Terence McKenna

 Terence McKenna: Resources & Collected Quotes

Terence McKenna: Collected Quotes

Deconditioning ourselves from ego & ignorance

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. 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. — Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double", 40

“We are the inheritors of that tradition, but it is now once again exhausted and our cultural crisis is much greater. It is global, it is total; it involves every man, woman and child on this planet. Every bug, bird and tree is caught up in the cultural crisis that we have engendered. Our ideas are exhausted: the ideas that we inherit out of Christianity and its half-brother science, or its bastard child science. What I’m suggesting is that an Archaic Revival needs to take place and it seems to be well in hand in the form of the revival of Goddess worship and shamanism and partnership, but notice that these things are old — 10,000 years or more old — but there was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn, persists right up to the present.”

• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRo

‟Unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.”

• Terence McKenna

Death of Old World and Birth of New

to me the major metaphor that is operating in the 20th century is what I call the archaic revival. Our civilization is falling to pieces. Its assumptions are no longer any good. It just doesn’t work. By our civilization I mean from Moscow to the Potomac to Tokyo to Sydney to Bangkok and back to Paris. Global civilization is not working. It may still be working in the rainforest but only if we haven’t reached them yet. As soon as we reach them, they’ll be sent to work in sawmills and involved in growing coca for the drug trade and be ruined. When a society is in trouble the way we are in trouble, what it does unconsciously – just in the same way that a drowning person reaches outward – it reaches outward for a previous cultural metaphor to stabilize itself. “

• Terence McKenna 1988 (The Light in Nature)

I require a society on the brink of social breakdown, to be able to do my work. And I think a society on the brink of social breakdown is the healthiest situation for individuals. I don’t know how many of you have ever had the privilege of being in a society in a pre-­‐revolutionary situation, but the cafés stay open all night, and there’s music in the streets, and you can breath it, you can feel it, and you know what is happening. The dominator is being pushed, it never succeeds, it’s never able to claim itself, but on the other hand, history is young. We may have a crack at this. A global society is coming into being. A global society made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but which is ours. Through the mistaken invention and distribution of small computers, the printing press, all of this stuff. Information is power and information has been spilled by the clumsy handling of the cybernetic revolution by the dominator culture so that it is everywhere. Never has the situation been more fluid. Never have the opportunities for infiltration, insurrection and hell raising been more present at hand, but we have to seize the opportunity, because the world doesn’t have that much more to run, unless someone begins to shake the apple cart. If we don’t begin to shake the apple cart, then the apple cart is just going to sail over the cliff and be lost. So the psychedelics are very hot in this because they dissolve boundaries, they dissolve assumptions. And our task, our being everyone who seeks self-­‐ empowerment through experience, our task is to dissolve the assumptions of the dominator culture and make it impossible for it to work. I think this is already happening. We have nature on our side, you see.

• Terence McKenna
• the way that the internet has opened things up and allowed people to get information, new persepctives, ancient wisdom. No longer does the Royal, Governmental & Priest class control the narrative

Breaking free of The Machine & The Dominator Culture

The fact that nature is itself being seen as a limited resource is tremendous tilt to our side. Because the provisional model psychedelic open-­‐ended partnership way of doing things is the only style that can perhaps seize the controls of this sinking submarine and get it back to the surface, so that we can figure out what should be done. If we continue as we have, then we’re doomed. And the judgment of some higher power on that will be ‘they didn’t even struggle.’ They went to the boxcars with their suitcases and they didn’t even struggle. This is too nightmarish to contemplate. We’re talking about the fate of a whole planet. Why are people so polite? Why are they so patient? Why are they so patient? Why are they so forgiving of gangsterism and betrayal? It’s very difficult to understand. I believe that it’s because the dominator culture is increasingly more and more sophisticated in its perfection of subliminal mechanisms of control. And I don’t mean anything grandiose and paranoid, I just mean that through press releases and sound bites and the enforced idiocy of television, **the drama of a dying world has been turned into a soap opera for most people. And they don’t understand that it’s their story, and they will eat it in the final act if somewhere between here and the final act they don’t stand up on their hind legs and howl. So – this whole effort to bring the psychedelic experience back into prominence is an effort to empower individuals. And to get them to see that we are bled of our authenticity by vampirish institutions that will never of their own accord, leave us alone. There must be a moment when the machinery and the working of the machinery becomes so odious that people are willing to strive forward and throw sand on the tracks and force a re-­‐evaluation of the situation. It’s not done through organizing, its not done through vanguard parties of intellectual elites. It’s done through just walking away from all that. Claiming your identity, claiming your vision, your being, your intuition, and then acting from that without regret. Cleanly, without regret.

• 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 Danger of Ideology & “The Felt Presence of Present Experience”

“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.”

• TM
• And to the degree that we commit ourselves to ideology, we are poisoned. Any ideology -­‐ Marxism, Catholicism, Objectivism, you name it. Rubbish – all rubbish. What is real is experience. What is real is this moment, and so then what it becomes about –what are the frontiers of experience? *How much of that has been taken away from us by these dominators? By these priesthoods, by these cults, by these philosophical shell games. Well – a lot. That’s the whole story of history. Our growing unease, our growing disease. Our malaise, is all about the fact that we are kept from the wellspring of experience. We are sexually repressed, you may not feel – but look back 100 years to a time when Pianos wore pants. Maybe we’ve made a little progress on the sexual thing, maybe not. Maybe more or less than we think. But we are repressed in all of these areas. *And we are particularly repressed in the area that relates to the psychedelic experience. It is raid to the dominator insect invasion. They can’t take it. They can’t stand it. Because it empowers the individual, it dissolves the cheerful model of science. It’s just exposed as a nice story. It enriches it accessible universe 10 fold, 100 fold, 1000 fold. It makes the individual complete within himself or herself; and this completion of the individual is extremely destructive to the plan of the dominators, which is that you will be a cog in the machine. You will participate in the life of an organization. Not your life – the life of an organization. You will go to some bullshit job, you will pour the best years of your life and your genius and your hopes into this. You will serve an institution. You will serve, serve, serve, serve.
• Terence McKenna

Materialism, Scientism, Limitations of Perception/Consciousness…

‟Unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.”

• Terence McKenna

The idea that the universe began as some tiny little ball of matter and then exploded into everything for no reason - is so insanely far-fetched it stretches the limits of credulity

(Terrence McKenna has good things to say about this . The limit-case for credulity) **If you can believe this, then you can literally believe anything ** (And people do)

“Give me one big miracle…..”

• McKenna

Authority & Experts

"There are no experts"

• Terence McKenna

“I know that I don’t know anything more than you know… There are no experts. There is only the integrity of doing and having done.”

• Terrence McKenna

“Real secrets can’t be told And a secret that can be told isn’t a secret”

• Terrence McKenna

Magic and Mystery

“Every electron is the yawning mouth of a wormhole that leads to quadrillions of higher-dimensional universes that are completely beyond rational apprehension. Matter is not lacking in magic; matter is magic.”

• Mckenna

"Not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine"

• Terrence Mckenna

"For 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 raccoon 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."

• Terrence Mckenna

Magic

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

• Terrence McKenna

Imagination

"The destiny of human beings is to live in the imagination, in the hands of the Goddess, and wherever that thrust is impeded, psychopathy will result."

• Terence McKenna “In other words, absent the conditioning of the animal body the human mind is a superb instrument for exploring non local space and time. And I don’t really have time to flail you with it this afternoon but this idea of non locality of information coming out of physics begins to make it look like we have a sensory organ which we have misunderstood. We know that our eyes tell us what is there to be seen. Our hand tells us what is there to be felt. But we have this peculiar organ called the imagination. We tend to think that the imagination is a psychological function for the production of what we call fantasy. It isn’t. The imagination is a perceptual organ for non local information. And when you imagine something, you are seeing something which is real but not anywhere tangential to your three dimensional spacetime locus and never can be. So when we smoke DMT or take psilocybin and are inducted into these worlds of self transforming elf machines, alien intellects, so forth and so on I believe this is non local information and that this non local information will become more and more important for the rest of our cultural development. There are no aliens, in my opinion, visiting this planet in ships of beryllium with a program of universal brotherhood. I find that preposterous for reasons too complex to go into. But I do believe that we can connect into a universal I don’t know the word, hegemony is somewhat loaded, but a universal system of intelligent organization. We can communicate with aliens, but they will always come clothed in the stuff of the human imagination. Art is the process of downloading non local information into local space. And now that we have understood this, we can carry the program of art forward in a much more efficient fashion. The purpose of art is to bring alien beauty from the alien dimensions in which it resides into the three dimensional human world as a source of positive reinforcement for the idea that we are ourselves part of this non local universe of information. These kinds of perceptions will dissolve the illusions of the limited historical vision and replace it with a technologically based, hyperdimensionally sophisticated neoshamanism completely capable of the rescue and restoration of the human destiny and the planetary ecosystem.”
• Terrence McKenna

We as a species are going to live in the imagination. The imagination is the future frontier for humanity. It may be a combination of drugs, techniques, technologies, linguistic re-design of our language assumptions. All of this may be necessary to propel us into a world whose rules are not the laws of physics, but the laws of the human imagination.

• Terrence McKenna

Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination."

• Terrence McKenna

We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything... This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.

• Terrence 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.” - Terrence McKenna

“We live in condensations of our imagination” ― 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

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

One idea that is worth entertaining, because it is entertaining, not necessarily because it's the truth, is the idea that the imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present. In other words, it's very clear from an evolutionary point-of-view that our body and our sensory perceptors are organized in such a way as to protect us—to warn of danger, to give the muscles to respond to that danger when it comes. The imagination doesn't seem to work quite like that. If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane, it's paranoia. -Terrence McKenna

It raises the possibility, then, that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception. Not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local, and never can be. -TM

If you take the view that biology does nothing in vain, and evolutionary economics are incredibly spare, then why have this faculty that allows one to command and manipulate realities which do not exist. I mean, that's, to my mind, the basic function of the imagination.

• Terrence McKenna

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”  ― Terence McKenna “We live in condensations of our imagination”  ― Terence McKenna “We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.”  ― Terence McKenna "The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions,”

• Terrence 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

"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.” - Terrence McKenna

Western Civilization, Modern Civ.

Western civilization in a way can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings.

• Terence McKenna

We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions.

• Terence McKenna

The importance of the Imagination

"The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions,”

• Terrence McKenna

“… For me the imagination is the goal of history see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. And its on a very crude level when its, ‘you make your mask and I make my mask and then we dance around together.’And it seven at a very crude level when its, ‘you design your shopping mall and I’ll design my World Trade Center and we’ll put them on the same piece of real estate.’ But we’re coming now through media, I believe, through virtual reality and human machine integration and this kind of thing into a situation where the imagination is going to become something that we can share … that the path of mind through its own meanderings will become something that can be recorded and played back.  We will have the possibility of living in our own past or creating and trading realities as art, and art as life lived in the imagination is the great archetype that rears itself up at the end of history … ”

• TM

Ideology

“Ideology always leads to atrocity.”

• Terrence McKenna

Intellectual Anarchism

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

The Danger of Culture

“Create your own culture… create your own roadshow….” Terrence McKenna

“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

“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”

• Terrence McKenna

The Death of Old World & Birth of A New

this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars \*“May you be alive at the end of the world” - Irish toast

I remember once in a psilocybin trance I expressed concern about the state of the world and the nous spoke, the Logos spoke, and it said, “No big deal, this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.” We are in the birth canal of a planetary birthing process, and as you know, if you come upon a birth in progress you would never dream that this is the culmination of a natural process. It looks like a catastrophe of some sort. There is moaning and groaning and screaming and thrashing and blood is being shed and there is a feeling that the walls are closing in, and yet it is scripted into each of us as a microcosmic reflection of the completion of human history — and not only human history — because we are simply the hands and eyes of all life, all process on this planet. The Gnostics believe that the earth is like an egg and that a moment will come when the egg must be split asunder. I love to quote the Grateful Dead, “You can’t go back and you can’t stand still. If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.” That is what we are being funnelled toward, that is the message of alchemy. That is the quintessence and perfection of the human enterprise, the biological enterprise. I like to recall the Irish toast, “May you be alive at the end of the world,” and we have a real crack at it. It’s not a pessimistic vision. It’s the most optimistic vision that one can suppose.”

• Terence McKenna

Technology & Nature, AI,

"Notice that the Internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They’re largely metals: silicon, glass, copper, gold, and silver – these are the products of demonic artifice. These are the things that the alchemists dreamed of." Terence Mckenna

Novelty Theory & The “Strange Attractor”

There is a magnetic “strange attractor” as Terrence McKenna said which is drawing all of life towards its ultimate fulfillment, towards transcendence, towards illumination and an ultimate crescendo.

“We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don’t think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a “destiny“, but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster — that’s the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example — we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate.”

• Terence McKenna, 1996

Reality, Insanity, Truth

"The search for somebody smarter than you are is totally futile because when you find them, you're not gonna know what the hell they're talking about."

• Terence McKenna

The thing about encountering someone of a significant greater level of intelligence than you Is that anyone more than a step or two above you on the ladder Will be completely incomprehensible to you.

You will think they are insane and deluded.

People don’t know what they don’t know

• (paraphrased from Terrence McKenna)

If Truth can be shared so as to be Understood, It will be Believed.

Language

Our Reality is Made of Language “We cannot evolve faster than we can evolve our language.” – Terence McKenna

The Gaian Dream

"There may be entities seeking control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself, because this process which is underway will take the control freak by the short-and-curlies and throw them against the wall! It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.”

• Terence McKenna (Dreaming Awake at the End of Time)"

Unsorted

Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, 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

One idea that is worth entertaining, because it is entertaining, not necessarily because it's the truth, is the idea that the imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present. In other words, it's very clear from an evolutionary point-of-view that our body and our sensory perceptors are organized in such a way as to protect us—to warn of danger, to give the muscles to respond to that danger when it comes. The imagination doesn't seem to work quite like that. If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane, it's paranoia. -Terrence McKenna

Separating art from imagination is simply the exercise of separating cause from effect. Art—sculpture, poetry, painting, dance—is like the footprints of where the imagination has been. The abstract expressionists—Pollock particularly—always insisted that a painting, a Pollock, is not what the process is about. The process is about making a Pollock, being Pollock in the act of creation. What the rest of us are then left with is a husk, a tracing, something left behind which says "imagination was here, imagination acted in this place, and this is what is left." -Terrence McKenna

Nonlocality is the idea that any two particles that have been associated with each other in the past retain—across space and time—a kind of connectivity, such that if you change a physical aspect of one of these particles, the law of the conservation of parity will cause the other particle to also undergo a change at the exact same moment, even though they may by now be separated by millions of light years of space and time. This was thought to be so counterintuitive, so preposterous, that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was chosen as the lesser of two evils. But it turns out, over the past ten years, experiments have been done in the laboratory—not thought experiments, actual apparatus experiments—which secure that nonlocality actually is real. Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility, then, that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception. Not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local, and never can be. I myself am up in the air about this. Or, as you get to know me better, you will see I don't feel the need to believe, to proclaim as true or untrue, but it is useful, at this stage, for understanding our mental life. -Terrence McKenna

The way in which the internet will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent. To each other. I mean, I can imagine a child of the future, we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators, and things like that—in the future we won’t stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website. And everything will go into our website. And by the time we’re 25, or something, our website will be the size of the American Museum of Natural History. And you can wander through it. And as a gesture of intimacy you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that’s who you are—it’s your imagination. And, I think, in a sense, I’ve said, at times, that: The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination, and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. But it’ll have to run on psychedelic design principles, or it’s certain to be a mess. from True Conversations with Terence McKenna (1999)

\*“Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality, I think. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief, and if it's not there why should you believe in it? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.”

• Terence McKenna

The Human Individual

'Only psychos and shamans create their own reality'

• Terence McKenna

“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. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

• Terrence McKenna

Dreaming ourselves awake at the end of time - to realize the fulfimment of the great mystery of Life My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.

• Terrence Mckenna

“Human history is a Gaian dream.” ― Terence McKenna

“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

“So with freedom—and I know this is a cliché, but hopefully not in this context—with freedom of that sort comes enormous responsibility. And it’s paradoxical. Responsibility to dream and, coexisting and simultaneous with that, an obligation to awaken. In other words, an obligation to make sense, be non-trivial, not to squander resources in foolishness. An obligation to awaken, and an obligation to, at the same time, dream. And then the rational mind screams out, “But this is impossible! This is paradox!” But the subtle mind understands that we have now reached square one. By openly confronting the necessity for paradox, and by openly confronting the fact that we can only enclose our dilemma by speaking in at least two modes at once, (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/dreaming-awake-at-the-end-of-time) we begin to actually honor the complexity of the situation. And so tonight the thought I want to leave with you is: the simultaneous project of awakening, and the simultaneous project of entering deeper into the dream for the purpose of cultivating, evoking, experiencing, remembering, transmitting, and communicating (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/dreaming-awake-at-the-end-of-time) beauty—which feeds back into the awakening process. Otherwise the awakening will be traumatic and demoralizing. We will awaken to an AIDS-ravaged Earth, to ecotastrophy, planetary warming, complete collapse of any concern for the destiny of future generations. This awakening must not be disempowering. And the mantle that can be spread over the awakening to counteract the possibility of disempowerment is this wish to evoke, realize, and serve the project of bringing ever greater amounts of beauty into the world.“

• TM

What’s Going On?

Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence. What does it mean? What does it mean, first of all, to be a biological creature—to be, as an animal—what is that? And then—what is it to be that, embedded then in a culture with histories and languages and aesthetic canons and literatures and scientific hypothesis about the cosmos, so forth and so on. And my personal journey, if you want to put it that way, lay through a successive series of, um, I almost would—I almost said "disappointments" but "awakenings" could be another word, as I realized that nobody has their finger on what's going on. These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses. And science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category "matter and energy."

Authority & Experts

"There are no experts" “I know that I don’t know anything more than you know… There are no experts. There is only the integrity of doing and having done.” "The search for somebody smarter than you are is totally futile because when you find them, you're not gonna know what the hell they're talking about." “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.” "If you want a teacher, try a waterfall, or a mushroom, or a mountain wilderness, or a storm-pounded seashore. This is where the action is. It's not back in the hive. It's not in the anthill, it's not knocking your head against the floor in front somebody who claims that because of their lineage and whose feet they washed and whose feet they washed, that you should give credence to them. Knowledge is provisional. And we are yet to approach even the first moment of civilized understanding. The way it is to be done is by trusting yourself, trusting your intuition. Reject authority, authority is a lie and an abomination. Authority will lead you into ruin. It's not real."

Insanity_

“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”

Language_

We cannot evolve faster than we can evolve our language.

“Reality is Made of Language”

That's why it is so important to communicate, for all of us to put our best foot forward, to put our best metaphors on the table. Because 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. And no culture, so far as I am aware, has ever consciously tried to evolve its language, with the awareness that evolving language was evolving reality. Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, “that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,” instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent trans-formative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of dis-empowered perception.

On Reality & Culture

‟Unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.” “What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.” “a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. bird. bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.”

Culture is not your friend

"Culture is just a cult you don't know you are in". “We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth.” “I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don’t think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium” “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.” “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.” “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. But 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.” “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. "Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned you might jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know may be wrong.” "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. And yet, 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. But 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. This is something, culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture. Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important. But the 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 - meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood…" “We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And 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.” “Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.” … But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects. It 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.” “You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program of a living world and the imagination.”

The Insane World & Individual

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.” ― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don’t draw the obvious conclusion: it must also mean then that our present situation is absurd. “Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.”

Archaic Revival

“The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that 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 and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies.” ― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, 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. Thank you very, very much.” ― Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival

History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back, and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. It's a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace. Because what we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where were going in the universe. And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of feeling immediate experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience. But that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body -- in the body -- there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.

Novelty & The Eschaton

Novelty is density of connection. ... We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don’t think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a “destiny”, but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster—that’s the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example—we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate. "As the universe aged, it complexified. This is so obvious that it's never really been challenged, but on the other hand it's never been embraced as a general and dependable principle, either" "Eros and the Eschaton”. A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic world—meaning a world not based on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information, but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretised in three-dimensional space as choppers, arrowpoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, spacecraft, what have you—all of this complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate "Eros and the Eschaton".

The Shaman

“The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.” “Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.” “Shamanism and alchemy are a seamless enterprise.” "Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists: shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago, there was no other form of religion on this planet; that was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred." In "Conversations At the Edge of Magic" (1994), McKenna said "Shamanism is about the felt presence of immediate experience in the absence of theory," and in "Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness" he observed that the shaman is usually "an intellectual and alienated from society." "The shaman is to be found sitting at the headman's side in the council meetings, but after the council meeting he returns to his hut at the edge of the village. Shamans are peripheral to society's goings on in ordinary social life in every sense of the word. They are called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill, a psychological difficulty, a marital quarrel, a theft, or weather that must be predicted." "Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans in various places and times is that once you get past the language barrier what shamans are are simply curious people, intellectuals of a certain type. In Australian Aboriginal slang, a Shaman is called 'a clever fellow.'"

The Task of the Artist - A New Myth, A New Story

“When we free ourselves, we are freed into a dimension where art is an obligation” “Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.” “Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don’t produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.” I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don’t think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium. Well, how do you shed your culture? How do you transcend your culture? By digging into your soul with the tools that have been given you to make art. This is how cultures are transformed: by art which flows up and actually (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/winter-king) submerges the previous cultural forms. “Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity.” So, now we are in the absurd position of being able to do anything, and what we are doing is fouling our own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction. This is because the poets, the artists have not articulated a moral vision. The moral vision must come from the unconscious. It doesn’t have to do, I believe, ……..these post-meaning movements in art: deconstructionism, and this sort of thing. I mean, I'm basically putting out a very conservative, but I think,exciting program for art: that art’s task is to save the soul of mankind. And, that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because if the artists, who are self-selected for being able to journey into the Other… if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate—just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And, believing as I do, that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. But unless the memes are released to play the game, there is no progress. Terrence McKenna, Memes, Drugs and Community The world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language.. Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us. "Because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe." Terence McKenna “The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language.”

Creating A Better World_

“We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.”  ― 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. And yet 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.” “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.” “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.” “The psychedelic community has not yet recognized or named itself as a community. We are well behind gays and black people and all those other minorities … we are still trying to figure out if we are a community. And if we are a community, and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies—it's not that we are all supposed to become dope dealers, it's that we are all supposed to become artists; that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art—we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization, and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far … and they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously.”

The Psychedelic Experience_

“I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.” “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.” “If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.” My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to the dark ocean of mind, and let our nets down into that sea. And what you're after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we're looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, "Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril?", and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle-size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible. Middle-size ideas we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner. And every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It's not for your elucidation, it's not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. 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 in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about. LSD - Terence Mckenna - The Purpose Of Psychedelics “Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.” “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. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.” ― Terence McKenna "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told: “You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society. You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.” Contrast this with what a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our society is told. They’re told: “You don’t fit in. You are becoming a problem. You don’t pull your own weight. You are not of equal worth to the rest of us. You are sick. You have to go to the hospital. You have to be locked up.” – You are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society. So that treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable." - Terrance McKenna

The Gaian Mind_

“The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had 5- or 6-billion years to create a slow moving mind that is made of oceans, and rivers, and rainforests, and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined-the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, we have a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance. “ "There may be entities seeking control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself, because this process which is underway will take the control freak by the short-and-curlies and throw them against the wall! It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.” It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. 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. — Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double" I remember once in a psilocybin trance I expressed concern about the state of the world and the nous spoke, the Logos spoke, and it said, “No big deal, this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.” We are in the birth canal of a planetary birthing process, and as you know, if you come upon a birth in progress you would never dream that this is the culmination of a natural process. It looks like a catastrophe of some sort. There is moaning and groaning and screaming and thrashing and blood is being shed and there is a feeling that the walls are closing in, and yet it is scripted into each of us as a microcosmic reflection of the completion of human history — and not only human history — because we are simply the hands and eyes of all life, all process on this planet. The Gnostics believe that the earth is like an egg and that a moment will come when the egg must be split asunder. I love to quote the Grateful Dead, “You can’t go back and you can’t stand still. If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.” That is what we are being funnelled toward, that is the message of alchemy. That is the quintessence and perfection of the human enterprise, the biological enterprise. I like to recall the Irish toast, “May you be alive at the end of the world,” and we have a real crack at it. It’s not a pessimistic vision. It’s the most optimistic vision that one can suppose.”

