Terence McKenna Quotes

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

... intuition is intuition, & noise is noise, so what you do is, cook it in your mind and go with what feels right

... the way I interpret the material you deal with Art, the weird experiences, and the ideas people generate out of it, and the public attention to all that, is that something is trying to be told, the universe is trying to reach us ...

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

So where does this all leave us today? Did the cosmic giggle move on? … It was easy to look back and to tell this story as if it were a completed cycle, something finished and resplendent in its completion. The problem with that approach is that this story is true, its actors real people, their lives ongoing. … My colleagues, my friends and lovers, have changed and moved on. Different fates have claimed each of us. … The only person who was part of the original team to whom I feel I can still rave at full bore with concerning the experiment at La Chorrera is Dennis. … He is now the scientist that at La Chorrera he could only aspire to be. … He tolerates my raving but is careful never to encourage me. … Because the major idea to emerge out of this experience is the timewave and the computer software that supports it, I am in the absurd position of being either an unsung Newton or completely nuts. … Do I have the winds of history blowing at my back and really did befriend the Logos and learn the secret of the universe, or at least one of many secrets, in the chaos at La Chorrera? I honestly confess that I do not know. As I write these words, my marriage to Kat of nearly sixteen years seems caught up in a process of dissolution painful to both of us. This despite our two children, the house we built together, and both our efforts to be decent people. Apparently the presence of the Logos has done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Like the Soul in Yeats's poem I am still an eternal thing fastened to the body of a dying animal. … I am assured by the people around me—publishers, editors, agents, marketing experts—people who are obviously uninformed as to the whispered promise of a special destiny made to me by the elves of hyperspace, that I am going to be big, have influence, and change the way people think. Perhaps this will be true. I hope so. Something happened at La Chorrera, something extraordinary. I was extremely fortunate to have briefly glimpsed a strange, beautiful, and better sort of world and to have made a marvelous pact with the alien gods who dwell there. … My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.

The psychedelic community has not yet recognized or named itself as a community. We are well behind gays and black people and all those other minorities … we are still trying to figure out if we are a community. And if we are a community, and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies—it's not that we are all supposed to become dope dealers, it's that we are all supposed to become artists; that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art—we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization, and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far … and they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously.

To my mind, this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.

People had group values, because the children were group-owned. And that made a tremendous difference in the way the society imaged itself. People lived for the group, and in the core of the group were the children, and people always put them first. So everyone identified with the children, everybody was willing to face risk to preserve the younger gene-pool. This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous factor …

You need an ego. If you didn't have an ego, you wouldn't know whose mouth to put food in when eating in a restaurant.

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.

We've been infected with the idea of original sin, that's what keeps us infantile … politics without responsibility is fascism.

If we are all God's children, then why have we rigged the earth with dynamite and are flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?

What's happening is that 8% of the world's people use 35% of the world's petroleum, and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way. This is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale. We're addicted, they got it, we're happy to pay for it, but if they won't sell it we'll break into their house and take it, because by God it will go into our right arm. That's the plan.

Somewhere around 1945, we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival. Some ethical norm was shattered.

Mark mentioned the vector of virtual reality, nanotechnology, global communications—it's clear that we're moving toward, if not the Eschaton itself, then some kind of historical echo of it, in simulation, that, for all practical purposes, will be the same thing, as far as the impact it has on our lives.
For example, you could doubt my much-vaunted prediction that the world will become unrecognizable by 2012; but do you doubt for a moment that by 2012, every major religion on Earth will have vast simulations of its eschatological vision for you to wander in and try out—so that you can look in on Nirvana.com, or lope over to the Celestial City, or look in on Sufi paradise? I mean, religious ontologies will be marketed like beers! And will be made as realistic and compelling as possible!
Well, then, who is to say what is real and what is not? "Real" is a distinction of a naïve mind, I think. We're getting beyond that. I mean, naïve empiricism worked well enough, until the discoveries of quantum physics seventy or eighty years ago revealed the hideous secret that the bedrock of reality is a funhouse basement!