Terence McKenna Quotes

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer

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

The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.

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

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

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.

There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!

I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.

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.