The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
TERENCE MCKENNAThe problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
TERENCE MCKENNANature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
TERENCE MCKENNANotice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.
TERENCE MCKENNAThere is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
TERENCE MCKENNAAstonishment is the proper response to reality.
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 MCKENNATo the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
TERENCE MCKENNAPeople without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
TERENCE MCKENNAWho is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
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 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 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 MCKENNAThe surface of things is not where attention should rest.
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 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 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 MCKENNA