895 Quotes by Terence McKenna

We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it’s a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.

The question is being asked, ‘Are we alone?’ And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we’re not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?

Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between “power for oneself and power over others,” she writes: “In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.

I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It’s not a personality.

I think there’s a very strong Calvinistic bias against a free lunch. The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation, and that sort of thing, is abhorrent to people because they believe that the vision of these higher dimensions should be vouchsafed to the good, and probably to them only after death. It is alarming to people to think that they could take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have these kinds of experiences.

And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It’s just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.