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
Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite..
I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.
What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.
It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.
We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.
Mind conjures miracles out of time.
The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?
What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.
What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.