• Terence McKenna

Find the others

“We need to interact with like-minded people throughout the world to establish the new intellectual order which will be the salvation of mankind.” “We are not an army, so our strategy must be stealth. It is an alchemical strategy. And what do I mean by stealth? The house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, by vision. And what is new, is that there are massive technologies available to us that were not available in the sixties… No gay kid in Montana, no Chinese scholar in Botswana. No person anywhere with a specialized interest or predilection now need feel alone. There is no aloneness. You can now find your people. One of the things Tim Leary said in the 1960s that I always remembered but I never heard anybody talk about or ever really heard him quote. It was a great rallying cry. It was much better than Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out; and it was this: “find the others.” “Find the others, and then you will know what to do.” And now you CAN find the others. You don't have to stick a flower in your hair and go to San Francisco. Now you can find the others! You just go to the Web. Find the others. We all need to create affinity groups which are subsets of the larger community that we are part of. And then, using this technology, which was designed to keep track of us, pick our pockets, and sell us junk that we don’t want. Use this technology to produce art. Massive amounts of subversive art. And all art is subversive. I’m not calling for an ideological agenda. All truth which springs from the individual is subversive.” “If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me.”

Personal Empowerment

“Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.” “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.”

Memes_

At the present moment I make no distinction between art and techne. I mean, to my mind these things are the same thing. A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It’s changed before, but not for a long time in our lives. Not since before our lives. But now it’s changing and there are many, many possibilities. The English biologist Dawkins invented the word “meme.” D’you all know what a meme is? It’s the smallest unit of an idea. It’s like what a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology. And so our task is to create memes. Madonna is a meme, Catholicism is a meme, Marxism is a meme, yellow sweaters are a meme. Create memes. Rainbow-colored dreadlocks are a meme. Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate! Just like genes replicate and infect and move into the organism of society. And—believing as I do that society operates on a kind of biological economy—then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. But unless the memes are released to play the game, there’s no progress.

Technology_

"Notice that the Internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They’re largely metals: silicon, glass, copper, gold, and silver – these are the products of demonic artifice. These are the things that the alchemists dreamed of." Terence Mckenna “Some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and nothing can stop it.” Both computers and drugs are what I would call "function-specific arrangements of matter," and as we develop nanotechnological abilities as we move into the next century, it will be more and more clear that the difference between drugs and machines is simply that one is too large to swallow. And our best people are working on that "Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines". The way in which the internet will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent. To each other. I mean, I can imagine a child of the future, we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators, and things like that—in the future we won’t stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website. And everything will go into our website. And by the time we’re 25, or something, our website will be the size of the American Museum of Natural History. And you can wander through it. And as a gesture of intimacy you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that’s who you are—it’s your imagination. And, I think, in a sense, I’ve said, at times, that: The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination, and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. But it’ll have to run on psychedelic design principles, or it’s certain to be a mess. from True Conversations with Terence McKenna (1999) I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980, but I never knew what... how it would come or what it would be. In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artefact like the internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world. We are building the nervous system of the human oversoul. We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies... societies—human groups run by rules—into telepathic collectivities of some sort. ... We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.

• Terrance McKenna “Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind. That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with."

Belief_

“I have been vehemently accused by people who didn’t understand me of not believing in anything. I don’t believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a candle for me at night. It’s a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip. After all, what is the basis for believing anything? I mean, you have to understand: You’re a monkey. In some kind of a biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the economy of survival—this is not a philosophy course. So belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn’t to be believed, it’s to be dealt with—experienced and modeled.” My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. “Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality, I think. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief, and if it's not there why should you believe in it? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.”

Stories_

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom. And people have asked me, then... is the goal to make the novel about yourself? I don't think so. The goal is to become the author of the novel. Then you can write any damn ending you want for your character or any other. And this 'becoming the author' is this psychedelic detachment. And suddenly you go from being a chessman on the board to the chessmaster looking at the board. It's empowering

Truth_

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. If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed. -Terrence Mckenna "For 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 raccoon 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." "Not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine" “The real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense.” "I represent to myself—and I hope to convince you of this—radical ideas, innovative ideas, even peculiar ideas, but not loose or preposterous ideas,"

Reality_

“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.” This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the "it's only a hallucination" thing—that horseshit is just passé. I mean, reality is only a hallucination for crying out loud, haven't you heard? "What's the deal with understanding anyway? I mean, you're a monkey...this isn't a philosophy course, reality is meant to be dealt with, not understood." "...Wittgenstein was raving about something, and one of his students said, 'but is it the truth?' and he said 'well, it's true enough'. And this really means a great divide has been crossed when you can say that, because it means you understand now that you are no longer a fairy in a platonic super-world, but that you are actually a monkey with a brain full of mush trying to sort out what's right in front of you. True enough is what we should probably rest with.” "This is not necessarily the truth, this is what Wittgenstein would have called an exercise in searching for that which is true enough." Terence McKenna It's amazing to me—I mean, if you were to meet a termite to state that his or her goal in life was the perfect modeling of the cosmos, you would think it was quite a comic undertaking, and yet how different are we that we should presume to more than a shadow of a shadow of the truth. "All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don't draw the obvious conclusion: It must also mean then that our present situation is absurd" "The World Could Be Anything”. I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, "Everything you know is wrong." But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like "are you alive?", "are you dead?", "are you you?" seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.

The balkanization of epistemology_

For some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place. And what I mean by that is: there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers. Their next door neighbors may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor. … It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is that technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story—a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist electronic pre-apocalyptics existence. And so, into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality, rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions: epistemological cartoons, if you will. … Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion … is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them, and then we can solve our technological problems? Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, you know, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying: that the real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. … Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control—the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others—but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. … Because this process which is underway will take the control-freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.

Ideology_

“Ideology always leads to atrocity.” “Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

Secrets_

“Real secrets can’t be told And a secret that can be told isn’t a secret” 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.

Magic_

“So the worth of it (a DMT trip) is that it shows you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world is made of magic. That’s what the world is made of. Not natural law, not interlocking cause and effect, not any of these things. The world is Magic. Not a little bit. 100 percent. Every atom from one end of this Cosmos to the other is magic, magic magic.” “Every electron is the yawning mouth of a wormhole that leads to quadrillions of higher-dimensional universes that are completely beyond rational apprehension. Matter is not lacking in magic; matter is magic.” “Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.” “Matter is not lacking in magic, matter is magic.” - Terence McKenna “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

The Future_

“We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don’t think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a “destiny“, but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster — that’s the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example — we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate.”

Apotheosis of Man_

“The culmination of man’s effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that we are ‘doing’ it. It’s that a natural law that we are still unaware of is inexorably unfolding.”

Reductionist, Materialist Science_

“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.” Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing. Terence McKenna “The great strength of alchemical thinking, and the way in which it is completely antithetical to science, and in fact why science has so much contempt for it, is because the alchemists had the wisdom to see that everything occurs in the presence of its opposite. That, it's not "either or", it's both; and. They called this the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, the union of opposites. This is a great truth, because I think all of us live under the rubrics of "Am I good? Am I bad? Am I lazy? Am I obsessed?". And the answer is, that it is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being, to ignore the union of opposites.” “Western civilization in a way can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings.” “We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions.” It is only the conceit of the scientific and post-industrial societies that allows us to even propound some of the questions that we take to be so important. For instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring premised upon a number of assumptions that a moment's reflection will show are completely false. To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world - psychics, shamans, mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads are filled with information, but it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is validated through consensus via certain sanctioned instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are so inundated by these signals — these other dimensions — that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit. We need to run it like a headline... it goes something like this: "Scientists discover nearby hyperobject in alternative continuum." It's that sort of thing. ... ... Because that's how big it is in there. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. We are like monkeys, sitting in the prescence of a flying saucer whose doorway has just been flung open. This is what we need to become conscious of. We need to dissolve the assumptions of the culture. And this is why LSD was so terrifying, because I firmly believe one of the things psychedelics do, is they dissolve cultural assumptions. It doesn't matter whether you're a member of the politburo or a go-go dancer in Berlin or a professor of agronomy in Kansas — you will doubt your beliefs and your world if you take psychedelics. This is good; we need to dissolve our cultural conditioning, and try to get down to brass tacks, because I'm convinced that reality is a tinker toy set that we can learn to take apart and put together in completely different ways. And we're gonna have to pull some real rabbits out of the hat, or the planet is just going to pour over the edge into chaos. And, you know, before they were called 'psychedelics', they were called 'consciousness expanding drugs'. Well, if there's any possibility that that's true, let's put our best people on it. Because consciousness is what we're dying for. We don't have enough of it.... I conducted the following exercise: I said I would move backward through the epistemological history of science to the last sane moment science knew. And then analyze what that consists of. And I'm not completed in this process, but what I find is that a curious betrayal has occured in science, that with the rise of capitalism and industrialism, science has actually become — has allowed assumptions to be made that betrayed its original intent. And, what I mean by that is that modern science relies on statistical analysis of data. ... This approach to phenomena mitigates against unusual phenomena, inevitably, because they are "statistically insignificant" — that's the phrase that is actually used.

Estrangement from Nature_

“Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism. The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was born.” ― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge “People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.”

Human History_

“Human history is a Gaian dream.”

Imagination_

"The destiny of human beings is to live in the imagination, in the hands of the Goddess, and wherever that thrust is impeded, psychopathy will result."

• Terence McKenna "The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions,” "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.” - Terrence 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.” “It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a descent of the World’s Soul into all of us.” “… For me the imagination is the goal of history see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. And its on a very crude level when its, ‘you make your mask and I make my mask and then we dance around together.’And it seven at a very crude level when its, ‘you design your shopping mall and I’ll design my World Trade Center and we’ll put them on the same piece of real estate.’ But we’re coming now through media, I believe, through virtual reality and human machine integration and this kind of thing into a situation where the imagination is going to become something that we can share … that the path of mind through its own meanderings will become something that can be recorded and played back. We will have the possibility of living in our own past or creating and trading realities as art, and art as life lived in the imagination is the great archetype that rears itself up at the end of history … ”
• TM Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, 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 If you take the view that biology does nothing in vain, and evolutionary economics are incredibly spare, then why have this faculty that allows one to command and manipulate realities which do not exist. I mean, that's, to my mind, the basic function of the imagination.
• Terrence McKenna The human imagination, as I suppose it, is almost an extension of the visual faculty. Imagination is something that one beholds. -TM One idea that is worth entertaining, because it is entertaining, not necessarily because it's the truth, is the idea that the imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present. In other words, it's very clear from an evolutionary point-of-view that our body and our sensory perceptors are organized in such a way as to protect us—to warn of danger, to give the muscles to respond to that danger when it comes. The imagination doesn't seem to work quite like that. If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane, it's paranoia. -Terrence McKenna Separating art from imagination is simply the exercise of separating cause from effect. Art—sculpture, poetry, painting, dance—is like the footprints of where the imagination has been. The abstract expressionists—Pollock particularly—always insisted that a painting, a Pollock, is not what the process is about. The process is about making a Pollock, being Pollock in the act of creation. What the rest of us are then left with is a husk, a tracing, something left behind which says "imagination was here, imagination acted in this place, and this is what is left." -Terrence McKenna Nonlocality is the idea that any two particles that have been associated with each other in the past retain—across space and time—a kind of connectivity, such that if you change a physical aspect of one of these particles, the law of the conservation of parity will cause the other particle to also undergo a change at the exact same moment, even though they may by now be separated by millions of light years of space and time. This was thought to be so counterintuitive, so preposterous, that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was chosen as the lesser of two evils. But it turns out, over the past ten years, experiments have been done in the laboratory—not thought experiments, actual apparatus experiments—which secure that nonlocality actually is real. Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility, then, that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception. Not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local, and never can be. I myself am up in the air about this. Or, as you get to know me better, you will see I don't feel the need to believe, to proclaim as true or untrue, but it is useful, at this stage, for understanding our mental life. -Terrence McKenna The way in which the internet will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent. To each other. I mean, I can imagine a child of the future, we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators, and things like that—in the future we won’t stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website. And everything will go into our website. And by the time we’re 25, or something, our website will be the size of the American Museum of Natural History. And you can wander through it. And as a gesture of intimacy you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that’s who you are—it’s your imagination. And, I think, in a sense, I’ve said, at times, that: The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination, and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. But it’ll have to run on psychedelic design principles, or it’s certain to be a mess. from True Conversations with Terence McKenna (1999) One idea that is worth entertaining, because it is entertaining, not necessarily because it's the truth, is the idea that the imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present. In other words, it's very clear from an evolutionary point-of-view that our body and our sensory perceptors are organized in such a way as to protect us—to warn of danger, to give the muscles to respond to that danger when it comes. The imagination doesn't seem to work quite like that. If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane, it's paranoia. -Terrence McKenna It raises the possibility, then, that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception. Not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local, and never can be. -TM If you take the view that biology does nothing in vain, and evolutionary economics are incredibly spare, then why have this faculty that allows one to command and manipulate realities which do not exist. I mean, that's, to my mind, the basic function of the imagination.
• Terrence McKenna "The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions,”
• Terrence 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 imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.” We as a species are going to live in the imagination. The imagination is the future frontier for humanity. It may be a combination of drugs, techniques, technologies, linguistic re-design of our language assumptions. All of this may be necessary to propel us into a world whose rules are not the laws of physics, but the laws of the human imagination.
• Terrence McKenna Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination."
• Terrence McKenna We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything... This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.
• Terrence McKenna “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.” “We live in condensations of our imagination” “We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.” “… For me the imagination is the goal of history see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. And its on a very crude level when its, ‘you make your mask and I make my mask and then we dance around together.’And it seven at a very crude level when its, ‘you design your shopping mall and I’ll design my World Trade Center and we’ll put them on the same piece of real estate.’ But we’re coming now through media, I believe, through virtual reality and human machine integration and this kind of thing into a situation where the imagination is going to become something that we can share … that the path of mind through its own meanderings will become something that can be recorded and played back. We will have the possibility of living in our own past or creating and trading realities as art, and art as life lived in the imagination is the great archetype that rears itself up at the end of history … ” “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.” Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, 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. "The human imagination is the dimension beyond space and time, or it precedes all dimensions,”
• Terrence 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.”
• Terrence McKenna “In other words, absent the conditioning of the animal body the human mind is a superb instrument for exploring non local space and time. And I don’t really have time to flail you with it this afternoon but this idea of non locality of information coming out of physics begins to make it look like we have a sensory organ which we have misunderstood. We know that our eyes tell us what is there to be seen. Our hand tells us what is there to be felt. But we have this peculiar organ called the imagination. We tend to think that the imagination is a psychological function for the production of what we call fantasy. It isn’t. The imagination is a perceptual organ for non local information. And when you imagine something, you are seeing something which is real but not anywhere tangential to your three dimensional spacetime locus and never can be. So when we smoke DMT or take psilocybin and are inducted into these worlds of self transforming elf machines, alien intellects, so forth and so on I believe this is non local information and that this non local information will become more and more important for the rest of our cultural development. There are no aliens, in my opinion, visiting this planet in ships of beryllium with a program of universal brotherhood. I find that preposterous for reasons too complex to go into. But I do believe that we can connect into a universal I don’t know the word, hegemony is somewhat loaded, but a universal system of intelligent organization. We can communicate with aliens, but they will always come clothed in the stuff of the human imagination. Art is the process of downloading non local information into local space. And now that we have understood this, we can carry the program of art forward in a much more efficient fashion. The purpose of art is to bring alien beauty from the alien dimensions in which it resides into the three dimensional human world as a source of positive reinforcement for the idea that we are ourselves part of this non local universe of information. These kinds of perceptions will dissolve the illusions of the limited historical vision and replace it with a technologically based, hyperdimensionally sophisticated neoshamanism completely capable of the rescue and restoration of the human destiny and the planetary ecosystem.”

Mysteries, Strangeness_

“.. the way I interpret the material you deal with Art (Bell), the weird experiences, and the ideas people generate out of it, and the public attention to all that, is that something is trying to be told, the universe is trying to reach us …” “My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.”

The Body, Sex, Nature,_

"Nature seeks to communicate, all being is pregnant with language." “I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.” “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

Courage_

“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. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

Mushroom_

"Man must have a plan. If he doesn't have a plan he will become a part of someone else's plan" "What you call man is time" "Nature loves courage. The way nature responds to courage is by removing obstacles."

• The mushroom said to Terrence McKenna McKenna said in "New Maps of Hyperspace" that he once asked the mushroom "what are you doing on Earth?" The mushroom answered: "Listen, if you're a mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I'm telling you, this was a very nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control."

