Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”

— Terence McKenna

153. “The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.”

— Terence McKenna

154. “What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use ‘higher dimensional’ in the mathematical sense.”

— Terence McKenna

155. “To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.”

— Terence McKenna

156. “Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what’s happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.”

— Terence McKenna

157. “Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.”

— Terence McKenna

158. “What I’ve observed, and I think it’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.”

— Terence McKenna

159. “We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern...”

— Terence McKenna

160. “You aren’t an object. You’re a process of some sort.”

— Terence McKenna

161. “The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.”

— Terence McKenna

162. “Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.”

— Terence McKenna

163. “In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.”

— Terence McKenna

164. “I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.”

— Terence McKenna

165. “DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it.”

— Terence McKenna

166. “In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.”

— Terence McKenna

167. “This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.”

— Terence McKenna

168. “Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.”

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

170. “The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.”

— Terence McKenna

171. “History is rooted in the future.”

— Terence McKenna

172. “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

173. “No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.”

— Terence McKenna

174. “As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.”

— Terence McKenna

175. “We don’t have to look far for miracles because they’re all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it’s surface is alive with mystery.”

— Terence McKenna

176. “The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”

— Terence McKenna

177. “We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -.”

— Terence McKenna

178. “There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else’s rules.”

— Terence McKenna

179. “How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?”

— Terence McKenna

180. “Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we’re embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.”

— Terence McKenna

181. “What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.”

— Terence McKenna

182. “For all we know, we know nothing.”

— Terence McKenna

183. “I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.”

— Terence McKenna

184. “Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.”

— Terence McKenna

185. “What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it’s done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.”

— Terence McKenna

186. “The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.”

— Terence McKenna

187. “I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.”

— Terence McKenna

188. “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.”

— Terence McKenna

189. “The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.”

— Terence McKenna

190. “We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.”

— Terence McKenna

191. “What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.”

— Terence McKenna

192. “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

193. “The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.”

— Terence McKenna

194. “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.”

— Terence McKenna

195. “We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.”

— Terence McKenna

196. “The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.”

— Terence McKenna

197. “There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.”

— Terence McKenna

198. “I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.”

— Terence McKenna

199. “I think that understanding man’s place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

200. “The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.”

— Terence McKenna