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
Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.
History is the siren song of the soul.
What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the Mandela, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.
That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.
What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.
We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.
Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!