16-04-2014, 09:24 AM
"We have to createculture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen toNPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where youare now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you'reworrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, thenyou are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons whichare maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress likeX 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 yourfriends 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 thecultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moronconsuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bonesof a dying world."
― Terence McKenna
"Chaos is whatwe've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It isfeared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, whichclenches because its existence is defined in terms of control."
― Terence McKenna
"Nature lovescourage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to thatcommitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossibledream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosopherswho really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this iswhat they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss anddiscovering its a feather bed."
― Terence McKenna
"If the words'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the rightto experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration ofIndependence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
― Terence McKenna
"The syntacticalnature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world ismade of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of,you can make of it whatever you wish."
― Terence McKenna
"The cost ofsanity in this society, is a certain levelof alienation"
― Terence McKenna
"Psychedelics areillegal not because a loving government is concerned that you mayjump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal becausethey dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models ofbehaviour and information processing. They open you up to thepossibility that everything you know is wrong."
― Terence McKenna
"You have to takeseriously the notion that understanding the universe is yourresponsibility, because the only understanding of the universe thatwill be useful to you is your own understanding."
― Terence McKenna
"You are anexplorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good youcan do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangeredby the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of theabsence of consciousness."
― Terence McKenna
"Westerncivilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet."
― Terence McKenna
"Only psychos andshamans create their own reality"
― Terence McKenna
"Television is bynature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content,uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably atool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The creative actis a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean ofchaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of itideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropicalsea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, somethingtears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row forshore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times whatslips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyologicalmetaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring homesomething that is food, food for the human community that we cansustain ourselves on and go forward."
― Terence McKenna
"You are a divinebeing. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginablepower and light, and you will return to those realms."
― Terence McKenna
"Ego is astructure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member ofa neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture,which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensusabout what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable."
― Terence McKenna
"We have been tothe moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart ofthe atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves becausewe sense that is where all the contradictions flow together."
― Terence McKenna
"If you don't havea plan, you become part of somebody else's plan."
― Terence McKenna
"Life lived in theabsence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism isbased on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego."
― Terence McKenna
"My technique isdon't believe anything. If you believe in something, you areautomatically precluded from believing its opposite."
― Terence McKenna
"The apocalypse isnot something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in majorportions of the planet and it's only because we live within abubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we stillhave the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse."
― Terence McKenna
"Nobody is smarterthan you are. And what if they are? What good is their understandingdoing you?"
― Terence McKenna
"Nature is not ourenemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to becherished and explored."
― Terence McKenna
"Right here andnow, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of activeintelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremelyalien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish forcontact with this other universe."
― Terence McKenna
"Even as thenineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of humandescent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that thoseapes were stoned apes."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"There is atranscendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell totalk about!"
― Terence McKenna
"The imaginationis the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literallyrealize our collective dreams."
― Terence McKenna
"I'll try to bearound and about. But if I'm not, then you know that I'm behindyour eyelids, and I'll meet you there"
― Terence McKenna
"We can begin therestructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have deniedfor so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion ofillegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"It's clearly acrisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have thetechnological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, tocure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack theintellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We mustdecondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it'snot easy."
― Terence McKenna
"Half the time youthink your thinking you're actually listening"
― Terence McKenna
"My voice speakingis a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carryingagree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without themeaning one has only little mouth noises "
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival
"The problem isnot to find the answer, it's to face the answer"
― Terence McKenna
"It is theimagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. Itis literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us."
― Terence McKenna
"Time will perfectmatter."
― Terence McKenna
"History is endingbecause the dominator culture has led the human species into a blindalley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look formetaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble itcasts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment itever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains ofAfrica 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great HornedMushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, beforeslavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets andmonotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future istaking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is notmodernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia forthe archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us bodypiercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll andcatastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for theparadise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africawhere the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of theanimal 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 thefuture is a forward escape into the past. This is what thepsychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and intothe wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this becauseif the community understands what it is that holds it together thecommunity will be better able to streamline itself for flight intohyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a newtrue story that tells us where we're going in the universe and thattrue story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and whenpsilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego issupressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of thedominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelicsreturn us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of thefeeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you andnobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is notinterested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that'swhat holds the community together. And as we break out of the sillymyths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplacewhat we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in thebody, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, aliendimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. Ithink of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experiencelike going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that younever figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the bodyand the way the body works itself into nature. What the ArchaicRevival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and thedefeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies ofthe people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get themon the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that meansyour getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected meansputting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition throughthing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaianmind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelicexperience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy ofthe planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert ofbogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the selfcan be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset thecompass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance,through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This iswhat we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace."
