Terence Mckenna Quotes – Inspiring Words from a Psychedelic Philosopher
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth.
Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, and what have you.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation.
Culture is a kind of informational and cognitive enslavement.
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.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
The imagination is where you can go anywhere and nothing is impossible.
If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body, so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.
The problem is not to find the answer; it’s to face the answer.
The nature of reality is the serpent forever devouring its own tail, and chaos is a way of ensuring that nothing is lost.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
When the ego dissolves, so does the boundary between self and universe.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
Reality is not what it appears to be, nor is it otherwise.
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth.
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.
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
The way to break the spell of belief is to become aware of the present moment.
If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.
What I think is that whenever you encounter somebody who’s primary motivation is money, you’re going to be encountering somebody who is very wounded.
The future is a syntactical machine run amok in a dimension of pure information, and its impact on the human soul is profound.
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
The imagination is a lot more important than rational thought.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation.
You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.
Kids are not humans, children are not people theyre something else. They are not your property.
We need to interact with like-minded individuals to sustain sanity.
Imagination is the matrix in which we reside.
We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Nature is everything and you are part of nature and what we do is an instinct within nature.
Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures, and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing.
Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
The world is truly only a little more than ordinary.
We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples convenience and the convenience of various institutions.
It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, its not easy.
Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Psychedelics are not a gateway to ultimate dissolution, but to the items and objects of your concern.
What if I suggest that the way males presently have jointed fingers has everything to do with the fact that this species developed weapons early on?
Nothing lasts; our time is the pass of a comet.
Work is being done to address the fact that the League of Nations and the United Nations havent provided the force to establish and maintain an effective peace on this planet.