Terence McKenna
I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.Collection: Want
What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.Collection: Reality
Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.Collection: Spiritual
Time will perfect matter.Collection: Perfect
The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.Collection: Tools
To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.Collection: Thinking
Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.Collection: Best Laid Plans
The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.Collection: Cutting
The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.Collection: World
The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.Collection: Simple
The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.Collection: Manipulation
You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.Collection: Proud
It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.Collection: War
The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.Collection: Space
I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.Collection: Thinking
Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.Collection: Ideas
Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.Collection: Mean
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.Collection: Book
There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.Collection: Needs
The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.Collection: Mind
If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.Collection: Mean
The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda.Collection: Reality
We are, in fact, hyper-dimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.Collection: Cycling
The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.Collection: Messages
If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.Collection: Civilization
As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.Collection: Struggle
There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.Collection: Moving
The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.Collection: Self
Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.Collection: Steps
Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.Collection: Real
The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.Collection: Personality
All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.Collection: Information
No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.Collection: Attitude
Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.Collection: Issues
In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.Collection: Mean
Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.Collection: Thinking
In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.Collection: Animal
The human brain is the god of technological innovation.Collection: Innovation
All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.Collection: Stupid
I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.Collection: Thinking
The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.Collection: Powerful
What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.Collection: Thinking
Human history is a Gaian dream.Collection: Dream
To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together againCollection: Together Again
I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.Collection: Ideas
It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.Collection: Feel Better
For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.Collection: Reality
My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.Collection: Communication
Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor.Collection: Art