QUOTES by Terence McKenna
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
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.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
Quote by -Terence McKenna
Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?
Quote by -Terence McKenna