Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Terence McKenna

202. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

204. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

206. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— 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. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

220. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

223. “We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.”

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

234. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

237. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

243. “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

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

247. “Authority will lead you into ruin.”

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

249. “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

250. “Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you’re practicing psychotherapy.”

— Terence McKenna