Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
TERENCE MCKENNACulture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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 MCKENNAFor talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe 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.
TERENCE MCKENNAOur world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
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 MCKENNAHow can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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 MCKENNAPsychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
TERENCE MCKENNABeing imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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 MCKENNAWhat was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhat 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.
TERENCE MCKENNAClaim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe surface of things is not where attention should rest.
TERENCE MCKENNAThese allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
TERENCE MCKENNA