Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKennawas an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 November 1946
CityPaonia, CO
CountryUnited States of America
Terence McKenna quotes about
The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
For all we know, we know nothing.
We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.
And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.
Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.
These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.
In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.