Authors:

Terence McKenna Quotes - Page 14

All Quotes Age Anxiety Art Assumption Atmosphere Attitude Balance Belief Birth Boundaries Children Christianity Church Commitment Communication Community Confusion Consciousness Culture Darkness Dying Earth Effort Ego Energy Environment Evolution Feelings Flying Giving Greek Growth Heart Heaven Imagination Inspirational Internet Journey Language Life Literature Lying Magic Manipulation Memories Metaphor Moon Nature Pain Past Perception Personality Perspective Philosophy Preparation Progress Purpose Reality Reflection Responsibility Revelations Revolution Sexuality Skins Soul Strategy Struggle Style Technology Terror Tradition Transformation Understanding Universe War Water Worry Yoga
We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows

We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?

Terence McKenna
Intelligent, Knowing, Historical

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.

Terence McKenna
Men, Made, Unconscious

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.

Terence McKenna
Mean, Animal, Past

Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.

Terence McKenna
Sympathy, Black, Events

The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.

Terence McKenna
Mind, Momentum, Furniture

The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood.

Terence McKenna
Limits, Bangs, Tests

Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.

Terence McKenna
Taken, Marijuana, Psychosis

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

Terence McKenna
People, Ambiguity

The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.

Terence McKenna
Sex, Drug, Secret

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.

Terence McKenna
Men, Made, Unconscious

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

Terence McKenna
People, Hollywood, Culture

Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.

Terence McKenna
Loyalty, Political, Inanimate Objects

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

Terence McKenna
Self, Order, Alarms
Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.

Terence McKenna
Pain, Animal, Ecosystems

Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.

Terence McKenna
Ideas, Space, Mind

We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

Terence McKenna
May, Monkeys, Consciousness

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

Terence McKenna
Two, Drug, Psychedelic

No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.

Terence McKenna
Dark, Night, Interesting

The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.

Terence McKenna
Smart, Moving, Believe

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.

Terence McKenna
Life, Religious, Feelings
Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

Terence McKenna
Animal, Ideas, Raw Materials

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.

Terence McKenna
Hands, Pieces, World

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?

Terence McKenna
Psychedelic, Moments, Reason

Time will perfect matter.

Terence McKenna
Perfect, Matter

What is happening, I think, it's really bigger than psychedelics, it's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That's what's happening.

Terence McKenna
Ocean, Unique, Thinking

You May Also Like: