Quotes by Terence McKenna

We have to create culture, dont watch TV, dont read magazines, dont 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 youre worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, youre 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, were unimportant, were peripheral. Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that. And then youre a player, you dont 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 thats being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

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.

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.

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

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that weve managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. Thats what science is good for.It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.

I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and Im perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. Im not sure thats a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit from shinola? Thats very critical. I think reason can only take us a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination, but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divine imagination will lead us into complete paranoia.

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.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

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

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the Worlds Soul into all of us.

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of 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.

Human history is a Gaian dream.

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

It’s very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point and, as I say; the tools, the data that holds the potential for our salvation is now known, it is available: it is among us, but it is misrepresented, it is slandered, it is litigated against, and it’s up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us at some point in the future, which is: What did you do to help save the world?

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 thats being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

What is important is to understand the true boundaries of reality, not the probable boundaries of possible future events. Although boundary conditions operate on the future, they are probabilistic constraints, not absolutely determined fact. We assume that ten minutes hence, the room we are in will still exist. It is a boundary condition that will define the next ten minutes in our space/time coordinate. But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence; that is free to be determined. One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist at any future moment. This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty. There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that. But we can make the inductive leap of faith that has to do with accumulated experience. We project that the existence of the room will remain a boundary condition, but in principle in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake and this building might not be left standing. However, for that to happen, the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted in some unexpected and improbable manner. What is so curious is that such a thing could occur.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.