Misc. To Sort_

“Nothing lasts but nothing is lost.” “You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears.” “If you’re not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing.” "The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer." - “I often use the metaphor that psychedelics are to psychology what telescopes in the sixteenth century were to astronomy. If a person is not willing to look through the telescope he cannot call himself an astronomer.” “Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.” "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." – Terence McKenna "if you're going into a trip not questioning that u may have taken too much, then u havn't taken enough.” The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we canperceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.” Surrender to the felt presence of immediate experience There is no reality. The mansions of heaven and the gardens of paradise lie in each and all of us The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream. “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” “The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation” The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I'm a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what'll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there's nothing to be well adjusted to "The truth is in the felt space of the body in the moment. Some great religions have gotten this far and they are-- whatever they are and there are many of them-- come at last to advocate something called Meditation, which has many guises and travels under many names and methods, but what it primarily is, is... Attention to attention." "Find The Others” "English language is a virus from space" "What's the deal with understanding anyway? I mean, you're a monkey...this isn't a philosophy course, reality is meant to be dealt with, not understood.” "We are all little pieces of eternity sticking into three dimensional space." The body is the nexus of the mystery of life. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. I mean, that's mind over matter: That's the violation of every scientific principle in the books... The body is the nexus of the mystery of life. And our culture takes us out of the body, and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us; that's why it's called escape, because it's escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what's on the tube, from consuming trash media—it's escape from all of that, into the authenticity of the body "Eros and the Eschaton". "Worry is preposterous; we don't know enough to worry." McKenna often paraphrased this from Wei Boyang, a second-century Chinese author and Taoist. "Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf" This is in response to Sartre's "Nature is mute” statement "My life is a mess. My message is my message" A conversation between Terence McKenna and Ram Dass. "Everything is a blessing, and everything comes as a gift. And I don't regret anything about the situation I find myself in. We're all under sentence of 'moving up' at some point in our lives. I have an absolute faith that the universe prefers joy and distils us with joy and this what religion is trying to download to us, and this is what every moment of life is trying to do - if we can open to it. And we psychedelic people, if we could secure that death has no sting, we would have done the greatest service to suffering intelligence that can be done. And I feel that it's close, and I feel strong. I feel strong because of this community and the plants that it rests on, and the ancient practises that it rests on, and I am full of hope, not only for my own small problems, but for humanity in general” "Our zeitgeist may be creative dreaming in the presence of technology, a place haunted by genies which wrap us in the blanket of their mysterium and lead us forward. Alchemy by another name” "I see my contribution to this Corpus Hermetica, that body of literature based around natural magic, and the heretical message opposed to Christianity. That man is the measure of all things, and not some fallen creature, but that man is somehow a CO-creator of reality, some kind of Pythagorean God that works through numbers and mathematics and color and musical form” "The mushroom said to me once, 'For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another’" "To paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane: Our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose; it may be stranger than we can suppose” J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), a British geneticist, wrote in Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927): "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." McKenna paraphrased this often, observing, also in True Hallucinations, that life is stranger than "even the strangest among us" can suppose. 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 in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about. "Culture is just a cult you don't know you are in". The Beliefs of a Witoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right. Here is something we have not assimilated. 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. 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. 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. “The chief lesson to be learned from the psychedelic experience is the degree to which unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us the unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.” “Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind.” “Plants are the missing link in the search to understand the human mind and its place in nature.” “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.” – Food of the Gods, 1992 “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. 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. — Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double", "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth" “Only psychos and shamans create their own reality”

• Terrence Mckenna “I think any reasonable person can conclude that the redemption of the world, if it’s to be achieved, can only be achieved through magic. It’s too late for science. It’s too late for hortatory politics.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRo “The Hermetic Corpus is the most poetic and cleanly expressed outpouring of ancient knowledge that we possess, but it was reworked in the hands of these late Hellenistic peoples. It is essentially a religion of the redemption of the earth through magic.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRo “We also are living in the twilight of a great empire, and I don’t particularly mean the American empire, I mean the empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern industrialism, the empire of science. Science has exhausted itself and become mere techne. It’s still able to perform its magical tricks, but it has no claim on a metaphysic with any meaning, because the program of rational understanding that was pursued by science has pushed so deeply into the phenomenon of nature that the internal contradictions of the method are now exposed for all to see.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRocoincidentia oppositorum “ In discussing alchemy we will meet with the concept of the coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of opposites. This is an idea that is completely alien to science. It’s the idea that nothing can be understood unless it is simultaneously viewed as both being what it is and what it is not, and in alchemical symbolism we will meet again and again symbolic expression of the coincidentia oppositorum. It may be in the form of a hermaphrodite, it may be in the form of the union of soul and Luna, it may be in the form of the union of mercury with lead or with sulphur. In other words, alchemical thinking is thinking that is always antithetical, always holds the possibility that by a mere shift of perspective its opposite premise will gain power and come into focus.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRo “Imagination: I think this is the first time I’ve used this word this evening. The imagination is central to the alchemical opus because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination, taken to be a physical dimension. I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three-dimensional space. We are polluting it, we are overpopulating it, we are using it up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination, and to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and re-encounter the mind; and we can do this psychedelically, we can do this yogically, or we can do it alchemically and Hermetically.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRoOur Cultural Crisis “We are the inheritors of that tradition, but it is now once again exhausted and our cultural crisis is much greater. It is global, it is total; it involves every man, woman and child on this planet. Every bug, bird and tree is caught up in the cultural crisis that we have engendered. Our ideas are exhausted: the ideas that we inherit out of Christianity and its half-brother science, or its bastard child science. What I’m suggesting is that an Archaic Revival needs to take place and it seems to be well in hand in the form of the revival of Goddess worship and shamanism and partnership, but notice that these things are old — 10,000 years or more old — but there was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn, persists right up to the present.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRo “My impulse is to, in the most austere sense, repopularize, reintroduce this kind of thinking so that people can live it out, and then, step by step, we can evolve our language and evolve our understanding to make our way back to the garden, back to Eden. It’s said that Christ opened the doors to paradise, yes, but he closed the doors to Eden; and paradise is a very airy place where everybody sits around on clouds strumming their lyres. I think that what we want to do is to make our way back to the alchemical garden. That’s where our roots are. That’s where meaning is. Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction, the coincidentia oppositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemas that are constantly beating us over the head with the “thou shalts” and “thou shoulds,” but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being, an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing. We each need to become Janus-faced and to incorporate into ourselves the banished contradictions of being that so haunt the enterprise of science. We can leave that behind, and when we do we reclaim authentic being; and authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That’s what they’re talking about: authentic being.”
• McKenna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RHdartcRoTransforming Lead into Gold “We’re lead, we’re saturnine…. It all begins in what is called the nigredo, the blackening, the depths of the leaden, saturnine, chaotic, fixed place, and that’s where we have been left by science and modernity and so forth and so on. That’s where the alchemist loves to begin. That’s where he or she stokes the furnace and begins the dissolutio et coagulatio that leads to the appearance of the stone.” "Notice that the Internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They’re largely metals: silicon, glass, copper, gold, and silver – these are the products of demonic artifice. These are the things that the alchemists dreamed of." Terence Mckenna