black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Culture 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 McKenna

Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Deal Doe Ever Experience Science Subjective Well
Dream 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 MCKENNA

Dream Grindm Under Impossible Philospher Teacher Really Touch Trick Understood
Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Before Behind Secret Unknown
Psychedelics 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 MCKENNA

Behaviour Down Everything Illegal Information Model Psychedelics Structure Wrong
It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Coax Lives Meaning Need Our Live
Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Deaf Environment Men Mute Nature
You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Assumption Cultural Die Engineer Manufacture Religious Turn World
When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Cultural Inspection Own Psyche Shed
We are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral – get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Degree Game Job Player Told Unimportant
If 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 MCKENNA

Civilization Dissolve Ego Hyperspace Other Regularly Repeatedly Self Transcend Unbound
What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Imagination Library Real Universal
Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Ability End Mirror Image Mirrors Psychedelic
The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Field Made Meason Photons Quark Reality World
The 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 MCKENNA

Adventure Authentic Being Culturally Give Major Real True
Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Alcoholism Disease Failure Image Self
Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Anything Become Divorce Fiction Form Hopeless Million People Understood
There is no knowledge without risk taking.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Knowledge Risk Take
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Abyss Bed Discover Done Feather Shamanic
Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough,
TERENCE MCKENNA

Capitalism Existence Game People Years
The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Conclusion Draw Drawing Human Last Long Night
The 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 MCKENNA

Behavioral Comox Ego Existence Metadative Override Personality Problem Psyche
You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Assumption Clothes Naked Off Prejudice Religion Religious Take
It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Confront Easy Measure Ocean
If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Actual Delusion English Look Mean Mind
How do we fight back? By creating art.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Art Back Create Fight Inspirational Life
The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Everywhere Golden Imagination Pathways
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Ego Feminine Masculine Tension World

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Terence McKenna Quotes