Terence Kemp McKenna was an U.S. author, mystic, lecturer, ethnobotanist and also an advocate of sensible use of psychedelic plants.
He wrote and spoke about a variety of subjects other than psychedelic plants and some of his favourite topics included culture, philosophy, technology, alchemy, culture, the environment and languages. Inspirational Terence McKenna quotes will philosophically expand your horizons, nourish the mind and soul.
If you’re searching for best quotes from authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of best Aristotle quotes, powerful Alan Watts quotes, and top Socrates quotes.
Thought-Provoking Terence McKenna Quotes
I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.
The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation.
If you don’t smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening balancing your checking account. If you do smoke cannabis you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek Renaissance.
Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.
Stop consuming images and start producing them.
Culture is not your friend, it’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why the words cult and culture have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation, and automatic, unquestioned and unthinking behavior.
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.
Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
The male dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.
Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.
You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program of a living world and the imagination.
Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.
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.
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.
Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.
We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
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.
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.
The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
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.
Our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it’s really all about.
The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.
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 rules.
We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
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 behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
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.
You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
History is the in rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
Matter is not lacking in magic, matter is magic.
We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.
My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
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.
It’s clearly a crisis of two things: 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.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
In trying to think conservatively about the possibility of a non-human local intelligence, it seems to me that in a way nature herself presents as an intelligence that the understanding of nature is the understanding of complex integrated systems of such complexity that to deny them consciousness is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind; that for anyone not burdened by that prejudice it’s self evident that nature is alive, cognizant, responding.
Some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and nothing can stop it.
Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.
If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
We need to interact with like-minded people throughout the world to establish the new intellectual order which will be the salvation of mankind.
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
What is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution, between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling toned types. If this can happen, then we will make a new world. And if this doesn’t happen, nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet, where so many have preceded us
Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
I think that’s the job of each of us: to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
