110+ Terence McKenna Quotes On Psychedelics, Death And Imaginative

Terence McKenna was an American writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist. He was known for his research on the use of psychedelic substances and his theories on the evolution of human consciousness. He is also known for his work on the ontological foundations of shamanism and his theories on the "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Terence McKenna on love, psychedelics, death.

Top 10 Terence McKenna Quotes

1. You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
2. The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.
3. If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
4. As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.
5. The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
6. The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
7. The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
8. Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
9. Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
10. 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.

Terence McKenna Image Quotes

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation — Terence McKenna

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

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Short Quotes

• Worrying is betting against yourself.
• How do we fight back? By creating art.
• Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas
• The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
• We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
• Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
• Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
• We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
• Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
• You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.

Terence McKenna Quotes About Love

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. — Terence McKenna

There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles. — Terence McKenna

You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. — Terence McKenna

This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed. — Terence McKenna

A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about. — Terence McKenna

You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair. — Terence McKenna

Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly. — Terence McKenna

I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love. — Terence McKenna

We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes About Psychedelics

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair. — Terence McKenna

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness — Terence McKenna

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. — Terence McKenna

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us. — Terence McKenna

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. — Terence McKenna

Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. — Terence McKenna

You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination. — Terence McKenna

I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes About Death

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. — Terence McKenna

Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole. — Terence McKenna

The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul' — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes About Imaginative

Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

We live in condensations of our imagination — Terence McKenna

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

Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired. — Terence McKenna

If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways. — Terence McKenna

The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. — Terence McKenna

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes About Animals

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. — Terence McKenna

The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous. — Terence McKenna

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas. — Terence McKenna

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious. — Terence McKenna

Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully. — Terence McKenna

The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis. — Terence McKenna

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity. — Terence McKenna

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. — Terence McKenna

We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer. — Terence McKenna

At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes About Earth

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

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. — Terence McKenna

Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us. — Terence McKenna

The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve. — Terence McKenna

If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with. — Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Famous Quotes And Sayings

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong. — Terence McKenna

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. — Terence McKenna

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche. — Terence McKenna

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation — Terence McKenna

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines. — Terence McKenna

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together. — Terence McKenna

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

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. — Terence McKenna

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception. — Terence McKenna

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization. — Terence McKenna

What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening. — Terence McKenna

Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be? — Terence McKenna

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that! — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

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

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation. — Terence McKenna

The truth for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn't, you should seek a deeper truth. — Terence McKenna

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives. — Terence McKenna

Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris. — Terence McKenna

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being. — Terence McKenna

You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness. — Terence McKenna

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components. — Terence McKenna

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world. — Terence McKenna

Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone. — Terence McKenna

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be. — Terence McKenna

The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary. — Terence McKenna

At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst. — Terence McKenna

So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship. — Terence McKenna

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste. — Terence McKenna

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening — Terence McKenna

For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves. — Terence McKenna

People are concrescences of ambiguity. — Terence McKenna

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons. — Terence McKenna

We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart. — Terence McKenna

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

Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. — Terence McKenna

Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place. — Terence McKenna

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it. — Terence McKenna

A long long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret, I won't keep it. I'm against secrets, I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost. — Terence McKenna

We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future. — Terence McKenna

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality. — Terence McKenna

The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another. — Terence McKenna

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries. — Terence McKenna

The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable. — Terence McKenna

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind. — Terence McKenna

Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue. — Terence McKenna

The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system. — Terence McKenna

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception. — Terence McKenna

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves. — Terence McKenna

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream. — Terence McKenna

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

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans. — Terence McKenna

It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically. — Terence McKenna

[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable. — Terence McKenna

Culture is your operating system. — Terence McKenna

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else. — Terence McKenna

A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness. — Terence McKenna

Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this. — Terence McKenna

The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature. — Terence McKenna

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process. — Terence McKenna

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy. — Terence McKenna

Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book. — Terence McKenna

I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance. — Terence McKenna

Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. — Terence McKenna

Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism. — Terence McKenna

This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human. — Terence McKenna

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery. — Terence McKenna

Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate. — Terence McKenna

Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially. — Terence McKenna

Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique. — Terence McKenna

Life Lessons by Terence McKenna

1. Terence McKenna's work emphasizes the importance of exploring the unknown and embracing the power of the imagination.
2. He encourages us to look beyond the boundaries of traditional thought and to embrace the potential of the unknown.
3. He also stresses the importance of cultivating a sense of wonder and curiosity in order to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.