Terence McKenna Quotes

We need a new concept of reality and a new set of values for things to change in a positive direction. LSD could help to generate such a new concept.

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.

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.

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.

I do think that taking these sort of natural mind-opening and altering drugs does have an effect. Doors and windows that you didn't even know were in the house are open and you're seeing views you've never noticed before. Even though, when you come down, the world sort of goes back to the way it was, an inkling of that transformed vision and experience of the world remains. I think it's a little bit medicinal, and over time it sort of builds up a new experience of the world. That's when I think smoking pot and doing drugs is really good for you, spiritually speaking.

Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

I've found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about.

Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil ? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it ? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.

Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

LSD is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.

Good or bad is a matter of perspective. I met an immortal hunami once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The way we describe our world shows how we think of our world. How we think of our world governs how we interpret our world. How we interpret our world directs how we participate in the world. How we participate in the world shapes the world.