― Terence McKenna
"The shaman is notmerely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healedhimself."
― Terence McKenna,The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching
"Alcohol is usedby millions of people, both men and women, and I will make no friendsby taking the position that alcohol culture is not politicallycorrect. Yet how can we explain the legal toleration for alcohol, themost destructive of all intoxicants, and the almost frenzied effortsto repress nearly all other drugs? Could it not be that we arewilling to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it isallowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps usall infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator worldcharacterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?"
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"It is not easy tomeasure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and bein it."
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival
"The purpose oflife is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that theact of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."
― Terence McKenna
"Human history isa Gaian dream."
― Terence McKenna
"We tend todisempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. Andin the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything awayto somebody else, to something else."
― Terence McKenna
"You see, a secretis not something untold. It's something which can't be told."
― Terence McKenna
"No one knowsenough to worry."
― Terence McKenna
"A hallucinationis a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotapeabout Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life."
― Terence McKenna
"Nothing comesunannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's veryimportant to actually listen to your own intuition rather thandriving through it."
― Terence McKenna
"The ufo isnothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess intohistory, saying to science and paternalistically governed and drivenorganizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn theworld upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what itis, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated intothe production of toys for healthy children. That's what science isgood for. It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point ofview from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to havethe hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down."
― Terence McKenna
"The bigger youbuild the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
― Terence McKenna
"Our selfdiscoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern ofhistory. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, foronly through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In thefact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors."
― Terence McKenna,True Hallucinations
"Ecstasy is acomplex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph,surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoricunderstanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, atremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyonewho thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy withdrugs unless they're willing to get their noses rubbed in their ownstuff."
― Terence McKenna
"Ideology alwayspaves the way toward atrocity."
― Terence McKenna
"I often like tothink that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centeredphysics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphorthat we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupiesthe same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book islife with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something thatlacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be akind of release into the imagination in the sense that for charactersin a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension offreedom."
― Terence McKenna
"Reality is, youknow, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed todrag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip backinto the sea of the unreal."
― Terence McKenna
"There's lightat the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the backof your mind. And if you don't go to the back side of your mind youwill never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you seeit, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people.Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, Godis some kind of lost continent IN the human mind."
― Terence McKenna
"Not to know one'strue identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing a golem. And,indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass ofhuman beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies.Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow massstyle changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junkfood, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned totoxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted dailytelevision fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act ofconsuming."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The artist'stask is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a ditheringwhile Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, forbeing able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find theway, then the way cannot be found."
― Terence McKenna
"What civilizationis, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standingon each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's nota pleasant situation."
― Terence McKenna
"No culture onearth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms ofbeing inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue abusiness-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crisesand irreconcilable contradictions."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"We are told 'no',we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get athis, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to evenplay in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out ofthe hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into ahalf-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufacturedout of the bones of a dying world." -"
― Terence McKenna
"It's clearly acrisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These arethe two things that the psychedelics attack. We have thetechnological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, tocure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack theintellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We mustdecondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it'snot easy."
― Terence McKenna
"The race isn't tothe swift, it's to the thoughtful."
― Terence McKenna
"It's prettysimple, the ethical life. It's just demanding."
― Terence McKenna
"This is why theshaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need tofeel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselvesthrough creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of thiscreativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy isan act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self andthat which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our mapsof reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend tolose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only bygaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of timeand space and our role in them be glimpsed."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Our culture,self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology andegocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominatorattitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants orsubstances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. Iwill argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance andinsistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us oflife's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, andour grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intactthe wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style."
― Terence McKenna
"The monkey bodyhas carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more andmore to exist in a world made by the human imagination."
