Terence McKenna
History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.Collection: History
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.Collection: Imagination
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
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.
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.
That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
Nature conserves, prefers novelty.
There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong.
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.
In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.
I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.
Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.Collection: Reality
Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.Collection: Our World
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.Collection: World
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Inspirational
The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.Collection: Beautiful
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.Collection: Government
Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.Collection: Years
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddleCollection: Mystery
Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.Collection: Ego
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answerCollection: Mind Blowing
This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.Collection: Children
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Emotional
Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.Collection: Light
Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.Collection: Mirrors
Worrying is betting against yourself.Collection: Worry
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.Collection: Ego
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienationCollection: Dmt
Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.Collection: Talking
To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.Collection: Animal
The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.Collection: Real
If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.Collection: Mushrooms
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.Collection: Jobs
As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.Collection: Eye
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Life
Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.Collection: Hands
Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planetCollection: Inspirational
Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.Collection: Memories
People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.Collection: People
The Logos is a voice heard, in the head. And the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion.Collection: Voice
There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.Collection: Eye
We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.Collection: May
The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermindCollection: Communication
This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.Collection: Psychedelic
I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.Collection: Thinking
The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?Collection: Psychedelic