I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen. Terence McKenna More Quotes by Terence McKenna More Quotes From Terence McKenna Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole. Terence McKenna black events sympathy It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable. Terence McKenna surface language organization We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language. Terence McKenna psychedelic evolution moving I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way. Terence McKenna burning drug book So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions. Terence McKenna individual civilization culture Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.' Terence McKenna intelligent waiting lying People are concrescences of ambiguity. Terence McKenna ambiguity people One reaches through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain...The human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body, and we don't 'imagine' anything. We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence. Terence McKenna ocean play reality We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination. Terence McKenna children past moving The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites. Terence McKenna grateful self night The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself. Terence McKenna mind-blowing sick men The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt. Terence McKenna debt space children This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human. Terence McKenna drug mean facts This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. Terence McKenna emotional long culture Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes. Terence McKenna apes mind-blowing facts The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream. Terence McKenna dream mean world As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side. Terence McKenna cosmos struggle two I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing. Terence McKenna cannabis life-is-like life-is It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is. Terence McKenna cycles labor fall Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected. Terence McKenna toil want men