― Terence McKenna
"We live incondensations of our imagination"
― Terence McKenna
"But technology isthe real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the contextof the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technologicalmaterial. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; weput it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, spaceshuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in atechnological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool makingimplies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flyingsaucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space."
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival
"Feminism is atremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present contextprimarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yetpercolated throughout society that the advancement of women is aprogram vitally connected to the survival of human beings as aspecies. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on thecharacter of the atoms which compose them, and what we are mostmenaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. Ifwomen played a major role in policy formation and execution on thepart of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benignand ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism notas a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypicimages, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of ouremphasis that is expressed through our institutions."
― Terence McKenna
"I guess I shouldsay 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 I'm perfectly aware of thedifference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence.I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circlesas it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit fromshinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us acertain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination,but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divineimagination will lead us into complete paranoia."
― Terence McKenna
"There's only theintegrity of doing and having done."
― Terence McKenna
"Human beings areco-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis ofall magic."
― Terence McKenna
"Meaning lies inthe confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum.That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that areconstantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and"thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity ofbeing and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak,noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing."
― Terence McKenna
"I believe thatthe use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gaveus the model for all religions to follow. And when, after longcenturies of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, theknowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish tradedpartnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape ofnature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, wetraded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind ofthe planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis,and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetarycatastrophe."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"We are theinheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable."
― Terence McKenna
"Monotheismstrenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style thatperiodically places the ego and its values in perspective throughcontact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mysteryof plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy andwholeness, what Joyce called the "mama matrix most mysterious."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Neither Bwitistsnor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world.This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walktogether. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We havetwo hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of theseself-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "oneheartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not findit there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction oftheir selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated inBwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow ofmany qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved inthe presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence ofbelowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of itsopposite."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"If the ego is notregularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of theTranscendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from thesense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimateconsequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeatesWestern Civilization."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"From one point ofview the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be aliveand intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union ofall the senses with memory of the past and anticipation of thefuture. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerfulhallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, bothas a species and as individuals. The Transcendent Other is Naturewithout her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, andcausality."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"I think of goingto the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going tothe Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figuredout what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way theBody Works itself into Nature."
― Terence McKenna
"Like the octopi,our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts becomeour bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence ofthe more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath PhiloJudaeusa Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard butbeheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:
A more perfectarchetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing,and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require themediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as thetruth of things."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"You are not nakedwhen you take off your clothes. You still wear your religiousassumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, yourdelusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then,essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your ownpsyche…and it's from that position, a position outside thecultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questionsabout what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are wecaught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in placeto assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder thatlurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between thebirth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to returnto first premises."
― Terence McKenna
"The ArchaicRevival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, howeveruncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that lifelived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon whichprimordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, lifeenslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysteriousmatrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revivalthat our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"We are asked byscience to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness,and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion isthe limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believethis, you can believe anything."
― Terence McKenna
"Part of whatpsychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This iswhat makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is akind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is onewhich causes people to start questioning the rules of the game."
― Terence McKenna
"It was warm andsalty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old,old thing. I tried not to think about how much at the mercy of thesestrange people I now was. But in fact my courage was failing. BothDona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold andmantislike. A wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed tosplatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged light. I felt my lipsgo numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to myhammock and lay back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowingriver of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind of dream mentalpirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, andthis was the last impression I had. When I regained consciousness Iappeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave ofbrightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high.Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realised that my wave wasspeeding toward a rocky coastline."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The war on drugswas never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long aspossible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wringthe last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits fromthe global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat"will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the mediawill correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and thereal players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidityand venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The globaltriumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered intoa state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connectionto the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through planthallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet.Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenchedroughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of theGreat God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression ofthe pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychologicalshift that ensued left European civilization staring into twomillennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism,and rationalism.
The monstrous forcesof scientific industrialism and global politics that have been borninto modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of thesymbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to naturefrom our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened,guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was"
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Our estrangementfrom nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly twothousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great GodPan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the paganmysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift thatensued left European civilization staring into two millennia ofreligious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, andrationalism.
