Terence McKenna citations

Page 3

“I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there”

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

“There is a transcendental dimension beyond language… It's just hard as hell to talk about!”

“We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”

“Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien… What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.”

“The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”

“Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”

“The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”

“It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.”

“The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.”

“My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises”

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”

“Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

“No one knows enough to worry.”

“Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.”

“Time will perfect matter.”

“A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.”

“You don't want to become so open minded that the wind whistles between your ears.”

“Human history is a Gaian dream.”

“What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.”

“It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.”

“What's happening is that 8% of the world's people use 35% of the world's petroleum, and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way. This is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale. We're addicted, they got it, we're happy to pay for it, but if they won't sell it we'll break into their house and take it, because by god it will go into our right arm. that's the plan.”

“You need an Ego, if you didn't have an ego you wouldn't know who's mouth to put food in, when eating in a restaurant.”

“History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.”

“We are being sucked into the body of eternity.”

“A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness.”

“We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.”

“We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth.”

“We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions.”