Terence McKenna
It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.Collection: Simple
Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.Collection: Thinking
On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.Collection: Believe
I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.Collection: Thinking
Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.Collection: Mean
The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.Collection: Journey
And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.Collection: Moving
What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.Collection: Talking
We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.Collection: Intelligent
Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.Collection: Reality
The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.Collection: Real
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.Collection: Smart
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.Collection: Real
Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won’t. It prefers to be unnamed.Collection: Ego
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.Collection: Ego
Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That’s where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.Collection: Real
Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.Collection: Stories
I’m as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Real