The monstrous forcesof scientific industrialism and global politics that have been borninto modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of thesymbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to naturefrom 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
"There is noquestion that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use ofdrugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
― Terence McKenna
"Chaos is whatwe've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It isfeared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, whichclenches because its existence is defined in terms of control."
― Terence McKenna
"Nature lovescourage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to thatcommitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossibledream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosopherswho really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this iswhat they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss anddiscovering its a feather bed."
― Terence McKenna
"If the words'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the rightto experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration ofIndependence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
― Terence McKenna
"The syntacticalnature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world ismade of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of,you can make of it whatever you wish."
― Terence McKenna
"The cost ofsanity in this society, is a certain levelof alienation"
― Terence McKenna
"Psychedelics areillegal not because a loving government is concerned that you mayjump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal becausethey dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models ofbehaviour and information processing. They open you up to thepossibility that everything you know is wrong."
― Terence McKenna
"You have to takeseriously the notion that understanding the universe is yourresponsibility, because the only understanding of the universe thatwill be useful to you is your own understanding."
― Terence McKenna
"You are anexplorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good youcan do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangeredby the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of theabsence of consciousness."
― Terence McKenna
"Westerncivilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet."
― Terence McKenna
"Only psychos andshamans create their own reality"
― Terence McKenna
"Television is bynature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content,uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably atool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The creative actis a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean ofchaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of itideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropicalsea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, somethingtears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row forshore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times whatslips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyologicalmetaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring homesomething that is food, food for the human community that we cansustain ourselves on and go forward."
― Terence McKenna
"You are a divinebeing. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginablepower and light, and you will return to those realms."
― Terence McKenna
"Ego is astructure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member ofa neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture,which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensusabout what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable."
― Terence McKenna
"We have been tothe moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart ofthe atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves becausewe sense that is where all the contradictions flow together."
― Terence McKenna
"If you don't havea plan, you become part of somebody else's plan."
― Terence McKenna
"Life lived in theabsence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism isbased on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego."
― Terence McKenna
"My technique isdon't believe anything. If you believe in something, you areautomatically precluded from believing its opposite."
― Terence McKenna
"The apocalypse isnot something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in majorportions of the planet and it's only because we live within abubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we stillhave the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse."
― Terence McKenna
"Nobody is smarterthan you are. And what if they are? What good is their understandingdoing you?"
― Terence McKenna
"Nature is not ourenemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to becherished and explored."
― Terence McKenna
"Right here andnow, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of activeintelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremelyalien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish forcontact with this other universe."
― Terence McKenna
"Even as thenineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of humandescent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that thoseapes were stoned apes."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"There is atranscendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell totalk about!"
― Terence McKenna
"The imaginationis the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literallyrealize our collective dreams."
― Terence McKenna
"I'll try to bearound and about. But if I'm not, then you know that I'm behindyour eyelids, and I'll meet you there"
― Terence McKenna
"We can begin therestructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have deniedfor so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion ofillegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"It's clearly acrisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have thetechnological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, tocure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack theintellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We mustdecondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it'snot easy."
― Terence McKenna
"Half the time youthink your thinking you're actually listening"
― Terence McKenna
"My voice speakingis a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carryingagree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without themeaning one has only little mouth noises "
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival
"The problem isnot to find the answer, it's to face the answer"
― Terence McKenna
"It is theimagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. Itis literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us."
― Terence McKenna
"Time will perfectmatter."
― Terence McKenna
"History is endingbecause the dominator culture has led the human species into a blindalley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look formetaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble itcasts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment itever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains ofAfrica 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great HornedMushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, beforeslavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets andmonotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future istaking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is notmodernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia forthe archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us bodypiercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll andcatastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for theparadise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africawhere the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of theanimal 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 thefuture is a forward escape into the past. This is what thepsychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and intothe wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this becauseif the community understands what it is that holds it together thecommunity will be better able to streamline itself for flight intohyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a newtrue story that tells us where we're going in the universe and thattrue story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and whenpsilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego issupressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of thedominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelicsreturn us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of thefeeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you andnobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is notinterested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that'swhat holds the community together. And as we break out of the sillymyths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplacewhat we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in thebody, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, aliendimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. Ithink of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experiencelike going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that younever figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the bodyand the way the body works itself into nature. What the ArchaicRevival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and thedefeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies ofthe people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get themon the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that meansyour getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected meansputting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition throughthing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaianmind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelicexperience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy ofthe planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert ofbogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the selfcan be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset thecompass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance,through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This iswhat we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace."
