Terence McKenna Quotes

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.

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the “thou shalts” and “thou should”, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.

Fortis fortuna adiuvat.

From one point of view the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be alive and intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union of all the senses with memory of the past and anticipation of the future. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerful hallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, both as a species and as individuals. The Transcendent Other is Nature without her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, and causality.

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding,

The nightmare of every government on earth is a million people assembled in the town square of your capital city, demanding that you pack up to Switzerland. Nobody can say no to a million people on the streets.

... yes I mean these journies into higher places, where-ever they are, seem to demand mathematical metaphors ...

The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That's what science is good for.
It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.

Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.

Rod Dickinson: In fact, the whole phenomenon is more like a large collective work of art, involving circle-makers, investigators, the media, and just about anybody who comes into contact with the circles. It's a kind of mind virus: once you get involved, you can't get out.<p>Terence McKenna: Absolutely. All these phenomena—UFOs, crop circles, even the cattle mutilation in the states—are all artifice in one form or another. All this stuff, these are fluctuations in the syntactical machinery of reality. The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis

because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through plant

hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from nature and the

unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God

Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The

psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and

persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.

The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were

conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature

from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was

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

You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.