black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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
The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Anything Artist Burn Country Journey Mankind Self
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

Blowing Consumer Create Culture Fetishzes Mania Mind Object People Prevention Silly
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
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
The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Absurdity Assertion Evident Exception Self
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Being Count Divine Inspirational Life Light
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Abstraction Barely Earth Flame Flames Look Mind Blowing Much Ourselves Rouse Victim
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

Against Blowing Culture Ego Fact Member Mind Neurotic Structure
This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Children Last Life Message Moving Nothing Pain
No one knows enough to worry.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Enough Know No Worry
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
TERENCE MCKENNA

Doing Good Nobody Smart Smarter Understanding
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Call Fact Hallucinations Nothing Reality Sanction
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
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

Animal Begin Imagination Mind Psychedelic Substance
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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Terence McKenna Quotes