Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “If you’re truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.”

— Terence McKenna

202. “Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.”

— Terence McKenna

203. “Mind conjures miracles out of time.”

— Terence McKenna

204. “The surface of things is not where attention should rest.”

— Terence McKenna

205. “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

206. “It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.”

— Terence McKenna

207. “Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.”

— Terence McKenna

208. “One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.”

— Terence McKenna

209. “Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.”

— Terence McKenna

210. “The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.”

— Terence McKenna

211. “Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.”

— Terence McKenna

212. “It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.”

— Terence McKenna

213. “In cyberspace things are built out of light.”

— Terence McKenna

214. “The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.”

— Terence McKenna

215. “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

216. “The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.”

— Terence McKenna

217. “The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”

— Terence McKenna

218. “The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.”

— Terence McKenna

219. “You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

220. “Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.”

— Terence McKenna

221. “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

222. “I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.”

— Terence McKenna

223. “The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

225. “We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.”

— Terence McKenna

226. “The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.”

— Terence McKenna

227. “You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.”

— Terence McKenna

228. “If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.”

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

230. “The real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one.”

— Terence McKenna

231. “In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told.”

— Terence McKenna

232. “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

233. “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

234. “Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let’s try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!”

— Terence McKenna

235. “To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.”

— Terence McKenna

236. “What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.”

— Terence McKenna

237. “There is no knowledge without risk taking.”

— Terence McKenna

238. “I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.”

— Terence McKenna

239. “We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.”

— Terence McKenna

240. “Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.”

— Terence McKenna

241. “Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.”

— Terence McKenna

242. “Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.”

— Terence McKenna

243. “There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.”

— Terence McKenna

244. “If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it’s an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.”

— Terence McKenna

245. “The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.”

— Terence McKenna

246. “We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.”

— Terence McKenna

247. “The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.”

— Terence McKenna

248. “Authority will lead you into ruin.”

— Terence McKenna

249. “By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.”

— Terence McKenna

250. “I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.”

— Terence McKenna