895 Quotes by Terence McKenna

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.

I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'

I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.

Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.

Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.

It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.