895 Quotes by Terence McKenna

If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, 'When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.'

The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.

The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.

It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.

And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.

I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.

It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.

I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.