Terence McKenna

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

The bigger you build the bonfire the more darkness is revealed.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and its only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse

The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.

I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.

There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong.

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.

History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.

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.

Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.

Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.

Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.

All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.

Nature conserves, prefers novelty.

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo at any point the best laid plans.

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.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.

You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality other people or language.

One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.

The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.

Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.

In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego

The leading edge of reality is mind and mind is the primary substratum of being.

Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.

Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.

The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.

As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

Chaos is what weve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world which is Ego which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.

The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.

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