Terence McKenna Quotes

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself.

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

You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.