What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.

Terence McKenna

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

Terence McKenna

hallucinations reality facts

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. 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. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

Terence McKenna

dream teacher commitment

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. 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

pain children moving

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 behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

Terence McKenna

dmt information-processing government

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

light inspirational life

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

Terence McKenna

perception museums world

I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.

Terence McKenna

inspirational life believe

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

mind-blowing silly people

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

Terence McKenna

duty mind beautiful

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

real adventure giving

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

Terence McKenna

dmt mind-blowing cost

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

Terence McKenna

clothes prejudice religious

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

Terence McKenna

dmt our-world ideas

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

library real imagination

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

Terence McKenna

mirror-image ability mirrors

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.

Terence McKenna

deaf environment men

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

waste worry thinking

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer

Terence McKenna

mind-blowing answers faces

We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind

Terence McKenna

needles eye needs

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

Terence McKenna

icons intelligent fighting