How do we fight back? By creating art.
TERENCE MCKENNAHow do we fight back? By creating art.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhat we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
TERENCE MCKENNAIt is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know… You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You’ll have that!
TERENCE MCKENNANature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhen we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
TERENCE MCKENNAOur assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
TERENCE MCKENNAThere is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
TERENCE MCKENNAAnything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
TERENCE MCKENNADream 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.
TERENCE MCKENNAYour memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.
TERENCE MCKENNAWe’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.
TERENCE MCKENNAThis is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe 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.
TERENCE MCKENNA