― Terence McKenna
"The shaman is notmerely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healedhimself."
― Terence McKenna,The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching
"Alcohol is usedby millions of people, both men and women, and I will make no friendsby taking the position that alcohol culture is not politicallycorrect. Yet how can we explain the legal toleration for alcohol, themost destructive of all intoxicants, and the almost frenzied effortsto repress nearly all other drugs? Could it not be that we arewilling to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it isallowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps usall infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator worldcharacterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?"
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"It is not easy tomeasure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and bein it."
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival
"The purpose oflife is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that theact of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."
― Terence McKenna
"Human history isa Gaian dream."
― Terence McKenna
"We tend todisempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. Andin the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything awayto somebody else, to something else."
― Terence McKenna
"You see, a secretis not something untold. It's something which can't be told."
― Terence McKenna
"No one knowsenough to worry."
― Terence McKenna
"A hallucinationis a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotapeabout Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life."
― Terence McKenna
"Nothing comesunannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's veryimportant to actually listen to your own intuition rather thandriving through it."
― Terence McKenna
"The ufo isnothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess intohistory, saying to science and paternalistically governed and drivenorganizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn theworld upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what itis, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated intothe production of toys for healthy children. That's what science isgood for. It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point ofview from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to havethe hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down."
― Terence McKenna
"The bigger youbuild the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
― Terence McKenna
"Our selfdiscoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern ofhistory. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, foronly through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In thefact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors."
― Terence McKenna,True Hallucinations
"Ecstasy is acomplex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph,surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoricunderstanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, atremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyonewho thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy withdrugs unless they're willing to get their noses rubbed in their ownstuff."
― Terence McKenna
"Ideology alwayspaves the way toward atrocity."
― Terence McKenna
"I often like tothink that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centeredphysics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphorthat we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupiesthe same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book islife with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something thatlacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be akind of release into the imagination in the sense that for charactersin a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension offreedom."
― Terence McKenna
"Reality is, youknow, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed todrag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip backinto the sea of the unreal."
― Terence McKenna
"There's lightat the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the backof your mind. And if you don't go to the back side of your mind youwill never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you seeit, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people.Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, Godis some kind of lost continent IN the human mind."
― Terence McKenna
"Not to know one'strue identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing a golem. And,indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass ofhuman beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies.Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow massstyle changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junkfood, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned totoxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted dailytelevision fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act ofconsuming."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The artist'stask is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a ditheringwhile Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, forbeing able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find theway, then the way cannot be found."
― Terence McKenna
"What civilizationis, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standingon each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's nota pleasant situation."
― Terence McKenna
"No culture onearth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms ofbeing inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue abusiness-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crisesand irreconcilable contradictions."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"We are told 'no',we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get athis, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to evenplay in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out ofthe hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into ahalf-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufacturedout of the bones of a dying world." -"
― Terence McKenna
"It's clearly acrisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These arethe two things that the psychedelics attack. We have thetechnological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, tocure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack theintellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We mustdecondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it'snot easy."
― Terence McKenna
"The race isn't tothe swift, it's to the thoughtful."
― Terence McKenna
"It's prettysimple, the ethical life. It's just demanding."
― Terence McKenna
"This is why theshaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need tofeel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselvesthrough creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of thiscreativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy isan act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self andthat which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our mapsof reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend tolose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only bygaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of timeand space and our role in them be glimpsed."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Our culture,self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology andegocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominatorattitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants orsubstances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. Iwill argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance andinsistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us oflife's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, andour grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intactthe wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style."
― Terence McKenna
"The monkey bodyhas carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more andmore to exist in a world made by the human imagination."
