The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe surface of things is not where attention should rest.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
TERENCE MCKENNAYou are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.
TERENCE MCKENNABeing imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
TERENCE MCKENNAFor all we know, we know nothing.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it’s not treated – if there’s not pharmacological intervention – it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.
TERENCE MCKENNANature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
TERENCE MCKENNAIt’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.
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 MCKENNAIf the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
TERENCE MCKENNAI think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
TERENCE MCKENNAHow can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
TERENCE MCKENNAWhen you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
TERENCE MCKENNACulture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhat happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.
TERENCE MCKENNA