What 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 MCKENNAIf 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
-
-
To 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 MCKENNA -
Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
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 -
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The 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 MCKENNA -
What 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 -
The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
TERENCE MCKENNA