There is no knowledge without risk taking.
TERENCE MCKENNAThere is no knowledge without risk taking.
TERENCE MCKENNAOur ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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 MCKENNANo one knows enough to worry.
TERENCE MCKENNABeing imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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 message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
TERENCE MCKENNATo realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
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 MCKENNAAlcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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 MCKENNAReality is made of words.
TERENCE MCKENNACulture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
TERENCE MCKENNADon’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhen you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
TERENCE MCKENNA