895 Quotes by Terence McKenna

I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It’s a strange kind of protective denial.

It’s as important to be well informed in this area, if you’re going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do that.

Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we’re embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call ‘civilization’ has been all about.

I think what’s really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.

What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it’s accessible.

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

One of the things that people don’t do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.

The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.