Terence McKenna Quotes

It is now very clear that techniques of machine–human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques—all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture. … And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple.

I know the disposition of women: when you will, they won't; when you won't, they set their hearts upon you of their own inclination.

I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.

For approximately 500 years, [science's] argument for its pre-eminence was that it could create beautiful toys: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that is a fool's argument for truth! I mean, that's, after all, how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an entirely rational way to proceed.

I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is 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.

It is the common vice of all, in old age, to be too intent upon our interests.

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.

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself.

Authority will lead you into ruin.

Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it"—in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.

Lovers' quarrels are the renewal of love.

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience, and this is, I think, much of the problem of the modern dilemma, which is that direct experience has been discounted, and in its place, all kind of belief systems have been erected. … If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

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.

In fact, we are most in agreement when we are silent with each other, because then our assumptions about how we are in agreement are able to fully unfurl themselves, but all it takes is someone breaking that silence and stating the contents of their mind, for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us. Because it turns out, you know, I think it's one way, you think it's another, I believe we're doing X, you think we're doing Y, I think we're serving so and so, and you think we're serving somebody else. And this is why I think great relationships are built in silence, because then nobody ever finds out what's really going on.