We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
TERENCE MCKENNANature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
-
-
There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Don’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 MCKENNA -
Worrying is betting against yourself.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
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 -
Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
TERENCE MCKENNA -
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 MCKENNA -
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
TERENCE MCKENNA -
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
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 -
Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
TERENCE MCKENNA -
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 -
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 -
Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
TERENCE MCKENNA