Terence McKenna was an American ethnobotanist, psychonaut, mystic, author, lecturer, and advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants.
List Of 50 Terence Mckenna Quotes About Love, Culture, Dreams, And Life:
#1 “Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf.”
#2 “It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.”
#3 “You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind whistles between your ears.”
#4 “You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.”
#5 “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.”
#6 “Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.”
#7 ”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.”
#8 “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.”
#9 “Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
#10 “Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we’ve managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”
#11 “It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings.”
#12 “The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.”
#13 “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.”
#14 “You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.”
#15 “The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”
#16 ”How can we explain the legal toleration for alcohol, the most destructive of all intoxicants, and the almost frenzied efforts to repress nearly all other drugs?”
#17 “Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”
#18 “The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”
#19 “Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies.”
#20 “History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaotropic approaches, people look for metaphors and answers.”
#21 “Right here and now, one quantum away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.”
#22 “We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate.”
#23 “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
#24 “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”
#25 “There is a transcendental dimension beyond language… It’s just hard as hell to talk about!”
#26 “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.”
#27 “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.”
#28 “The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”
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#29 “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”
#30 “Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening”
#31 “Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
#32 “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
#33 “Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter.”
#34 “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
#35 “Only psychos and shamans create their own reality”
#36 “Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”
#37 “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.”
#38 “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”
#39 “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”
#40 “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.”
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#41 “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.”
#42 “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.”
#43 “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.”
#44 “If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”
#45 “The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”
#46 “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.”
#47 “Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
#48 “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.”
#49 ”’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.”
#50 “We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”
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As a founder and chief author at InsightState.com, Bulgarea Candin helps readers on their spiritual journeys. His writings are designed to inspire creativity and personal growth, guiding readers on their journey to a more fulfilled and enlightened life.