Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.
TERENCE MCKENNAYou 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
-
-
Your 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 MCKENNA -
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Worrying is betting against yourself.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.
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 -
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 -
The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
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 -
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
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 -
It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
TERENCE MCKENNA






