Terence McKenna Quotes

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

It's pretty simple, the ethical life—it's just demanding. … The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is—unless you're at Esalen—you should clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple of other obvious things to be done. It's not about how many prostrations you do, or what lineage you've associated yourself with, or how much cholesterol is in your diet. And somehow, we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices—probably because we have been too infected by the memes of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity. Because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming. That's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy, the quietude of Asian religion, I think.

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.

I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want.

Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us; but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of starflight and longevity extension, and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Well then, that means that when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.

... Arabian hyper-space ... <small>(discussing DMT , & finding his own quotes on the Internet)</small>

Things are pretty strange in this world and people do it many ways and you are just an atom in a galaxy of possibilities and your opinions and your science and ‘What I think’ and all that, is just so much noise in a very complex and busy world. And its that same humbling perception that comes out of psychedelics. It just shows you, you’re very parochial.

Authority will lead you into ruin.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

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.

Many a time a man cannot be such as he would be, if circumstances do not admit of it.