― Terence McKenna
"We live incondensations of our imagination"
― Terence McKenna
"But technology isthe real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the contextof the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technologicalmaterial. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; weput it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, spaceshuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in atechnological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool makingimplies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flyingsaucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space."
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival
"Feminism is atremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present contextprimarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yetpercolated throughout society that the advancement of women is aprogram vitally connected to the survival of human beings as aspecies. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on thecharacter of the atoms which compose them, and what we are mostmenaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. Ifwomen played a major role in policy formation and execution on thepart of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benignand ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism notas a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypicimages, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of ouremphasis that is expressed through our institutions."
― Terence McKenna
"I guess I shouldsay 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 I'm perfectly aware of thedifference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence.I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circlesas it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit fromshinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us acertain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination,but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divineimagination will lead us into complete paranoia."
― Terence McKenna
"There's only theintegrity of doing and having done."
― Terence McKenna
"Human beings areco-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis ofall magic."
― Terence McKenna
"Meaning lies inthe confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum.That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that areconstantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and"thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity ofbeing and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak,noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing."
― Terence McKenna
"I believe thatthe use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gaveus the model for all religions to follow. And when, after longcenturies of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, theknowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish tradedpartnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape ofnature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, wetraded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind ofthe planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis,and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetarycatastrophe."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"We are theinheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable."
― Terence McKenna
"Monotheismstrenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style thatperiodically places the ego and its values in perspective throughcontact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mysteryof plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy andwholeness, what Joyce called the "mama matrix most mysterious."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Neither Bwitistsnor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world.This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walktogether. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We havetwo hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of theseself-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "oneheartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not findit there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction oftheir selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated inBwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow ofmany qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved inthe presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence ofbelowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of itsopposite."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"If the ego is notregularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of theTranscendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from thesense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimateconsequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeatesWestern Civilization."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"From one point ofview the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be aliveand intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union ofall the senses with memory of the past and anticipation of thefuture. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerfulhallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, bothas a species and as individuals. The Transcendent Other is Naturewithout her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, andcausality."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"I think of goingto the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going tothe Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figuredout what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way theBody Works itself into Nature."
― Terence McKenna
"Like the octopi,our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts becomeour bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence ofthe more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath PhiloJudaeusa Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard butbeheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:
A more perfectarchetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing,and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require themediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as thetruth of things."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"You are not nakedwhen you take off your clothes. You still wear your religiousassumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, yourdelusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then,essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your ownpsyche…and it's from that position, a position outside thecultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questionsabout what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are wecaught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in placeto assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder thatlurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between thebirth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to returnto first premises."
― Terence McKenna
"The ArchaicRevival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, howeveruncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that lifelived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon whichprimordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, lifeenslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysteriousmatrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revivalthat our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"We are asked byscience to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness,and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion isthe limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believethis, you can believe anything."
― Terence McKenna
"Part of whatpsychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This iswhat makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is akind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is onewhich causes people to start questioning the rules of the game."
― Terence McKenna
"It was warm andsalty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old,old thing. I tried not to think about how much at the mercy of thesestrange people I now was. But in fact my courage was failing. BothDona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold andmantislike. A wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed tosplatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged light. I felt my lipsgo numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to myhammock and lay back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowingriver of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind of dream mentalpirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, andthis was the last impression I had. When I regained consciousness Iappeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave ofbrightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high.Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realised that my wave wasspeeding toward a rocky coastline."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The war on drugswas never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long aspossible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wringthe last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits fromthe global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat"will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the mediawill correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and thereal players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidityand venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"The globaltriumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered intoa state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connectionto the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through planthallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet.Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenchedroughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of theGreat God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression ofthe pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychologicalshift that ensued left European civilization staring into twomillennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism,and rationalism.
The monstrous forcesof scientific industrialism and global politics that have been borninto modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of thesymbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to naturefrom our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened,guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was"
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Our estrangementfrom nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly twothousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great GodPan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the paganmysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift thatensued left European civilization staring into two millennia ofreligious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, andrationalism.
The monstrous forcesof scientific industrialism and global politics that have been borninto modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of thesymbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to naturefrom 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
"There is noquestion that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use ofdrugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass