Terence McKenna
c/terence-mckenna
The largest collection of talks by Terence McKenna — visionary ethnobotanist and advocate for the mindful use of natural psychedelics.
c/terence-mckenna
The largest collection of talks by Terence McKenna — visionary ethnobotanist and advocate for the mindful use of natural psychedelics.
Memorable moments captured from Terence McKenna transcripts and documents
“The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.”
“Notice that the internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They're largely metals, silicon, glass, copper, gold, silver. These are the products of demonic artifice. These are the things which the alchemists dreamed of they transform space and time they allow us to speak at a distance, they allow us to wander through libraries thousands of miles distant. No fact is too obscure, no person so hidden that you can't reach them.”
“The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world you see. So we operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions.”
“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.”
“If you go to Paris, you know more about reality than people who don't. And if you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.”
“Do you see where I'm going with this? So that in fact the modern enthusiasm for shamanism and secondarily or in a connected mode with psychedelics is actually an intuitive feeling back toward this state of non neurotic empathy that characterized archaic time and that is what has specifically been lost by the descent into the historical process.”
“Somehow part of the package of being a living, thinking being is that you get a universe inside of you. You know you get a galaxy sized object inside you that you can access. And there there are the mountains, the rivers, the jungles, the dynastic families, the ruins, the planets, the works of art, the poetry, the sciences, the magics of millions upon millions upon millions of worlds and this is apparently who we each are we're a little bit of eternity sticking into three dimensional space.”
“I don't know what the signature is on these grasses I'm sure Jonathan does. Are there pure DMT sources there? So that makes it very exciting but in terms of its interest it can't come close. I mean from my experience and I think most people who've done it would agree with this is: 5 methoxydmt is an enormous oceanic emotion.”
New and Old Maps Of Hyperspace“All information is everywhere information that is not here is nowhere and that information stands outside of historical time. It's like Plato said: time is the moving image of eternity. Eternity does not have a temporal existence even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed it does not have temporal duration of any sort it is eternity. We are not primarily biology, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology we are in fact hyperdimensional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter and the matter, the shadow in matter is the body. And at death what happens basically is that the shadow withdraws or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws and metabolism ceases and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that and when I make these declarative statements I'm making them from the point of view of this shamanic tradition which touches all these higher religions.”
Trading With Aliens [Workshop - Part 1]“And I was a rock collector and a butterfly collector and an amateur rocketeer and all these things and when I analyze these pursuits of mine it was the pursuit of a certain flash of iridescence the iridescence that you get when you break open ore bearing rock. Or the iridescence that you get when you capture certain kinds of butterflies in tropical environments or the kind of iridescence that you get when you mix potassium perchlorate and sugar in a hot sauce pan and ignite it in other words, pushing out at the edge of the permissible, at the edge of the probable, looking for a certain something, a scintilla, a spark, a possibility.”
“It's a hyperdimensional membrane, or something on the border between metaphor and reality that is activated in the psychedelic state by these totally apeshit ayahuasqueros to then objectify their power and their ability to melt through the dimensions and make big magic.”
“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
Food of the Gods“We can begin this restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Let us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”
“Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyper dimensional and extremely alien.”
“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 lay down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
“This is what we should be looking for it's not for your elucidation, it's not part of your self directed psychotherapy. 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, and so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit and that after all is what it's really all about.”
“So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
“The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what's going on because nowhere is it writ that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. You know, Wittgenstein had this idea that philosophy should be what he called true enough, and I think that's a great idea let's just make it true enough because that's as true as it can be gotten.”
“So chaos is what we have lost touch with. This is why it has been given a bad name, because it is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is the ego which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control and the furious modeling process and this will now sound like a knock on modeling the furious modeling process that the ego endlessly carries out is an effort to fight the absence of closure. The ego wants closure, it wants a complete explanation.”
“The mushroom said to me once: nature loves courage, nature loves courage and I said: what's the payoff on that? And it said it shows you that it loves courage because it will remove obstacles. 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 it's done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it's a feather bed and there's no other way to do it.”
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