna

If you can turn yourself into a cartoon character, you can retire, and a whole team of people will keep you au courant.

Terence McKenna

One exists in eternity, one has become eternal.

Terence McKenna

One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.

Terence McKenna

There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!

Terence McKenna

You don't want to become so open minded that the wind whistles between your ears.

Terence McKenna

We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture -- the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not -- because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see.

Terence McKenna

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I'm a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know-what'll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there's nothing to be well adjusted to!

Terence McKenna

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

Terence McKenna

Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.

Terence McKenna

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.

Terence McKenna

The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.

Terence McKenna

Rod Dickinson: In fact, the whole phenomenon is more like a large collective work of art, involving circle-makers, investigators, the media, and just about anybody who comes into contact with the circles. It's a kind of mind virus: once you get involved, you can't get out.Terence McKenna: Absolutely. All these phenomena-UFOs, crop circles, even the cattle mutilation in the states-are all artifice in one form or another. All this stuff, these are fluctuations in the syntactical machinery of reality. The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

Terence McKenna

Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it"-in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.

Terence McKenna

It's strange-you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth.

Terence McKenna

... intuition is intuition, & noise is noise, so what you do is, cook it in your mind and go with what feels right.

Terence McKenna