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
[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.
The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.
Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.
There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.
Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness