Terence McKenna
I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.Collection: Believe
Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?Collection: Style
All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.Collection: Hallucinations
You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!'Collection: Light
Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.Collection: Done
The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.Collection: Real
And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.Collection: Believe
Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.Collection: Path
History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.Collection: Way
If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.Collection: Differences
Culture is another dimension.Collection: Culture
It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.Collection: Organization
It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.Collection: Fall
Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.Collection: Drug
If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.Collection: World
Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.Collection: Ayahuasca
There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.Collection: Mind
I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.Collection: Jobs
Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.Collection: Imagination
The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.Collection: Self
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: Powerful
History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.Collection: Reflection
I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!Collection: Dope
This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.Collection: Thinking
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.Collection: Psychedelic
Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.Collection: Song
An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.Collection: Long
Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.Collection: Psychedelic
Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.Collection: Believe
I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millenniumCollection: Thinking
What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.Collection: Ideas
Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.Collection: Vocabulary
What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.Collection: Past
I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?Collection: Messages
And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.Collection: Hands
Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.Collection: Struggle
It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.Collection: Ocean
There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rulesCollection: Spiritual
The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.Collection: Reality
You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.Collection: Two
This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.Collection: Voice
It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.Collection: Needs
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.Collection: Life
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.Collection: Lying
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?Collection: Smart
There is this persistent theme in all of these notions that death is made more easy, whatever that means, if you've learned the territory before you get there. And you know, in the Mahayana Buddhist situation it even becomes as extreme as saying; 'life is essentially a preparation for death, a studying of the maps of a learning of the skills a packing of your picnic basket so that when you get out there and demons are sniffing you up one side and down the other you don't bungle your mantras'.Collection: Buddhist
The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.Collection: Luxury
We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.Collection: Years